Murphy Tolstoy's car breaks down in Irvine. She's got a mechanic, but it means waiting for two days to shoot. And I am desperate to leave. But when you write the scenes, they take on their own strange life and start making demands of you; I am helpless and agree to wait. I wonder how she will do with these:
Sean always calls himself an eco-yuppie. I'm an eco-yuppie, too.
I rip small holes into the sky every time I fly to Chicago or Amsterdam.
Just me, normal size, I'm good for three big bags of trash a week.
I wash my hands too much. Flush even when I only pee.
But I give twenty five bucks a year to the Nature Conservancy so they can buy a forest in Madagascar and keep it from being sold at Pier One in small blocks of burnished furniture.
I cry when I think about polar bears drowning while they swim looking for a floe to stand on.
(pause)
But when I think about the future, and the cost of all this gasoline, and an executive from an oil company walks in front of me, if I had a trigger I would pull it, leave him cut in two on the sidewalk as an example for the other yuppies walking by, don't let this happen to you, get a degree in solar energy.
It's the same thing I always write, the same character, the same subject, the same plaintive lament. To other people, it sounds shrill. They are annoyed by my incessant bleats. But I like the line about the burnished furniture at Pier One. Even at Target, as I cruise the aisles looking for pink crocs, I notice the handsome hardwood from Thailand and Indonesia, stapled into armoires or sofas, and instead of my heart sinking I feel the yuppie compulsion to acquire. "That would look nice!" Can I buy these pieces and offset their destructive influence by refusing to buy Crest toothpaste? No. Wise up. Don't covet unreplenished nature as pretty possessions.
Murphy will do a good job wih these lines and others, and the video will take on two lives, one as a short for the attention-deficited on utoob, the other as a longer piece on brightcove. There are weaknesses, small touches of sloppiness, but not from Murphy Tolstoy. The icky parts are all mine.