Unfreshman

Meet Carnie. She’s a 28 year-old college freshman starting her life over after breaking up with her loser boyfriend and moving across the country to pursue her dream of an education in the arts at NYU. She’s spent a decade in the school of hard knocks in Hollywood pursuing a career as an actress and now she’s finally ready to grow up and learn to take herself seriously as a writer — The only trouble is she’ll be learning to write alongside 18 year olds virgins dripping with privilege, private school educations, are encyclopedias when it comes to greek mythology, can’t hold their liquor, are navigating their sexualities, and don’t know how to wash their own laundry. Will she find out she has more in common with these kids than she thinks???

Episode one finds us in an oyster bar in New York City where a co-worker from a poolside bar Carnie worked at in Los Angeles has set her up on a date with a distant cousin living in New York. Carnie sips wine as a pudgy white 30 year old drags on about a recent break up and how he’s attending his brother’s wedding next weekend and would like to bring Carnie as his date. Hopelessly sad, lost and a fish out of water, Carnie internally rolls her eyes as she slides out of the obligation to attend the wedding because she will need to stay home and study.

Reluctantly Carnie takes him back to her dorm where the security guard has to sign him in and take an ID in order for him to enter. They listen to some music and lay down on the twin sized bed but when he leans in to kiss her, Carnie shifts out of the way of the kiss and they fall back behind the bed knocking into the air conditioning unit just as Carnie’s incredibly stoned college roomate, Sam enters the room and thankfully spoils the moment. Carnie walks him back downstairs, and signs him out just in time to get back into the elevator with a girl from one of her classes. Sparks are flying between them. But will Carnie fall for an 18 year old girl? Is she too questioning everything including her sexuality?

In this uproariously dark and funny comedy, we watch an unlikely coming of age story transpire filled with awkward and beautiful moments of humanity that show us that in fact it is never too late to chase a dream or find out who you are or what you’re made of. We will follow her along a series of heinous dates and unbelievably challenging interactions with kids and somehow inside all of this she might just find out who she is and what she’s made of.

She will hold back her roommates hair as she vomits and cries about how her mother didn't buy her the apartment on Madison avenue like she promised, she'll befriend the shy gay boy next door who comes over each night to giggle in bed beside her in her twin and tell her his fantasies about their 30 year-old writing professor, and will spend evenings alone in the dorm's basement exercise room giving herself pep talks and doing online ballet exercises on her laptop, and sneaking wine into the dorm in her backpack.

Despite believing that the college kids will reject her for her age, they instead begin to flock to her for advice (as if she has all the answers). She will begin to find her courage and her voice talking with teenagers on New York stoops and park benches in the middle of the night drunk on cheap wine and the simple adrenaline of living an artist's life among the rich kids of entertainment legends who are now her piers. In Flashbacks we will learn about all it took for Carnie to get here and become the college spectacle she is now. She will come out to her ex boyfriend in time who will say, "My friends all thought I was going to be the one to get a young hot girlfriend! No one saw it coming, Carn, that you'd be the one to snag a hot young thing!"

She will be called a cougar as she visits home for old friend's bachelorette parties and baby showers and weddings but somehow her path will be the one that is all worth it in the end.

There is no shortage of ego death for our lead in this story. She will have to learn that a life left un-lived is no life at all, and despite the challenges of living amongst a pier group ten years her junior, she too will at last come home to herself as not so young anymore young person, discovering that without an interesting life, she will have nothing to write about and if she isn't embarrassing herself a little and sometimes a lot, she isn't living all the way. She's going to live out all the teenage moments she never gave herself as a responsible and too old/wise for her years teen. Better late than never to give herself the full experience of college, one night stands, all nighters, big risks, flaws and all. She's going to let it rip!