Tag: romantic comedies

Rom-Communism, Fav Rom Coms, And Doing What You’re Meant to Do

Rom-Communism, Favorite Romantic Comedies, and Doing What You’re Meant to Do on the Torg Stories Podcast

Ted Lasso Season 2, Episode 5 titled “Rainbow” Summary and Discussion Questions:

  • Why is this titled “Rainbow”? Ah, the song She’s a Rainbow by the Rolling Stones.
  • The episode opens with Nate in Richmond entering a restaurant called Taste of Athens trying to make dinner reservations for he and his parents for their 35th wedding anniversary. There’s a joke where I think Nate is trying to tell the hostess that it’s his parents 35th wedding anniversary and that’s the jade anniversary but it also happens to be the hostess’s name and she wants to know how he knows her name.
  • More on the Jade anniversary: Jade is said to represent good luck, fortune, wealth, and wisdom, and gifts made of jade are thought to bring these qualities to the couple.
  • Nate wants the window table but isn’t able to secure it. We start to develop a major plot point of this episode, Nate isn’t able to be assertive.
  • Anne, I don’t think Greek food is your thing? Here’s a list: tzatziki, souvlaki, gyros, baklava, Greek salad, or grilled octopus…
  • Did we already talk about it’s Marcus Mumford who wrote and sang the theme song?
  • Cut to football action! For me, not a football guy, it looks good. The team loses and we go to a locker room film session. We find out Ted believes in Rom-Communism which is the belief that everything will work out in the end.
  • We get a list of a bunch of rom-com stars including Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal, Hugh Grant, Drew Barrymore.
  • What’s your definition of a rom-com? I’d say the primary story is about whether a couple will get together and it needs to be above average funny.
  • Ted shows his team film. Here’s what I do:
  • The English word piles is used and I didn’t know what it means. Do you? It means hemorrhoids.
  • Ted makes this joke to describe Issac the captain: He’s a wigwam in a tepee. What’s that, Anne? Too Tense.
  • Keeley catches Regecca giggling as she chats on her BANTR app. The guy quotes Rilke: “Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasures.”
  • Keeley passes out free cappuccino makers. We learn Dani’s mom says he was born caffeinated. Nate doesn’t get one because he is not a player. We start to see what is going to add up to quite a few Nate slights even though I don’t think they would register with us.
  • There’s a joke about a call from Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, owners of Wrexham AFC. I watched and enjoyed that show but then didn’t make it back after the break. That show did give me Deadpool.
  • Higgins ringtone is “She’s a Rainbow” because it’s his and his wife’s song. Previously, Keeley explained your personal brand matters in relationships too. Higgins offers a different take. The best brand is being yourself.
  • Anne, the first brands that come to mind? Apple, Coke, Amazon, Nike
  • Who jumps to mind personal brand? Taylor Swift, Jordan, Trump, Curry, maybe not for someone such as Clark, or waiting for it to develop?
  • Famous people trying to sell me stuff?
  • Nate goes to see Keeley about if she can make him famous. She takes him on as a pupil to be assertive. Anne, are you assertive?
  • Roy is at his kebab place and Ted goes to see him to try and talk him into coaching and to see if he can help Isaac McAdoo.
  • Do you say GIF or JIF? Think it stands for Graphics Interchange Format but maybe the person who coined it wanted it said JIF anyway. AND, do you have a place like Roy’s kebab place? I def don’t have a sanctuary place to eat. I feel like the Boone Tavern could be but I don’t go there much and I think I need more comfortable seating than that.
  • Assertive training continues with Nate the Great, Keeley, and Rebecca who shows a trick she has of making herself big.
  • Isaac plays pick up soccer where Roy grew up for having fun and this seems to work. McAdoodle-doo!
    • I remember doing this at ONU being bummed I didn’t get to play. Anne, any pick up sports for you? My two favorite pick ups: 3v3 at the Uptown YMCA and the lunch game in New Canaan, CT.
  • Nate tries making himself big and cursing at himself but he kind of stumbles into spitting in the mirror to pump him himself up to be assertive. It works and he gets the window table for his parents anniversary. Jade declines to give him her number.

Let’s pause to see if you can tell me where these lines come from. Roy mentions them all:

  1. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want to start the rest of your life as soon as possible. -When Harry Met Sally
  2. I love you. You, complete me. Woman: Shut up. Just shut up. You had me at hello. – from Jerry Maguire
  3. I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her. -Notting Hill Julia Roberts to Hugh Grant
  4. As You Wish – Princess Bride

Back to the summary and discussion questions:

  1. Back to football action. We get a lot of shots of couples. They pay homage to When Harry Met Sally and get a couple talking about how they first met and what it had to do with the Richmond Football Club.
  2. Rebecca is texting about football in the owner’s box, cut to Ted texting as he walks in the tunnel onto the field.
  3. I have yet to develop Beard’s use of “baby” and I’d like to: Lumberjack world qualifier baby!
  4. Roy gives a speech on Football Sunday saying what I’ve always said about that job. They aren’t in the fight. They just sit around and give short soundbites about games that come and go. Pays well but looks meaningless and boring! Roy says it isn’t what he’s meant to do and he makes a dramatic return to the field to join’s Ted’s coaching staff.
Roy Kent, dressed in black, returns to Richmond and joins the coaching staff
  1. There’s a great shot near the end from behind Roy with the field in front of him.
  2. Anne, if you coached basketball, what would you wear? Do you have opinions about what men and women should wear coaching basketball?

Torg’s Fav Rom Coms:

  1. Notting Hill – Hugh Grant the bookshop owner and Julia Roberts the movie star as the couple with Rhys Ifans the incredibly hilarious roommate to Hugh.
  2. Jerry Maguire – Tom Cruise is a sports agent and Renee Zellweger is the mother of a really cute son and she leaves her job to be Tom’s only employee. (almost not a romantic comedy for me)
  3. The Princess Bride- Cary Elwes is a good guy pirate trying to get together with Robin Wright as Buttercup. Billy Crystal plays Miracle Max and there’s the Fire Swamp with the ROUS’s.
  4. High Fidelity – John Cusack again owns a Chicago record store and it’s one of my favorite books too. As part of the plot, he visits his ex girlfriends to try and see what happened.
  5. Sleepless in Seattle – Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan
  6. Groundhog Day – Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, and Punxsutawney Phil live the same day over and over.
  7. When Harry Met Sally – Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, can men and women just be friends?
  8. If Lucy Fell – Sarah Jessica Parker and Eric Schaeffer are roommates. Also has Ben Stiller, Elle Macpherson, and Scarlett Johansson as a little girl. Sarah and Eric agree to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge if they don’t get some kind of romantic life going in 30 days.
  9. Pretty Woman
  10. Four Weddings and a Funeral
  11. So I Married an Axe Murder with Mike Myers and Nancy Travis.

Thanks for listening to the podcast!

Love on the Big Screen Podcast: My Novel is Now Available as a 2nd Edition

Love on the Big Screen is my first novel, and it tells the story of a college freshman whose understanding of love has been shaped by eighties romantic comedies. The protagonist Zuke is obsessed with movies such as Sixteen Candles, Say Anything, When Harry Met Sally, and The Breakfast Club. Love on the Big Screen is a novel of friendship, the dangers of romanticized love, the complexities of faith and real life, and what happens to one young man as he finds out that life is nothing like the movies he loves.

  • Click here to link to Amazon where you can purchase the eBook or paperback.
cover design by Izzy Torgerson

As someone who grew up in the decade of the eighties and graduated from high school in 1989, the novel was inspired by my own experiences attending college at Olivet Nazarene University and playing on the basketball team.

Click below to listen to the Torg Stories Podcast episode where my sister Anne took over hosting duties and led a discussion about the book:

Discussed on this episode:

  • What necessitated the 2nd edition?
  • What inspired the story?
  • How does real life inspire fiction?
  • What’s the process of self publishing a second edition?
  • What makes for an effective book cover? My daughter Izzy designed this one for the second edition!
  • Why is the price the price of an eBook or paperback?
  • Shonda Rimes and other requests by studios and production companies for the book.
  • Writing the screenplay and winning the Grand Prize of the Rhode Island International Film Festival Screenplay Competition.
  • Memories from college.

Facts of my life that made it into the novel:

  1. I really was a member of a group called The Brothers in Pursuit that met weekly on Sunday nights. We dressed in matching boxer shorts, wore helmets, and reported back to each other on the four pursuits.
  2. I did like a girl who told me that she was going to break up with her boyfriend but she came back from the meeting engaged. She did not date one of my teammates.
  3. People did wear t-shirts at our games that spelled my name T-O-R-G and sometimes there was a “!” at the end.
  4. A professor did take me and a small group of English students to a performance of MacBeth which began with naked witches.

Just a few examples of how details from life can become fiction:

  1. One of the Brothers in Pursuit was named Chad Zaucha and my buddies and I called him Zuke. I used his name for my main character even though that character is based more on myself than anyone else.
  2. In the book, Zuke likes Abby and her boyfriend is nicknamed Cheese, and he’s the star of the college team. Cheese is also a name I took from someone I know. Cheese was a teammate and when he set the record for assists at Olivet Nazarene where I played, the fans really did throw cheese slices on the floor. However, Cheese didn’t date someone I liked, and Cheese was a great teammate. The character in the book is sometimes a less than ideal teammate who has no connection to the guy I knew.
  3. Zuke’s high school girl friend is named Colleen. I got that name from when a 3rd grader passed me a note to ask if I wanted to be her boyfriend and I freaked out. So I didn’t go to high school with a girl named Colleen.

