How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 7
by Traveling Matt- How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 1
- How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 2
- How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 3
- How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 4
- How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 5
- How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 6
It's hard to talk about what happened on February 5, 2012. The day feels like a confusing dream, the kind you wake from in happiness and then sadly realize never occurred. The only difference is that it did.
I'm writing this nearly two months later—the first break I've gotten from the crush of work and responsibility that awaited me when I returned from Indianapolis. I didn't have time to adjust after that staggering week, or to savor its taste. Sometimes I doubt it happened. I've had lots of happiness in my life, but it's mostly been the flavor of calm satisfaction. Loss, failure, and grief are the only feelings I've had before with much actual intensity, and so the feelings of Superbowl night, and the recollections of it, take on a strange tinge of sadness, as one might wince when flexing a healthy joint that you remember once injuring as a child.
"It is in our idleness…in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top." —Virginia Woolf
I'll try to walk you through the day…
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In 2003, I was selected for the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab. The Sundance Institute does not just put on a massive film festival every year; they have fabulous all-expenses-paid artistic development programs in film, poetry, theater, and more, and provide a kind of fertile creative soil which I never knew existed and might not have believed had I not been lucky enough (and believe me, it's more luck than talent) to get planted in it. You're housed for a week in the Sundance Village in Utah, surrounded by woodfire cabins, forested mountains, and Academy Award-winning screenwriters. The airfare is paid, the expenses are paid, and there are three grade-double-A buffet meals a day plus social events and–if you stick around a few days beyond the Lab–some free Film Festival tie-ins. There is no industry talk except around informal dinner tables, no producers, no worries, no focus on anything except the art and craft of screenwriting. Plus there's a THX theater where you get to watch prior films by your fellow participants, and get sneak-preview 35mm screenings of films that are about to premiere at Sundance. It was among the very best and happiest weeks of my life.
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