Judy Meiksin
When I was 8, my friends and I loved the song “Leaving on a jet plane,” so we made up a story around it and performed the play for our families and neighbors, singing the song about 5 times or so throughout the show.
I was 4 the first time I fell in love: My babysitter was beautiful and taught me how to read. My adrenaline ran so high when she came over that I couldn’t sleep, so she coaxed me to count backwards from 100 and when I reached “1” I was allowed to get up and talk with her again. I always fell asleep first. This activity made its way into one of my plays where a stressed-out mother teaches her kids to count backwards from 1000 to help them sleep.
My second love (at age 11) was Kate Jackson in The Rookies (1972). A few years later, I grew so head-over-heels for her in Charlie’s Angels that I wrote my own episodes for Kate. Can’t remember what happened in them, but I recall writing myself into one of the scenes having to do with a kidnapping.
Back in middle school, I learned about leveraging the 5 senses when writing poetry, so for my first assignment, I wrote about crying in the cemetery but not knowing who died. Then two weeks later my grandfather passed away.
The same teacher also gave us an assignment to write a short story. Cool! I thought, I’ll finish the one I began in the summer. While the other kids turned in 1 page, I turned in 10—thoroughly embarrassed. The teacher asked if I had just written it. I couldn’t lie, so I confessed to having started it in the summer. She proceeded to explain that when typing, I should indent 5 spaces, not 10, for each new paragraph. Nothing about it not being new. Nothing to improve the story itself. The story was about a bad week for a teenage girl who OD’d on drugs but came through.
I was pretty much in love with that teacher, too.
In high school we were given the assignment to look up poetry by Robert Lowell. Alphabetically, these books were on the bottom shelf in the public library, so I sat down while pulling a book and accidentally drew one by Amy Lowell. I sat there on the tiled floor between the stacks reading the whole book and the next and the next by her. And began taking my poetry writing seriously. Years later, I included her books in my independent study for my MFA degree in writing: Turn-of-the-century US women poets. While the pretty-much all-male canon tells a story that when transitioning from the 1800s to the 1900s, “Americans” were nostalgic for the good ol’ days, the story these women poets tell is that changes aren’t happening fast enough.
Here’s the rest of my CV.
Here are my plays on New Play Exchange.