Testing testing 1 2 3

Alright, it's Thursday, December 18th, I'm driving home on the 101 through San Rafael just passed Marin Civic Center. I'll be down poor right now. And I've been thinking about the new romantic comedy version of the story. And I'm liking it a lot. It's a new twist. It's not so serious. I had no framework for lighthearted telling of the story. Maybe I'm finally loosening up a bit, I'm not sure. So, I think what's interesting about this version is that I can create two characters in some ways. And I'm fairly certain to clerk at the newspaper or county office in the Lisa. It's going to be either Latina or maybe a mother from Mexico and a white father. Not really sure yet. Maybe a stretch to say that. But yeah. And her mother will definitely have to be somehow connected back to Florence. Florence will have participated, will have picked cotton a couple of summers. And when you're out there in the fields picking cotton, you talk to people. And one of the persons she spoke to was a woman who had was bust in from Mexico as part of the Braceros program. Although most of the Braceros were men, there were a small amount of women. Let's just put it at that. Or you could get a woman cheaper to pick cotton under the table. And that's how these women came in and took some of these jobs. And this woman learned English from Florence and vice versa from Spanish. There were share stories. And then one day Florence just disappeared. I really disappeared but left for college and never came back. And one day she saw, she picked up the paper and saw her in the paper and brought it home. And kept it with her and used to tell her stories of this woman who just... She used to refer to her as Florence the right way. If that makes sense in Spanish. And... So, or Florence the peacock. There's maybe some word that they gave Florence in the cotton fields. But yeah, that's how this girl comes to learn of Florence. And when she meets... I will have to come up with a name for this person. It has to be a definite, a romantic name. Like, I'm sorry, but Mohammed Ahmed, not many of those names are romantic. The theme is romantic. So, maybe Rami. But Rami still sends like... Roomy or like a mystic. It's too mystical. Or yeah, it sounds too close to runaway. And his mother will have to have given him a fancy name. A name that like, you know, she insisted on... When he was born. And yeah. But, like a famous poet of something for painting. Like, like... Yeah. And then look up again, famous names. An Omar. And I don't know what a Joe Obama makes a good one. Or... Yeah. Malik. I think Malik is a better name than Rami. And his dad could be in the scene. And his son's name is Malik. But, yeah. So... So... So we have four characters, so far, five plus four central characters. You know, we have Malik. Malik is the son who was in the oil company. His father was in the same who was in the fruit juice company. You know, his wife is Florence, who is basically a... An accountant for her entire life. Never really got to be who she wanted to be. And... This girl, the clerk, needed a good name for her. A little name that, you know, it's clearly like a classical Mexican female name. And something that works well with Malik. Rosa. Rosita. Alia. Alia. Yeah, possibly Alia. And again, Alia is... What's going on with her? Why is she working as a clerk, you know, in Lameza? Maybe she's come back to Lameza to take care of her father. And that's the only job she could get. You know, maybe she's... No, she's never gone anywhere. And she's just stayed there. But she's super well read. She is... Lives in the home that she was raised in. Both of her parents are gone. Her mother picked cotton, then she basically did. Maybe she was a cleaning lady after that. And she would have to be, I think, full-on. You know, both parents Mexican. She, her father worked in a cotton gin. Yeah. And then maybe Alia's mother eventually became a teacher. Does that fit in the narrative? Already maybe Florence's mother's a teacher? Yeah, that's kind of messed up. But, you know, Alia discovering this name that she hasn't seen since childhood. She walks away from everything. She's been waiting to simply find an excuse to run. The trick is, how does she know she has to go to Egypt? And how does she make it on the same flight? Malik will have to... You know, as he tells her what he needs, you know, out of the, I guess, add in the paper. She, you know, throws a couple questions, adding... Is that here, you know, she's... She's in a bit of shock, you know, she sees the name. And of course, as I had stated in the previous recording, that she was recalling, you know, I guess, a moment where she first learned of the name. And so, yeah. Now, Malik, you know, is completely, I guess, unaware of what's happening. And possibly she just throws out a simple innocent answer like, oh, that sounds like such an exotic name. Is that like from Egypt or something? And maybe, I don't know, that's a good way of putting it. But yeah, I suppose that's how he could, you know, couldn't, you know, kind of start talking about himself, that, you know, he's from Egypt or that his parents are from Egypt, or his dad is from Egypt, not those parents. But, yeah, I'm going to pause it right now, because I'm feeling tired. I need to focus on the road.

