Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

Do you remember life before the internet?

We were returning from the university cafeteria, stopping and chatting with everyone we knew on campus, which was just about everyone, headed back to the sorority dorm at my small state college. Looking at us (we always traveled in a pack of 5-7 girls), you would think we hadn’t a care in the world. Well, maybe the others in my group didn’t.

I, on the other hand, had a whopper of a final project due at 9:00 am the next morning. A final project I had not yet started.

I was an English major and this course was required, Creative Writing Drama. All semester we had read plays, watched movies, and watched pilots of popular TV series. We had written papers on most of them, but the final project was to write a SCREENPLAY for a made-for-TV MOVIE!

You might wonder why in the world I had waited until the night before to start such a massive project. That’s fair. The answer is that while I was an English major on the books, I was really majoring in procrastination and denial. I never missed a class, but let’s just say my study skills and time management were not my strong suit.

My unofficial minor was club membership. I belonged to just about every club on campus for which I was even remotely eligible. Student Government, English Club, Pre-Law Students Association, Student Ambassadors, Circle K, Catholic Students Association, Little Sisters of Tau Kappa Epsilon, and, of course, my sorority, Phi Mu Fraternity.

Add my very active campus life to my almost non-existent study skills and you have answered your own question: Why did you wait so late to start such a massive project?

First of all, I work best under pressure. I need deadlines, alarms, timers, and reminders to stay on track with most things. I also need to be isolated from any other human being or domesticated animal. If there is anything breathing within 3 feet of me, I will talk to it. I will tell them my entire life’s story. I will tell stories my dad told for decades, word for word. I will talk about books, what I’m reading, what I’ve read, and what you should read next. I will talk food until the cows come home, recipes, restaurants, cookbooks, you name it. I will cuddle and pet any dog or cat that is attached to you.

Somehow, no matter how long I put off a project, I will get it completed, on time, and to the best of my ability. How many all nighters have I done in my life on this planet? Too many to count. Like Martha Stewart, I don’t require hours and hours of sleep. I just need snacks, coffee and/or Diet Coke, and something playing nonstop on TV or Spotify. And then maybe a nap the next day after said project has been delivered.

Baby quilt due tomorrow for an auction event? No problem. I can start that around 8:00 pm and put my classical music playlist on repeat and sew until dawn. It will be done and it will be glorious!

Dozens of cupcakes due tomorrow morning for a church fundraiser? No worries. It’s a Columbo marathon on Cozy TV. Mix, bake, cool, frost, and repeat.

Don’t even ask me how many times I’ve read into the wee hours of the morn to finish a book, even if it wasn’t for a deadline!

Back to the screenplay. This was in the early 70s, long before the internet and long before computers, printers, Google Drive, and, not that I would have used it, but long before AI. All I had was a portable electric typewriter, a stack of white copy paper, and a copy of Robin Cook’s novel Coma.

You see, I had this idea for a movie, loosely based on the novel Coma, which I read and loved. My protagonist was a young girl who woke up in a hospital room with wires and tubes running in and out of her. Machines are beeping and hissing, people are milling about. Her parents are standing at the foot of the bed crying, and a man, a man she can’t quite place, is holding her hand. She can’t feel him holding her hand but she can see him rubbing the top of her hand with his thumb. He has the saddest look on his face. The doctor is standing on the other side of the bed saying things like, “Brain dead…she can’t hear or see…no that’s just nerve reflexes that are randomly moving…she’s gone…I’m really sorry.”

So, I began typing. I typed and typed and typed. I was in the room across the hall from mine because my roommate was already asleep. The girls who lived in the room where I was working had gone home for the weekend a day early as they didn’t have class on Fridays. I had the vinyl record of Silk Degrees by Boz Skaggs (1976, CBS) playing on a little portable record player with the little button on the arm pushed in so that same record just kept playing over and over while I typed and typed and typed.

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, I raided Melanie and Kim’s mini-fridge and made myself a bologna sandwich. Then, back to my screenplay. Eventually, as the sun was shining brightly through the metal blinds in that dorm room, I finished the last line of dialogue and typed the magic words, “The End.”

I ran across the hall and changed clothes, brushed my teeth, grabbed this sheaf of typed pages, unbound and unstapled, and ran to the Humanities Building to turn in my screenplay. We didn’t have class but the department secretary was charged with receiving the manuscripts and stamping them with the time and date. Whew! I made it.

I dragged myself back to my dorm and fell into my bed, fully clothed, and slept like a rock.

Did this horrendous night of creating an entire made for TV movie out of thin air and typing it all on a small portable typewriter teach me a lesson? NOPE.

Oh, you are wondering how I did on that final project, the all-nighter where I wrote an entire screenplay for a made-for-TV movie due the next morning? Well, I got an A on it and an A in the class. Legend has it that the professor picked up our manuscripts and drove out of town for the weekend to grade them and was in a terrible car accident along the way where all of the manuscripts were destroyed. We never saw him again and the course was taught by someone new the following semester. I went on to graduate with a decent GPA albeit still not so decent study skills.

Over the decades that have ensued, I have grown better at not procrastinating quite so much, at least not to such drastic extremes. I still work best under deadline, and if the novel I am currently working on ever makes it to an editor’s desk at a publishing house, I am sure I will be up until the wee hours of the morning revising in order to meet a deadline. I will, however, have a Mac and an HP printer at my disposal, along with Google Drive and email, to get my sheaf of papers where they need to be in much easier fashion. But, we’ll never know if my retake on the novel Coma would have been a hit or miss movie!