An Infinite Number of Monkeys

if i don't make it as a filmmaker

2009-03-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

facebook game i couldn't resist

2009-02-25T15:01:00.001-08:00

Today was feeling overly productive. So here:

Create Your Band and Their Debut Album

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click on http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

500 days of sundance, part 3

2009-02-22T20:03:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed that many, many days have passed since my "part 2". I'm chalking it up to a serious bout of workaholism, from which I am now recovering. I may have to skip parts that I don't remember. Or make them up.

Day 6. Tuesday.

9:00 a.m. Our first African-American president is inaugurated. In Washington D.C., movie stars and politicians cry and celebrate. In Park City, Utah, Destin and JoJo dance in the middle of Main Street. In Karen's downstairs guest room, I sleep. It's not that I don't care. I do. On this particular day, I just care about sleeping more.

3:00 p.m. I take a bus to Eccles to join Destin (who had spent part of the night before playing Rock Band with Topanga from Boy Meets World), Joy, and Brad. We watch Push. Not the sci fi movie with the dumbest premise ever. Another movie named Push, which is about - and don't read this if you think you're going to see it in theaters - a black high school student in 1980's Harlem named Precious, who is: illiterate, obese, pregnant by her father, emotionally and physically abused by her mother, and HIV positive (because of her father.) Oh, and her first child by her father has Down syndrome. It's extremely powerful, with great acting. The audience gave the filmmaker a standing ovation. But later that night, I was talking to another actor who had been at the screening and he was like, "Is he being serious with that movie? She's fat and she can't read the word 'day' and her father rapes her and she's pregnant with his child and her kid has mental problems and her mom beats her and she's dying? Of AIDS? At some point, I just wanted to tell the movie to shut up." I could see his point, but other people didn't seem to feel that way - the movie ended up winning both Sundance's grand jury prize and the audience choice award.

5:30 p.m. Destin and I meet Jared (the other A.D. from the crew) to watch something that was listed in the film guide as "Sneak Preview with Steven Soderbergh."

6:15 p.m. Steven Soderbergh and Festival Director Geoff Gilmore sit on stools on the stage. Soderbergh starts talking about how people keep asking him what movie they're going to show. He has this whole coy little speech about how he doesn't know why people think they're going to show a new movie of his... he just doesn't know how these rumors get started... oh, maybe it's because he's going to show movie of his! This would be a more effective surprise if the words "Sneak Preview" could be interpreted to mean anything other than that they were going to show a movie of his.

6:20 p.m. The movie starts. It's a low-resolution cut of Soderbergh's next movie The Girlfriend Experience, about an escort having problems with her boyfriend, and starring real-life porn star Sasha Grey. At one point, an escort reviewer gives the main character a bad review, calling her dull and pretentious with a flat affect. These are basically my thoughts on the movie. Extremely talky and edited to be non-linear for no discernible reason, the only thing I really liked was the cinematography. Fans of the Red camera (by which I mean you, Bays) will be interested to know that only two scenes in the whole movie were lit.

7:30 p.m. I'm relieved that Destin and I have to sneak out of the movie early to go to the shorts awards ceremony. We take the shuttle over. I ask Destin if he wishes he had bothered to take a shower that morning. Because... what if... something happens where people... might perhaps want to take a picture of him? He acts like he doesn't know what I'm talking about.

8:00 p.m. We arrive at the shorts awards reception. TIME columnist Joel Stein, who had a short in the festival called Joel Stein's Completely Unfabricated Adventures, describes it this way:

I'm not sure where the award ceremony for the feature films was held, but the shorts awards were given out a mile from town at a weird '80s dance party with a really bad buffet in a room without seats. I did not see Robert Redford.

I didn't actually think the buffet was that bad. In fact, I seem to recall this mushroom bread pizza thing that I may have gone back for thirds on. I don't see Robert Redford either.

8:30 p.m. Sundance people announce the winner of YouTube's Project Direct contest, and they screen the film, Perfecto. Unfortunately, the sound system is awful and most of the crowd can't hear the dialogue. If you want to watch it, you can here.

8:45 p.m. I start getting texts from cast and crew asking me if they've announced the awards yet. I just text back, "Not yet" but now I'm kind of feeling pressured. I mean, there are 96 shorts! That's only a... 1.04% chance of winning. I really don't want everybody's hopes to be up.

9:00 p.m. People move downstairs to hear the announcement of the shorts awards.

9:05 p.m. The Honorable Mentions are announced. I didn't realize there would be so many... eight are awarded. The three that I've actually seen are Omelette, a Bulgarian film set during the '80s when inflation prices made food staples nearly impossible to afford, Love You More, a British film written by the writer of Closer and exec produced by Anthony Minghella (this seems like cheating to me), and The Attack of the Robots from Nebula-5, which was in our program, a weird, funny, sad black and white Spanish film about a mentally handicapped young man who thinks Earth is about to be destroyed. The fact that I actually really liked all of these makes me wonder if I'm finally getting Sundancy taste or if Sundance is finally getting Steffesy taste. Short Term 12 doesn't get an Honorable Mention. Part of me thinks this is a good sign. I tell that part of me to shut up.

9:11 p.m. Next they announce that Lies, a short film I haven't seen, has won the International Prize. (If you click the link there you can see that Sundance calls this the "International Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking." Nice.)

9:12 p.m. The guy says he's getting ready to announce the last award, the Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking. He says it was clear early on which film would win, that this filmmaker (which he refers to as "he," not that that really narrows it down) is clearly enormously gifted, etc. I think, "He's going to say Short Term 12." He does. Despite my confident intuition from two seconds earlier, I shriek and drop my vodka soda. (Sorry, Sundance janitorial crew.)

9:12 1/2 p.m. I turn around and hug Destin, who's standing behind me, perfectly still. He hugs me back, hugs Joy, and wanders in a daze to the stage. He wrote about the experience in a blog for a San Diego news station:

They called our name and I thought I was hallucinating. Joy, Michelle, Jared, Brad, and Brett all started screaming but their voices sounded like little chickens to me, and their lips were moving in extra slow motion. I only had about two hours of sleep the night before, so I was feeling pretty weird already, and then the extra stimuli just sent my head spinning. But I managed to stumble through some kind of thank you speech and get off the stage without fainting.

You can see part of Destin's speech in this video from the Sundance website. I wish I could embed it, because it's great, but I can't, so I just really encourage you to watch it. Again, here is the link. Watch it. Seriously.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid2524592001?bctid=8713597001

9:18 p.m. Destin takes pictures with other winners, then with us. I ask Destin if now he wishes he had showered that morning. He does.

9:20 p.m. I text the cast and crew that I have in my cell phone and say "WE WON" with about twelve exclamation points. Several of them text back to ask if I'm being serious. A couple of them want me to tell them the exact name of the exact award so they understand how excited to get.

