Courtneywing.com

Hi All,

News:  The popular Montreal-based writing project ‘365 Attempts at Life‘ has invited me to write a post every Monday for an entire year.  Six other Montrealers in the Entertainment biz are writing on alternate days.  The topic of each post is simply, ‘life’.   Below is my 6th post, and below this post, are 5 posts like it… I will log each post here, along with upcoming news, as I progress through the remaining 11 months ahead.  I’m enjoying the writing process, and have been toying with the idea of releasing a little book of short stories following it’s completion.

In other news, I’m slowly carving away tunes for my 4th upcoming album – yet to be titled…, yet to be aged.  If it was a human in development, it would be a 7 year old

Evja, my project with dancers from the Ballet Jazz de Montreal, is shaping up and will be presented at the Outremont Theatre in early January, 2013.

An iPad app I helped develop for the award winning children’s book ‘Monkeys in my Kitchen‘ will be released soooooon…  We are just wrapping up a few loose ends with the technical side of things.. hang tight mothers, fathers, and toddlers.

Writing Post #6…. :  Nov 13th

Impressionable Fool

By Courtney Wing

If the word ‘love’ was a tree, it’s branches would be made up of
words that gave characterizing definition to the tree.  ‘Romance’,
‘hurt’, ‘bliss’, ‘butterflies’, ‘warmth’, ‘security’, ‘insecurity’,
‘pain’, ‘hatred’, ‘clarity’, ‘anger’, ‘soft’, ‘warmth’ are only a few
words that come to mind when thinking of such branches.  There would
be a plethora of branches, for there would be hundreds of words to
associate with such a tree, and no doubt these branches would come in
all different sizes and shapes – some sturdy and gnarly, others wilted
and cracked, some even dead.  The leaves, whether growing or falling,
would be the names of those currently tangled in it’s branches, some
clinging on for dear life, others growing, some drifting away and drying up.

When I was a young robust pup at the tender and confused age of 15, I
was a fool for love.  My hair was long, my skin a victim of teenage
hormonal grease release, and my coat of confidence was rice paper-thin
and was forever threatened to be shredded by the gentlest of life’s
breezes.  I wanted love, even yearned for it, but just didn’t know how
to go about gettin’ it.  Any girl remotely crushable remained at least
20 arm lengths from my heart, for even the most subtlest of
communicative transmissions would most certainly end in doom and
defeat.  (If only Sharlene, Kira, Michelle, and Amber could read this
now, I’d be a high school hero running out of confession with my
rice-paper suit caught in the church doors.)

It wasn’t until I saw the film ‘Cinema Paradiso’ that I first gained
an inkling of understanding for what love could be.  I watched it with
my dear cousins, curled up with a random assortment of pillows and a
sharp pair of eyes that speedily manoeuvred between the subtitles and
each breath-taking scene.  The story covered numerous themes of love,
all of which carried significant weight regarding life and it’s
trials, but the most potent storyline for me was that between a young
Italian teenage boy and girl, and how they fell in love.  The romance
of each scene was gorgeously outrageous. Drama reigned heavily, as it
should with any Mediterranean love story. The cadence of the music
segued perfectly with each momentous passionate moment. The sincerity
of heart and the pain of loss maintained potent strength throughout
the entire film.  My heart ached and eyes welled with most love
scenes.  I was a kid, in love with the idea of what love could be.

I recall the feeling I felt as soon as the movie ended.  It was as though a puppeteer strung up my heart and danced it around double the speed of it’s beat. The lasting impression it had on me was profound, as it apparently was for many, for it went on to win a plethora of awards, including an Oscar.  I decided Italian was my favourite language, and desperately wanted to fall in love with an
Italian woman, one who put bite into the cadence of her song-like
mother tongue and had bounce to her lengthy brunette hair as she threw
up her hands in ordinary gesture.  I imagined I would meet my dream
girl in Italy when I went as a young spry and wide-eyed 18 year old
gallivanting Europe on a 160$ open-ended Euro-rail pass. The closest I
got to fulfilling the dream was in Sorrento, a small quaint cobble-stone town nestled on the Mediterranean sea an hour and a half south of Napoli.  A Canadian friend who had been living and working in a local hotel introduced me to a young woman named Ana-Lisa.  Our meeting was ridiculously brief and consisted only of a
simple hand shake, greeting, and a smile from her that could melt
gold.  My impressionable heart decided to have a crush on her that
would last the rest of my trip across the continent.  Clearly fleeting
in nature, I was a victim of hopeless romanticism, or in other words,
a fool for a dream that wasn’t quite fulfilled, and clearly wouldn’t
be fulfilled.

As the years of my youth turned to adulthood, I lived and loved how I
knew to – with reckless abandon and foolery.  I dated a few women,
none of whom were Italian, and sort of gave up on the dreaminess of my
dream to meet an Italian woman with beauty like the sea.  My heart was
battered around a few times, and with each time, new layers of crust
were added – a  natural occurrence for aging fools living and loving
recklessly.  I hadn’t thought about ‘Cinema Paradiso’ for quite some
time until I watched it again during a heart-wounded period of my
life a number of years ago, and rather than feeling fuzzy and romancified, I felt critical towards it.  I viewed the film with an objective cynical eye, one
that was more conceptual than heartfelt.  I searched for formulas and
clichés and felt like a bitter-hearted film critic.  I was surprised
at these feelings, but also recognized that it was a moment in life
that would pass, as all things do, until new freshness comes to be.

These days, I feel a new freshness is somewhat present in my life
again, of course not in it’s entirety, like it was when I gallivanted
Europe impressionably foolish, but a newer revised version of it is with me now.
Perhaps I should watch the film again, with these new and different
eyes from this time of my life, and perhaps it will restore my hope that I will fulfill the romanticized dream I once dreamt, for it seems that that dream has yet to be fulfilled, or at least a variation of it