Drew Barrymore Starring As Sylvie Potemkin

Even since we announced casting had begun for the film version of our unfinished novel, The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship, our office has been deluged with Hollywood agents. They’re camping in the front office while messenger boys rush in with fresh portfolios and sample reels. We think Kurt Cobain has Walrus Pemmican sewed up - although we’re not sure about the blond hair. Other than that, he’ll make a believable Walrus.

But Sylvie Potemkin, there’s another story. The novel clearly indicates she is barely eighteen, hardly touches make-up, has long straight chestnut hair, and is a big girl, zoftig. Not obese, you understand, not at all - just a big girl. Mama Cass Eliott auditioned of course, but she was just too big, and she looks too experienced. Chelsea Clinton showed up in her eighteen year old guise, and she was great, but just wasn’t right for the part. Next Drew Barrymore sent in her resume and a clip of herself driving a VW bug while rolling a joint. She’s a good actress and we think she’ll end up with the part, although she’ll have to do something about all that makeup. Feel free to submit suggestions, we’re still looking.

Wait, here’s a messenger just arrived with a new photo of Drew taken for our casting session. Much better, Drew. You’ve got the part!

Sylvie Potemkin is the story’s second lead character. She grew up in a faux French Provincial home with gardens in Hillsborough, a wealthy San Francisco suburb. Her neighbors included Bing Crosby and the chairman of the California Republican Party, Caspar Weinberger. Sylvie attended Crystal Springs School For Girls, where she met Patty Hearst, who is a few years younger.Sylvie’s father is a successful wholesale liquor distributor. Her grandfather started the family business as a bootlegger and rumrunner. Papa Potemkin is still alive, lives with and advises the family on business matters. The Potemkins still maintain mob connections, although Sylvie is not sure how deep they go. Truth is, Sylvie wants nothing further to do with that life. She loves her family but wants to be an artist one day, when she gets around to it. For now, she lives in a dark old flat on Page Street with the rest of The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship, at the start of her life and eager for everything it could possibly hold. One more thing: Sylvie does not yet understand the depth of her character, but her courage and resourcefulness in danger will be the Syndicate’s greatest asset.

How To Write A Novel Set In The 1920s

1) First, get in the mood by watching this terrific video by Aaron 12…

2) Now listen to a 1920s pop singer like the fabulous Ruth Etting, (she’s the clam’s garters) or the endearing, sweet and lovable Annette Hanshaw until you start to Get Hot!

Lovable and Sweet by Annette Hanshaw

When the music stops sounding quaint and you’re thinking “Hey, I want to go Leona Wilderson’s house party and dance the Charleston (Charleston?) all night with a red hot hopper!” then you’re getting there. You’re almost ready to write.

3) Memorize stories about how much fun your ancestors had in those glory days. Like here’s my Dad in 1924 with a few intimate friends…

and here he is on the way to a costume ball with his incomparable cousin, the reigning princess of Haight-Ashbury radio…the unforgettable…Miss Margaret Hancock.

Now, when your hot tamale is ridin’ the trolley, when your goose is on the loose, your cherry smashes have strawberry rashes and your cuddling cutie’s shouting Rootie Kazootie, start typing! You can’t miss.

The Novel: Progress Report

Readers of my novel-in-progress, The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship,
might be wondering if I’ve developed an advanced case of writer’s
block. Or if I’ve become bored with the whole process. Nope. I haven’t
given up on the novel at all. But I’ve been wandering around the
country a lot in its service. It’s going slower.

It’s not that easy to write dialogue that sounds real. And getting
1922 right is slow going. But I’m hitting it every morning. That’s why
the blog has been a bit sparse of late.

I love my characters. I feel honored that they’ve chosen me to write
about them. The Hancock family and their friends in the 1920’s are
becoming as real to me as Paulie and Walrus and Sylyvie Potemkin are. I
like spending time in their company and I hope you will too.

Chapter 36 is forthcoming - one of these days soon.