That was really fun. I kind of want to not delete the texts, ever.

Here's this period of time from Joel Stein's perspective:

Standing near the stage, rehearsing my speech, I was relieved not to get any of the eight "honorable mentions," which is some kind of Sundancespeak for "loser." But when the actual award was given, they called up a young hipster named Destin Cretton, who not only did not have a speech prepared but also was holding a half-eaten lollipop. Trying to be a gracious runner-up, I walked over to congratulate Cretton.

"I assume yours is about either the Holocaust or a mentally disabled guy," I said.

"You're right," Cretton replied. "I worked for two years at a residential facility for at-risk teenagers." I felt an interesting mix of discomfort and validation. Then Cretton put his arm around me and said, "It's not about winning and losing. We're all at Sundance together." When he offered me his half-eaten lollipop, the discomfort quickly melted away.

deface

2009-02-05T23:25:00.000-08:00

Even though it's now well past Sundance, I'm still planning to finish blogging about it. If you have a problem with that, you don't have to read it, ok?

In the meantime, wanted to let you know that John Arlotto's film Deface, which I mentioned in my last post, is now up on the Windrider site. It's very good and well worth the 22 minutes it takes to watch it.

500 days of sundance, part 2

2009-01-23T23:47:00.000-08:00

We now return to our story, already in progress.

Day 4. Sunday.

10:00 a.m. Karen gives me a ride into town. She is worried that I'm not eating. I promise her that I'm headed to a producers' lunch. (The producers' lunch is the only thing Sundance does for producers. Destin gets $500 and a Timberland jacket and Timberland hiking boots and various tickets to receptions and brunches. I get quiche.)

10:30 a.m. I take a shuttle to Main Street. I overhear the man next to me telling a filmmaker that he's a film critic and head of an Italian film festival. I introduce myself and he asks me to send him a screener of Short Term 12. I'm rather proud of my schmoozing.

11:30 a.m. I walk into the producers' lunch, steel myself, then walk up to a couple at a random table and ask if I can sit with them. Both of the table occupants (the producers of Nobody Knows You, Nobody Gives a Damn) shriek when they see that I produced Short Term 12. They tell me they love the movie, and David shows me the button on his jacket - it's the pin for Short Term 12. He tells me he was excited when he found it on the ground. I also meet a producer who turns out to be a good friend of my friend Maggie's. I congratulate myself on my excellent choice of tables as I eat my quiche.

12:00 p.m. Mary Jane Skalski, the producer of The Visitor, Mysterious Skin, and The Station Agent, among others, gives a talk about producing. Part of her talk was about tough love, letting people you respect rip your project to shreds so that it can be better in the end. I feel inspired to take criticism better.

12:30 p.m. Michelle Satter, the Director of Sundance's Feature Film Program, introduces the five fellows of Sundance Creative Producing Initiative. I would like to apply for the program but I see that I may be too pale.

12:45 p.m. I force myself to go up to another table and introduce myself. I meet the director of a short I haven't seen. She tells me she is "a shrieking atheist."

1:00 p.m. I decide two tables of producers and one film critic on the shuttle is my schmooze limit for the day.

1:30 p.m. I meet my friend Geoff (fellow LTL veteran) for coffee on Main Street. He's the co-producer of a film that I have tickets for the next day, called Adam.

2:30 p.m. I meet Destin on Main Street. We run into to a few other filmmakers from our program on the sidewalk. We chat about what a genius Destin is. I wait for his sister Joy while he goes to a press reception.

3:00 p.m. Joy and I walk around Main Street. On the sidewalk across from a fur shop is a group of scary animal rights activists who are dressed like zombies. Joy and I are kind of scared to walk past them. I'm afraid they're going to pour paint on my leather purse or grab Joy's fake fur-lined jacket.

3:30 p.m. Joy and I find a little bookshop/coffeeshop to hide out in.

4:30 p.m. Destin gets out of his reception and we head to an art gallery for an NBC/Universal reception. It's completely packed. As we stand at the door about to go in, a woman comes up to the woman checking names at the door and tells her that the place is completely over fire capacity and they have to stop letting people in. We slip in just before they close the door behind us and try to push our way through to the wine bar.

5:00 p.m. We don't win $25,000 in the business card raffle.

5:15 p.m. Two other short filmmakers and I talk about what a genius Destin is for approximately 45 minutes.

6:00 p.m. Joy and I eat dinner at Nacho Mama's while Destin meets with a manager interested in signing him. (Destin has previously informed me that he only wants to be represented by a nice person.)

8:00 p.m. I look over the list of short films in Shorts Program 1 and decide to wait list it. Ones of the shorts in this program is called Little Minx Exquisite Corpse: She Walked Calmly Disappearing Into the Darkness. And I am not even kidding. If you would like to watch it (and maybe explain it to me after,) here it is:

8:30 p.m. Joy, Destin, and I watch the program, which is very strong. A couple I like are Omelette from Bulgaria and Netherland Dwarf from Australia. Two are about boys (one English, one Russian) smoking and drinking for the first time then losing their virginity. It makes me wonder why they're in the same block. One is about an evangelical family that goes around murdering people with no faith. Another is about an elderly mother and her mentally retarded son who live in a house filled with birds and take baths together.

10:15 p.m. Alex, a documentary filmmaker working on a British show called Follow the Filmmaker, asks if he can interview me. I'm relieved to learn that the filmmaker he's following is Olivia Silver, director of Little Canyon, a short in the program that I very much liked. And understood. Which makes me sound smarter in the interview. I give him a screener of Short Term 12.

10:35 p.m. We wrap up the interview. Alex tells Destin that I was great and he could have gone all night. Destin smirks at him. Alex says that phrase doesn't mean the same thing in England.

Day 5. Monday.

10:30 a.m. Karen gives me a ride into town. I wait in line at Eccles theater. A woman near me in line shows me the picture she got with Ewan MacGregor who was at the theater earlier for his screening of I Love You Phillip Morris.

12:15 p.m. Destin shows up at Eccles and we watch Adam, the film Geoff worked on. I lurrrrve it. It would be great to make a movie like this one day. I find Geoff to congratulate him.

2:15 p.m. I try to head home on the bus to take a nap, but Adam, one of our actors, needs an extra credential, so I reroute.

3:00 p.m. I meet Destin, Joy, and our A.D. Brad at Mountain Vineyard Church, where the Windrider Forum is based while at Sundance. (Windrider is really how I know Destin - we both had films as part of the Forum last year.)

4:30 p.m. The four of us meet Adam and his girlfriend Katie and stand in line for an hour and a half to get into a Damien Rice concert. I stole this picture from Adam's Facebook page. Katie with the line for the concert in the background:

6:00 p.m. We finally get into the show. Our numb toes and fingers are totally worth it. Despite our poor view, I develop a little crush on Damien Rice.

