Nathan Baylet’s Marina Rom-Com Series

You may wanna get a soda and sit; this story is about 4,000 words.

February 17, 1984, the movie Footloose was released, and Kenny Loggins’ song “Footloose” ruled the radio airwaves. February 28, 1984, “Weird Al” Yankovic released “Eat It,” his parody song of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” A bored middle schooler at the time, I suddenly felt inspired by Mr. Yankovic and spent a day writing a parody song of “Footloose” called “Toothloose:”

I got a loose tooth, tooth loose
Get it out before I get goose
Doc, don’t balk
Pull it out before dark
Mac, give slack
Rip it out before I get back
Tie a noose, to my tooth
Everybody cut a tooth loose

Sorry to inflict that on you. But writing that song was a blast. It was soooo fun that I wrote parodies of several other songs on the Footloose movie soundtrack: “Let’s Hear It For The Girl,” “Almost Pair Of Dice,” and “Holding Out For A Hero Sandwich.” I started to like lyric writing so much that, between the ages of 12 to 41, I wrote lyrics almost every week, just for fun. I have boxes full of interesting song lyrics and lots of cringy, awful songs like my high school notables: “Dr. Love,” “Rescue Mission Of Love,” and “Boobs.”

Let’s fast-forward.

November 7, 2012, after quitting stage acting and photography school, I was at a hotel in Los Angeles for a songwriting conference called Taxi, an A & R company I had been submitting my original songs to for artists to record, even though none of my song submissions had been chosen to be forwarded to artists and recorded ’cause my songwriting kinda sucked ass. While finding solace in room service chicken piccata, I reached for my college-ruled notebook to try another attempt at writing a song good enough to get recorded, become a number one hit, and launch me into a brilliant career as a songwriter!

I remembered a catchy song title I had come up with: “Heartful Of Heartbreak.” Surely, someone would want to record a song with that awesome title. But, for some reason, that balmy winter night, the words that fell out of my pen weren’t lyrics; they were prose. I don’t know why. I guess at that time, I felt like this title idea could be for a book rather than a song, and, even though I had never really written a short story before, I ended up writing a couple of pages about a couple breaking up. The story was depressing as heck, but writing prose was new and exciting!

Back home in Portland, OR, I started writing fewer lyrics and more prose. I enjoyed this new world of writing longhand; I didn’t have to rhyme every line all the time, and I didn’t have to write a melody to go with it. Cool. The fact that all of my songs were continually rejected made me wonder if I should catch a frickin’ clue that I wasn’t the next Paul McCartney and press pause on songwriting and instead explore writing a short story or something. But what would I write about? They say: “write what you know.” But, even at age 41, the only things I felt I knew about were Star Wars trivia and how to write a bad song.