The best thing I saw at #AWP15

I got to go the Association of Writers Program conference in Minneapolis this past weekend, thank you Workplace Pro Growth account! It was the best carnival of all for a writer, a smorgasboard of publishing goodies and a veritable Main Street USA of connections, all overstimulating and whipping one around at full-tilt. Also, I am now in possession of 45 bookmarks and 8,000 pens.

It's easy to fall prey to AWP overwhelm and to just want to stand bowlegged in a corner and hope someone is going to shout, Red Rover Red Rover, Girl with the manuscript come over. But one is better off wading into the book fair looking as though one has a plan. And waiting for something shiny to call out.

Which is why the BatCat Press was my absolute favorite booth. How darling are these girls? They were all shiny dappled cheeks and information and I was all standing stun-gunned, trying to get past the fact that they are in high school and cranking out professional books and hand-marbling pages and all kinds of other ridiculousness. They attend a high school called Lincoln Park in Pennsylvania, which I hope it's okay if I'm posting their pics here, because they're kind of a big deal. They operate the only press in the U.S. run by high school students.

This is the part where I tell you how I spent my high school years: shoving cup after cup of Reese's pieces into my wide open maw while I stood in the walk-in cooler at the Dairy Queen where I (supposedly) worked.

These girls make books. With their hands and their brains and probably some hipster pixie dust.

And here is their teacher, perhaps the most charming teacher I've ever snuck a picture of at AWP.

Shout-out to BatCat Press. Press on.....

Things I have pondered while watching "A Different World" on #netflix

- The women of Gilbert Hall did not have landlines in their room. Merely a payphone for the entire hall. I believed that this was the case for my parents but that this was still happening in the late 80s seems ridiculous.

- Sinbad has reddish hair.

- The students appear to have infinite time and an endless appetite for dancing, such that in broad daylight, there are consistently a handful of students dancing for no reason, around other patrons eating at The Pit.

- Julissa is 26 years-old and living in a dorm. Nope.

- Maggie (Marissa Tomei) is the inexplicably white girl at a Historically Black College. I know students who are not black attend HBCs. But she transferred to their journalism program. Really? Cosby was down with this?

- The character of Whitley Gilbert seemed so overblown and unfathomable when I watched this show as an 8 year-old. As a 34 year-old, I have known many a Whitley Gilbert.

- Architectural wedge haircuts were some pretty gnarly 'dos.

- Maggie didn't know if her law school boyfriend was going to visit; he hadn't called OR sent a letter (which she would have found in an open slot in her dorm lounge). So meta 1988.

- The Debate Club met on a Friday afternoon. Wrong again, people who wrote about fictitious college life. Fridays are for napping/laundry/napping while you forget about your laundry.

- Dwayne Wayne really immortalized those flip-ups.

- Lisa Bonet is such an extraordinary beauty and not a bad actress. I would like to see her in more movies. I really loved her in "High Fidelity."

- I actually remember watching the episode where Rudy Huxtable visits Denise and takes a shine to Whitley. I believe I reenacted the Vaseline-on-teeth scene with my sister, multiple times.

-I wish I could have been a student like Denise -- skating by on my matchless beauty and always befit of the flyest fashions. But then that would have been boring after, like, a day.

- Skirt/pants waistbands are literally inches from armpits.

Review: Old Fashioned #oldfashionedmovie

I am probably too medicated to have been able to cry at all the right parts in the indie film "Old Fashioned." Oh, don't say that, they will say. Don't cop to your being medicated. That doesn't reflect well on Christianity. You should be able to pray away all your depression and anxiety....

I know I run a risk in reviewing a film that is Christian-themed. I might align myself with the more-righteous-than-thou who decry my meds. I might also align myself with the fanwagoners who try to pack the theaters when any faith-based film projects onto a silver screen.

The cool thing about Old Fashioned, which several of my colleagues helped to direct and produce, is that it is a film that is so counter-cultural, it is effectively without niche. It is not a Kirk Cameron morality tale. It is not a saccharine rom-com with Nicholas Sparks-caliber lines.

Old Fashioned is, on the surface, a sweet romantic tale about a born-again believer man who has grown a tad curmudgeonly in his set apart ways, and the attractive tenant who moves in above his antique store. The romance spools slowly and sweetly. As each character unpacks his and her personal histories, we see their fine lines and their friction.

But Old Fashioned is also about a larger love story. The film is an allegory for the Gospel, about how a perfect God came to offer a perfect love in a broken world. There are moments in Old Fashioned, whose lighting is perfect and whose soundwork is really strong, that crystallize perfectly the way divine grace is offered freely, and how we reject it and fail to offer it to each other in the form of forgiveness.

Old Fashioned is not a perfect movie. At times the script felt a little uneven to me.  Sometimes scenes where body language and facial expressions were totally winning felt a little squandered because the dialogue bordered on the preachy. But it is a good film with solid performances and a wonderful message for the righteous, the proud, the hypocritical, dastardly, wicked and vain. And even the overly medicated.