Cast of characters:
Britteny – Born into a trendy name with a trendier spelling, her parents are b-rate actors.  To be played by Parker Posey, if possible.
Posey: born 1968, House of Yes -- 1995.  Thus she is 32 now, and 27 in the house of yes…  Crazy, okay, the character is 27 in one part, and 32 in another.  Simple enough, we’ll just shoot the 32 scenes first, then botox her and shoot the 27 scenes.  She can claim its for her art and not get too much bullshit from the talk show hosts and fans.
Britteny’s mother’s acting career started in her teens 1957-1961.  In 1957, Catherine, or Cattie as she like to be called, was a mere 14 when she appeared on the tv-series “boots and saddles,” but already there were hints of the absolutely scandalous sexuality that she exuded with presence alone.  By sixteen she was already the ample breasted, full lipped, full of confidence, take-no-shit attitude, ubersex-kitten nymph lolita.  At 18, with the movie  the rest of the world knew it, well, they would have, for though she gave a Lauren-Bacall-in-To-Have-And-Have-not-rate performance, the movie was horrible.
But her acting career ubruptly ended when she got pregnant with her first child, which was quickly followed by a second and a third—oh and a marriage that happened somewhere between 1 and 2.  She was originally raised religious or at least spiritual, but certainly did not ascribe to any of the virtues of sexual prudence as a young, unmarried woman.  However once married, she was encouraged to return, by her truly loving husband—and that was the end of her beloved birth control (she was not a virgin, not that he ever asked)—and that opened the birth canal gates—and there went her career.
But being a mother would be enough for Cattie... for a while.  Until, of course, the mother-life reared its ugly, tedious head and yawn longingly.  Now, you can take the cat out of the jungle…  In 1967, at 24, She met up with an old co-star from the movie she made 6 years earlier (Britteny’s father) and the jungle returned to the cat.  Her husband, Christian, his name was actually Christian, was off in Brazil on some retreat with his church community group to help convert natives or something (he found God himself around the time he found out Cattie was pregnant). And the kids were at his sister’s (he explained lovingly, “you need a break honey, further, you look tired”).  She saw this passionate younger man (i.e. her age—her husband was 30) for a week, and they made love once on the last day.  Well, depends on how you numerate “making love,” furthermore their last day went on into the next.
Who can say which orgasm or culmination conceived Britteny, maybe she was just in some passing seminal fluid.  But Britteny was conceieved.  On their last day together, she told him that he mustn’t contact her, and that as long as he doesn’t, she will think of him.  He vows to her that he’ll make an album of love to her (he’s a musician now), and asks if he can at least give her that.  She agrees, but says that must be the last contact.  For I’ll think of you always as long as you try not to contact me…  “Other than this album,” he interjects.  “Yes,” she concedes.
Well, Christian returns, kids in tow.  And Cattie realizes what disaster could have happened if she was foolishly selfish again, went to confession and went back life as normal.  Until a week later, she gets the first 8-track.  Week after week, another 8-track.  It was a neverending album.  She called them relaxation music, given to her by a maharesh from her earlier days, who required that only she listen to them.  Soon it was the maharesh who she met that night, and it was soon established that what she had under lock and key was eastern mumbo-jumbo which her husband of course disapproved of, but lovingly accepted.  Many nights she would wear her enormous, expensive headphones that would isolate her from the world around her.  She found she could turn up his songs quite loud and still his voice would be contained in the space between the ear piece and her drum.
He was clever in that he never did directly contact her in any other way than with the manilla envelope and unlabelled cassette a week.  Instead he left clues in his music, of a place he would be…  For example, one song said how he sat in a particular booth at a particular late night coffeeshop/resturaunt, where he had this particular sandwhich, while listening to a particular old black rhythm and blues performer.  Well, Cattie, of course, made a point of going to the same place, to the same booth, the next time that particular rhythm and blues performer was up.
