I thought the whole 'found a stranger's grocery list' thing was just a cute internet story until I found a whole one-act play in a diner booth.

It was in a cheap spiral notebook left behind at a diner in Tacoma. The first page was a shopping list, so I almost put it back, thinking it was just that. But I flipped it and the next twenty pages were this handwritten play about a guy arguing with a ghost in a laundromat. The dialogue was actually pretty good, and someone had clearly worked on it. I turned it in to the staff, but part of me wanted to keep it. It made me realize people actually do leave these little bits of their creative brains lying around. Has anyone else found something that started normal and got weird fast?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisa_wilson871mo ago

Wait, is it really a one-act play if it's twenty pages? That sounds more like a full short play to me. I took a theater class in community college and they were super strict about that stuff, a one-act is usually way shorter. Still, finding any kind of finished creative work like that is so cool. It's way more personal than just a list.

barbaragarcia1mo ago

My old drama teacher said page count gets fuzzy (like, a one-act can totally run that long if the dialogue is sparse). The definition seems looser outside of class.