Mother's Day Romance

This has probably been one of the busiest months of my screenwriting career. The producer working on my Christmas Bonbons script for Hallmark (he changed the title to Emma and the Chocolate Factory) asked me if I'd be willing to change it from a Christmas movie to a Mother's Day movie. GASP!

The first major changed was to bring the dead mother back to life. That was actually fun, because I was able to name her Rita in honor of Mother's Day and my mother, who has been gone now for almost 25 years. Next, I need a new B-Story having to do with a missing recipe box from Rita's mother, and it reminded me of the surprise 25th Anniversary party I had planned for my parents. A few weeks before the big day, my mom's brother and sisters had decided that Grandma Nellesen should move in with my Uncle George. They planned to divide up all the stuff from my Grandma's house between the 5 of them. Everyone was going to meet at Grandma's house at 10AM and take their things. It would be rather easy because my Grandma would take masking tape and put each person's name that she wanted something to go to on the bottom. 

That fateful day, my parents arrived at 10AM, and the house was empty. Her brother and sisters had their trailers and trucks all loaded. Sitting on the porch were 3 items for my mom: an old footlocker, a book, and something that I don't remember. My dad probably knows. My mom called me crying that afternoon when she got home. She was especially upset because she knew there were keepsakes for my brother and me. She vowed that she'd never speak to her brother and sisters again.

I got my dad on the phone and told him about the big party. He told me that I would need to cancel it. Since there were hundreds of people invited, we quickly sent out postcards and called people, telling them that my dad had planned a cruise and we had to cancel. My dad quickly booked that cruise, and I spent the next few years angry at my mom's family and trying to use up all the napkins that said Rita and Larry - 25 years! But they loved their cruise and my dad ended up going on many more after my mother passed away and paid for me to go on a cruise - which I did after I retired.

So in this script, I had the B-Story be a dispute between my mom, Rita and her sister, Catherine. I picked Catherine (the tallest one in the photo to the left) because she was always one of my favorites, and Mom said I looked the most like her. Like all Hallmark-like movies, Mother's Day Romance ends happily, and this script is special because it is about a handsome chocolatier from Ecuador named Luis Silva. My precious granddaughter married the real Luis Silva last year, and I am trying to learn Spanish to travel to Ecuador in a few years to attend their second wedding for the Ecuadorian family. Luis can't travel until his green card comes through, so I have plenty of time to get fluent.

I have some other projects, the play I wrote - Colonoscopy the Musical, that I hope our local theater group, the KR Players, will perform someday. I'm pitching a girls' soccer script tomorrow, and finishing up my book Churchill's Mum - about Keith's 5th cousin, Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill. I had to get a new picture done for that!

I had an article written about me this month - https://canvasrebel.com/meet-sandi-jerome/

That was exciting!

Getting back to the keepsakes, I'm happy today that I don't have a lot of stuff from my grandparents. I keep downsizing houses, so not a lot of room! I try to give things to my granddaughters when I can - and I wrote this blog 

https://sandijerome.blogspot.com/2021/03/your-grandkids-dont-want-your-junk.html - about how your grandkids don't want your junk.

So a very busy month - and that was only half of it! More next month! Thanks for reading!