She had yet to order when his sandwich appeared before her, the waitress was practically gone before she could stop her.  “Who ordered this?”  The waitress was perplexed, seemed somehow someone got into the kitchen and put this table on someone else order.  The waitress was so busy, she didn’t even realize it, apologized and asked what she wanted to order.  And so it went, and so he came to see what became evident to everyone.  She was pregnant again.  The flirtation continued, until one day he was surprised to see her outside his apartment complex.  But she wasn’t coming in, and it became evident she was waiting for him to come out and see her.  Which was horrible, of course.
Since he knew this meant she wanted to end it, that he would have to make the contact, otherwise, she’d have already called to him or come inside anyone of the numerous times people offered to let her in, thinking she was locked out.  He knew, because he lived there, that she wouldn’t be able to see him looking down at her from his second floor apartment.  But she stared at his window, nonetheless, the whole time she was out there, cause she knew from his songs, that he could see the street below.  He had to test the theory, by in fact sticking his head out the window, purposely not looking in her direction, purposely looking in every other direction.  But as soon as the window started to open her case turned instantly to the lobby door, never does she look up at him.  He realizes this, and chances a look at her, but she is unwavering in her gaze.  He closed the window, and once it got dark came out to see her.
So, he disappeared, and got into a nearly all-black soul group in ‘68 (as the “nearly” part) when Britteny is born.  Well, that Christian was a loving husband, by most standards, and I guess a loving father then too.  After all, he wasn’t technically Britteny’s father, and that’s pretty much how it stayed.  Britteny was wild too, straight from the womb.  In so much as she may well have been from the jungle, the way she was treated and acted.  However, Christian wanted a civilized house, so Britteny lived a Jane Eyre-like existence for a few years.  Then Christian left her mother.  “Her mother encouraged her outrageousness, telling her if she had a giraffe for a pet, that we should move our hanging plants so it can have dinner with us.”  But this is not why he left her.
No, he left her because she revealed to him one night that she had never been baptized nor ever an active member of the Christian faith when they were married.  He said he was convinced he had been living with a spy, an imposter this entire time.  He, of course, knew the child was not his, and said that he could not have her around his children, as he wanted them to learn honesty and integrity.  They’re marriage was annulled in ’73 and was and spent a good 6-months in a drunken depression.  She had nothing of his but the tapes, it had been three years.  She’s never gotten even his last name, and he know longer lives at the return address on her packages.  Then, realizing she still had some of that sexual vitality in her somewhere, the next two and a half years were discos, cocaine, and boose.  In ’75 she played her best known role, she was 29 at the time.
She was in Switchblade Sisters, a teen-exploitation flick by legend Jack Hill, she had a small but pivotal part as a long-haired brunette with a fight to pick with Maggie, the lead character.  Then she went on to do some even seeder (by those standards) work, She did a lot of sexploitation b-movies.  She often liked to get in close proximity with the other actor to make them uncomfortable with her sexuality.  She used it as a weapon, daring the other actor to contain himself and keep to the script.
Anyway, in ’78, Cattie is 32 and Britteny is herself 10.  These last 5 years for Britteny were mostly spent away in boarding school, her mother not thinking herself fit, and indeed was quite erratic when she was with her during the summers.  In ’78 Cattie meets a british old-money fop of age 30.  Been living a life of a playboy since leaving England at 25, he’s been used to dating Hollywood actresses, he’d explained.  He was living a life of socialites and cocktail parties, while she was living a life of coke heads and key parties.  She could say she married him because it would be a more stable situation for Britteny.  But she spent even less time with her afterwards, often going to Europe for months at a time.
However, Britteny now has a nanny that will entertain her fantasies.  Soon Britteny gets the whole mansion staff to perform in plays she writes.  Often they are quite viciously making fun of Britteny’s mother and step-father, their roles are always most sought after in the staff to play.  The staff realizes she has talent, but keep the plays a secret, Britteny’s parents have never shown interest in Britteny’s obvious talents before.  Besides this helped the next 5 years go buy.
Britteny’s father returns in 1983.  Britteny’s 15.  Britteny’s father, Jim, now 37, is a studio musician in LA.  He gave up his dreams of personal stardom, and further now looks 45-years-old, but is making good money playing guitar for studio recordings.  He says when she came to see him that night, she was only 3 months pregnant and showing only slightly.  She said to him that she had an abortion, and then she moved away.  He, of course, knew better than to take her word for it, but there was never any mention of any birth with Cattie’s last name.  He knew her married last name, and he thought he knew her maiden name.  But he in reality only knew her stage name, which had a fictitious last name, as it was listed in the credits of the movie they were both in.
