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Yesterday, Oh Boy

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Yesterday, Oh Boy

When my friend David Boatwright, who produced the cover of Today, Oh Boy, approached me about adapting the poolroom chapter from the novel into a fifteen-minute film, I jumped at the chance.  David whipped out a script, which I approved, then later made some significant changes. 

Near the end of the novel, which is set in 1970, Rusty Boykin, an ADD-riddled hippie-wanna-be from Summerville, South Carolina, and Ollie Wyborn, a straightlaced, straight-A transplant from St. Paul, Minnesota, join forces in thwarting an attack from a pair of rednecks whose favorite pastime is, to use the Lowcountry lingo of the day, “cutting ass,” i.e., beating up people they don’t cotton to.  

David’s major change in the second draft of the script was fusing Rusty and Ollie into one character, which I again approved, given I had complete confidence in his intelligence and talent, and because as a practical matter, there’s virtually no room for character development in a fifteen-minute movie.  Another significant change, which added gravitas to the film, David created a new character, a Viet Nam vet who relates a harrowing account of wartime mayhem to the bartender, played my former student, David Mandell. 

So anyway, David Boatwright and his producer Paul Brown raised the needed money and assembled a crew of costume designers, cinematographers, assistant directors, sound people, make-up artists, art directors, property managers, actors, a stunt coordinator, a basset hound, etc. and shot the film in four days. 

The exterior shots, which included fisticuffs and car chase, were filmed on bucolic Wadmalaw Island and the interior shots at the defunct West Ashley restaurant Bearcat, which has been transformed into a ’70s era bait and tackle shop/bar complete with pinball machines and a functioning jukebox on loan from my friend Thom Piragnoli.

I asked David if I could have a cameo, and he said, of course, so yesterday I spent twelve amazing hours on the set being part of an incredibly complicated matrix of moving parts. 

When I arrived at seven, an actor was seated having his hair tended to. One of the make-up women said she would do my hair next, and I explained, “But I have no hair,” removing my hat, and she said, “Great!,” meaning, I take it, less work for her.  After I introduced myself, another woman said, “Oh, these young actors can’t wait to meet you. They’re walking around with the book.” 

Indeed, they were incredibly appreciative. Each one sincerely thanked me for writing the novel.  Two actors, twins brothers playing rednecks, asked me why their characters were so angry. When the actor Logan, who played the Viet Nam vet, thanked me for, in his words, “creating all of this,” I told him that, in fact, David had created his character and dialogue. He said yes, but I had created the world around him. To my mind, his performance and speech are the climax of the film. 

I abstractly knew that it would be cool to see characters I had created “come to life,” but had underestimated how gratifying it ended up being.  It was especially moving to see Jill Birdsong, modeled on the high school version of my late wife Judy Birdsong, performing her role, and I especially enjoyed the actor Patrick Basquill, who brought the bully Bobbey Ray Bosheen to life. The creepiness he brought to the role reminded me of William Dafoe’s portrayal of Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

Also, it was really weird to hear the name “Rusty,” my childhood nickname, called out throughout the day. Sometimes, I thought they were referring to me. And Thomas, the actor who plays Rusty, looks a lot like I did in high school, except he has blue eyes, high cheek bones, brown hair, and isn’t riddled with freckles and acne. 

In other words, he’s skinny.

from left to right, Thomas Beck, Rusty Moore, and “Rusty Boykin”

It was such a wonderful day, the best ever in my life as a writer, and I can’t wait to see the finished product, entitled Summerville 1970, which will make the festival circuit and premiere sometime in the fall at the Terrace Theater on James Island.

Before I end this way too egotistical account, I want to acknowledge my wife Caroline Tigner Moore, without whom the manuscript of Today, Oh Boy would have been found in a drawer after my demise, rather than becoming a published novel. 

Caroline has encouraged me throughout but also has bravely said, “Un-uh, that doesn’t work, why don’t you do this instead.” She’s tactfully guided me through the interviews and the whole befuddling process of my post-teaching career, including offering encouragement in my avocation of creating “fake paintings.” 

After my beloved Judy Birdsong died, I imagined the lonely life of a wounded epicurean, but Caroline has enriched my life in ways I could not have imagined, especially in establishing a loving family that includes my wunderkind stepdaughter Brooks, who is as kind as she is brilliant, and a trio of pets, KitKat, the demi-mutt, and our blue-eyed ragdoll cats, Juno and Jasmine.

