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A very quick post, but I need to keep this consistent. It’s a way of keeping me accountable for making progress each week. If I get really productive, perhaps I could write more than one post a week. But let’s not get too far ahead of myself.

This week, I thought a lot about contraception. (Details and reasoning coming) My mind flitted back to my time in college, my junior year. In the Honors Program at my school, you had to take 4 honors seminar classes with 4 generic titles: “Style and Transformation in the Arts,” “Culture and Revolution,” “Non-Western Culture,” and “Topics in Scientific Inquiry.” They were generic titles because they rotated among the various faculty members who taught on whatever they wanted. For example, one teacher’s “Culture and Revolution” course could cover Soviet Russia, while another’s “Culture and Revolution” could cover Roman culture. This is all set up to tell you that in my “Topics in Scientific Inquiry” was about the white tailed deer population in Iowa.

Iowa, specifically Linn and Johnson Counties have problems with deer. They have too many of them. They’ve taken to extending deer hunting season and to hiring sharpshooters to try and thin the herd. In my class, there was conversation about plans to shoot the deer with contraceptives. Yes. You read that correctly. Shooting the deer with dissolving pellets that would put contraceptives into the bloodstream. My class took place in 2000, and in 2007, it looked like this, can I call it a dream?, was about to become a reality. From everything that I read, it looks like it didn’t. Sad, really.

Anyway, what does this have to do with my play? First, I have to tell you a little about my characters. (Maybe this won’t be such a quick post) I’ll give the quick descriptions.

Victoria: Latina, 30’s, teaches Voice as an adjunct at a small, liberal arts college in an unspecified Iowa city.

Francesca: Latina, Victoria’s only best friend.

Brian: 35, adjunct Poli-Sci professor at the same college as Victoria.

Rob: 35, old college buddy of Brian’s, now an Iowa state Senator.

The plot of the play centers on Victoria’s aggravation with the “War on Women” in America (fight for contraception, fight on abortion) to the point that she wants in on the action; she wants to bust her way into politics. Brian is her resource and Brian offers her Rob as another resource. Turns out, however, that Rob is a Conservative.

This week I made a list of possible scenes (see last week’s post) and I started thinking about arguments that Rob and Victoria might find themselves embroiled in their times together; one of those would be contraception. Rob has 4 kids. Victoria asks
why he doesn’t have more. Does he not have that much sex with his wife? Things break down from there. Then I heard Brian coaching Victoria, “Bring up the deer.” Bam. Deer contraception. And, though I’m not sure references to white tailed deer contraceptives will remain, the thought started to solidify Victoria’s relationships to both Rob and, especially, Brian. So, this week was a good week for jotting down ideas and making lists and finding snippets of dialogue and discovery of character relationships. Not too bad.