The Professor and the Artist

I think Sweet Hubby and I should be a sitcom.  We're practically one already.  It would be called "Gus and Trudy" or maybe "Augie and Gin".  They are an older (not old!) couple dealing with family, politics, money, and their sometimes colliding world views.

He's a professorial type, sort of grizzled, very, very smart, retired from a job at NASA.  (Sweet Hubby used to work at NASA.  When I first learned this, while we were still courting long distance by phone, I said "Wait wait wait, let me just take that in.  My boyfriend is a rocket scientist!")  He's grounded, practical, skilled at almost anything he tries his hand at, loves doing project around the house.  To stimulate his great big brain, he often will spontaneously take a class in some subject he knows nothing about.  Although he sometimes seems gruff or anti-social, he's got a fluffy soft spot for cats and a wicked sense of humor.

She's an artsy type, a writer, or so she thinks of herself.  Her career path has been more checkered, a wildly curving road to his straight line.  She is highly social, loves books and parties and dancing and travel.  While not actually bipolar, she does experience high high and low lows, but for the most part her moods are happy and energetic.  She has written a moderately successful series of romance novels, and has been working for several years on a literary novel, which she despairs of ever finishing.

In one episode, their beloved cat has died.  He wants to get another cat, but she wants a dog so that she will have a companion when she goes on her long walks.  It turns into a fight until they realize that they can have both.  In another episode, she has invited a houseful of people to come for a weekend visit but forgot to tell him (or did she just pretend to have forgotten because she was afraid he'd say no?).  In another, she sets up a threatening situation, without telling him it's a set-up, because she wants to see how it plays out so that she can put it into one of her books.

As in most sitcoms, it's not the situations that cause the comedy and poignancy, but the characters, the people who come into our houses week after week until we feel that we know them as friends.  I think people would like Gus/Augie and Trudy/Gin.  I know I already do.  

I probably won't ever write this myself, of course.  TV writing requires a stringency, a discipline I'm not sure I have.  But it's a fun idea to play with, one of the many hundreds which plague my waking dreams.  This is another case of what I call Writer's Deluge, the opposite of Writer's Block.  It's a mixed blessing, or a mixed curse, one I relish and am grateful for but which can be exhausting at times.  After my death, if someone bothers to look in my "Incomplete writing" folder, oh what treasures they will find.