It is a truth universally acknowledged that artists are scammers, and a time-honored scam amongst artists is convincing rich people that we need to be paid, fed, and housed in a remote location to be able to “focus” on “creating” “art”—a grift also commonly known as “the artist retreat.” I myself scammed MacDowell not too long ago into housing me in one of their gorgeous studios to “write” a “novel!”
I jest, of course—I did write a novel (as well as a not-poem) and it was a wonderful experience, but one for which I was not allowed to apply again for two years (every scam has its limits). So when my friend Lilly and I decided we needed some time away to write a screenplay we’ve been working on for some time, we applied to other places, who went ahead and rejected us like a bunch of twats. What were we to do? Write it in our time off from our day jobs, like struggling artists? Never! We’d rather have no script than struggle.
Then out of nowhere, another friend, Adam, cc’d me in an email titled “Crazy Writer's Retreat Summer Idea.” His radical pitch was: what if we put together a retreat?
The first roadblock was, of course, that Adam is only friends with poor people, and retreats cost money—hence why we usually scam rich people for them. But his reasoning was that if we grouped together, the costs would be divided enough for us to afford them on our below-living-wage incomes.
Lilly and I were very amenable to the idea, so we decided to join, though I still thought there might be some way to get a rich person to pay for this, and I tried hard to find them. In fact, the only thing I meaningfully contributed to the organization of this (which was otherwise all Adam and Charles) was getting someone to donate space in a lovely location—though sadly we couldn’t make the dates work, and we had to go back to the plan of paying for a house. Next time!
The place we (meaning Adam) found, a gorgeous three-story house in Jeffersonville, NY, had a shitton of rooms in it, so we set about inviting more people. The final group was composed of the aforementioned me, Lilly, Adam, and Charles (all of whom I went to school with) plus Nikki (whom I had only met by seeing her amazing performance in Wish You Were Here) and Salma (who once joined me on a panel to tell the American theater to stop being xenophobic). We wanted to get more people, but looking back, this number was kinda perfect for the first cohort. We bonded in a way that maybe we wouldn’t have with a larger group. We’ll now forever be the First Class, and will be able to lord that over anyone else who joins.
Once the group was settled, we discussed transportation—Jeffersonville is kinda in the middle of nowhere, with the closest train station being Port Jervis, an hour away. Of the six of us, only Charles had a car, so it was decided that three people would go with him while Lilly and I braved it on the NJ Transit; after dropping the group off, Charles would come to Port Jervis to get us. Little did we know… Port Jervis isn’t real.
The trip to Port Jervis started where all trips start for me (and all days start for Ben Affleck): at Dunkin Donuts! Lilly and I got to Penn a little late, though, so I couldn’t luxuriate in my traditional sausage, egg, and cheese on a bagel, which would’ve taken time to cook; I had to settle for a sprinkles and a Boston creme to go with my iced vanilla latte. Lilly foolishly got a gigantic cold brew with nothing to eat, tempting the NJ Transit to do exactly what it did—fuck the whole thing up while they starved.
Our train to Secaucus, where we would transfer, left late, so we ended up running into the Port Jervis line seconds before it left—to miss it would’ve been to wait three hours for the next one. For a while, it seemed like that small hitch leaving Penn would be the only problem. And then, when we were about to pull into Suffern… we stopped. For a LONG time. The official reason was that the train ahead of us had broken down. Then, it turned out, OUR own train had broken down as well. We exited onto the station. We waited for so long that it seemed we were going to have to catch the train that we would’ve caught anyway if we had missed ours.
Then, out of nowhere, a brand new train came onto the tracks, promising to cut the wait down and take us to Port Jervis immediately. We get in. The doors close. And… it doesn’t leave. For what feels like five days. Clearly, Suffern is a cursed town that trains can only enter, but not leave. The group in Charles’ car had already arrived in Jeffersonville and we were still stuck. We were considering asking Charles to come get us in Suffern—and then we started moving. Passengers cheered. Could the nightmare be over?
NOPE!
A couple of stations later, the conductor, clearly fearing a lynching (he even said “I also wanna get out of here and back to my family” before delivering the news) timidly announced we had to get down again and wait for the train behind us. Everyone was ready for murder. We were supposed to have gotten to Port Jervis at 1:30pm—it was already 3:30. Some of the passengers, we discovered, had been in that line since 8am. We got down, wondering how mob-y things would get if the next train did not arrive very soon. But it did.
At 4pm, just one station away from Port Jervis, we stopped again. A train ahead of us had broken down. We wondered if we had died and this was purgatory, or more likely hell. We were clearly never going to arrive.
ME: Port Jervis isn’t real.
LILLY: The real Port Jervis was the friends we made along the way.
ME: Port Jervis was inside us all along.
When the train finally pulled into the last stop, Charles greeted us with open arms, but we ignored him and ran into the Burger King across the parking lot. We needed to eat our feelings before being able to enjoy life again.
Jeffersonville turned out to be a quaint little town (technically a village), most of which is owned by the same person who owns the house we were renting. It has absolutely no cell reception, which fucked up my texts but otherwise was kinda nice in a remote sort of way, and it became clear as we drove in that this was the perfect place to write and do other retreat things like eating or napping (though that would be interrupted around noon each day by a loud siren that made it sound like the Nazis were coming, and served no clear purpose).