7:00 p.m. We head over to the church, but miss the spaghetti dinner. We watch three current Windrider films, Small Change, Deface, and Unattached, which are great. I had seen (and loved) Deface at Savannah Film Festival and had met director John Arlotto there. Here's a trailer:

That's all for now. Must sleep.

500 days of sundance, part 1

2009-01-22T02:18:00.001-08:00

Well, maybe not 500 days. Maybe just seven days that feel a bit like 500. It's 1 a.m. and I have to be up by 8, but it's been long enough and you really deserve a bit of a rundown. Here's what happened the first three days:

Day 1. Thursday.

11:00 a.m. After staying up all night working on an arbitration (and by working, I mean going to Cat 'n' Fiddle for three hours and spending at least another three staring at a wall in a jittery, modavigil-inspired stupor) I take a 45-minute nap, throw boxes of Short Term 12 postcards and business cards as well as piles of arbitration scripts into a suitcase, after which I have approximately six square inches left for my sweaters, jeans, and new waterproof boots. (Thanks, Zappos.)

1:30 p.m. My friend Jason arrives to take me to the airport. We discuss arbitrations practically the whole way, which is fascinating to us but would make anyone else want to punch themselves in the face. I get to the Delta counter and find out my script-and-postcard-and boot-laden bag weighs 70 pounds. "That will be ninety dollars," the Delta representative tells me sweetly, as if that's even a remotely reasonable amount to charge for a heavy bag. I throw the suitcase at her and run.

3:40 p.m. I board the plane and sit next to the window. The guy next to me is a loud Hollywood type who jabs me with his elbow throughout the flight. All attempts to sleep are futile, which means I'm awake for a lovely sunset.

7:00 p.m. I take an Xpress Shuttle from the airport to Park City. I meet the editor and director of a movie called Black Dynamite and make plans to get a drink later in the week. The shuttle driver seems jittery and weird. I wonder if I'm going to make it to town in time for the opening night film at 9:30.

7:45 p.m. The shuttle driver announces he missed my stop and will have to drop everyone else off before me.

8:30 p.m. The shuttle driver, who is using his iPhone to navigate while driving on icy roads, gets lost for the fifth time.

8:45 p.m. The driver gets into a screaming match with the only other remaining passenger and threatens to leave her on the side of the road. I stop wondering if I'm going to make it to the opening night film and start wondering if I am going to die.

9:00 p.m. After much harrowing iPhone usage/driving, I drop off business cards and postcards for Destin so he can take them to the opening night film, which I will now definitely not be able to get to on time.

9:30 p.m. I arrive at the home of my host, a lovely woman named Karen. She makes me the most delicious tortilla soup I have ever had in my life, and then I retire to my room to try to finish the arbitration statement that I should have completed the night before.

2:00 a.m. With my head aching and my eyes closing of their own accord, I finish a (mostly coherent) draft of the statement and send it to my writer, then collapse into bed.

Day 2. Friday.

10:00 a.m. I wake up to find a dishearteningly long list of notes from my writer on the draft. I work on changes for the next three hours, then shower and race to catch a cab into town to make the premiere screening of Short Term 12. Ryan (our publicist) meets me in front of the theater with a ticket.

2:15 p.m. The shorts program begins. To my shock, I at least like every single film. The audience is amazing, they're laughing at everything.

3:15 p.m. Short Term 12 plays and goes over amazingly well. The audience is laughing at everything that's even a little funny, and gasping in shock at parts.

4:00 p.m. The program ends, and Destin hands me his video camera so I can record his Q&A. One of the Sundance staffers comes over to me and says, "Ma'am, I need you to come with me." He's looking right at me, but the tone of his voice is bizarre, like my visa is expired and he's about to deport me, so I look around to see who he's talking to, and he says, "You, ma'am. Come with me." I say, "What, are you serious? I want to see the Q&A." He says, "I need to make sure you didn't record any of the shorts, I need you to come with me and show me your footage." After arguing with him for a couple of minutes, saying that I'm not trying to pirate short films, for pete's sake, and I want to be there to see the Q&A, Destin finally goes with him to show him footage and makes it back in time to give me the camera and go up front.

4:15 p.m. Destin's footage of the Q&A is made significantly less watchable as I go into a huge coughing fit and nearly fall on the floor.

4:18 p.m. I go into another coughing fit, hand the camera to Bekah (our production coordinator,) and stumble out of the theater. As I walk by the Nazi staffer guy, he says, "Thank you," in a voice that may or may not be snotty. I cough on him a little just in case.

4:20 p.m. I grab a shuttle, where I try to hold on to the railing and talk on the cell phone to my writer, who is freaking out about the nearing WGA deadline of 5:00 PST, without pouring Diet Mountain Dew all over myself. I pour Diet Mountain Dew all over myself.

4:30 p.m. I arrive at Sundance Headquarters and grab a spot on the floor, where I pull out my laptop and make frantic changes to the statement for the next hour and a half.

6:00 p.m. We finish the statement and my writer turns it into the Writers Guild just in time, only to find out that the people at the Writers Guild have gone home early for the weekend. I make a note to egg the Writers Guild when I get back to LA.

6:10 p.m. My crew arrives at Headquarters after a long and very frustrating shuttle ride in which they passed Headquarters twice. We head over to Main Street.

6:30 p.m. I grab dinner with some of the cast and crew of Short Term 12 at Main Street Pizza and Noodle. The caesar salad and pizza seem incredible to me, possibly because I haven't eaten all day.

12:00 a.m. I wait list another shorts program with Tania (who plays Natalia in our film) and her boyfriend. These films are slightly weirder than our block, I think. One I like is Captain Coulier, Space Explorer, about an aloof, bipolar, Gen X space captain who is looking for new planets and true love. Another is Boutonniere, which I actually read as a script when the filmmaker applied to the DWW.

Day 3. Saturday.

11:00 a.m. I oversleep, then get ready and walk to the bus stop near my place. I wait outside for a while.

11:10 a.m. I decide I have missed the bus and call a taxi. I am supposed to be at Headquarters by noon to catch a shuttle to Salt Lake City for the second screening of Short Term 12, which Destin cannot attend (as he is at a brunch meeting John Krasinski.)

11:20 a.m. The bus drives past me as I continue to wait for the taxi.

11:40 p.m. I continue to wait. I begin mildly freaking out.

11:41 p.m. Now that there's no way I can get to HQ by noon, I call Tania (who is going with me to the screening) to ask if she can try to get the shuttle driver to meet my cab driver on the side of the road somewhere and pick me up.

11:46 p.m. My cab driver arrives. He races into town. We discuss the possibility of us catching the other shuttle on the road to Salt Lake City and me climbing from one van to the other while they're both moving, a la Speed.

11:58 p.m. Tania speaks to the driver at HQ, who tells her that he's waiting for Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who directed a short in our program called Sparks) anyway and won't leave right at noon. I silently thank God for tardy movie stars.

