Review: First Stage of Being in the Club

Becoming a mother doesn't start on that final push, it starts with preparation. And giving birth is only the beginning of the wondrous adventure. As with Nature, maternity and motherhood comes in stages: there's the time of flirtation, getting attention and attraction, inviting a touch or visit that leads to fertilization. And then the miracles that happen during gestation.

"In the Club" is a mini series aired on KCET. It allows us to visit the lives of six women who become acquainted with one another because of a prenatal class they attend together. With a major life issue in common and regular visits filled with learning and sharing, they form a bond, even a friendship, with one another. Their partners become part of that friendship.

One by one, we learn about each woman and her circumstances. We learn about her partner and their living circumstances. With each episode we get drawn into the intrigue of what will happen next and whether the characters will be able to work through the challenges they face.

At first blush, it would seem that it's merely a story about six bloated women who will ultimately go through a time of screaming and groaning and exposing their bottom to the world so that they may receive a slimy, wriggly, wailing newborn. Well, we do go through all of that but there's more to each of the six stories.

One woman discovers, at 37 weeks, that she's expecting twins. An hour later, she discovers that her husband was fired five months before but never told her. Their car has been repossessed, they are in arrears on their house payments, they have two adopted children who are very much a part of the parents' lives, and Mom has been blithely going about preparing a nursery that the family cannot afford. The final straw comes when Dad takes the children for pizza after school but can't pay the bill. His solution is to feign being a terrorist and robbing a bank.

There is also the older woman who became pregnant by a lover who is 25 years her junior and has a lot of maturing that needs to be done before he'll be ready to become a responsible father. Meanwhile, Mom is going through a torrid divorce from a resentful husband and even more resentful adult children.

The unwed teen has been hiding her pregnancy from her widowed long-haul driver father. She's been resourceful enough to rent tapes about childbirth but she has no clue about what's happening to her. Housekeeping skills have not been part of her maturation agenda. She stumbles into the class in full labor. Meanwhile, her dad has fallen asleep at the wheel and suffered a serious injury. The teen and hre baby's after care become a major issue.

The young Indian couple are having their ups and downs. It doesn't help that she claims she became pregnant while they were honeymooning. She confides to one of her friends that she's not really in love with her husband but he's a good man. Tensions rise when her doctor questions why her ankles are so swollen this much in advance of her due date. Complications arise not only with her pregnancy but also with determining the paternity of her baby.

The lesbian couple are going through the strains of living out of the closet with the teenage son of the non-gestating partner. The ex-husband is also the father of the the coming life. What is ultimately revealed is that the pregnancy was not started by in vitro fertilization and the couple are falling in love with one another.

And then there's the prenatal class instructor, a nurse, who is expecting the child of her boss, the OB/GYN for the women in the class.

Yes, it's a bit of a soap opera scenario. The thing of it is, the story is well written. You don't get bored with weekly screaming and grunting sessions. It's the intricacies of each story that pull the attention. It's the tension that mounts causing the viewer to wonder what will happen next. The writers make the audience try to anticipate how the challenges will be resolved and ask their own selves how they would handle each one or whether they would be able to do so.

The writers succeed in making this a story of diversity in a unique way. Each mother faces a unique situation. There are different social issues at play, different ethnicities represented, different economic circumstances. Even the children pose non-traditional challenges that wouldn't be expected in a traditional family drama.

For example, one of the fraternal twins was a successful birth. But his sister had a difficult time and will be a special-needs baby. Those twins are special to their adopted older siblings. As far as those two are concerned, they are a family of six, all special and all equally loved. The teen son is going through rage and hate for his mother now that she's come out. He's abusive and disrespectful. Getting him to curb his behavior toward her is not the responsibility of her partner nor her ex-husband. Although she's good at being demanding, it's at the wrong time and her aggressive behavior is directed at the wrong person.

The story winds the audience into its telling but there's a bit of a snag there. This is a story premised on six expecting women. Those pregnancies are the primary basis of the show. It's not feasible to have the same six women having a new pregnancy year after year. So how will the series perpetuate itself? Perhaps by morphing into a story about raising children. That friendship bond can only last so long when lives become disparate because of disparate circumstances.

Spoiler alert: This show only lasted for one season.

The good things about it are the acting, the writing, the symbolism. It makes for some good conversation about dealing with Life circumstances and how many options we actually have. It's eye opening to consider Life outside of our circumstances in order to safely consider how long we should stay on a particular path before taking a turn onto another road that may get us to our destination in a more comfortable or safer manner.

Even though it's a brief indulgence, it's worth making friends with these women and becoming involved with their lives. We learn that maternity is only the beginning of the story.

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Review: Writer in a New Land

Public Broadcast Stations (PBS) are airing a few new week night series. It's a mixed bag of drama, light comedy, situational comedy, mystery, and whodunits. These are in addition to the weekend Masterpiece dramas.

One of the new series, 800 Words, seems to pick up on a theme from the Masterpiece story, Durrells in Corfu. There we were told the 1930s story of the newly widowed English woman and her four children who left England in search of a more affordable existence in a small village in a Greek island. Her eldest embarks on a career as an author.

With 800 Words, the story is modified. It's a contemporary Australian widower, George Turner, who transplants to a small town in New Zealand with his two teenagers. Each day is a new adventure of errors and calamities. The family learns the house they thought they were moving into is not the ideal abode. Instead, it's more than a fixer-upper. It's a disaster that is barely tolerable - and then gets worse. Then the boat with all of their furniture and belongings sinks. The family is left to quite literally rough it as they learn about the island, the people, the customs, and survival in a new place.

