Synopsis: THE ELEPHANT'S DANCE

DRAFT: This creative non-fiction drama tells the story of a man raised as a child in an alcoholic and dysfunctional family of origin as he prematurely tries to learn how a normal man is supposed to live. Starting in the Willamette Valley, the story moves on to Interior Alaska where, along with his two younger brothers, our sensitive boy knows something is wrong but doesn't understand that they have been emotionally abandoned in their hateful house by their narcissistic mother to be subjected to the mean tirades of her drunken, angry second husband - a womanizing, whiskey-drinking, gun-toting animal-killing man brought up in a Springfield family of logging and timber workers whose idea of fun is skinning his prey each night in the living room while drinking himself to black-out as the boys hide quietly in plain sight. Ill prepared for the world, our young man is driven out of this home as a teen to begin his challenging trip through the lower 48 and Hawaii before returning to Alaska and ultimately returning to the Willamette Valley, expecting that he'll be greeted with a warm welcome if he can somehow win the whithheld love of the family. After an initially disastrous start, he begins to relentlessly achieve impossible accomplishments in the face of improbable odds -- driven by his unfulfilled need for love and acceptance from his emotionally unavailable family. As he unskillfully -- and at times carelessly and unwholesomely -- wends his way through his life of loss after loss, survival, growth, and finally a completely unforeseen success, another betrayal by his family of origin, leads him once again to his catastrophic failure and scandalous ruin. Along the way, he meets a series of like-wounded characters. Wanting to help everyone he meets, he instead unintentionally and completely obliviously often causes as much - or more - interpersonal emotional carnage to the people he meets as his family has caused him. Ultimately, disgraced, abandoned by all - family and non-family alike - destitute, near death and hopeless, he begins to finally find the source of the love he seeks -- knowing love and life for the first time -- from a surprisingly unlikely place!