12:10 p.m. Tania and I ride down to Salt Lake City with JoJo (as I now call him) and his producer Beau. We discuss the craziness of my near-arrest for piracy at the last screening and JoJo records the conversation on his camcorder.

1:00 p.m. We arrive at the theater in Salt Lake City.

1:10 p.m. The moderator introduces us to the half-full theater twenty minutes early, when JoJo, Beau, Tania, and I are all out in the lobby getting popcorn and such. It's awkward.

1:30 p.m. The theater is full now. The shorts program starts, and I watch them all a second time. They hold up surprisingly well, and I notice little things about each of the films that make them more interesting.

3:15 p.m. Tania and I do a Q&A with the other filmmakers, including the producer and actress from Our Neck of the Woods, a great film about spontaneously combusting lawn deer that was shot in Mt. Airy, North Carolina. I give my camera to an audience member to record the Q&A. I chew gum the whole time, which, shockingly, looks obnoxious on camera. Hence me not posting the video. We climb back in the shuttle and head back to Park City.

5:30 p.m. I wait list for Prom Night in Mississippi with Katie (our casting director) and her sister Kari and cousin Amy. (How it works: you line up two to three hours before the film you want to see begins. At two hours before, they give a number to each person in line, and you're free to go. Half an hour before the film, you come back to the theater and get in order according to your number. Fifteen minutes before the film, they allow all ticket holders in to the theater, count the empty seats, and allow that many people from the wait list line to buy tickets and come in.) We sit on the floor for an hour to get our numbers and play "I'm Going to the Moon" to keep ourselves occupied. A woman behind us in line gives us some popcorn, which is the first thing I've had to eat all day.

6:30 p.m. We get our numbers and walk to Sports Authority to buy gloves, Albertson's to buy trial-size conditioner, then to Burger King so I can eat actual food. Somewhere during this time, I lose my wait list number, but don't realize it.

7:45 p.m. We return to the tent to get into our wait list line, which is when I realize I don't have my number anymore. I try to explain the situation to the staffer in the tent, but she says there's nothing she can do for me. Kari goes with me to look for the number in Sports Authority, but it's no use. I stand on the edge of the line and try to make plans to meet up with the girls later. After we complain loudly for about ten minutes about my missing number, the woman behind us in line offers us an extra number that she's not using. I get in line, and we make it into the theater.

8:30 p.m. We watch the movie, which is about the first integrated prom in Charleston, Mississippi. The first integrated prom, which happened in 2008. Before that, they had black proms and white proms. Before that, meaning in 2007.

11:30 p.m. We join the rest of the cast and crew present and I watch the shorts program for the third time in two days. And I can still tolerate it, which I think says something. I find out we got a great review on a website called Gossip Sauce: http://www.gossipsauce.com/sundance/sundance-one-to-watch-short-term-12

From left to right, this is the cast and crew that was there that night: Bekah, Katie, Phoenix (who plays Jayden,) Katelin (who plays Chelsea,) Adam (who plays Scott,) me, Tania, and Destin.

2:00 a.m. Bekah and Destin drive me home, twenty minutes in the wrong direction. Bekah hates me a little.

it's not about the money, because i'm not making any

2009-01-13T13:45:00.000-08:00

There's an interview with Destin about Short Term 12 here.

chinese new year

2009-01-01T16:06:00.001-08:00

My dad, Micky, and Sean are leaving for almost nine months in Africa tomorrow. They each get to take one suitcase weighing 44 pounds. You don't realize how much stuff you use, how much stuff you need, until you have to fit it all into one suitcase. Think about all the stuff you use that you might not be able to get in Benin. Contact solution... toothpaste for sensitive teeth... your special conditioner that you like... your new Legos Star Wars Republic Gunship... not to mention clothes and books. I am not jealous, and I will be a little bit more thankful next time I walk into Rite-Aid.

We went out to lunch for my dad and Sean's last meal out in America until next fall. (Micky stayed home to kick her suitcase against the wall repeatedly.) We stopped by Andy's, a fifties diner, then walked out because of poor service (apparently we're that family,) then went to Waffle House (yes, for their last meal in America for nine months, we went to Waffle House,) then walked out because Waffle House was just a terrible idea to begin with. Then we went to a Chinese buffet. Sean doesn't like Chinese food, so he wasn't happy, but breaded, fried chicken is basically the same anywhere, so we found him something to eat. He picked up each piece of sweet and sour chicken to show me before he ate it, saying "This is an eyeball," or, "This is a nose," or, "This is a brain." I asked him how the brain was. He chewed for a minute and said, "Tastes like chicken."

balls

2008-12-31T17:34:00.000-08:00

this sits on a chair in the guest room at my dad's house

2008-12-29T12:05:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what the point of it is exactly, but if it's supposed to scare the crap out of me every time I walk into the room, it's doing the trick nicely.

my date

2008-12-28T21:20:00.000-08:00

I had a date tonight; it was pretty sweet. He took me out to dinner and a movie. We hit Mickey D's for chicken nuggets, and then went to see Bolt. In 3-D, no less, so he got to see how awesome I look in shades:

On the way home, I asked him what his favorite Christmas gift was. He answered immediately, "Legos Star Wars Republic Gunship. And my Legos wristwatch." After a beat, he added, "And the ones you got me."

why the chimes rang

2008-12-26T18:37:00.000-08:00

When I was at the Grove Christmas Tree telling Christmas stories with Cubby and Breezy (I feel like Brie deserves a blog nickname too), I was trying to remember the story that my dad used to read to us every Christmas. It was about two brothers who were trying to make it to a church, where only a great offering laid on the alter of the Christ-child would make the Christmas chimes ring. I couldn't remember the story very well, and I was like, "I think one of the boys gets stuck in the snow, and the other one leaves him behind to go to the church... and then... his coin makes the bells ring."

Cubby and Breezy just stared at me. "He leaves his brother behind in the snow? To die?" And I was like, "Yeah, I think... that's what it was." They were like, "That cannot possibly be right."

You'll be pleased to know that it wasn't right, but one of the boys does stay behind in the snow, to help a woman who is about to freeze to death. I forgot that part. My Dad read it again this Christmas, and you can read it here.

After presents, we played with our toys. Sean with his legos:

And me with my new camera:

the fayetteville food lion would like to wish you and yours a happy kwanzaa

2008-12-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

and to tell you and yours that Bud Light is 12.99 for a 24-pack, limit 2.

I'm sitting in the kitchen trying to work on revisions for that writing job I mentioned, and doing my best to ignore the dog, who thinks that I will take her out into the backyard in the rain and play fetch with her if she looks at me like this long enough:

Here's hoping you're all having a very Merry Christmas, and also hoping that you didn't get $400 worth of unauthorized paypal charges on your checking account this morning, like I did.

they're singing deck the halls, but it's not like christmas at all

2008-12-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

My mom just wandered out from her bedroom to see why the living room light was on at 3 in the morning, and found me sitting on the floor, using the sofa as a table and eating potato chips and drinking cherry coke zero while reading blogs of people that I don't know.