Love to them and to you!

PS. Here’s a link to the Kirkus review of Today, Oh Boy that includes an interview and links to purchase it via Amazon and Barnes and Noble, or better yet, get it from your local independent book store, which in Charleston is Buxton Books.

Novels Vis-a-Vis Screenplays

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Novels Vis-a-Vis Screenplays

At the request of an actor who’s interested in pitching my novel Today, Oh Boy to producers he’s worked with, I’ve written an adaptation of the novel for the screen.[1] It’s not an official screenplay per se, but a roadmap for the actor to determine what scenes he will use to produce a short “teaser” reel consisting of would-be shots from the would-be movie. I have no idea how this is done. Via AI I suspect.  Anyway, with the final proofs from the novel to the right of my iMac’s screen and a blank Word document on the left, I began writing and cutting and pasting.

The good news is that originally, using present tense and employing crisp visual imagery, I consciously composed Today, Oh Boy to read like a movie progressing. For example, here’s the opening of the novel.

A mango-hued, pockmarked bulletin board hangs on a classroom wall of pale lime green concrete blocks, the bulletin board pencil-stabbed and compass point-gouged. Among the graffiti are the names of the star-crossed lovers: Sandy + Tripp. Tragic Tripp, whose body was found last week tangled in blackberry bushes along the banks of the Ashley River, his skull smashed after falling off Bacons Bridge.

S-A-N-D-Y + T-R-I-P-P.

Rusty Boykin, a skinny, freckled redhead sitting on the bulletin board row in Mrs. Laban’s homeroom, traces his index finger in the depression of Sandy’s name. He supposes it’s Tripp’s work – the letters inartistic, juvenile. Sandy hasn’t been to school since Tripp’s death, four class days ago, and now it’s Monday, and she’s still not here. She should be sitting right in front of Rusty, her honey-colored hair hanging like a curtain to her waist. 

How to adapt this for the screen?  One way, you could have Rusty tracing his finger in Sandy’s name and then suddenly cut to Tripp falling off the bridge, or you could begin with Tripp’s accident. What I did was to begin with Tripp’s last meeting with Sandy, a conversation through her open bedroom window, his leaving in a rage, jumping into his GTO, pealing off, and ultimately driving his car off the road at Bacons Bridge into the Ashley River.

Actually, Tripp’s death is what Hitchcock called a McGuffin, a misleading device that’s irrelevant to the overall narrative.  After all, Today, Oh Boy is a comedy. Its title comes from the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life.”

I read the news today oh boy

About a lucky man who made the grade

And though the news was rather sad

Well I just had to laugh 

So, by having Tripp drive off the bridge rather than falling off the bridge, what I gain in cinematic excitement, I lose in the comic pairing of his first and last names. As it turns out, Tripp was a bully, a high school version of Trump.  At one point in the book, Alex Jensen, a junior at Summerville high, says to a friend Will, “Your last name is Trotter, you name your son Tripp, and he falls off a bridge to his death. What a surprise.”

In addition, the novel employs a great deal of what critics call “indirect discourse,” a device that allows a narrator to report what someone is thinking without using his exact words. For example, in the above excerpt, the sentence, “She should be sitting right in front of Rusty, her honey-colored hair hanging like a curtain to her waist” is rendered second-hand through Rusty’s consciousness. In a screenplay, you have to “show” rather than tell “tell,” which can lead to really awkward exposition, like you find in bad fiction like “The Most Dangerous Game”:

You’ve good eyes,” said Whitney, with a laugh,” and I’ve seen you pick off a moose moving in the brown fall bush at four hundred yards, but even you can’t see four miles or so through a moonless Caribbean night.”

That I couldn’t use direct narration or indirect discourse meant I had to omit some characters, like Camilla Creel, the impoverished girl who lives in an abandoned school bus with her mother and sister, and Weeza Waring, Will’s mother, who added several comic touches throughout the narrative.

So, overall, the script is much tidier than the novel, much more streamlined, yet not as rich in my attempt to capture the zeitgeist of Summerville, South Carolina in 1970, during integration, the beginning of the counterculture, and during an influx of Northerners moving to what at the time was a staid, conservative community.

