The Movie

I highly recommend having a single girl partner in crime. Mine is…let’s call her Shroom. 

Shroom and I have seen enough damn romantic comedies, thank you. So we decided to write our own.

How hard can it be? And who better to write about the realities and adventures of a single girl looking for romance? And the inherent comedy therein?

So from a simple conversation of how I’m running out of cafés to have first dates at, we came up with the Ultimate Single Girl Romantic Comedy. Look for it in theaters as soon as we get an agent. Oh, and write it.

Synopsis:

Fade in on Hope’s Café.

Date montage.

Our protagonist, the inexplicably unlucky in love Lea, always takes her internet first dates to this café. She gets her tea for free if her date brings up sex, she has a special signal to the staff for them to call her cell phone if the date is going really badly, and the café owner, Hope, has been giving Lea dating advice including who to ditch and who to see again. Meanwhile, Hope is having her own dating woes. Her on-again, off-again relationship with Tammy the tow truck driver is less than satisfying as the breadth of Tammy’s conversation topics are confined to the lack of truly gruesome car wrecks in this town with only one highway. Hope doesn’t see any other options in her Lesbian Small Business Owners’ Book Club, the only other place she’s willing to come out. While the other book clubbers urge her to, she fears that since everyone in the community talks to her about their issues, she will lose her place in the community, and her best customers, if she comes out. She finds herself admiring Lea’s sense of freedom, as well as Lea herself, as Lea continues her string of misfit dates. 

Lea sets up these dates while at her job as assistant to the mayor. She often marvels at how she can keep the town functioning under a truly bumbling mayor who can’t even get the roads paved, but she can’t get her lovelife functional. She realizes how much respect she has for Hope, who is not only a competent, successful entrepreneur, but uses her place within the community to help others, and she tells Hope exactly that. She also tells Hope that she’s just about given up on dating, but she’s going to give it one more shot. She’s got a date with someone that she met – not online – but at a meeting earlier that day with the road maintenance crew. 

Just then, in walks her date, Tammy, who apparently is in the “off-again” phase with Hope. Hope watches in disbelief, not because Tammy is on a date with someone else, but because Lea, the person she wanted to be with all along but never admitted it, even to herself, was on a date with a woman. She’s relieved when the date tanks and Lea gives Hope the “call my cell phone and save me from this date” signal. 

The next day Lea is despondent and tells Hope she’s giving up on dating. Hope convinces her to try one last time and come back to the café that night for a blind date. When Lea arrives she finds that her blind date is Hope. Lea is shocked and Hope is nervous, both because of her excitement about Lea and as her first foray into living as an out person. The date goes horribly. They find they are horrible at small talk, and Lea finally demands to know why Hope never told her before. Hope gets angry and accuses Lea of not understanding what it’s like to be a real lesbian. Hope then thinks she sees Lea do the sign for “get me out of this date,” and Lea storms out. 

Two weeks go by, as shown by a montage of both of them, melancholy, at their respective jobs. As the song ends, Hope tells her Lesbian Small Business Owners’ Book Club that she’s closing the café and moving. As much as she loves this town, she believes she has to move to a large city to live the kind of life she wants to live, and she believes her only chance at love is to leave. The next day, Lea is walking to work in the rain, hiding under her umbrella as she walks across the street from Hope’s Café, but peeks out long enough to see the “Out of Business” sign in the window. As the music swells, there is a long shot of Lea staring at the sign, until she finally ditches the umbrella and runs for it. She runs home, grabs her bike (and bike helmet – safety first!) and books over to Hope’s house, just in time to see Hope’s overpacked station wagon turning the corner at the far end of the street. As Hope’s packed car blocks her review mirror, she can’t see Lea racing behind her, and she mistakes Lea’s yelling for something wrong with her Indigo Girls CD. Lea finally takes a shortcut but hits a patch of mud on the street the inept mayor couldn’t get paved, flying out onto the road right in front of Hope’s car. Cut to overhead shot of Hope running out to cradle Lea in her arms, promising her everything is going to be okay.

One year later.

The camera follows a bouquet of flowers into Hope’s café, and Hope exclaims that it’s a terrible day to remember. Lea is holding the flowers, and explains that although it took her a few days to get out of the hospital and go on their first official date, they should celebrate today as their anniversary. Hope hands Lea her morning tea and they both walk out the door and up the street. Everyone they pass greets Hope, their new mayor.

Fin.

See? We came up with that in 20 minutes. What a racket.