Of course, Jim forgot about it and accepted her story, until he came by one of those ridiculously huge anthologies of actor bios.  The ones so big as to even have actresses as obscure as Cattie listed, as he found out.  And so found out her real last name, found out a baby was born to a woman of that last name, and that Britteny had that last name, Churchill (yes, of distant relation).  He finds Britteny Churchill, is reunited, and Britteny decides she wants to live with Jim in LA as much as she’ll miss the staff.  Cattie doesn’t like Jim, thinks he’s a washed out pot-smoking hippy, Jim reminds Cattie that if he were take this matter to court he thinks a jury would be sympathetic to the fact I was lied to about having a dead daughter.  Cattie, of course, cares more about the bad publicity, so she acquiesces.
Turns out Britteny and Jim are very similar, both enjoy making elaborate fantasy worlds.  And though he would have wanted her to wait until she was at least in college, turns out she had tried pot before ever meeting him.  Said it was fun enough the one time, though in reality she didn’t get stoned and didn’t even really inhale.  The young black chauffeur and his friends would often go and get stoned in the toolshed, and come back to be an eager and easily entertained audience for one of Britteny’s stories.  She begged them to let her try it, so they let her have a puff.  Then she entertained them with a story and found that reality was still very much the same.  That’s when, she said, she found that she could make worlds without drugs.  He chuckled at this, but he conceded it’s true, and that all one needed was someone who wants to make worlds with you.
Jim slowly and eventually stopped smoking pot as he immediately began spending every minute he could with Britteny, having fun just coming up with elaborate stories that he’d write the music to.  They were the happiest years of both their lives.  Though she was the oddest kid, probably, in high school, she was still surprisingly one of the happiest for such a misfit.  And, of course, her father recognized and encouraged her talent.  And though she was still very shy, eventually it became evident in school work as well.  So she went to NYU in 1989, at 19.
She found she would have to make friends, just because she knew absolutely no one, and did so eventually, making 3 friends.  She hung out with the weirdest people she could find, her friends ran the gamut as far as socio-economic-cultural-age backgrounds—their weirdness being the only common thread.  She became a pot smoker.  She inherited that raw sexual power from her mother, and the attractiveness, but she didn’t use it.  Instead she lived a solitary, sexless life of a poet.  And wore all gray, she would wear black, but thought it too trendy.  She didn’t purposely drift from her father, but they were both solitary creatures, there she purposely differed from her mother.  She graduated with a degree in English and absolutely no ambition to do anything, and she was absolutely sure that the world was completely full of boring people.
She decided to live off the largess of her mother, moving back into the mansion at 23.  Cattie and the fop’s marriage was a farce and they both had side projects up the ying-yang, of both sexes, for both of them.  But they seemed to be having fun, at least they always keep themselves entertained.  Doing something somewhere with someone, if nothing else.  Britteny went back to her plays, and created true masterpieces, still being played out by cooks and maids.  She never thought what she did was any good, why would she?  But now at least she didn’t care, she smoked out with the chauffeur (who had left, but she found and made come work with them again) and his buddies in the wood shed.  After a while it soon became clear that all the fun was at the woodshed, and sometimes the whole mansion would be empty because everyone would be out by the woodshed, perhaps the cook has his fiddle, or Britteny’s reciting, or the chauffeur would sing one of her tunes.
Britteny and the young chauffeur would flirt, it was in her genes, she could not be sexual, but she always rejected his advances.  The chauffeur accepted it, and just smoked more of the pot which she was providing.  The chauffeur was an earnest young man, and they would have probably have benefited from a little physicality, but they had something special in that house, everyone knew it and they were a family.  But as a family, they realized, like her father did, that she needed to get out more, trust other people.  But towards the end it was very clear she wasn’t ever going to leave the house, and it seemed she would just be destined to go the Emily Dickenson way.