Then again, I’m sure a professional screenwriter could do a much better job.

[1] By the way, it’s on sale at Amazon for a mere $10. 

Failed Poems, Fake Art, and Commerce 

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I subscribe to an internet entity called “Poem of the Day,” which provides me each a.m. with a dollop of verse to go along with a cup of whatever ground coffee is on sale at Harris Teeter on the previous Senior Citizen Discount Thursday.

This morning’s poem, Copyright © 2025 by Jessica Abughattas, has a title guaranteed to perk the interest of anyone interested in verse. It’s called “Failed Poems.” It’s one of those works where the title serves as the subject of the first sentence. To wit:

            Failed Poems

            will crawl out of the drain and try to kill you
            like some 80s horror flick.[1]

I like the poem, its witty catalogue of unpleasant analogies. Bad poems are like “a black widow creeping/from the mound of linens still warm from our bodies.”  They “steal your breath/ when you wake parched, hungover, emptied,” etc.

What really caught my attention, being a fake artist and all, were these lines describing another, much more successful fake artist:

Once, in Zurich, we were served rabbit paella at a party 
celebrating an exhibition of an artist from Venice Beach 
who used to be homeless but drinks $25 Erewhon smoothies and paints 
hundreds maybe thousands of happy faces with his feet. His canvasses 
go for $25,000. Toe paintings are better or at least significantly 
more profitable than failed poems.

This really hit home because the day before yesterday I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize with this message:

“Found some ‘fake’ art at goodwill today. I’m going to buy it as an investment.”

I responded, “Who in his right mind would give a masterpiece like that away?”

But to be honest, I did know. It was the fellow who won it at Chico Feo’s annual Canine Halloween Costume Contest. Harlan, the organizer, asked if I would donate a print, and I thought it was one of the better prizes, but as luck would have it, the winner is an actual artist who upon receiving it asked me if I’d seen any of his works.  

I hadn’t.

But I’ll also admit it would take a certain, rare art lover with a funkadelic sensibility maximus to want to hang the print above the mantle.

Anyway, the poet nails it when she whines about the unprofitability of writing poems vis-à-vis creating pictural art. In fact, believe it or not, despite receiving a rave review from Kirkus Reviews and having appeared on a local television show and several national podcasts, my novel Today, Oh Boy has provided me with less income than my fake paintings.[2]

Already this month, I’ve received two commissions and sold another print, not including the secondhand Good Will purchase. 

Anyway, I’d say that creating these canvases is more fun that writing fiction and certainly more fun that going over the “corrected proofs” of a manuscript that soon will be bound and sold in bookstores and online, which I have been doing of late.

I don’t  have a pub date yet for Long Ago Last Summer, but I’m guessing late spring or early summer.

PS. Speaking of commissions, Caroline and I have commissioned the unfake funkadelic artist Thom Piragnoli to create a sign for our driveway to alert visitors where our hidden house hides. 

You can check out Thom’s art at Chico Feo. The one above is called Galaxy Gals. Check out this LINK for more on Thom. 

[1] Rather than cutting and pasting the entire poem, I’ll provide a link because non-poetry lovers, i.e., 99.97% of people, would abandon this post for the greener pastures of a TikTok video. Here’s the LINK. You can read along while Jessica Abughattas reads it in a rather pleasant regionless accent.

[2] To be honest, this was not the case in 2023, the year Today, Oh Boy was published.

James, Huck, and James McBride: A Review of Percival Everett’s “James”

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After reading Dwight Garner’s laudatory review of Percival Everett’s James, I was eager to check it out, especially since I’m a huge fan of Huckleberry Finn. 

Here’s a snippet of Garner’s paean:

Percival Everett’s majestic new novel, James, goes several steps further. Everett flips the perspective on the events in Huckleberry Finn. He gives us the story as a coolly electric first-person narrative in the voice of Jim, the novel’s enslaved runaway. The pair’s adventures on the raft as it twisted down the Mississippi River were largely, from Huck’s perspective, larks. From Jim’s — excuse me, James’s — point of view, nearly every second is deadly serious. We recall that Jim told Huck, in Twain’s novel, that he was quite done with “adventures.”

Garner goes on to say, “This s Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful.”

