I'm Just a Girl Who Can't say No

For those of you not au fait with Rodgers and Hammerstein's oeuvre, this young actor here is Gloria Grahame playing Ado(pronounced Aydo rather than ado) Annie off of Oklahoma, who sang the song and famously couldn't say No. Not a good attitude, some may say. But what can you do, if you want to avoid a proper job and still put food on the table, you have to be accommodating.
And being accommodating has led me down some very interesting paths. some of which include Albanian breakfast TV, learning to drive a horse and cart down Bethnal Green Road, a Barnardo's shelter for exploited teenagers and sharing the platform last week with a young Grime star and I don't mean Aggie off How Clean is Your House. Everytime he shifted in his seat the whole audience screamed. It was like a mini slice of Beatlemania.
I've had a lot of maybe jobs this summer too, work for film and TV which may, or may not come to anything. Some of the stories are wonderful, joyous things, one set in early seventies London; imagine a soundtrack that mixes Knock Three Times (yes, yes, I know, Tony Orlando and Dawn) and Pressure Drop by Toots and The Maytals, although not at the same time. The setting makes me think of my childhood, hot summers and a pre regeneration London which still had empty spaces, bomb sites, derelict factories and suburbia.
I would love to go back and write more of that one.
And then there's the audition piece I'm writing for a TV soap - hard work but strangely obsessive and resulting in a knowledge of whizzy surgical procedures.
And the meeting I went to yesterday about another project, I should have walked away, I should have said no.
But it sounded so interesting, and I'd learn so much about American prisons and Angela Davis. And of course there's the carrot of money. So my lovely girl in her high waisted frock and interesting headgear is sulking until I get back to the book. I will soon. Just as soon as I've finished in the 1970s.

So altogether now...........
I always say 'Come on Let's Go!' Just when I oughta say 'Nix.'

Catherine Johnson