She rarely went out, and only at night, usually around 4 AM.  She liked late night diners where she knew there’d be no one but really old men and the old women who serve them.  She always fancied that if she ever was to meet someone, it would be there.  Perhaps the story of her parents courting secretly at a restaurant started the fantasy.  But the fantasy was in part because a lot of the servants she knew growing up had left the mansion.  She was finally getting dissatisfied and unable to entertain herself even with her plays.  They had all gotten too dark anyway.  She really got into the Emily Dickenson self-parallel and actually had started to live in the attic.  Granted, it did have all the amenities in the world you could ask for, not as bleak and austere as you might think.  Nonetheless, she stayed in that attic and never left for a year, that’s when she started going to the diners.
It is now 2002.  She is now 32.  It is a quarter to 5 AM, and she, Britteny Churchill, currently played by Parker Posey, is sitting in a corner booth, well removed, and is writing into a notepad.  In walks a young man, 23, stubbly, a bit disheveled, with more nervous energy than you can imagine, on his back is a massive book-bag.  He knows this diner, she can tell, he just nods to the waitress and seats himself.  He sits at his table, opens his bookbag and takes out thousands of pages of writing, typed, hand-written, some drawings.  He’s evidently cleaning out his bookbag, sorting the pages into 10 seperate piles all over the table.  He sees her, she looks down, he looks away.  But she starts writing in her notebook, and immediately, his interest is piqued.
From then on, it’s an uphill battle of courtship for the young man.  She, of course, thinks he’s too young for her, but he’s too clever and entertaining—just when she was sure everyone in the world was boring.  He tries to convince them that they are really the same age.  They’ve both had about the same amount of interaction with the outside world, after all.  Sexually, they were both barely post-adolescent.  But they were both more mature than most people get intellectually.  And as far as hope and optimism, they were both cynical tired, old souls.
Anyway, this is all backstory, the movie is all about him trying to convince her (and in a way himself) about how things need not be perfect.  However, there’s a certain urgency as he knows that this could very well be the last time he would ever see her again.  And indeed I’m still not sure if they get together, since they are so different in age.  However, I’ve spent this entire day writing this just so I could avoid studying for the chem. midterm I’ll have in 4 or 5 hours.  And until Parker Posey tells me she’ll play the role, I think Britteny’s love life will have to stay on hold, as unfortunately will it for the disheveled young man with the cumbersome backpack.
A diner.  He, Jum, looks up at her.  She is not looking at all at him.  He gives up and drops his eye, but looks up quickly as if to catch her.  But she is giving no indication that she is noticing him at all.
 He does a little looking about absently, then looks intently at her.  Looks away, then, gives an eye-brow thinking.
Then he looks directly at her, and makes no ends of increasingly silly expressions, mostly in eyebrow configurations, from “come-hither” to eventually “I’m-a-moron.”
Then he just looks at her blankly for a while.
He gives up rejected, as soon as he looks down, she doesn’t look up, but she barely gives an eyebrow, he notices.
Then he panics a bit, looks about quickly, then purses his lips, and thinks intently, eyebrows scrunched.  Absently, he looks into nowhere, tugging on his upper lip with his fingers.  He quickly (for everything he does a bit too quickly, nervous energy, again—while as she is the complete opposite, her energy more subtle)…  He quickly gets out a notebook.
He is writing.  They are both writing, he furiously, for a few moments.  But he gets impatient.  He stops abruptly and gets up from his table.
He thinks, then goes about toward the bathroom, stops apprehensively (“she may leave”), then goes into the bathroom.  He comes out, checks to see if she is still there.  She is, and she has an eye-brow.
His eyes panics and he purses his lips.  He tugs on his lip and when he looks again at her, the eyebrow is gone.  He looks into nowhere again, lost.  He looks at her again, the eyebrow is back.  He raises an appreciative eyebrow and smiles.  She is suppressing a smile, that fades as he comes near, slowly, booth by booth.  In quick repartee:
Jum: You can not imagine what I’ve been thinking.
Brit: Should I?
Jum: Would you?
Brit: Could I?
