No one ever took her seriously when she talked about her play. Day after day she dreamed up what she would write, adding sweet words and epic moments and dramatic stunts she was sure the world would never experience again.
“But Megan!” they would advise, “there is no money there! You work at GameStop and have no theater training or experience!”
She scoffed. No other writer had experience until they did. No other writer had a tale of an anthropomorphized trash can who becomes the mayor of Gotham by day and dethrones Batman in the role as Batman at night.
“It will never work on stage,” they said. “How are you going to do all the stunts with someone dressed as a trash can?!”
Um, Cirque du Soleil much? Megan thought. She herself had seen in person in Las Vegas a clown with a giant prosthetic butt swinging from a 100-foot cable out across the entire audience while blowing up balloon animals and dropping them toward delighted faces below. A trashcan man swooping down in pursuit of a homicidal penguin would be nothing.
Her shifts at the store always began promptly at 10 a.m., four days a week, stretching on for 10 hours that left her alternately slammed with customers and so devoid of productive tasks that her mind had time to wander. On one particular day when she dreamed up a fight scene between Batman and Mayor Can, she barely found a piece of scrap paper in time to jot down the outline of their matchup that resulted in a massive fire in deep in the Bat Cave before it slipped from her mind.
Then she discovered the perfect solution – a giant roll of register tape she kept stashed in a locked drawer, and which allowed her to keep track of her notes on into eternity. That’s how she came one afternoon to drag her MacBook, the one covered in the wildflower skin, into the Starbucks next to her own store and sit down at a table with her coffee, bottle of water and what must have seemed to others like a crazy person’s life notes. It was time to finally put everything to page.
Megan had cut pieces of the receipt tape into thematic strips, some just a few inches long, other stretching taller than her own body. Certain sets were stuck together with binder clips of different colors representing the various acts pinging around in her head.
Her fingers flew as Mayor Can rained refuse down upon his opponents and a city convulsed in fear and raw animal excitement. She had him plead his benevolence on live television while Batman sat tied to a chair in the background, trying everything he could to blink a Morse code message to the newly minted BatDrone With Retinal Scan Technology™.
Another scene found Robin rounding up every trash truck in Gotham to hold as ransom to try to convince Mayor Can to give it all up, save his own, and settle for being the city’s sanitation commissioner.
Megan made the Penguin cut off his love affair with Catwoman in order to go save his nemesis and restore the proper balance to Gotham because, as he reasoned, “You dance with the devil you know.” A final scene featured a badly dented Mayor Can writhing in pain on the steps of City Hall as Batman and Penguin walked hand in hand slowly down the street before parting ways to the sounds of soaring strings.
Megan hit save and looked up to see, to her great surprise, nine empty coffee cups covering the non-laptop areas of her table while a crowd of no fewer than 20 people stood around her in amazement. She hadn’t noticed that the entire time she had been narrating the story out loud, drawing in more and more fans as the drama swelled to the climactic battle. The denouement left a small child in tears, while his grandma nodded in appreciation for an experience well felt.
Megan wasted no time. Her pre-made email list of every theater in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles received the script at the same moment. Before she could fully catch her breath from the flurry of her activity the answers started coming back in various forms for “YES,” “MY GOD IT’S PERFECT,” and “TONY TONY TONY.”
Then there was one respondent she had not sent the script to, but which shared the intensity of the others’ responses. The sender: DC Comics headquarters. Subject: CEASE AND DESIST: COPYRIGHT VIOLATION.
The play opened on Broadway a year later with the kind of character names that recalled grocery store brand Cocoa Puffs replacing the real thing. It swept every category at the Tonys, even new ones the voters made up just to make sure the work got its proper due.
The next Tuesday she walked into GameStop store #382 and clocked in. Kids were freshly out of school. It would be a busy day, no time for daydreaming.