Alas, when reading James, I was never able to suspend my disbelief, to lose myself in the flow of action and forget that the narrative I was reading was a fictive construction. In his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Everett creates the conceit that the antebellum argot of slaves, the “Else’n they takes you to the post and whips ya[s]” is a linguistic ruse to appease the white population by making them feel superior. The narrator James (aka Jim) speaks (and thinks) in English so standard that he uses “one” instead of “you.”  In short, for me the novel is a contrivance; it’s created in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic.

Everett’s relating the events from James’ perspective in easy-to-decipher prose makes a lot of practical sense; however, the regionless diction of the retelling of Jim and Huck’s escape robs Jim of a breathing individual’s voice –– he could be from 21st Century Dayton, Ohio –– there are no quirks in his phraseology, no flashes of individuality, few regional linguistic markers, which divorces him from time and place and therefore relegates him into the status of a character in a novel rather than a person whom we believe is real. 

That said, Everett does an outstanding job of effectively depicting the horrors of slavery, the never-ending degradation, the perennial fear of having your family disbanded, the horrors of being horsewhipped, the constant verbal abuse. And the novel, especially after James hooks up with a minstrel show, becomes a real page turner, a sort of thriller with cliffhanging chapter endings as he and Huck manage a series of hairbreadth escapes a la The Perils of Pauline. Everett also creates a rich array of colorful characters that you care enough to keep reading, though you might grow a bit weary of the episodic nature of the plot bequeathed by Clemons. 

I couldn’t help unfavorably comparing James to James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, which is also narrated by a slave, Little Onion, who is “liberated” by the historical abolitionist John Brown.  

Here’s Little Onion describing his liberator:

The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath ’em all, and his grey eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren’t no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was – from the very first.

This is a person talking, not the idea of a person talking, which creates a depth of character that James lacks.

Compare McBride’s description with this: 

I was afraid of the men, but I was considerably more afraid of the dogs I’d heard coming our way. I could only imagine that they were after me, and so I was left confused by the presence of these two white men in our boat. Adding to the absurdity was the fact that they were opposite in nearly every way. The older man was very tall and gaunt, while the younger was nearly as short as Huck and fat. The younger had a head full of dark hair. The older was completely bald.

That’s not what I would call “cooly electric first person narrative.” In fact, when I taught composition, I would not allow my students to use the phrase “was the fact that.”

But, hey, look, as I’ve said elsewhere and often, writing a novel is a very difficult undertaking, and James is well worth reading, even though it falls short of my censorious standards for the high praise it has received.  It’s an audacious effort to reconfigure the novel that Hemingway credited with being the root of “all American literature.”  Also, the idea of seeing Huck’s world from Jim’s perspective is existentially cool, underscoring Hamlet’s observation that “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” 

I’d give it a B+ overall.

Episode 3 of “My Boys Were Back in Town, Backroads Edition Featuring Joel Chandler Harris

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Episode 3 – Eatonton’s Rural Literary Legacy

[In episode 2, My ex-pat son Ned and I wended our way through backroads headed to Reynolds, formally known as Reynolds Plantation, just outside of Greensboro, Georgia, to reunite with his Aunt Becky at Uncle Dave].

Around four-thirty on Thursday, Ned and I arrived at Reynolds where we negotiated the security gate rigamarole. At the house, Becky and Dave greeted us warmly, plied us with drinks after our long (well, six hour) journey, and we did some catching up. It turns out that Becky and Dave had recently suffered a hair-raising flight from New Jersey to Atlanta, the inside of the plane perpetually rocked by turbulence for the entire time they were airborne. As she was exiting the plane, Becky found it especially disconcerting to see the pilot and copilot exchanging high fives. She informed Ned if she were going to visit him in Nuremberg, she was likely to take an ocean liner.

On Friday, Dave, who is overseeing the construction of one of the houses his son Scott is building in Reynolds, headed off to work, and Becky drove Ned and me to Eatonton so we could check out the Georgia Writer’s Museum, home of the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame. 

Eatonton is a lovely, sleepy verdant town that reminds me of the Summerville of my youth. It seems like a pleasant place to retire, that is, if you’re not a Folly Beach hedonist hellbent on cha-cha-cha-ing yourself to death.