Sometimes you don't realize how sad you're being until someone else sees you being sad. Even if it is someone who loves you unconditionally and barely raises an eyebrow at the chips you're scarfing down after you swore you weren't eating any more junk food for the rest of the trip. Although let's face it, you didn't last two minutes after she pulled the little sugar cookies with Christmas trees in the middle out of the oven, anyway, did you?

ok, good to know

2008-12-23T12:12:00.001-08:00

When I was driving the other night somewhere in or near Ohio, and my family was all asleep, the GPS told me to get off of I-77 and take a state road. I wasn't sure that was what I was supposed to do, but I decided not to wake up my dad to ask him, and to just do it. But as soon as I took the exit, he woke up anyway, and said, "What are you doing? Stay on 77 to Cleveland."

Then he turned over to go back to sleep, mumbling, "Even when you're not watching them, you can tell when your kid is doing something wrong."

got this note from vincent

2008-12-22T00:20:00.001-08:00

who wanted to cheer me up about the groovy situation:

I cannot repeat to you often enough, boy, that when one is thirty, one is just beginning. Look at the biographies of artists. Even many who had painted from their earliest years changed only then, found their own personality only then. I only ask you to take those things into consideration.

~ Vincent van Gogh

Very encouraging, though I keep asking him not to call me "boy."

do not go gentle into that groovy night

2008-12-21T00:09:00.001-08:00

Friday night the paternal side of my immediate family drove all night to Michigan, braving snow and wind and doughnut pit stops. About midnight I was driving through West Virginia, and everyone else was asleep. I was listening to the radio, very low, and balanced all the way to the front and left, and trying to find a station that wasn't playing either country, gospel, or classic rock. I finally stopped on one that was playing U2's New Year's Day and then Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U. I think Sinead O'Connor and U2 were among the very first batch of cassette tapes (cassette tapes!) that I ever bought when I was trying to grow up and listen to cool music. (Rounding out the list: Janet Jackson, REM, and a band called Icehouse that I bet you don't remember.) And I definitely recorded the video of Nothing Compares 2 U on our beta player (beta player!) and watched it obsessively.

So, I'm driving along, happily listening to Sinead, and a commercial came on. Well, first there was a commercial for Pocahantas Mine (which apparently has underground positions to fill immediately, great benefits) and then there was a commercial for the radio station itself, Groovy 94.1. It went something like, "Don't you hate it when you get into your car and the kids have been messing with the presets, and you turn on the radio, and it sounds like this: [punk guitar riff]? Turn it back to Groovy 94.1! The music from your generation!"

And I realized with horror that I was listening to an oldies station. An oldies station that plays music from my lifetime. An oldies station that not only assumes that I have kids, but assumes that I have kids old enough to listen to crazy rock music that is too loud for my sensitive, decrepit ear drums.

I didn't know what to do. Accept my fate? Change the station to country? Try to find a station playing the Jonas Brothers? I just shut off the radio and pretended it didn't happen, but I'm still feeling a little shaky.

love and basketball (ok, just basketball)

2008-12-20T14:15:00.000-08:00

I nearly slept through my last flight to Fayetteville Wednesday night. I left LAX at 5:30 pm, flew to Salt Lake City, had a five hour layover, flew to Atlanta, then had a two hour layover. I fell asleep waiting for the last flight, thinking the noise of people boarding would wake me up. Instead, I woke up to the sound of a stewardess standing over me, going, "Fayetteville? Fayetteville? Ma'am? Fayetteville?"

They had already closed the gate, but they reopened it for me and I boarded the plane, which was about 3/4 empty. I picked a random seat in the back in an empty row. After a few minutes, a man came walking down the aisle. He stopped in the aisle and stared at me. I figured I must be in his seat, and I kind of felt like, "Are you kidding me, just sit somewhere else." Then I remembered the creepy guy who sat next to me on the flight to Atlanta (who introduced himself to me and shook my hand, then put his other hand on top of mine and asked if he could "catch up with me sometime") and hoped there wasn't going to be a repeat performance. I said, "Am I in your seat?" And he kind of laughed and put his backpack down across the aisle, and said, "Yeah, you're in my seat." Then he turned back to me and went in for a hug, and I think it was about two seconds before contact that I realized he was my high school basketball coach. He was thinner and had a beard! He was hard to recognize! I have a picture of him and my team at home, which I will scan in later.

It was fun to catch up with him. He had just gotten back from six months in Afghanistan, where, he said, his beard was "four fingers long," which is how it's measured there. And I had just been talking about playing basketball a couple of days ago. I loved it, it was my favorite part of high school. That's definitely something I wish I could go back and do again. Guys can play in pickup games, but girls don't really do that. Unless some of you want to. In which case, let's do it. There's a park near my place.

My mom picked me up at the airport and I went home and slept for a few hours, then we got up and drove to Raleigh to pick up my brother Ryan and his wife Rachel, and we all went to Chapel Hill to go to the Carolina-Evansville game.
When my dad first moved to Fayetteville, he opened a surgery practice with a friend from residency who had played center for UNC in the 60s. He is so tall. I definitely remember being pretty old and still only coming up to his waist. And so we became Carolina fans. By "we" I mean Mom and Ryan. And me by attrition.

Ryan was freaking out that we wouldn't get to the game on time. He and Rachel left work early, and Mom and I left at like 2:30 to get to Chapel Hill for a 7:00 game. We parked at the lot, got on the shuttle, where everyone is wearing Carolina Blue (I borrowed a shirt from my mom) and talking to each other like they know each other, and got to the stadium. WHICH WAS NOT OPEN YET. That's how early we were. THIS is how early we were:

The game was sold out because it was the night that UNC forward Tyler Hansborough was poised to beat the record as all-time leading scorer at Carolina, if he scored more than nine points. My mom made a poster ("All I want for Christmas is 9 points" written in her perfect, third-grade teacher cursive,) but they took it away from her in the line to get in. She did manage to smuggle her purse in under her shirt (she didn't want to go through the "search your bag" line) which looked pretty great, with a strap poking up out of her neckline and a big Frankenstein-looking lump on her torso.

Tyler beat the record, of course. And my mom did a little dance to "Jump Around," which was my favorite part of the evening.

what in the sam hill you yellin' for, george?

2008-12-13T22:25:00.000-08:00

Brie and Cubby are over watching It's a Wonderful Life. I've been working on research on a certain post-impressionist painter who cut off a body part (because I got my first for real writing job that is not an arbitration!) but I am taking a break to be Christmasy.