Alright, I'm back. I'm going in the dip. Still same day, Tuesday, December 18th, 3.02 pm on my way home from work. Tomorrow we'll fly to Egypt. It's kind of interesting. Well, I was thinking about somewhere else there, but I was just trying to come up with a way in which Rosa... What Maria? What are the mediums? Miriam, maybe. Anyway, she has to go after Malik. She can't, you know, she wants to ask him so many questions. I think for material. But I think there's, you know, something that leads her to believe she'll never see him again if she does not take this chance. And I think there was a time in her life where she was literally trying to track Florence down and could not find her. And then a memory, here's a someone from Florence's life just handed to her on a plate. Now why was she tracking Florence down? I guess later I've got to come up with something. But, you know, the only... You know, because he filled out an application with the location of his drill site, she drives out there and starts asking questions, where is he? Where is he? And they're like, he's not here. She's like, oh no. Well, he left his phone in the office and I have to give it back to him. He's like, well, I'll just, you know, he ain't here. He's gone. Like, where is he? He's at the airport. He's going back to Houston. And so all she knows is that he's flying to Houston. But, you know, so she realizes at that point she's got either a book, a ticket. So maybe that's the last we hear of her. And then the story starts up again with Malik and his journey to Egypt. And perhaps it starts off with him, you know, chatting online while he's boarding the plane, chatting online with one of his cousins about, you know, how his uncle doing. He's, you know, his cousin's telling him basically it doesn't look good. He's not doing very well. And, but he's apologizing he couldn't get an earlier flight. Things came up. And so, yeah. And one of the last questions would be to, maybe by his cousin would be, well, you know, dad can't wait to meet your wife. And maybe that's when he, just like size, you know, we kind of, he ends the chat and doesn't know what to do because he just lied about it. And maybe he had a friend, you know, arrange, I don't know, pictures that he got married, all that kind of stuff. I don't know. It is kind of cheesy in the sense that it's the obvious hookup because now you're going to think, oh, Malik and Rosa are going to be a thing. But Malik is pretty bummed because he knows he's traveling to Egypt without a wife to see his dying uncle. And he's not married and he's losing a family member. So, you know, amidst all that, he hears a commotion up front or at the back of the plane. And that's when he realizes that Rosa has, has boarded. And he doesn't know why.

And just a quick note here, Rosa as a child always wanted to hear the story of Florence and you know the kinds of things she did how she wrote letters how she was nice to everyone and then one day you know how she would read the letters out in the middle of the their cotton fields while the other you know while the other workers were picking cotton and how one day she just left and they never heard from her again except to know that she went to Egypt and she was always in love with that story that her mother told her and she never she felt sad that well she wanted to meet Florence and she couldn't I think she either found out that she had died because how does she know to get on the plane that's the thing well maybe as far as Rosa is concerned Malik is going to see Florence and and that's it you know so get on the plane he's going to see Florence and yeah I mean there's there's no other way around it I mean either plus there was a part of her that knew she had to walk in Florence's footsteps to really know whether or not she could understand the rest of Florence's story and so this was Rosa making that same leap

I mean one of the things that Rosa learned from her mother was that you have to take a chance, you have to seize the day, seize the moment. Had she not, ah-ha, she impersonated a man in order to get on the registry for the Bracero's program because it was only men who were allowed and then it, ah-she eventually, but she, you know, maybe she sought asylum, something allowed her to stay in the United States after, you know, she, ah-her mother made it to the U.S. and found work. But, um, yeah, she survived with everyone thinking she was a man. Until one day, ah-maybe it was Florence talking to her mother, I don't know, but, um, it's possible that Rosa's mother could have come to Florence's mother's aid when she was going through menopause and chemically imbalanced because of the, you know, the, I guess her diabetes, the combination of diabetes and menopause, but, yeah, not really sure there, but, um, not so sure if we need to know the technical details as to how Rosa's mother stayed here. But either way, you know, if it weren't for the actions of her mother taking chances, she wouldn't be here today and she would have had to stay in Mexico as, you know, I mean, she would have had a hard life in Mexico, whatever that hard life was, she would have had it. And so, ah, yeah. Now, what else does that say? I don't know. I'm sorry, I'm just drawn a blank here. Um, so, Rosa's decision was if you have no idea what you need, what you need to do and you, you are chasing this dream that you had, is it a dream, this, this fascination you had ever since you were a child, you know, I mean, Rosa pretty much never knew what she wanted. She was, she was always just the loyal child, you know, loyal, but she was, she was whimsical only in her, her mind, only in her imagination and never in her actions. And so, this is that one sees the day moment for her and perhaps this sees the day, concept works well with the whole YOLO attitude, I'm not sure. But, um, yeah, this, so, so she seizes the day. Now, how does she know how to get on the right flight? That's what I don't understand. Um, she knows she needs to go to Egypt, but how does she get on the right flight? You gotta think more about that.