Last Night on Wonka Island
A tale of two
Daniela and Sam were the worst friends. They met on a rainy day in New York and ended killing each other forty-six years later on a lost dune of Wonka Island.
This is their story.
December 27th, 1995. It’s a rainy day in New York. Sam is on his way home, and Daniela’s having a break from unpacking her boxes. She moved into Sam’s building the week before.
“Don’t look up!”
“What?!” called Sam, looking up.
“I told you not to look up,” replied Daniela from the window sill where she was smoking. “There are some hostiles in the neighborhood; you need to be careful, pretty boy. No! you’re more than pretty; you’re a beautiful boy.”
“WHO are you?”
“I’m Miss Stevens, but you can call me by your name; it will be easier for you to remember. What about you?”
Playing along, Sam told her he was Antoine, the French dispatch sent by the King to retrieve the shipwrecked little women. They were students in the Interstellar secret society ruling the kingdom in the shadows. Without them, the future of the whole planet was in jeopardy.
“Are you one of them, by any chance?” Sam asked.
That was the kind of reply Daniela expected.
“Yes, I’m Lady Bird. Come up! We need to plan our escape carefully. The baron’s soldiers have been chasing me for three weeks.”
As fate would have it, Sam had all the time in the world this day. He went up and kept his role of Antoine, the French dispatch, till late in the night. The dialogue they built together along the way would become part of their co-written debut novel, the Adderall diaries.
Although writing was a close second, Sam and Daniela’s favorite was acting. Cold winter mornings or hot summer nights, it didn’t matter. Their passion was always burning. Men, women and children, dogs and cats, all loved to watch them perform.
Fame came with their off-Broadway play, co-written in a creative burst in June 2001. Nobody but friends and family came for the premiere of Love the Coopers. But the second evening, luck bought a ticket in the person of Zac Vance, the famous theater critic. He was supposed to meet his wife, Greta Romanovska, for dinner, but she had canceled at the last minute because of an emergency at the hospital.
Nostalgic for simpler times, Zac forced himself to be spontaneous and decided to enter the first theater that showed a play with love in the title.
A month later, the four of them were celebrating at the Bones & All restaurant. Thanks to Zac’s review, the play had become a success, and the adaptation to the big screen was only a matter of signing a contract with the highest bidder.
Greta and Zac saw their younger selves in Daniela and Sam. Energetic and ambitious, yes, but above all, driven. They had a vision.
Fast forward forty years of realizations and worldwide recognitions, Daniela and Sam just finished their autobiographical movie, One & Two, a gigantic eight hours opus, and are spending a week in their estate on Wonka Island.
“Remember how much Zac and Greta loved it here?”
“I miss them; they were the best friends one could wish for. Unlike us, we’ve always been the worst friends, even between us, especially between us.”
“It was never about friendship, Daniela; you know that. Tragedy, that’s what we’ve been aiming for all these years, and I don’t have the strength to keep it moving, darling.”
“I know, honey, I know; me neither. Our time has come.” Remembering this day from December 1995, Daniela smiles and adds, “once again, you’re my savior, Antoine.”
“It was always my pleasure, Lady Bird.”
This story includes 20 movie titles taken from Timothée Chalamet’s filmography. For another story using Keanu Reeve’s filmography, go there:
