This project was fun, to take a historical event and put a unique spin on it. It’s been said that “good artists borrow, but great artists steal.” Using a historical event as inspiration is handy because stealing from it is more socially acceptable than most alternatives, and you can take a lot of liberties. Also, it is an almost endless source of fascinating stories about true human behavior, which as we know, can often be stranger than fiction. The historical story we drew on and interpreted had kind of a ridiculousness about it, as it’s not often we hear about national, royal decrees involving potatoes, that most unshapely tuber. We chose to run with that, emphasizing the cartoonish aspects rather than the realistic aspects of the story. Originally, I heard about it from my Dad, who is an expert collector of mental lint and told it emphasizing the potato’s role as the solution to marching soldiers over the crop fields, and talking humorously about the great lengths Frederick the Great went to take advantage of them. I fixated on just one aspect of the process, this potato field, partially because it was crazy, partly because it worked, mostly because it was crazy that it worked. As I wrote it, I did some more research, and learned that Frederick the Great still has potatoes placed on his grave. And Austria, of course, still grows potatoes. I love that plans that seem crazy, both at the time and decades afterwards, can turn out to be a good thing. Our script celebrates that craziness while trying to maintain the spirit of its success. We were really glad in class when we watched “My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts.” Most other examples we enjoyed were much more serious, and dealt with harsh issues in a strong, humanist light. That was good, but not super compatible with the spirit of our scripts’ premise. Granted, we could have focused on the famine and stubborn resistance to change that preceded the potato, but we think that always would have been undermined by the way Frederick the Great went about solving this admittedly grave issue. Instead of taking that route, we went the way of gentle exaggeration also utilized in “My Grandmother.” We felt like we had more confidence in our approach after watching that. We also felt like it reminded us to focus more on characters, not just events, because it’s the characters that ground the events.