Sexy vampires make me want to vomit

I have no tolerance for vampire stories. I refuse to read novels about them, won't watch any of the twelve thousand new TV shows about teenage 90210 vampires and wouldn't dream of paying ten bucks to see beautiful twenty-something British actors biting each other's necks on the big screen.

I will be so bold as to say I hate the vampire movement. It bugs the crap out of me. Some people will accuse me of being a realist, of lacking imagination, even of not being fun. But I don't care.

I prefer drama of the mortal world. I like law and order. I mean I really like Law and Order. All through my adult life, my roaring twenties when I thought I was the first person ever to discover the beauty of Van Morrison and wearing Doc Martens made me anti-establishment (please!) I have watched this show. In my early thirties where I saw myself as some sort of sophisticated urbanite because I ate expensive food and drank good wine and into my late thirties where I've finally started to uncover the me I like, I've always loved Law and Order.

There is something simple about the formula. A person discovers a body. The cops come in, take cues from the crime scene to uncover what happened. The lawyers prosecute those responsible. There is nothing glamorous. There is no plot. We rarely get a personal look into the bedrooms or even the kitchens of the characters unless it is crucial to the story of the crime. And my favourite part?

It's real.

In Dick Wolf's world, there are no gratuitous sex scenes, no seductive teenagers committing the crimes to drive up ratings, no superhero detective named H swooping in to save the day, wearing clothes he likely couldn't afford on a real life cop's salary, no solving the crime within the hour time frame, no good guys always winning. The bum on the street, looks like a bum on the street, not a beautiful guest actor with strategically placed 'bum' makeup above his eye.



And the story unfolds as it would in life. In his memoirs, Stephen King says that he rarely ever writes a novel with a preconceived plot. He starts out with an idea or situation and then lets the story uncover itself - he likens it to digging up a dinosaur skeleton. Done right with the appropriate tools, he says, the story will show itself.

It's not unusual for the DA's office to lose their case on a tiny technicality. Sometimes the person we spent 45 minutes blaming for the crime ends up being innocent. Children die. Women get raped and don't get justice. Innocent men spend ten years behind bars. People are refused medical care because they can't pay.

Real life. Ugly and messy.

I'm participating with Mama Kat using the prompts simple and bold. Check out some of the other entries.

My first love

I'm participating in Mama Kat's writer's workshop. I chose to use the prompt Look up a favorite childhood actor and tell us where they are now:
One of my favourite parts of the day in elementary school was when the teacher read to us. In grade five Mr. Jansen introduced us to S.E. Hinton and her novel The Outsiders. It changed me. The whole experience affirmed my already growing love affair with reading.

The silent rapt attention of the class while he read a few chapters each Friday afternoon, the exhilaration of hearing our teacher talk of things so unorthodox in our Catholic school environment, while he opened up a world where the poor kids known as Greasers fought to keep their turf and dignities intact against the rich and privileged soc's (short for socials) gave me joy. I remember the excitement with which we would all discuss the chapters we had just heard on our walks home, trying to figure out who amongst us would be considered Greasers and Soc's.

The following summer I borrowed a copy of the book from the library and read it again even memorizing some of the passages and the Robert Frost poem Stay Gold*. I can recite it by heart to this day:

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf a flower
But only so an hour
Then leaf subsides to leaf
So Eden sank to grief
And dawn goes down to dayy
Nothing gold can stay.

In grade six our family moved all the way to Tucson Arizona. It was a devastating and difficult move but I found enormous comfort when Hollywood came out with the movie version of The Outsiders. That I was seemingly half away across the world and yet this beloved story was known there too, eased the pain of leaving behind my friends and school.

It was when I fell in love for the first time. He was the lead character in the movie, Ponyboy Curtis, and the actor's name was C. Thomas Howell. To me, he was Ponyboy, I made no distinction between the character and actor. I wrote his name on all of my notebooks, and there was always an I love T.H (Tom Howell) at the top of every note I passed to friends. I used my allowance and babysitting money to buy any teen magazine he was featured in, and plastered my share of the wall, of the bedroom I shared with my two sisters, with his pictures. I even wrote to him once and received a postcard from his Fanclub Headquarters. It said something like:

Thank you for the letter. Stay Gold. C. Thomas Howell.

His name was a stamped signature but the rest had been written in pen. I was convinced it was directly from him and carried the postcard around in my pencil case showing it to anyone and everyone.

I hadn't thought about Ponyboy in a long time. A few weeks ago I was watching Criminal Minds and there he was, C. Thomas Howell. He was guest starring as the unsub and time had not been kind to his face. He was gaunt and lean, his hair shaved close to his head. There was nothing left of that teen hearthrob I once worshipped.

I guess Robert Frost knew what he was talking about. Nothing gold can stay.

*I googled the poem after I posted this. The title is actually Nothing gold can stay.