The Best of Reasons

Monday June 4, 2012
O'Hare International Airport
Early Evening

Another year, another Italian sojourn. I suppose that some people might find this odd obsession I have with continually returning to Italy to be a bit mystifying. After all, there are plenty of nice places in the world. Why keep going back to the same one year after year? I can defend this on a number of levels. First, it's Italy. Why wouldn't I long to return? Second, it's not like I don't travel to other countries (although I will only do the one this year). Third, and most important, I always manage to come up with good reasons to come back. And when some of those reasons make it tax-deductible, well, need I say more?

This year, I have two very good reasons. One is professional. Jack and I have proven to be an effective production team - a short, a feature, and now a documentary in production. For our next project we want to shoot a feature in Italy. Part of this trip is to suss out the production capabilities and tax incentives that this country has to offer so that we can return next year and shoot my script Through A Door Like Anna.

The second reason is personal yet intimately intertwined. I wrote the script in 2001 as a way of processing a very intense relationship I had with Bridget Boland, another writer at Ragdale. Not wanting to make it too masturbatory, I appliqué-ed the story of our time at Ragdale onto a road trip that I had done through Italy the year before. Try as we might, Bridget and I weren't able to figure out how to be together and the script - with it's deliberately ambiguous ending - had long become a wistful reminder of something very special but not to be.

A few days after Jack and I first started talking about shooting the script, I was surprised (well, shocked really) to get an email from Bridget. We had not seen or communicated with each other for five years. Very gingerly at first, we reestablished our friendship. By this past July, it was quite clear to us that it was much more than this. Now, after nearly a year of building our relationship, she will be moving up from Dallas with her son and we are going to move forward with dispatch.

Before this, we want to celebrate our relationship. And what better way to do it than to replicate the road trip that once symbolized the start of our journey together?

Yes, I'm that romantic.

For the first twelve days of this trip, I'll be on my own. I'll approach it the way I always do: seeing the sights and leaving the overall planning to the capriciousness of my own traveling nature. There will be meetings with people about the film, as well as the myriad odd run-ins with cab drivers, innkeepers, waiters and railroad employees that always add color to the day-to-day life of a wanderer in no hurry to get anywhere. Then, on the 16th, a new and wonderful character will enter the narrative in Rome.

I can't wait.