Day 10: 21,578 Words and a Platinum Blond Mullet

My plot is now moving along swimmingly. Finally, Kiefer Sutherland (or at least the idea of Kiefer) has made an appearance. I had a lot of fun writing today. I can only take credit for 1,400 words written today. I resurrected a couple of old passages from Katie's blog back in 2011 and 2013 describing Jackie's Place and Jackie Bauer. Click here and here to enjoy those passages in all of their glory.

In this excerpt Serena and Evelyn are brainstorming new business ideas after taking over Fellini's, a Stratford restaurant previously owned my Michelin-starred Chef Floriano.

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“Let’s brainstorm, then. Is there anything that you have always wanted to do, but been too afraid to try? Is there anything that makes you light up every time you think about it?”

“Well…” she said with a note of hesitation in her voice.

“Out with it,” I demanded good-naturedly.

“It’s really embarrassing…”

“If you don’t tell me, I can’t help you make it happen,” I prodded.

After another moment’s hesitation, she abruptly stood and left the room. An unexpected reaction, but nothing I haven’t seen before. People get surprisingly bashful when discussing their life’s dreams with another. I waited a full minute, and was about to get up to get a refill on my coffee before following to see where she went when I heard her footsteps coming back down the stairs.

There was a gleam in her eye, and her hands were full of a stack of manuscripts.

“Did you ever watch 24?” she asked me.

“Did anyone NOT watch 24?” I countered.

“Ok, great. So you know who Kiefer Sutherland is. That means I have less to explain.”

“Again, is there anyone who does NOT know who Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland is?”

“Not anyone that I want so spend time with,” Evelyn replied with a wink. “So I used to be obsessed with Kiefer. Not just regular obsessed, but obsessed obsessed. He was my absolute favourite. Posters on my wall. Practicing signing Mrs Evelyn Sutherland in my diary over and over and over. There was a year when I would only watch movies or TV shows with Kiefer in them. And this was in the pre-streaming era, so it was a much bigger challenge that it is now. I know all the words to every song on every album of The Kiefer Sutherland Band.”

“That all sounds pretty normal to me,” I reassured.

“Well… I saved the best for last. The best two, I guess. In my twenties, I had my hair in an exact platinum blond mullet that Kiefer had in his turn as David in The Lost Boys,” she said, pulling up her phone and showing me a picture as evidence. She looked surprisingly better than I had thought she might. Then, she motioned to the stack of papers beside her on the table. “And I wrote a ton of Kiefer Sutherland fan fiction. I was really inspired during his bad boy phase, where he was caught by journalists out at bars, with or without pants, acting like an drunken fool. Sometimes I wrote about Kiefer himself. Sometimes I wrote about my invented alter-ego for him, Jackie Bauer.”

“Ok, that’s a bit more than normal, but I can work with that. How does this connect to our project? I thought it was Harper who you had pined for all these years. If we have to change tack, and get you connected with Kiefer Sutherland…well that would have been useful information 2 months ago,” I told her.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she said emphatically. “I don’t want to be with Kiefer Sutherland romantically. I want to work with him.”

“Aha! That’s much easier! Not easy, but doable.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “Tell me the dream.”

“I wrote quite a few stories centred around a dive bar called Jackie’s Place, owned and operated by Kiefer Sutherland’s gruff alter-ego Jackie Bauer. Let me read you an excerpt by way of explanation,” she said, then opened one of the manuscripts in front of her, flipping through the pages until she found the one she wanted.