Alibar - Juicy and Delicious

Could be checkout time, Boss, Daddyd say. All of a sudden I felt breathtakingly stupid. I couldnt wrap my head, or my heart, around my parents mortality. I wrote a play about it, called Juicy and Delicious, about a frail, cowardly kid in the hot red clay of South Georgia named Hushpuppy, and Hushpuppys daddy, who was a lot like my Daddy, and Hushpuppys brilliant and ferocious teacher, Miss Bathsheba, who was a lot like many teachers Ive had, and a herd of aurochs. I dont know where the herd of aurochs came from.
We did it at the Tank/Collective Unconscious in Soho, and I had a great time doing it, and then it ended, and I went back to waitressing and writing more plays.
A few months later, I was exhausted and covered in bacon grease from a brunch shift, and I met my friend Benh Zeitlin on the roof of the Russian Turkish baths. Benh and I won a teen playwriting contest when we were 14.

If memory serves, his play was about a bunch of vulgar and poetic drunks, and mine was about a Southern Baptist sex-ed class gone horribly wrong. We became friends instantly, and even though he lived in New York while I was in Florida, wed trade books and mix tapes. He introduced me to Nick Cave; I turned him onto Gram Parsons. I kept writing plays, he made movies. That afternoon on the roof, as he was drinking Czech beer and I had carrot juice, he asked me if I wanted to do my play as a movie, set in Louisiana. I said yes.

He pulled out a portfolio of sketches hed done, pictures hed taken, and talked to me for I dont know how long about telling Hushpuppys story in Louisiana, the Aurochs coming from Antarctica, the causeway on the water. Suddenly I forgot that I was tired and smelled like old bacon and burnt coffee and had half-and-half in my hair.
It took us a year and a half to adapt Juicy and Delicious into what was, for most of us working on the film, our firstBeasts of the Southern Wild. Hushpuppy changed from a little boy to a little girl, because finally I could make the story about a girl. Benh had a long-standing love affair with Louisiana, and after my first week living in a fishing marina outside of Point au Chien, I did too. Have you been there? Sweet Jesus.
The red clay hills of Georgia became the bayou and Gulf. And the confrontation between Hushpuppy and the ferocious aurochs became infused with a grace that it took me several years of working through all of my deepest fears and furies to reach.
This is the play as I wrote it many years ago, covered in bacon grease, raw, angry, and, like Hushpuppy, realizing that there is an order to the whole universe.

Even if I am too stupid to see it.
Lucy Alibar, author of Juicy and Delicious
("Once There Was a Hushpuppy appears by permission of Zoetrope: All-Story)