They met on the amateur zombie movie set

Introducing: a new Society Pages thread to Confluence City.

Grinning away here we have architectural historian and reluctant coffee entrepreneur Lynn Josse and banker and bon vivant Neal A. Alster, celebrating the nuptials of Amanda Allen and David Adkins this past Saturday.

I take the Society shooter to be the architectural writer Michael R. Allen, brother of the bride and beau of Lynn. Neal's family has an intimate professional relationship with the groom.

Why do I care? Well, first of all, I very much like these two people, which I would still like to consider the primary thing, on the face of this at times friendless and hostile Earth.

Why was the picture sent to me? Because I am the degree of separation between the two. Had I not undertaken to make an ambitious surrealist zombie film two years ago, Neal would have been a smiling friend of the groom at this wedding reception and Lynn would have been a smiling friend of the bride, but they would not have ended up posed and smiling together in a photograph, just the two of them.

Lynn - friends of my silent coproducer and featured actress Stefene Russell - was "scenic coordinator" for my movie, Blind Cat Black. That means she did everything I thought a director does. I, the director, looked at Lynn a lot and said, "What do we do now?"

(What we do next is get Lynn involved in the next film, long before we start shooting. Her core crtique of my finished movie was too little thought went into pre-production. That's believable. I didn't know there was anything called pre-production.)

Neal plays one of the johns in Blind Cat Black, which has a prostitution theme (which I didn't invent - it's in the Turkish poem that I set to music; we then made a silent film and edited it to that poetry score). Neal co-stars in the scene that drove my friend state Rep. Jamilah Nasheed out of the premiere at The Tivoli. Her description of what she saw of that scene has circulated at the mosque, I take it, as none of my other black Muslim friends will accept an invitation to see my movie.

"To dramatize prostitution is not to celebrate prostitution," I tell them. "It's like the Scared Straight movies Officer Friendly used to show us in school. You can't scare someone away from being a junkie without portraying what a junkie's life is like. Jamilah missed the last image in that scene, which has The Pharoah (K. Curtis Lyle) weeping over the blowjob - the Elder mourning the lost generation of the streets."

We've come pretty far from Society Pages, haven't we? And the nuptials of Amanda Allen and David Adkins? Congratulations to the bride and groom! May a Pharoah never weep over your lovemaking in an amateur surrealist zombie film!

As for Lynn and Neal, I hope to see you on the set - I mean, at the pre-production meetings - for Go South for Animal Index! Want to start on Super Bowl Sunday again? Start shooting, that is. That means we should start pre-production ... when? Lynn? What do we do now?