KAREN HARTMAN WRITER
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    • Op-Ed/Memoir
    • Musical Book and Libretto
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WILD KATE

Inspired by Melville’s Moby Dick and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico, Wild Kate takes place on a high school semester at sea. Isabel--a participant--is about seventeen.
BUY SCript HerE

ISABEL
 
Call me Isabel.  Junior year was dark.  Dark like oil in the ocean, dark like a sparkle on the surface, a rainbow of superficial possibility that turns out to be a slick thick fake.  Worse, a poison. Trust me you don’t want the details. The most obvious way to escape - pill swallow, wrist slit, a trip to davey jones - was so not my road.  My great grandma survived Birkenau so, you know: obliged. And anyway if those dive bombs at school wanted me dead, the last thing I planned to do was actually die.
 
So I joined High School on the High Seas.  I never heard of it, but you can miss half your senior year and still go to college.  It might be a scam, and it costs the median American family income, but I skyped my dad in Tokyo with his new preferred children and I said it was life and death.  I had to go to sea. I said, dad do you know that feeling? Where you have to go to sea? 
 
We’re sailing almost around the world – from the Gulf around the Bahamas, up to Nova Scotia, Barcelona, Naples, Dubrovnik, Athens, Istanbul, Alexandria, Casablanca, and back to Virginia.  We’re gonna see whales. We’re gonna expand our horizons. Literally, like be places where the horizon expands. Also we’re going to get rockingly tan which will boost morale. I’m ready to view my body as more than a Smartcart for my brain. 
 
Of course I read the schedule wrong so I arrive in St. Pete a day early with nowhere to sleep.  I have thirty bucks and dad’s blood money Visa. And I’m like, screw you Visa! I’m gonna live like the people!  Along the sea!
 
The normal looking hotels with big driveways and fountains cost bucks, so I yelp a youth hostel and go sketch sketching my way down this sketch sketchy back alley.  It’s getting dark and I’m like: Isabel, this is it. You might die before you reach sea, but hey, it was your Plan B anyway, so no bigs. I couldn’t make this up: youth hostel is run by a dude called Spout.
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