Acceptance

Harvey was dying. He had throat cancer. The girl sitting next to him
was a major worry and the awards ceremony was the endless tortuous
smarm that it always was. Every year he longed for an impromptu
massacre or gas attack but to no avail. This was his fifteenth, no
sixteenth year of sitting and clapping, standing and clapping, clapping
and more damn clapping. Eventually the sound of clapping began to sound
like a word you said over and over in your mind until it became
meaningless. Harvey had vowed several years ago that, should he ever
win, he would bore the smug rotting swans and the filthy princes of
stage and screen into diabetic comas.

The girl's name was Jennifer and she was the daughter of a friend of a
good friend. The good friend had been reluctant to approach the friend
on Harvey's behalf. To their surprise, the friend was surprisingly
eager for Jennifer to attend and agreed instantly. Of course it might
not ever happen, Harvey had told them, but he suspected it might.
Jennifer bubbled effervescently beside him. Harvey could feel the
energy in her as he held her hand gently, and occasionally he patted
her arm to reassure himself more than anything..

They had purposely arrived late. Harvey knew that by the time that they
took their seats, most of the attendees would be transfixed on the
titanic scale of the stage, the theatre and their own self importance.
The beautiful people sat towards the front. Writing screenplays meant
that you gravitated towards the rear of the auditorium. Harvey had in
fact noticed over his many years in the industry and because his large
volumes of contacts that the more gritty and grounded you were the
further back you were seated. He suspected that this was something to
do with the risk of controversy.

Some aspects of this business sickened him more than others. Harvey had
recently met a young actor who had told him about his experience
working as a stuffed cartoon mascot in a studio theme park waiting for
his big break.
"Can you believe that they, the company wouldn't let us be photographed
with disabled children?"
"What, you're kidding?"
"No. It happened to me this one time. I was strutting around in this
big mouse costume, greeting all the kids and suddenly a whole group of
these kids in wheelchairs came along. They, the security had obviously
been watching on the CCTV and in seconds I was bundled away from the
kids."
"That's sick."
"Tell me about it. Later I found out that it was company policy that
they only wanted normal kids being photographed with us."
"Do you think the security guys had targets based on how many disabled
kids they kept away from the mascots?"

Jennifer's legs began to twitch and she turned and looked hard into
Harvey's eyes. He wasn't sure what she was trying to convey to him so
he just re-assured her once again. This was so difficult, how do people
do this for all their life? "Jennifer, listen to me honey, everything
will be fine. Just sit and watch the show, it'll be fun. If we need to
get up like we practised, I'll tell you." She smiled in her cranky way
and nodded enthusiastically. It was only when Harvey looked back at the
stage that he realised that he had absolutely no idea if she'd
understood anything he'd just said.

The compare had been cheesing off with his hackneyed gags and double
sugar frosted asides for what seemed an ice age. Applause followed
applause. Canned laughter rebounded off the back wall like a bad
sitcom. Harvey took out a notebook from the inside pocket of his $200
dinner jacket and scribbled three words, the only three words that
described this moment. Syrupy cluster fuck.

Harvey felt sorry for the staff at these occasions. The waves of
perfume must be inducing near blindness and vomiting in the ranks of
security goons and the cameramen. Jennifer meanwhile looked enchanted.
He cast his eye down to the front rows and began to count the dresses.
$20,000, $40,000, $60,000, $80,000?Jesus. If two thirds of the world
lived on less than a dollar a day?The thought made him nauseous. Harvey
had truly worked himself up and felt more disillusioned with this
industry than he had in twenty years, even more so than when they'd
gone on strike. Today there was a universal set of corporate behaviours
that even the lowest stagehand or sound operator invisibly signed up
to. This as far as Harvey could tell, was unheard of in Hollywood's
history. The industry had always thrived on hellraisers, lushes and
luvvies not the cohorts of robot sheep that now sat in rows one through
five. Of course the money had always been the bottom line but today,
the slightest suspicion that the money was being compromised would get
you permanently blackballed. There was a McCarthyist bite about modern
Hollywood, only communism had been replaced with a churlish high school
teen angst. What good did these people do in the whole universal scheme
of things given their wealth and influence? Come to think of it, what
good had any movie ever done?

The only movie that had changed Harvey's life was the one that had
launched his tepid career and he wasn't especially proud of that. That
was nearly twenty years ago and now he sat and clapped in this seat
because of another movie he'd written. These days they changed endings
and emphasis. They'd write out fundamental scenes, entire characters
even after the movie had been shot and put together. He'd personally
worked on a movie where one actor tested particularly badly when shown
to pilot audiences. The producers had edited out all traces of the
actor and altered the entire plot so the final version not
surprisingly, resembled a badly hand-stitched puppet glove. Most movies
were in fact unrecognizable from their dirty births. Harvey had always
felt movies were there to challenge our beliefs and lifestyles, not
reinforce them.

The rumours had begun about six months ago that Harvey may be up for
Best Screenplay. They washed over him since the product was predictably
bastardised from his original. But soon it became clear that the movie
was the outstanding piece of the year largely due to lack of any
serious competition. The movie, an animated tale, voiced over by famous
voices was nominated for every category open to it. In a way, he hoped
that the rest of the team would fail miserably so that he alone could
claim the golden goose. When the studio offered him the work, he'd
paced for days. It was a big payday, no doubt, but his mind kept
returning to the story of the disabled children wanting their photo
taken with their heroes. How could he justify taking their
dollar?

Harvey was startled out of his self-induced tedium by Jennifer who was
repeatedly banging him with the palm of her hand on the shoulder and
pointing to the enormous screen behind the stage. He looked up to see
himself, live and crosshatched with the other hopefuls who looked as if
they couldn't care less about the outcome.

An agonisingly thin actress he utterly failed to recognize stood at
the podium teetering like a drunk on a ledge as she struggled to open
the envelope. Harvey turned to Jennifer. She was still transfixed by
Harvey's image on the screen.
"And the winner is? ?Harvey Fox for The Children of the Forest."
Harvey handed Jennifer a large piece of card embossed with some words
in large font. Harvey leant into her as the applause cascaded around
him. He felt a large pat on the back from behind but he was unmoved.
Instead he whispered to Jennifer. "Go now, just like we
practised."

Jennifer bounded down the slight incline towards the stairs up to the
stage waiving the piece of card as she went. Harvey watched as the
security looked quizzically at each other and shrugged their shoulders.
Apparently this was going to happen, like it or not. She was on the
stage.

The actress presenting the award was visibly taken aback. She'd have to
explain that unexpected career move to the media later. Harvey checked
to see that he was no longer on the big screen before smiling to
himself. The compare meanwhile retained his curly headed cool and
smiled warmly at Jennifer who snatched the prize from the woman's
hands. Jennifer raised it high into the air where it faltered
momentarily until she brought it down onto the lectern the way a drunk
slams an empty shot. There was instantaneous and rapturous
applause.

Harvey had chosen Jennifer for three reasons. Jennifer was profoundly
deaf and had enormous problems with her speech. Her full time carer had
told him that she also had a mental age of about eight. Despite her
problems, Jennifer was one of the most interesting and funny people
Harvey had met in his twenty years of Hollywood. The second reason was
that she was not only amazingly confident but as aggressive as a tiger
defending her cubs. Lastly it just seemed strangely fitting that a
person who had problems talking naturally should step in for a person
who'd spent his life abusing his with cigars, cigarettes and booze.
What right did he have to use his voice when Jennifer had spent her
whole life wishing that people would take the time to find out what she
had to say?

Jennifer began to read. Harvey listened intently and watched images
from the movie play behind her. A small victory in its own right. The
sound she emitted would have been magical if it hadn't come from a
human being. There was an unintentional sadness to her delivery that
was discovered by everyone in the theatre. But it was their sadness not
Jennifer's. A minute passed and Harvey figured that she was barely
through the first sentence. By the third minute, there were quiet
mumblings all around him. In the fourth he spotted that the show's
producer had come out to the very edge of the stage and was looking on
in absolute exasperation. Harvey knew that any attempt to stop Jennifer
would not look pretty. That award was hers and she would defend it to
the death. He knew that the producers would have gone to commercial and
then whatever contingency they had long ago. He would wait just a
little longer.

Three more minutes would make it ten. That was enough. Harvey got out
of his seat and strode down to the front of the stage. No-one stopped
him; the rising hubbub in the audience signalled they all wanted this
to end and by now the point had been made. At a convenient point in
Jennifer's speech, he lightly said her name. Most of the audience had
noticed Harvey's movement to the front and had quietened down. He
repeated her name and she looked up and smiled at him. Harvey beckoned
her. She remembered the courtesy to the audience, picked up the award
in one hand and the speech-card in the other and skipped down the short
stairs. The audience reacted belatedly and began clapping and cheering
wildly, perhaps more wildly than they had all evening. Harvey took
Jennifer's arm and walked to the back doors of the auditorium refusing
eye contact with any of the aisle as he went.

They passed an overdressed celebrity news anchor talking squarely into
the camera. "?And the biggest mystery tonight is, what the young lady
actually said." They kept walking back up the red carpet and soon
passed another news crew.
"Torture for audience and viewers as a young disabled girl hijacks the
stage." Harvey looked back in disbelief. Was that how this whole thing
would be remembered? A hijacking? Harvey stopped and took the piece of
card out of Jennifer's hand. He walked back to the crew. "Would you
like to know what that young disabled girl said tonight as she was
hijacking your big night?" Harvey barged in to shot. The anchor looked
as if Harvey had clubbed a seal. Taking the card he held it up for the
camera.

"Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your wisdom. For many years I have
sat in this theatre and wished that my work was worthy of your award
and now I know it is. Unfortunately I have a story to tell about the
studio who made this movie and it is not a pleasant one?"