BorealLOVE, SEX & MEPreface(2.1 Draft) A Los Angeles production company stumbled upon Love, Sex and Islam and called to offer, for a price, to make it more marketable to movie studios by creating a script that was all about sex and relationships and nothing about Islam. What they suggested I had already considered after I failed to find a producer for Remembering Uzza - If Islam Was Explained to Me in a Pub with Islam as the focus. This, despite praise for what makes for a compelling production, and that is the characters. We... particularly appreciate the level of thought that went into crafting each character and their relationship with one another. A factor that we also take into consideration is that CBC does not produce content in-house, we license content from production companies. Because of this, we typically require projects to have a production company attached to them before we can move forward with development or production consideration. CBC Scripted Content Team It’s late in the day, and Farewell Posting was supposed to be my last attempt to get you interested in my scholarship; but, if you’re holding a copy of Love, Sex and Me reading this Preface, then I have been successful in transforming Love, Sex and Islam into a book strictly about women that have left their mark on my psyche. With these relationships no longer required to be an introduction to Islamic scriptures I have added three more that hold a special meaning for me. Since the ultimate goal is to get a movie studio or producer interested in a production of Love, Sex and Me I invited an insightful aspiring script writer to provide additional dialogue and a female perspective. These imagined conversations that seek to compensate for a fragmented memory of what was said are in italics. Recalling these relationships from years gone by without scriptures as accompaniment has raised, for a man my age, the embarrassment factor somewhat. I keep telling myself that if it gets you interested in more edifying stuff I have written the embarrassment will have been a small price to pay. I only use first names. If you recognise yourself in a character, I hope you will not be displeased, but flattered that I still fondly remember our time together after all these years. Ella(1st Draft) I was born in Hearst, Ontario, a mostly French-speaking town about 150 miles southwest of James Bay on a northern leg of the Trans-Canada Highway. When the glaciers retreated, they deposited a lump of clay in the middle of the great Canadian Shield, and on this lump of clay, in the middle of muskeg and stunted pine trees, grew the town of Hearst. On this lump of clay, hardy farmers managed to grow some vegetables and enough forage to support some animal husbandry—mostly dairy cattle—but it is with the logging industry that Hearst is foremost associated. Ella and I were grade 11 classmates at Hearst High School. Ella lived in a shack with her father and two sisters at the end of a street on which we used to live. People whispered about what went on in that shack. Saint-Pie X parish’s only school was St Anne elementary. Like me, before we moved across the track, Ella, to get to school, had to negotiate a lumberyard next to a sawmill and a set of railroad tracks that separated the parish from the town of Hearst. My parents decided to move across those tracks after our home in Saint-Pie X burnt to the ground. It was sometime in June after midnight when I was awoken by people shouting and the glow from a fire that illuminated the basement bed-room where I slept. The house next door was on fire. The family home, along with most of its contents, was quickly reduced to a pile of smoldering embers when the fire next door caused a rupture in the natural gas line where it entered our house. This momentarily turned the gas line into an impressive flame thrower that spewed fire into every corner of the basement where three of my siblings and I, only a short time earlier, had been sound asleep. I don’t remember the first time we said hello. What I remember is the day we both stayed after school, for some forgotten reason, on an exceptionally warm late September or early October day when I offered to walk her home. On our way to her place, we passed by the sawmill. Next to the temporarily unoccupied building was a small mountain of sawdust. We looked at each other. I took her hand, and without a word being spoken we started walking towards the pile of sawdust. When we got there, with her standing in front of me, I started unbuttoning her blouse. I half expected her to slap my hand away. She didn’t! She let me take off all her clothing while standing there motionless except for when she stepped out of her granny-panties and maybe her skirt. We let ourselves fall unto the welcoming sawdust. We rolled around for a bit, clutching at each before she pushed me away and just laid there her legs close together. She just wanted to be caressed, and that is what I did. Then she rolled over onto her stomach. It was getting dark when she got up and put her clothing back on, but not before I had wiped the sawdust still clinging to her skin. Her home was now only a short distance away. I had never kissed a girl. I leaned forward to kiss her as we were saying goodbye on her doorstep when the door burst open and an unkempt figure holding a shotgun appeared in the doorway. With both barrels aimed at my head he shouted: “Get out of here you son of a bitch.” Ella had quickly squeezed passed by the man I assume was her father and disappeared inside the house. I slowly backed away, more startled than scared, before turning around and making a run for it. The next morning at school a sheepish Ella would not even look at me. When I finally did get to talk to her, it was as if it had never happened and it would never happen again. I did not press her. She had enough trouble at home from what I could tell. Ella was the closest I came to having a girlfriend while in Hearst. About six weeks after that bit of fun on a pile of sawdust, the family left Hearst for British Columbia. Whenever a new sawmill opened in or near the town, Hearst experienced a mini economic boom. Those who could profit from these periodic booms, by risking big and not going bust, would be set for life. Many of the people who got rich were those who obtained the contracts to supply these sawmills with trees and, to a lesser extent, the vendors who sold and maintained the equipment to harvest the forest for these sawmills. My father was one of these vendors. I was not yet a teenager when Hearst experienced another of these economic booms. This time it was not just another sawmill that was coming to town, but a plywood plant whose appetite for trees would dwarf the demand of most of the sawmills that doted the Hearst landscape. The owners of the logging companies, who would get the contracts to supply what some claimed was destined to become the largest plywood plant in the world, would be the new millionaires. My father teamed up with one of the owners of a small logging operation. His company financed the purchase of the equipment the logger would need to make him a serious contender for these lucrative contracts. The logger did not get the sought-after contracts and my father was left with having to pay for a large assortment of expensive logging equipment, only a portion of which could be resold to the successful bidders. My middle-aged parents loved our nondescript little town anchored on a lump of mud in the middle of a swamp. Hearst was home. They rebuilt the family home after the fire, but not enough time had passed to build any equity when their worst fear became reality. In the fall of 1967, Traders Finance forced them into bankruptcy. On a cold Sunday afternoon in November, in a scene reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath, with a snowstorm threatening, the family set out on a journey of more than 2,000 miles to begin again. A few hours into the journey, the gently falling snow became a blizzard. Somehow, we made it to Thunder Bay where we spent the night.
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