Of Love & The Chinese Beer Flower

n the latest screenplay, The Beer Flower Limited, I juxtapose two characters with conflicting philosophies; an American financier who swears by the free market, but sees the affairs of the heart as a monopoly and a Chinese micro-brewer who refuses to mass produce her beer for fear of poor quality, but who claims to love everyone and everything. He derides her ubiquitous hugs and off-the-cuff proclamations of love for one and all as "the Bud Light of Friendship." She mocks his "Unicorn Love Ale" as non-existent.

Who's right? Which of the two values love best?

She fills her love portfolio with friends, family and animals; a healthy diversity of love assets that keep loneliness risk at bay for a steady and modest love yield at the cost of a big love return.

He values love so high that it's an illiquid issue akin to Berkshire Hathaway A stock which he is only willing to purchase when sure it will out-perform the average love market for the long run; a good, all-his-organic-love-eggs-in-one-basket bet...till Warren Buffet meets his maker.

Through the writing of this screenplay and The L-v- Fund earlier this past fall, I've had to think about a subject I haven't thought about seriously in a long time. In so doing, I've asked myself, what's normal? What's not? What's best? What can be learned from the other side of each argument? And what could constitute a compromise?

Using beer, Chinese drinking games and the language of the marketplace for cover, I find a way to discuss how we value love - for better or for worse - in The Beer Flower Limited.