The house itself was a surprising purple color, which immediately christened our little endeavor as The Purple House Retreat. Inside, it revealed itself enormous, with an old-timey vibe that was simultaneously charming and also clearly indicated there were ghosts living there (one of them, downstairs, kept popping a closet door open no matter how firmly we fastened it). It was agreed that the “morning” people (Lilly, Adam, and I) would take rooms on the second floor, while the “night” people (Salma, Nikki, and Charles) would sleep on the top floor. My room did not have ghosts, but it did have a big spider living under the AC, which I was okay with (having Chester has made me way more amenable to sharing space with other life forms).
It was also agreed that one of us would cook dinner each night, but the trip up there took it out of us (even the ones who did not face the Port Jervis nightmare), so we just headed into town to get groceries, liquor, and pizza for dinner. We proudly represented the Big Apple by walking in a group, talking loudly, and being the most insufferable version of ourselves, audibly discussing our favorite New Yorker articles. Locals did their best to ignore us.
After pizza, we found ourselves on the porch, occupying the many rocking chairs available and arguing about when is it okay not to read other people’s scripts. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
The retreat went by faster than any of us anticipated. Like most places that are not New York, something in the air of Jeffersonville makes it so that you sit down on a chair and three hours go by without you noticing (in my case, as pictured above, that chair usually rocked, which also sped up time).
We spent most of the day apart from each other working on our projects; Lilly and I managed to bang out an entire draft of the movie (a 70-page draft, sure, but still), which tells the story of a white female New York artistic director who finds out she’s being pushed out of the theater she’s run for 30 years; it was very fun to write, as we included references to all the theater dramas of the past two years.
When we weren’t writing, we also found time for communal activities, including a very misguided visit to Lake Jeff, which one Google reviewer accurately described by saying “it used to be such a nice lake but now it’s mainly just a mud pit.”
As you can see, the land around the lake looks dry, but is in fact treacherous quicksand, and I quickly sank into it. Completely put off by the disgusting mud that almost swallowed my flip-flops and now covered my arms and legs, I tried to approach the lake from a rockier side, only to sink again and now lose the entire toenail on my left big toe. It hurt like fucking hell, and it looked awful (the nail flipped 90 degrees upward and I had to tear it off), so the group understandably decided to call it a day and head back to the house, where I was babied by everyone while trying not to puke from how painful and upsetting the situation in my toe was.
The mood shifted later, though, as that was also the day that we (meaning Lilly) started making fires at night, which proved to be thee ultimate bonding experience, as we got drunk, sucked on the endless bags of frozen pops that we found in the freezer, and played games like “this or that,” in which we tried to determine the famous people each of us had the biggest hots for (Edris Elba was always a fair guess).
It was also around the fire that we came up with most of the Purple House Retreat’s inside jokes, which included:
Multiple references to this brilliant article (“or, the _______ play” was said many many times in every possible context);
A round of “girlboss, gaslight, gatekeep,” in which you rank people’s behavior in those three categories (I am gatekeep > girlboss > gaslight, obviously), and which resulted in Adam proclaiming “if you can’t gaslight yourself, how the hell are you gonna gaslight someone else?”
The expression “Moth Suicide” (coined by Lilly upon noticing that moths came too close to the flames and died), which will be the theme of a future playwriting bakeoff in which everyone will do their worst to try to live up to that title, and the cringiest effort will win;
Me correcting Lilly when they said they were assistant manager at work by saying “assistant TO the manager.”
Those nights were truly the heart of the Purple House Retreat, and if you’re a rich person reading this, we are happy to name the fire after you if you sponsor us.
The last day was bad for all of us for individual reasons (in my case, an upsetting dream followed by some jarring reminders of the annoying stuff that was waiting for me back home), but it was clear that none of us wanted to leave. Commiserating as we ate the soup and tacos that Salma and Adam had respectively prepared for dinner, we admitted out loud what a good time we had and how necessary it was for us to do it again as soon as possible. The first cohort of the Purple House Retreat was a success!
The next morning, we left Salma behind (someone was picking her up for a gig in a nearby town) and headed back in the car with Charles, none of us wanting to test the unreliability of the Port Jervis line again. It was a short trip, which stopped for only one pee break (amazingly, not for me, notorious Small Bladder King), and before we knew it, we were back in dirty boring Manhattan fighting severe depression.
Warning! Sappy honest moment ahead.
I really loved this trip, not only because I got to relax and do some great writing with someone with whom I work very well, not only because I gained new friends at the impressively old age of 32, and not only because it was so peaceful that losing an entire toenail didn’t upset me much, but because we did the thing I love doing the most as an artist: not waiting around for someone to give us The Thing and making it happen ourselves instead. Obviously, this is not always a viable path (again, we currently make under a living wage!) but it feels incredible when things click to allow us to support ourselves. In an industry that girlbosses, gaslights, and gatekeeps like nobody’s watching, being your own girlboss for a few days can be transformative.
That being said, again: if you’re a rich person reading this, please sponsor the next one! We can pay you back in toenails.