Now in a new place with offspring who need to be cared for, George needs to earn a living. He finds a job as the local newspaper columnist and journalist. Somehow, that job pays for the family's most immediate needs and affords George the ability to pay for the numerous repairs for the house and the car. While the teenagers go through their form of grieving and trying to make sense of this new life, we learn about Dad as he works through his own battles through his weekly column that has a word count limit of 800 words - thus the name of the series. He speaks to us, and the village, through his column. He philosophizes. He learns. He discloses.

The story is made more endearing because it's situated in a very small town on an idyllic island. Needless to say, everyone knows everyone else. Gossip is the mainstay. People pitch in to help one another. Spontaneous housewarmings happen. Scandals come; scandals go. Peace abides as Life shifts and existence spins its way into a new day and new situations.

We go through the maturation process with the teens. It's easy to recognize that the story is authored by a man. The older daughter seems a bit more mature for her years than we would expect of a 16 year old. She is also not shy about speaking her mind to anyone, whether adult or peer. The younger son is learning about claiming territory and where he fits into the pecking order of the land. But he is also learning about his voice and he uses his voice and sophistication to work through the various situations that confront him.

Both of the youth are very sophisticated and philosophical. They make the viewer wonder what type of woman Mum was and what type of parenting was happening before the transplant occurred.

When George isn't writing, he's negotiating his way through existence as he goes through his own form of release from grieving. He attempts to reclaim the precious days of his youth when he longed to surf the New Zealand waters. Now approaching middle age, he realizes that may be more of a daydream than something that will be attained but it creates an occasional respite and an opportunity to meet more of the neighbors and become one with the land. He wants to fit in and he wants his family to be accepted by the locals. After all, they're going to live there for the rest of their lives.

Like the petals of a flower that slowly peel away from the bud, so the knowledge about the transplanted family comes to life in the series and we're drawn into the drama of life in a new place. We laugh at the double-handed doses Life dishes out in the form of tragedies that morph into moments of laughter that make it all the sweeter to be in Weld. We begin to yearn for that simpler time when Life was much more mellow in spite of what seems like chaos.

Perhaps the chaos is merely the unpredictable nature of living one day into the next. It's all a surprise and an exercise in a type of game of survival. In this idyllic setting, the threats and dangers are sparse. It's a relief to believe that type of existence can happen both in the past for the Durrells and in the present for the Turners.

If only more of us were as articulate so that we would paint word pictures for others to savor while we surf through our days.

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First Impressions

I love this blurb from an American Management Association promotional email. It highlights the reasons why using a proofreading and copy editing service is so important:

Troubleshoot Writing Errors That Make You Look Bad

Every time you send an email or submit a report, you are being judged on your writing skills. Business writing errors (even simple grammatical mistakes) can complicate your message, confuse your readers, cost you money, diminish your professional image, and hold you back in your career.

There are many instances when the writer's message attempts to convey the level of expertise they have to offer. Were it not for the grammatical and spelling errors in their written message (the ones that the reader is willing to overlook because the logic is very sound), the advances the author could be realizing could dramatically increase. It's a heartbreaking situation.

For example, it may be possible that the author of this content wasn't able to afford the time for an additional copy edit before publishing it. Or maybe they were simply so motivated to get the content published, were pressed for time, and had a lot of confidence in what existed that they felt there was no need for an additional read-through.

Cash – obviously if you can make a sale that’s revenue for your company. One example of this would be a facility that sells monthly memberships.

Attention and Trust – now they’re lots of businesses that need this. For example: I’m going to watch channel 6 news tonight. Well, I’m not paying them cash. I’m giving them attention and trust, in which they can figure out how to make money through advertising.

Referral – Does your service or product work better when your friends use it too? Krispy Kreme uses the revenue of referral. Everytime they open up a new location, employees start giving away thousands of donuts. The people most likely show up for a free hot donut are those who have heard the legend of Krispy Kreme and are delighted that the company is finally in town. These people spread the word. They tell their friends and even bring them into a store.

Imagine the fan's disappointment when they read this excerpt and sincerely want to recommend the author to colleagues:

"The problem with this approach is if you think everyone that breaths is your ideal customer chances are you’ll spend money in the wrong media channels and time at the wrong events or on the wrong platforms, wasting your greatest resources of time and money."

or here when they find the stupendous advice that's laced with a few problems with the use of articles, such as:

"The typical bland response for many is to say . . . “I’m in the cleaning business, I’m an consultant, I’m a plumbing contractor or I’m a account specialist.”"

Then there are the writers who allow their spell checker to dominate their proofreading. Unfortunately, the spell checker is simply an automated system that doesn't really pay attention to context. So the printed version of the speech may sound right but it talks about the person who "lead" the throngs or the one who "new" all of the facts. And there's the classic where the reporter wrote about their interview with a South African artist who shared with comfort she derives from going back to the "crawl" to escape from the rigors of touring and being in the entertainment industry.

A grammatical issue makes the speaker seem to be in charge but the copy editor is wincing when they read this sentence: "Let's look at it another way. Do you care to listen to people whom you dislike?"

It's a good idea to use at least a proofreader for a quick review of the copy before it's published. Yes, the pressures of being first to speak are there. Yes, there are other issues happening that are demanding your attention and attempting to tear you away from that precious item to be pushed out to the world (literally).

Perhaps life would be better if instead of a one-time, gig-style service, a retained copy editor (or just a proofreading service) would be the answer. No doubt a reduced, continuous service rate could be worked out that would provide a more satisfactory result for all involved. After all, the real goal of the writing is reaching a destination that represents success for the writer / speaker. So it just makes sense to have the end result be an enduring positive first impression.

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