Today I spent the day in love. Well, sort of. I mean…It’s Complicated.

Ohhhhh…I can already tell the jokes are never going to get old. 🙂

While the book is away being read over by Jillian, I decided to spend my time working on the poster design for our community theatre show, It’s Complicated: An Evening of One Acts About Life, Love and Other Important Things. I’ve written about the origin of the title before, (https://ashleyraymerbrown.com/2015/01/29/35-days-to-35-its-complicated/) so now I’ll tell you the story behind the poster.

We have four complete one acts, one commercial, and a fifth one act that is broken up throughout the evening called, I Do. It begins with two young children who meet in school, and the girl takes an immediate liking to the boy.

She has a lengthy monologue, and he simply sits there, bewildered by her. I wrote it in early 2007, before Up was released, but if I had to describe their relationship, it closely resembles Young Carl and Young Ellie.

As the evening progresses, we revisit these same characters, named Corrie and Marcus, at different points in their lives. Young Adulthood, Middle Age, and finally, Elderly. We see how their relationship changes, and how, in some ways, it stays the same.

We have an extensive number of people in our cast, so when it came to poster design, I knew that using them all would be impossible. I needed something that represented the entire theme of the show in one image. I decided to use Young Carl and Young Ellie, I mean, Young Corrie and Young Marcus.

While there is the chance that it might get misconstrued as a children’s show, I’m willing to take that risk. The children were true pros, even though they didn’t know they had to hold hands until right before, and even though they were less than pleased about that requirement, they soldiered through it with a minimum of resistance.

Their faces say it all. His raised eyebrow, her giant smile.

Love is Complicated.

Right at 35 days before my 35th birthday, Rachael and I found out that a book we wrote about our experience making our first film “No Lost Cause,” was being returned to us by the publisher after a year of waiting for it to be printed. Instead of wallowing in our collective misery, I committed to blogging every day while I searched for ways to overcome this perceived rejection and obstacle to our goal. I currently also have about three other projects brewing at the same time, and write about the progress of each of them. This is part of that series.

Read the first entry here: https://ashleyraymerbrown.com/2015/01/23/35-days-to-35-dealing-with-rejection/