Back In The Haight-Ashbury Again

Readers of my ongoing story, The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship, available only by asking to be on my special mailing list, must sometimes wonder about the story’s veracity. I mean, how likely is it someone invented a radio that picks up signals from forty years in the past? Or a transmitter that allows The Syndicate to communicate with a fifteen year old disc jockey living in the year 1927? On the face of it, I have to admit, we have some credibility issues.

Yet, every word is true. Every word! I wasn’t actually there myself of course, but I’ve interviewed both Sylvie Potemkin and Paulie Ratskiwatsky many times and I always made careful notes afterwards. When I could still see my notebook. If only I could talk with Walrus Pemmican too, but I just can’t find him. Nobody can. It’s like he was sucked up in a cyclone and blown all the way to Oz. Maybe he’s living in a hut in a forest somewhere in the kingdom of the Winkies. Well, even without his testimony, I have evidence. Incontrovertible evidence, which I now present for the first time. Step right up. Admission 10 cents.

To gather this evidence, I hitchhiked across the wild steppes of Oregon all the way to San Francisco, slept out in the rain in abandoned pigsties, made friends with the Rogue River Rustlers who let me sleep under their porch, bunked in virginal youth hostels with young Ostrogoths and Franks, all with one intent and one intent only - to get to San Francisco to convince you, gentle reader, of the absolute truth of every wild claim, no matter how outlandish.

I now present, for the first time ever, actual photographs of the very locations where The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship takes place. If these don’t convince you, then you are a hard case indeed, and probably eat boiled owl…

Here is the fabled intersection of Page and Clayton, the geographical center of the story’s universe. Half a block north lies the Hancock house. Someday there’ll be a plaque. And half a block west you’ll find the bay-windowed, asbestos-shingled, anonymous-looking flat where the Syndicate of Eternal Friendship began their incredible adventure.

Here’s where Tosh stood knocking, waiting for someone to answer the door, on that morning that changed their lives forever.

Half a block north on Clayton you’ll find the Hancock home and the dumpster where Paulie and Walrus first found the time radio. You can see where Margaret had her attic studio there at the top of the building. Ken and Don, the gay landlords who bought the place from the Hancock estate, sold it in 1981. Now, in 2008, it’s being remodeled back into a single family home. How likely is that, oh mocker? I wonder if there’s anything else still hiding under the floorboards of the attic?

Looks like they’re converting the garden apartment where the old man with the Siamese cat lived into a garage…

Here is the Childrens’ Playground in Golden Gate Park, where Walrus and Tosh first met. Kismet, I guess. It was six o’clock in the morning. Walrus was trying to wake up the chickens in their little chicken house while Tosh watched in amazement from atop her carousel horse. They didn’t do things like this at home in St. John’s Wood. If you look closely you can still see the columns of the merry-go round peeking through the trees.

And here is the very chicken house, a little larger than in 1965 and it no longer houses chickens, of course. Other than that, you must admit there really is a chicken house right where they said it was.

Finally, compelling, incontrovertible evidence! Here is the exact tree that Howie Morris climbed like the great apes after he accidentally and innocently absorbed a megadose of 100% pure, pharmaceutical grade, Sandoz-manufactured, lysergic acid diethylamide. In the crook of this very tree, in the rain, he gibbered and shivered, attracting a small crowd of neighborhood toughs in the process, who urged him on to greater heights. The police had to call the fire department to get him down. After which they put him in the back seat of their patrol car and hauled him off to the bughouse.

Of course the tree was a little smaller then.

Secrets of A Semi-Fiction Writer

In case you haven’t noticed, The Pondering Pig has been writing fiction lately. Or something impersonating fiction. Or something completely different. Actually, he’s not quite sure what he is writing because so far he has been a ponderer, not an imaginer. He didn’t really set out to write a novel or a serial. He just thought it would be interesting to add dialog and create some little illustrative scenes of his life as an original hippie in San Francisco back before the world knew about such things.

