Proximity Muse

Today I thought I might start working on a new project, and I thought I’d share some of that work with the class. We’re going to take a stab at a character study. One Mr. Idaho.

Mr. Idaho isn’t this fellas real name, of course. It’s just what I’ll be calling him. In fact, I have no intention of actually giving him a real name. I asked myself what the most boring state in the union might be and the answer I got back was Idaho. If you live in Idaho, I apologize. Give the potatoes a hug for me.

So, Mr. Idaho is very much like the picture I posted. A boring, suit and tie, wage-slave for the insurance industry. He probably went straight to a state college right out of high school, did the requisite amount of partying (not enough to get him in a frat, though) and scraped through with a C+ average. What? A C+ average isn’t bad. We had a president with a C+ average. But I digress.

Mr. Idaho marries the first woman to give him a hummer. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s unattractive or 40 year-old virgin material, that just means the girls in Hometown, USA had firm ideas about where a penis should be placed. He and the missus pop out the usual 2.5 children, buy a house with a white picket fence and settle down into American stupor.

Right now, Mr. Idaho is a boring motherfucker. That’s fine. Most people are boring. You ask a crowd of people what they do for fun and you’ll get way more “I watch TV” type answers than you will “I ski naked” type answers. Further, for the purposes of my study, boring is what I want. Now let’s tie boring to the theme I’ll be working with, which happens to be poker.

Mr. Idaho watches every poker program on television and DVRs the one’s he misses. He enjoys poker so much that he organized a weekly poker night, where the guys sit around, drink beer, curse, (but no smoking in the house) and play cards for penny ante. It turns out that Mr. Idaho is a pretty solid poker player. He ends up with way more pennies than he loses. He dreams of playing poker in a real casino for big time money.

Last Tuesday, Mr. Idaho’s boss asked him to accompany him to a insurances sales convention. The town the convention’s being held in just happens to have a casino. As an aside here, there’s no good reason to always make that town Vegas anymore, either. Hell, Pittsburgh has a casino. If you feel you must go all in (as it were) with the glitz of Vegas, cool, I’m just saying you have alternatives. Anyways, Mr. Idaho knows about the casino and decides to go to the convention. He spends the next few months saving up as much extra cash as he possibly can, maybe even quietly siphoning off some of the savings account, to make a credible stake for some serious poker.

What actually happens to Mr. Idaho while playing poker is the meat of the story, so that doesn’t really need to figure in the study. We will want to know seemingly trivial things like the names of his wife and children. My initial temptation is to name the wife Gladys, but I’ll resist. Mr. Idaho isn’t nearly old enough to have a wife named Gladys. Speaking of age, I figure Mr. Idaho is mid-30s. So, names. Here’s the thing about names. Sometimes a name should mean something, and sometimes it really doesn’t matter. Mr. Idaho doesn’t have a name because I want him to have a certain anonymity. I want my audience to be able to stick the name of whoever Mr. Idaho reminds them of on the character. I’m also tempted to just leave the wife with a cutesy nickname, like Honeybuns or Snookie. This is the only name we’d ever hear Mr. Idaho refer to his wife by (he will, of course, just call her “my wife”). It would even be on his iPhone. The kids need real names though. Simple names will do. Mr. Idaho and his Snookie Bear aren’t really that imaginative. We’ll go with Matt and Ashley.

Now we need something in Mr. Idaho’s background that would make him willing to take a risk. To this point he’s a pretty boring and low risk kind of fellow. For him to do something crazy, like snort coke and bang a hooker over the balcony railing in his hotel room, he’s going to need a shove. Maybe Mr. Idaho is a really bad winner. He’s a trash talker. The more he wins, the more excited and self-confident he gets. Eventually he passes the line from vaguely annoying to egomaniac. The penny ante games at home aren’t enough to bring out the worst in him, but if he won some real money, he might start to behave like a real jackass.

Meet Mr. Idaho.