Years ago, before you were born, my friend Dave Stewart and I wrote a silly little screenplay called "Florid", about a group of street bums who were trying to raise money to get to Florida, to escape the cold of the Prince Edward Island winter. We wrote it to make ourselves laugh. And with the vim and vigor of our youth, we set about filming it, with a budget of zero dollars, and a too-relaxed schedule of a few months (maybe even over a couple of winters?). Dave directed and some of our friends and acquaintances were hand-picked to play all the various roles.
You can watch it here.
It's an imperfect 22 minutes. Lots of terrific little moments, and lines that we still find ourselves quoting during apt moments in our lives. The ending kind of fell apart, as I think the desire to get it finally finished started to outweigh the desire to have the story continue to make sense. As writers, I think we made a few plot-jumps that made sense in our heads but that weren't really there on the screen.
Anyway, it is what it is, and there are lots of things about it that I, and, I believe, Dave, are proud of.
A couple of years ago, we started kicking around this idea: "wouldn't Florid make an awesome musical?" We even got to the point where we started fleshing out some of the scenes, adding new scene ideas, to make it a longer production, and coming up with ideas for where songs could / would fit into the story.
I even was inspired enough to write and record a very rough draft early version of a song called "Eyes Froze Shut", which sounds nice enough to my ears that I'm sure it must be a rip-off of a song that already exists.
The (incomplete and partial) song was only sung out loud once, so keep that in mind, but You can hear it here.
Alas, after a brief period of inspired energy, but no longer full of the vim and vigor of youth, enthusiasm for the project collapsed and it is currently in a coma, barely clinging to life.
Who knows, if a wealthy benefactor approaches us and throws money at us to get it done, I'm sure we'd happily give Florid the Musical the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation it deserves.
