A Golfing Lesson & Other News

Remember last week when I asked if the needlework store Classy Threads was still in business? I’ve been doing too much needlework. The store sells clothing. I should have known that, I’m old enough to remember when "threads" was beatnik slang for clothing. D’oh!

Eye report: Nothing to report. Vision still blurry, doubled at a distance. My doctor is pleased with the reduction in eye pressure, he told me today that sometimes the tiny cut will heal up completely and the pressure inside the eyeball will climb again. My pressure is nice and low. He says the blurring will heal in time.

I ad my first golf lesson yesterday evening. The local pro says to start with putting, that putting is more than half the game. I’ve been playing miniature golf for years and so thought there was nothing I could learn about putting. Boy, was I wrong! I couldn’t believe how quickly I improved once I lined up my feet, my body, my club and the ball properly with regard to the hole. Now I want to go find a putting green and practice some more – but I won’t have a chance tomorrow, and I have another lesson on Thursday. There’s a miniature golf course out in Edina that is laid out on real grass not that indoor-outdoor carpet of most of them. I’ll have to go out there this summer to see if my game is better there as well as on a putting green. The only thing I was really bad at during my lesson yesterday was "readng" the green. A good player can see the subtle shifts of terrain that cause a ball to drift left or right from the straight line to the hole. Maybe it’s the blurry vision messing me up. Now I have another reason to be impatient to heal.

I have had an extraordinary opportunity handed to me. A friend from church knows a Hollywood producer and in the course of "pitching" some ideas he had for movies and television shows, he talked about my Betsy Devonshire series. And the producer was intrigued enough to ask for something in writing. So between pushes of writing Buttons and Bones I am now also working on synopses of six episodes of a one-hour television show featuring my sleuth. It’s a learn-as-you-go opportunity, as I am not used to writing for the screen and am finding it quite different from writing straight prose. This all may come to nothing, of course; I understand most proposals go nowhere. But it’s exciting none the less? Who do you think should play Betsy? Who would make a great Godwin? How about Jill?