[TWP04] Related

Hey all. TWP04 is now up! It was written by myself, Jeff, stars Ivy Hong and myself, and was filmed by Bryan Dembinski. Bryan also did sound, I suppose. It was shot in Central Park on a day when it was just way too cold to be doing something like that. But nonetheless, the shoot was a lot of fun, and everyone did a great job! This is probably the longest any Wonderment could be, unless it's shot live or something, as we just made it under the one hour mark.

Related is based on a true story. Ivy and I actually are related to every guy in each statue we describe. Of course, certain liberties were taken in the telling of how we are connected. The idea behind Related is two characters who are playing a lighthearted game. Trying to out BS one another with fantastic, over the top stories of how they were connected to each person in the statues. After my brother read the script, he immediately said I was trying to go for an Italo Calvino vibe (Invisible Cities, go read it, now), which is perhaps true, especially given the Marco Polo reference, but wasn't at the forefront of my mind when I wrote it. Italo Calvino has a more dreamlike feel, while Related is more fun. Ivy did a great job setting the tone, and I'm very happy with how it turned out.

It was really inspired by a conversation I had, at a dinner party at my advisors house of all places, about Mitochondrial Eve, who is......

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the last common female ancestor. Meaning, the woman who was alive most recently, who is a progenitor to every currently living human. It turns out mitochondria are one of the best ways to track maternal genealogy, since mitochondria are passed from mother to children. Since mitochondria are asexual, any change in the mitochondrial DNA in a given family line is strictly due to mutation. All you have to do is track all the different strains of mitochondria that exist in humans today, measure how long it takes, on average, for one line to mutate, and then you can simply calculate how long ago it was that every human had the same mitochondrial strain. It turns out that number is between 180,000 and 240,000 years. So, we all have the same great great ... (How ever many greats it takes to get back 200,000 years) grandmother.

Evolution of course mandates that we're all related to each other, but having a date, and a conceptual woman, we can point to makes it feel a more tangible to me.

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Mitochondrial Eve got me thinking about the stories that exist which connect all of us. And how they're all probably really really boring. Hopefully the ones in Related are a bit more interesting than the truth.

Jeff