Earlier we walked to the Grove and got hot chocolate and sat on a bench under the big Christmas tree. Brie told a story about the year she and Adam saw Santa Claus in the sky. Cubby told a story about a gift that meant a lot to their family one Christmas. He was sitting in between Brie and me on the bench, and a guy from Crate and Barrel walked by. He looked at us, gave Cubby a nod, and said, "Life is good."

So true, guy from Crate and Barrel. So true.

sundance, or as my friend katie calls it, hollywood schmoozefest 2009

2008-12-09T14:43:00.000-08:00

Now that it's been officially announced, I can say in the blog that Short Term 12, which, as you may remember, is the short film I produced with director Destin Cretton earlier this year, was accepted into Sundance! So in January, I will be off to Utah for a week and a half of doing my two favorite things in the world: networking and standing in lines in the freezing cold.

all i ever get for christmas is blue

2008-12-08T01:46:00.001-08:00

If you go to a little college in the middle of an Indiana cornfield named Taylor University, it's practically a rule that you have to have a favorite milkshake at Ivanhoe's, you have to be willing to trample other people for a good seat at Airband, and you have to listen to Over the Rhine.

My friend Heather inducted me into the OTR cult fall of freshman year. I remember riding in her SUV and listening to the first line of Latter Days - "What a beatiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be, Lord knows we've learned the hard way all about healthy apathy" - and falling in love a little.

I haven't seen them play in a long time, but it seems fitting that when Cubby, Brie, and I went to their show at the Troubadour last night, I saw at least three people from Taylor.

One was a guy who was known as Phubbbbs at Taylor. (I'm not sure I have the number of b's right.) I remember that he drove me an hour to the airport in Indianapolis only to find that I had only brought my student ID and not my license with me. Even in those pre-orange-alert days, a student ID didn't fly (haha) and he drove me all the way back to Taylor to get my license and then all the way back to the airport. And we barely knew each other. That is a nice person.

Another was Brie's and my friend Matt. We saw a couple with a baby standing in the coveted side bench seats above us and thought, "That couple has a baby with them. In a nightclub." And then we realized it was Matt. Karin dedicated a song to them. The baby seemed to enjoy it.

Another was my friend Neville, who I didn't even know at Taylor, but met at Sundance last year. This is apropos of nothing, but Neville made it pretty far on Chinese Idol, which is awesome.

The show was great, although I am old and my back hurt after standing up the whole time.

This clip is not from last night, but this was my favorite song they did, and she's wearing the same dress, so it's practically the same thing. The video quality's pretty poor but you can see the fun cookie-sheet-weird-mallet percussion thing she was doing. If I could have one stupid, selfish wish, it might be to sing like this:

tired of the job search? try this!

2008-12-02T18:09:00.000-08:00

Seeing as a lot of people are looking for work right now, I thought I would share a little tip I came across in my research today:

All right. There's a thing call the wishing bean - you've heard of them, yessir. Well, I have some at home. I wish I had brung some. Well, anyhow, there's a wishing bean that most of the places has them. It's a little bean that looks like - looks something like a peanut, the inside of the peanut, but it's yellow. It's got a straw-colored shell on it, it's soft, and inside the shell is a lotta little bit of seeds like guinea pepper. You know guinea pepper seeds. It's got little seeds in there like that. You take one of these wishing beans and put it in your purse, anywhere about you.

Then before you get to this - before you go to this place to seek this job, you sweeten you a little glass of water - very, very sweet. Pour it in a little bottle and before you leave your home you take a drink from this bottle. Let it be big enough so that you can take about two drinks of it. Take a good drink of this water and you spit it and go across it to go out.

Then when you get to the office or place of work where you want to work, you take another drink and you spit it before you go to see the man, and you put one these wishing beans in your mouth, and take a match stick or toothpick or something that you can keep in your mouth, and while you talking to him you bite the bean. Be just talking and bite it with your teeth, and you do like this [demonstrates] - like that. You'll get that job. Yessir. You'll get the job all right.

~ excerpted from "Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork," an oral history by Harry Middleton Hyatt

Now, of course this does require you to have a prospective employer who doesn't mind you spitting in his office and chewing a toothpick and a bean while you're talking to him. It might work better with a telephone interview.

the something of boris

2008-12-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

This pretty much sums up my thoughts. If my thoughts had British accents.

thanksgiving, then and now

2008-11-28T17:42:00.001-08:00

Eight years ago was my first Thanksgiving on my own, cooking the meal without a mom or anyone mom-like in charge. I was living with my friends Heidi and Tim the Lawyer (not yet a lawyer) in a cockroach-infested duplex in an entirely Spanish-speaking Van Nuys neighborhood, but Heidi and Tim were both with family for the holiday. My college friends Laurie and Matty were visiting from San Jose, and my friend Ben and his roommate were coming over. I was also cat-sitting a kitten named Miss Moneypenny for a friend from work.

I didn't want to get up early so I don't think we started cooking anything until mid-morning, and then I remember sending Matty to the store to pick up various items several different times. We didn't even remotely have the hang of timing the food so everything comes out at once, and I think we just kind of made one thing at a time. When I got to the turkey, which we had stuffed full of dressing, I had it on one of those tinfoil bans you get at the grocery store, and I kept pulling it out to check on it, because I didn't know what I was doing.

All that pulling out and pushing in eventually ripped a hole in the bottom of the foil pan, which I decided to ignore. Turkey juice and butter from the stuffing (as I recall, we accidentally put twice the called-for amount of butter in the stuffing, so it came out kind of like stuffing butter stew) ran out the hole in the pan and collected on the bottom of the oven. Where it caught fire.

I don't know how long it took for us to realize the oven was on fire, but when we did flames were licking the inside of the glass door. I didn't know what you do about an oven fire, so I called the fire department. They told me to shut off the oven and keep the door closed, and they would send a truck. I said, "Don't send a truck, I just wanted to know what to do." The woman said, "Ma'am, if you have a fire, we have to send a truck." I said, "Um, I don't have a fire. I just wanted to know what one would do if the oven caught on fire... hypothetically." She said, "Ma'am" (people only ever say Ma'am when they're annoyed) "Ma'am, if you call the fire department we have to send a truck." I said, "Tell them not to put on the siren." She said okay.

So they sent a fire truck (without the siren,) and three firemen in full gear trooped into the living room to check the oven fire, which by then had gone out. They said this was the sixth oven fire call they had been on that day. As they left, Miss Moneypenny ran out the door through their legs.

So Laurie and Matty and I spent some time looking for Miss Moneypenny in the neighborhood. We finally found her hiding under a car, came back in, and resumed cooking one thing at a time.

Eventually Ben and Aaron came over. We finally ate at midnight, sitting on the floor around the coffeetable. The turkey was slightly singed but overall pretty good.