But as soon as I gave them some lines, my characters started acting uppity. Like Walrus Pemmican, for instance. As soon as he sat down in Sylvie’s room I could tell he was pissed off about something, and was just itching to pick a fight with Paulie. And Paulie got carried away and imagined the Syndicate of Eternal Friendship should corner the Haight-Ashbury retail marijuana market. The real Paulie never said that!

It was too absurd. In the Haight, of course, we all just wanted to be flower children and wear flowers in our hair and listen to Donovan records, and suddenly these guys are shouting at each other and plotting dreams of empire and acting like crooks! And poor Allen Cohen.

Allen was a real person, a poet and the founder of the San Francisco Oracle, one of the first and most influential of the underground newspapers of our era. We shared a flat in the City for about a year and I got to know him well. Yet I found I couldn’t give him any lines because I was afraid if I did he would start acting like a crook too! He was a man of respect in our neighborhood. And I don’t want to dishonor his memory. So he ended up just sitting on the mattress waiting for his cue - which doesn’t come.

You start changing people’s names and creating dialog for them and suddenly anything can happen. The police may break down the door any second and the Syndicate of Eternal Friendship will have to run out the back. Or the girl on the merry-go-round might turn out to be a messenger from God. Or an Indian princess in disguise who’s seeking the Lost Ruby of Khalimar. And maybe Walrus Pemmican is actually a real walrus! Just a very skinny one who lives in the Haight-Ashbury.

What I found is you start giving people dialog and new clothes to wear and pretty soon they don’t like any of it and want to choose their own costumes. Flowers in my hair? Forgeddaboudit.

And then there’s names. Real living people can sue you for libel if they start abusing children and robbing banks in your story. So I realized I’d better change everybody’s names before I’m subpoenaed.

Now I’ve got a new set of problems. Take Howie, for instance. He’s a minor character so far — you probably forgot about him already. So far, he’s just one of the guys who bought the marijuana and brought it back to 1736 Page. But you never know. The first time he opens his mouth he wants to know all about Machine Gun Kelly!

So my first inspiration was to call him ‘Howie Kalishnikoff’. Has a certain drama to it, sort of like ‘Sylvia Potemkin’. Then I thought - why not change his first name too - to, uh, ‘Lennie’. Sounds like Howie, except it’s Lennie. How about ‘Lennie Kalishnikoff’? Trouble is, the reader is going to expect exciting things from a guy with a name like that. Is he a walking time bomb? Seething behind that smiling mask? Ready to go off like an AK-47? Or maybe he lives for his ‘gun’?

Nah. And besides, Kalishnikoff is too hard to spell. I’d be looking it up all the time.

OK, then I thought, well - the guy I’m basing this character on had one of the most common surnames. Maybe a nice, ordinary name would work. So I looked up America’s most common last names. Here’s a good one: White. Number 14.

How about ‘Willie White’? Nice alliteration - but he sounds too much like a bluesman from the Mississippi Delta. Blind Willie White. Recorded one earthshaking session in 1928. Then he disappeared into the night and my character is his kid! Except he doesn’t know it! He thinks he can’t even play the kazoo! What do you think?

Nah.

Onward - well, the 16th most popular name is Martin. So how about ‘Mel Martin’? Yeah, that’s it! Mel Martin! He’s a smooth lounge singer from Vegas who’s on the run from the Mafia because he was making love to Duh Capo’s beautiful wife and Mickey Duh Mouse caught them in the linen closet. Now he’s hiding out at 1736 Page pretending to be an original hippie.

Nah. I think my character is more of a ‘Howie Morris’. Just an ordinary pussycat of a name to hide an extraordinary person.

On the other hand, maybe I should give up the whole thing and write history, plain and simple. With footnotes, like this:

Chap 3, p.47: According to Ronald Palaver (op cit. p. 38), a gang of evil hippies once lived at 1736 Page Street. After cornering the Haight-Ashbury marijuana market they kidnapped Patty Hearst and insisted she go to college. Later, the FBI shot them down like dogs. Except for Walrus Pemmican, who remains missing to this day.

So much simpler.