Jum: I said you couldn’t.
Brit: So should I?
He stops and thinks; she looks back at the notebook.
Jum: Sorry.  Um, I’m sorry that is, if um, you know, can I?
Looks at booth seat, before she can respond
Jum: I mean, can I uh, borrow, um something stupid, I don’t know… that’s what I’m apologizing for, for, otherwise, you know, why would I be apologizing?
Brit: Would you like to sit down.
Jum: Yes, please, relieve some of the gravity taking the blood from my brain.
Brit: But your head will be as close to your heart.
Jum: Yes, but my center of gravity, and further the centers of gravities of both said organs will be closer to the center of gravity of the earth.
Brit: ah.
Jum: Yes.
Brit: Ah.  And?
Jum: Um…  Ah, here.  I have a book.  You are a writer yes?
Brit: I guess.
Jum: Good, because I would never think of doing this, otherwise..
Gets up goes to bookback.  Returns with a large book.  The title says “Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature.”
Jum: Out of shame.  Check this out, Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature.
He opens the book at a book marker, with a drawing, the book marker says “I don’t book the mark, I mark the book.”  He opens to the page 931 and reads the entry for “rasa.”
Jum: I found this entry today, I was going to write a story today which would encorporate all of the various rasas, as stages in the order here: “erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrible, odious, marvelous, and quietistic.”  Which is sooo not a word, but whatever.
Brit: You’re not that sanctimonious.
Jum: Never.  Anyway, I suggest we go through these stages together right now.
Brit: Oh really…  Starting with erotic.
Jum: Of course.  But erotic isn’t sexual.
Brit: Of course not.  No more than fish is trolley.
Jum: Right.  Arguably, erotic from the beginning, perhaps not even yet.
Brit: How about introductions?
Jum: Mine was “You can’t imagine what I’m thinking.”
Brit: If that’s an introduction, what about names?
Jum: Usually I don’t ask, because I always forget people’s names.  You could not imagine how easy it is to go through life without knowing anybody’s name.  I always defend my own feeble mind by saying Einstein didn’t know what street he lived on.  One part of your brain doesn’t grow, and instead a part that comes up with the unified field theory comes out, and grows in, its place.  Anyway, there are other theories as to my mind slippage.
Brit: Slippery in there is it?
Jum: A bit.  Okay, your name?
Brit: Britteny.  But spelled even worse.
Jum: Don’t feel too bad, mine’s Jum.
Brit: Jum?
Jum: Jum.  (sighs)  It is short for something, and that something is a long and boring story that I have had to tell too many times, and no I’m not being coy…  (being coy)  Unless you want me to.  But please, don’t ever ask.
Brit: If you wish, shouldn’t be too hard to resist.
Jum: Oh, just wait, it’ll eat at you.
Brit: (coughs) I don’t want to get eaten.
Jum: You sure?
Brit: Are you?
Jum: No, I guess, don’t beat it till you try it, beat it or eat it basically.
Brit: Or don’t try it.
Jum: You get it.
Brit: I suppose…
Jum: What?  Not enough?
Brit: Not from lack of offers.
Jum: You’re taking offers?
Brit: You’re giving?
Jum: You taking?
Brit: What do you want in return?
Jum: I’d want everything, but need nothing.
Brit: Be enough?
Jum: More than enough, if any less was too little to survive, I’d be dead by now.
Brit: You’re young yet.
Jum: Mmm…
Brit: How old are you?
Jum: 23.
Brit: Mmm.
Jum: You?
Brit: 32.
Jum: Mmm...  But a transposition!  Same numbers.
Brit: But order?
Jum: Ordinal is ordinary, come on.
Brit: Mmm.
Jum: Okay, let’s go onto comic and come back to erotic.
Brit: You might.  I come and go as I please.  I come as I please and I go as I please.
Jum: And that’s very well said, too bad the double entendres are too distracting.
Brit: Comic.  How do you just do “comic?”  And you know meta isn’t funny.
Jum: Oh hell no.  It’s all attitude.
Brit: In other words…
Jum: Good idea.  You write me some lines, I’ll write you a few and we’ll pass em to each other.