The Beginning of "Holy Schmidt!"

At a coffee shop, I was working on an assignment, seated with my friend and fellow playwright, Cristina Pippa. The assignment was to write a short play with certain “ingredients,” such as include a “phone call” in the scene. I couldn’t think of anything to write, so I listened to a conversation that Cristina was having with my fiancé, Rachael. They had noticed a couple of medical students studying in the corner. Cristina wasn’t feeling well and thought it would be funny to go over to the med students and ask them to take a look at her. This sparked something. I started to think about that scenario: What if a med student in a coffee shop was approached by a stranger with a medical question? And what if this medical question was something big? What could this medical question be? For some reason, the answer to this question went straight to religion: What if the stranger was a man with stigmata?

I began the piece as, I suppose, I begin all my pieces: two characters, awkwardly trying to sort through a large issue, but never seeming to get to the issue. This is evidenced when I think back on my beginning of "With Lars," "In the Closet," and, most vividly in the pivotal hot cocoa scene that started "Father Bob."

The short play I wrote for the assignment basically became a scene about a med student named Angelina, who was modeled on both Rachael and Cristina, bits and pieces. Rachael had just gotten back from a trip to China, Cristina was having relationship worries, etc. I stole from them both in order to give the character a sense of history and reality. I set the scene in Angelina’s apartment, after having been approached in a coffee shop by a man named Schmidt. I chose the name Angelina to add to the not-so-discreet religious theme. The man was named Schmidt because at the time I was writing, I was listening to the soundtrack to the movie About Schmidt, some of the only music that I am able to listen to while writing.

I gave the short “play” the title "He’s Got the Whole World," making use of the religious children’s song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” I decided for myself that the hands held all the answers and, most importantly, that the wounds in Schmidt’s hands were truly stigmata. Yet, in the scene, we never hear about stigmata or get any answers. The scene ends with a tease: Schmidt’s about to show his hands to Angelina, but the lights go out before he does.

The scene had some references to George W. Bush: Schmidt reveals that he received his wounds on the day of Bush’s inauguration as Bush pronounced “So help me God.” This was meant to be some kind of political statement, yet I never fully thought it out. I was trying to make a large statement, but left it as a cheap joke at President Bush. I didn’t think too much about the implications about my decision until I sent the scene to my friend and demi-dramaturg, Laura Farmer. She’s an old friend who is in a fiction writers’ workshop in Syracuse. For a long time, she’s been the first to read anything that I write, and I’ve come to get a good sense of the world I’m creating from her questions and comments. After a few days, I received this response from her:

"I like this piece. I like the humor-- the way it's subtle, but the thing that threw me was the GW Bush reference-- does it make him evil (as if we didn't already know that) but I just wondered how much he was a part of it? And is it going to be longer? What happens to his hands? Are there people after him to look at them? I've got lots of questions, just, basically, because I want it to be longer so I can get more into these people. Because you've got the hands, you've got the suspense with that, and then she's a doctor, and there's this tension between them, at least on his side it feels like, and she's got someone else? So much. What do you think? Will you keep going on this?"

I set the scene aside for a while, letting the questions sink into my head while I worked on another project. Then, lightning struck. It hit quite suddenly, out of nowhere, really. While driving through Coralville listening to a greatest hits album by The Beatles, I heard “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” The song has a strong beat, a fun feeling to it, playfully folksy. It contained the lyrics:

"Christ! You know it ain’t easy.
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going,
They’re going to crucify me."

And that is when the extravagant need to flesh out the story contained in that small scene of He’s Got the Whole World started to eat at me. Those lyrics pushed me, and I revisited Laura’s questions. The song created the necessary spark of outer ignition that I usually need in order to really get into a project. Sometimes it’s a song, or a picture, or an experience, or a comment by a friend. This time it was John and Yoko leading me on my way on this journey that would soon take me to the ends of faith and the edge of reason.