This year went much more smoothly, probably because I wasn't in charge of anything except the sweet potatoes, which I volunteered to make, because sometimes I go to Thanksgiving meals various places, and they don't have sweet potatoes, and I just feel like, what are we even doing then?

I was going to go to the store to get ingredients (based on a recipe from my friend Brie's mom*,) but I couldn't find a parking space at noon on Wednesday, so I decided to come back at midnight, when I figured it would be less crowded. And it was less crowded, but it was also set up like an obstacle course:

And this was the line at 12:15:

I got everything I needed. The next day I tried to make them at home but realized I really should have gotten more sweet potatoes, so I gathered my stuff, picked up my faux-boyfriend Cubby (as he is now called to distinguish him from the myriad of Joshes in my life,) and set out for Heidi and Josh's loft downtown, bearing wine:

which Heidi and her mom taught Cubby how to open:

My workstation:

Josh carving the turkey:

Heidi's mom making the gravy:

My sweet, sweet potatoes! You want to eat them, don't you:

Our lovely hostess:

presiding over her lovely table:

Us:

Jeremy actually ate all of this:

After the delicious meal, we sprawled out on the floor and watched a bunch of shorts that Heidi and Cubby and I made our senior year of college at LAFSC. If they weren't on VHS, I would post some of them to show you, especially Josh-in-a-Box (brilliantly directed by Tim the Lawyer,) which is an experience that should not be missed if it can be helped. Heidi's on the SAG nominating committee, so she had a bunch of DVDs, from which we chose Wendy and Lucy, which reviews called "quaint yet gut-wrenching" but which was actually "boring yet really boring." In that way it was kind of the perfect post-turkey movie. Cubby slept through most of it. I kept drifting off, but then waking up because I thought something was happening in the plot. It wasn't.

Hero was into the scenes at the dog pound:

After the movie, we all went on a field trip to see the lights on the street:

And then we had pie. And then we left, and I dropped Cubby off. And then I drove back to my apartment, where I crawled into my bed, still wearing my clothes, and fell asleep.

*Mrs. VC's Sweet Potato Mallow

Ingredients:
2 big cans cut sweet potatoes
1 cup sour cream
2 egg yolks
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup miniature marshmallows or cut up large marshmallows
brown sugar to taste

Heat oven to 350 degrees F.

Heat yams with a bit of salt, drain off the water, then mash the warm potatoes.

Beat in sour cream.

Beat in egg yolks quickly.

Mix in brown sugar, beginning with half a cup and adding more if desired.

Pour mixture into buttered 2-liter casserole dish, top with marshmallows.

Bake 30 minutes or until marshmallows are puffed and golden brown.

fiasco!

2008-11-22T23:01:00.000-08:00

Next time you have 23 minutes free while sitting at a computer with speakers, please take a listen (free!) to at least the first part of my favorite episode of This American Life ever. (And if you know how much I'm in love with This American Life, you know that's saying something.)

caplearing and other useful screenwriting terms

2008-11-18T12:52:00.001-08:00

When working with a writing partner or on a writing team, it can be useful to have a shorthand for describing certain types of jokes or plot situations. I've seen a couple of lists lately that cover comedy writing or TV writing jargon, but since the last two things I've written with a partner have been thriller features, I'm more interested in jargon that serves as shorthand for dramatic situations.

One you may have heard of is the term "MacGuffin," which is the thingamajig in a movie that advances the plot or motivates the characters, without itself being important to the story. The term was described by Alfred Hitchcock in an interview:

"It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a MacGuffin.' The first one asks, 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well,' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no MacGuffin!' So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all."

Most James Bond movies have a MacGuffin. I would use an example from The Quantum of Solace, except I'm not sure I followed that movie well enough to know what the MacGuffin was. Maybe it was the quantum, maybe it was the solace. You know it's a real MacGuffin if you could switch out the Thing that Everyone Wants and make it a different Thing that Everyone Wants, and it could still be basically the exact same movie.

Tim the Lawyer and I have developed a few of our own terms that serve as shorthand for us. For your reading pleasure, a brief glossary:

Red Rum Clue: Taken, of course, from the movie The Shining, where the boy Danny keeps saying, "red rum," which later is revealed to be "murder" backwards. We use it to mean a clue that seems to mean one thing but actually means another.

Boo Scare: Fairly self-explanatory, this is when you put in cheap scares that aren't really scary at all, like a cat that jumps out at the hero when he's creeping down a dark hallway.

Smart Audience Member: The Smart Audience Member is the one who's trying to stay ahead of you in the story. The Smart Audience Member knows things like Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, which states that, "Movie budgets make it impossible for any film to contain unnecessary characters. Therefore, all characters in a movie are necessary to the story—even those who do not seem to be. Sophisticated viewers can use this Law to deduce the identity of a person being kept secret by the movie's plot: This 'mystery' person is always the only character in the movie who seems otherwise extraneous."

In order to attempt to stay ahead of this problem, our theory is you keep the audience busy by giving the Regular Audience Member one set of clues, then lay in a second, more subtle set of clues for the Smart Audience Member, when really the solution to the mystery lies in a third set of clues.

Recently, Tim the Lawyer came up with a brand new, useful term. It happened because I foolishly let him write the outline we were creating on the dry erase board, even though his printing is sometimes terrible.

Days later, we were planning to meet at our friendly downtown IHOP for a quick between-lawyer-meetings outlining lunch. Before I left home I tried to transfer Tim's dry erase board outline into my notebook. I was struggling to make out his writing, but it was coming along pretty well when I hit the point halfway between the end of Act One and the Midpoint. It said this:

Try as I might, the best I could come up with was "Caplearing." So I wrote that down and brought it to IHOP. Tim and I stared at it, but we couldn't figure out what he had written, or even what the plot point was that was supposed to go there.

And so a new screenwriting term was born.

Caplearing: When you have a spot where a plot point needs to go, but you don't know what the plot point is. And you can't read your partner's handwriting to tell you.

while doing (legitimate) screenplay research this afternoon

2008-11-17T15:57:00.001-08:00

I came across this:

(source: www.dazeofourlives.com)

mementos

2008-11-03T23:57:00.001-08:00

If you've ever asked me anything about my past more distant than a few years ago, you probably know that I have a terrible long-term memory. Maybe it's because I don't focus on the past, maybe it's because I'm blocking things out, maybe it's because I was a kid in the eighties.