College Memory Section

Here are some of the memories I share with Anne on the podcast:

  1. What we did in forming the Brothers in Pursuit.
  2. Riding rented scooters in Hawaii when the team went the first time.
  3. Complaining Sessions With Teammates. We called them something else but we would gather in a room and complain for an hour and then when that was up there was no more complaining for the week.
  4. My friend Zuke threw a bunch of CDs out the window because he thought music was consuming his life. Zuke also did not roll down the windows on his new car.
  5. TECMO football leagues. Status pro basketball with Cowboy.

Just a few of the people that influenced me at Olivet Nazarene:

  1. Joe Bentz. The first person I ever met who was working on a book. I wrote an essay The Royal Castle and he told me that was what I should be writing.
  2. Ruth Cook: I took a Shakespeare Class from her. She made it really fun. She told me I was a good writer. She was the one who took us to MacBeth with the naked witches.
  3. Judy Whitis: head of the English Department. I asked her for a recommendation letter to get into a creative writing program, and she suggested I might want to teach at Olivet instead. She planted the seed that I could teach at a college.
  4. Shirley McGuire. I had her for a few classes, and she was the sponsor for the English Honor Society. The Prof Moore character is based on her mannerisms. I think it’s better for the narrative to take Prof Cook’s taking us to MacBeth and just giving that to Moore.

Thanks for checking out this episode and learning more about the novel Love on the Big Screen!

If you do purchase the novel, it would be a big boost to the project if you would share it with friends and write a review on Amazon. Thank you!

Love Can Be Complicated: A Cartoon from Karin Schmitt

As I’ve written before, I was the sort of guy–even before all the eighties romantic comedies I ingested–who could believe I’d fallen in love with a girl even though I’d never talked to her before.  This happened more than once to be sure.   Sometimes I think this is something everyone experiences to some degree, and other times I think I am a certain sort of freak–we all find our ways, right?–and that I’m guilty of projecting my experience onto the experiences of others.  After all, when one of my students says, “I had the typical childhood,” I’m always quick to quiz people around the room about their childhoods.  We often find almost nothing in common.
I write this thinking it’s an obvious observation that many of us romanticize what we think a relationship ought to be, and then we are dissatisfied with relationships when they aren’t are fantasies.  At the recommendation of some of my new Facebook friends, I’m reading Rob Sheffield’s book talking to girls about duran duran. Although I think I know my tendency to romanticize relationships isn’t universal, I see Sheffield has also had this experience.  He writes, “One hundred percent of teenagers dream about making out, but they only dream about making out with 5 percent of other teenagers.  This means our dreams and our realities are barely on speaking terms, so we look forward to making out with people who aren’t real, keeping us in a nearly universal state of teen frustration” (186).  I read Sheffield and I think, “Man Rob, me and you could be buddies,” but then I know that Sheffield is good at what he does, he’s able to tap into the details of his experience that causes a certain circle of people to connect with him, and so he’s probably regularly bombarded with people who approach him calling out, “I loved Morrissey too! We should hang out.”  I teeter totter on a tightrope of tension between universal experience and the uniqueness of each of us.
I have not talked with Karin Krista Schmitt, the artist who drew the cartoon below, about what she “meant” by her drawing.  This seems like another “no, no” I’ve somehow learned:  don’t ask a poet what the poem means.   So whatever I have to say about Karin’s drawing below comes from me, but it comes as a part of a conversation started by her and her work.   I read a piece about the expectations of relationships; I read a text about how life is full of surprises.  There are two fantasies here, and they don’t match up.  Karin is another of my new Facebook friends, living in Germany I think, and when I saw her drawings (in a language I can’t read) I asked her if she might be willing to draw something for my blog and Facebook book page.  I hear lots about how Facebook is such a time waster, and of course it is for many and often for me, but I also think there can be something very exciting happen.  A person told me to read Sheffield and now I am on his second book my yesterday afternoon was better because I sat on a stationary bike for 40 minutes and read.  Karin has sent me this funny and thought-provoking drawing and she has got me thinking…

Karin Schmitt catoon for William Torgerson Love on the Big Screen
Cartoon by Karin Schmitt / see link below for more of her artwork

If you want to take a look at more of Karin’s work, you can find her Facebook here.