The museum itself, located in a coffeeshop, struck me as the literary equivalent of a science fair, consisted of tables lined up with poster board information. Eatonton and its environs have produced a remarkable number of noteworthy writers including Alice Walker, Jean Toomer of Harlem Renaissance fame, and Joel Chandler Harris, who adapted African folk tales in book form, creating the Uncle Remus stories. Milledgeville, the home of Flannery O’Connor, is a mere twenty miles south.

The museum houses both Joel Chandler Harris’s and Flannery O’Connor’s typewriters, plus an exhibit delineating the evolution of machines of writing, starting with primitive typewriters and ending with a progression of computers getting smaller and sleeker through the decades.

As I slowly strolled along the exhibits, The fact that Joel Chandler Harris had been born in the Barnes Inn and Tavern caught my eye. Being born in a tavern seemed odd, colorful, so I read on. 

Here’s a short version of his life:

The year of his birth is uncertain, either 1845 or 1848. His mother Mary, an Irish immigrant who worked at the inn, was impregnated by a cad who abandoned his infant son and Mary.  She named the baby Joel Chandler Harris after her attending physician.

Of course, illegitimacy, as it was called in my youth, was especially problematic in the antebellum South.[1] In addition to that disadvantage, Joel was redheaded and stammered, which made him a target for bullies.[2]  The stigma of his “lowly” birth haunted him throughout his youth and early adulthood.

Fortunately, Dr. Andrew Reid, a prominent Eatonton physician, provided Mary and Joel with a small house behind his mansion. He also paid for Joel’s tuition (in those days public education didn’t exist in the South). Mother Mary fostered Joel’s future literary prowess by reading to him out loud, which helped him to develop the remarkable memory he would utilize in assembling the Uncle Remus tales. She read him Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield so often that he could recite lengthy passages by heart.

At fourteen, Harris dropped out of school and went to work for a newspaper, Joseph Addison Turner’s The Countrymanwith a circulation around 2,000. There Harris mastered the basics, including typesetting. Addison allowed Harris to publish his own stories and poems. Eventually, Harris moved into Turnwold Plantation, Addison’s home, located nine miles outside of Eatonton. Here Harris had access to a voluminous library and where he began devouring the classics and contemporary authors such as Dickens, Thackery, and Poe.

At Turnwold, Harris spent hundreds of hours in the slave quarters. Wikipedia claims that Harris’s “humble background as an illegitimate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant helped foster an intimate connection with the slaves. He absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of people like Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy,” who in amalgam became the narrator of the Brer Rabbit Tales, Uncle Remus.

I was unfamiliar with Harris’s biography, but what strikes me as truly remarkable is that he replicated these stories in dialect without any written sources. He essentially gave voice to and preserved these tales that had been stored in the brains of Africans, transported across the Atlantic in slave ships, and told and retold in slave cabins throughout dark nights of captivity.

Because of the Disney movie, Song of the South, Harris has been tarred (pun intended) as being a racist, which is unfortunate. What Harris did was preserve a rich trove of folklore featuring an African trickster who used his wiles to outfox foxes, tales where the underdog prevails. Of course, you can accuse Harris of cultural appropriation, but to my mind, the dialect enriches the tales, making them much more linguistically interesting. 

After the war, Harris moved up in the world of journalism, working at the Atlanta Constitution for nearly a quarter century, and addition to the Remus tales, he published novels, short stories, and humorous pieces. Luminaries such as Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain were among his admirers. Alas, he was an alcoholic, and died from complications from cirrhosis of the liver at 59.

After our visit to the museum, Becky gave us a driving tour of the area, which includes a dilapidated chapel where Alice Walker’s ancestors are buried. We arrived back at Reynolds in the early afternoon, looking forward to Cousin Scott’s arrival the next day. At the museum, Ned had bought me Jean Toomer’s Cane, a literary mosaic of poems and short stories that brings to life a subculture, which reminds me of my work-in-progress Long Ago Last Summer, an up close and personal exploration of real life Sothern Gothic.

In short, it was a very meaningful morning and afternoon for Ned and me. 

Alice Walker’s Childhood Home around 1910

[1] Of course, “bastard” was the preferred 19th Century nomenclature. 

[2] As a former redhead, I can emphasize. If interested, check this LINK out.