Bitty's (Z)addy

im full of great ideas tonight

The wedding is beautiful. The bride and groom figurines on the cake are little hockey players. Lardo looks amazing. Shitty is wearing an actual suit. Jack is his best man. Bitty brought a thousand of those travel-sized tissue packets, just in case. Bitty has also been practicing his catching skills because he is gonna get that bouquet he will check you if need be. 

Lardo walks down the aisle. Chowder is already sobbing, like, super loud. Shitty has this look on his face, bright and a little crazy like he might start laughing or throwing up or both at any second, because how can one person handle all of this happiness at once? 

They stand in front of the priest. Shitty takes Lardo’s hands. She gives him a quick, sideways smile and quirks an eyebrow, silently asking him if he’s gonna cry at his own wedding like a loser, as if she wasn’t just breathing heavily into a paper bag half an hour ago. 

The priest smiles, and turns to Lardo. 

“Do you, Larissa Duan, take Brian Knight–” 

“Do I take fucking

WHOM

Jack: Haha. Think he likes you. Bitty: Oh my–WHUH! Jack: Haha.  

finally one of them plucks up the courage to ask him and is like “um, Bitty? is it true you’re dating Jack Zimmermann?”

Not only have I never played, I skate like a newborn giraffe and have literally held a hockey stick in my hand once!

And I’m from Texas.

I’ll probably do a FAQ/write-up on the creation of Check,Please!, but long story short, I did 3-months of hockey research my senior year of college in order to write my first screenplay Hardy, a story about a really butch hockey player named Chris Einhardt who falls for his best friend and former teammate. It has intellectual gems like:

MALKOV…Yeah. Not really. But I mean,everyone has like fucking randomthoughts. Okay, say you have likea million thoughts in a year, somaybe like 400 thousand are aboutgirls and stuff, and maybe 400thousand are about hockey, andmaybe 1 of them has to be randomlyabout a guy. Completely randomly.But that thought may not even be afull thought anyway. And you don’tact on that, because, hey. That’spretty fucking gay. But there’s aline. Now, gay guys—your friend?Shit. Like 500, 600 thousand thoughts ayear about cocks and stuff.HARDYSix hundred thousand.

MALKOVEhhh, give or take a cock.

HARDYOkay.

For the writing of that screenplay I interviewed hockey players at Yale (one of whom plays in the AHL!) and roommates of hockey players, talked to the hockey beat reporter for the newspaper, interviewed girls who dated hockey players, watched every single of documentary about hockey ever, checked out books from the library about hockey, hit up JSTOR for scholarly articles on hockey culture, watched Miracle/Goon/Slapshot and took notes during hockey games.

Believe you me, I was paranoid about stepping into this completely foreign culture and making some horrible faux pas. But the upside of the excessive research is that I had all this leftover hockey know-how when I completed the screenplay…