Whatever the reason, I've come up with a few cheats to deal with this, one of which is to keep tons of random stuff in a cedar chest that my dad made for me when I was twelve. They're mementos, literally helping me to remember my life. If you've ever handwritten me a letter, I probably have it, along with the little wallet sized photo you gave me in grade school with a note like "LYLAS!" written on the back. I have the first teddy bear I was given by the first boy I ever kissed, complete with the GI Joe Ninja Force box it was wrapped in. I have a report on the Soviet Union I did in the sixth grade in Mrs. Wendell's class, which my mom stayed up until six a.m. helping me type on my typewriter. The cover has gold glitter on it, (naturally):

I have a detention slip from high school:

It's for tardiness, what a shocker, and, as my mom pointed out, it was supposed to be signed and returned, and was neither. We used to have to clean the school as detention, and I got detention all the time. In 9th grade I had a crush on Adam Curry, who used to stay after school and talk to me while I swept classrooms, so it was fine with me. And Mr. Hill, the janitor, told us stories about Vietnam and taught me how to drive stick in his pickup. (No, I don't remember how to drive stick.)

I have the piece of fake sweater I had to knit on stage when I played Reba in Last Night of Ballyhoo in college:

It's terrible knitting, as you can see. I got my grandma to teach me but I didn't pick it up very well, so I had to hold it carefully on stage so you couldn't see the holes in it.

I have the flyer I used to have pinned to the bulletin board in my office:

(It's funny 'cause it's true.)

Recently the cedar chest has become completely full, so since I would like to remember a few things from 2008 onwards, I had to get rid of some stuff. But going through it and throwing some of it away felt like deciding what I would no longer need to remember.

So I needed to come up with another way to remember things. Writing a blog is part of that. I figure if I exhaustively detail, for example, the night I missed the train to Florence and stayed up all night outside Termini Station with Heidi, Brie, and two ex-soldiers online, I won't be able to forget it.

But I also think part of it really is learning how to pay attention. One night when I was a kid, I was playing by a creek in the woods near my house, and I looked up and saw that the air was full of fireflies. In the darkness of the trees, it looked like the branches were hung with stars. I held my breath and thought, "Remember this." And, about twenty years later, I do.

What if I did that all the time? Chose moments to keep? My mom's been visiting this week. A few days ago, we went out to eat with my aunt, uncle, and grandmother. When we were leaving the restaurant, my grandma was sitting in the front seat of my uncle's car, and before I got in, I leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. It was a silly kiss, a "mwah!" kind of smooch. And she looked over at me and smiled, and said, "Thank you." Twenty years from now I would like to be able to still see her smile, hear her voice, smell the rain lingering in the air that day. Maybe I can keep a thousand of these moments, mental souvenirs, just by stopping for a few seconds to really pay attention, and reminding myself: "Remember this."

final update

2008-10-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

OK, this is my last post about this, I promise. Just wanted to give you the update.

Ryan and I have been doing some IMDB experiments and have come to the conclusion that IMDB doesn't count votes from users who have only voted for one (or not many more than one) film because they want to prevent vote stuffing (as I have been encouraging you to do in my last two posts.)

You see here where five votes moved the weighted average five tenths of a point:

Whereas before twenty votes only moved the weighted average two tenths of a point.

In conclusion -- if you are just sitting on your couch watching Pushing Daisies tonight and you want to help me out during the commercial breaks, delete your vote for Driftwood, vote for a hundred movies you've seen, and then go back and vote for Driftwood again.

I realize this is a much bigger favor than the first request, but I'm just putting it out there. Thanks to everyone who voted so far. I won't ask for anything else, not even for Christmas.

three point four

2008-10-22T19:23:00.001-07:00

Thanks SO MUCH to the twenty of you who voted for Driftwood. It did raise the "weighted average"... one fifth of a point.

Clearly I'm going to have to come up with some new strategery.

a plea for those with two extra minutes today

2008-10-20T09:43:00.000-07:00

Dear friends and others who have just stumbled on this blog and want to do a good deed,

I applied for a little writing job today (nothing big, don't get excited, Mom) and was going to include a link to the trailer for my short film Driftwood on the movie information website IMDB.com.

But... this is the Driftwood page on IMDB.com:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071788

This is a little picture of what this page looks like at this exact moment, which is 9:48 am on Monday morning:

That's right. It says 3.2 stars. Three point two. Out of ten. And if you click on the little link next to the stars, you will see that it's a WEIGHTED average, meaning they use whatever math they want to, because the actual average is nowhere near 3.2 stars. PLUS there are eight "one star" votes from non-US users. Even though it essentially hasn't been screened or released outside of the US.

So here's what I'm asking: if you've seen the movie, and you liked it (more than say, three point two stars worth,) please do me a big favor and complete a free IMDB registration and vote for Driftwood. Or maybe even if you haven't seen it and you just think it might be better than three point two stars. Or even if you just like me better than three point two stars.

Here's a trailer for the movie, in case you don't want to judge just based on my blog/face/taste in poetry:

http://www.driftwoodthemovie.com/trailer

You know what... if you saw it and thought it was only a three point two stars movie, please go ahead and vote that way. At least I will know that people who have actually seen the movie are hating it.

And that is so much better.

fade in

2008-10-17T14:52:00.001-07:00

Today it's time to start writing actual pages for the thriller idea I was researching in Louisiana. Usually I like to take nine years to write a screenplay (see: Lucidity, writing of) but with this one I'm thinking maybe we should try to keep it down to about five. And since I thought of the idea in approximately 2003, I really have to get going.

"But, Michelle," you say in disbelief, "don't you and Tim the Lawyer first need to make note cards and outline the idea while sitting on an uncomfortably hard sofa in a blue-lit coffeeshop where East LA hipsters play pool and listen to loud music?"

"Done," I say.

"But don't you guys then have to map out your three-act structure using the dry erase board that you bought in Plano, Texas and proceeded to cart around the country for no reason?" you continue.

"Done," I reply.

"But if you're so ready to start the screenplay, why are you sitting here writing a blog?" you ask in a kind of annoying voice. "Are you afraid? Just start, already. Stop writing this blog entry. Why are you still typ

no, denny's doesn't have the right feel

2008-10-16T23:47:00.000-07:00

As previously mentioned, yesterday I was in San Francisco and stopped by City Lights Bookstore, where apparently various members of the Beat Generation used to meet.

Today I've been thinking: all those cool artist gangs had a special hangout. The Beats had City Lights, the Inklings had The Eagle and Child, the Romantics had Villa Diodati.

We (and by we, I mean you and me) are a cool artist gang, and therefore should have a cool artist hangout. How else are we supposed to come up with the artistic ideas that will define our generation?

I'm open to suggestions.

this morning i sat in the corner of a bookstore on columbus avenue and read a poem

2008-10-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

This was the corner:

And this was the poem:

Bedcovers thrown back,
Tangled sheets,
Lustrous in moonlight.

Image of delight,
Or longing,
Or torment,

Depending on who's
Doing the imagining.

(I know: you are the one
Pierced through, I'm the one
Bent low beside you, trying
To peer into your eyes.)

"The Distribution of Happiness"
~ Robert Hass

bwessed awangements

2008-10-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

I've always really liked weddings. They're like a party, but with meaning. A holy ritual that includes the Electric Slide. I especially like it when weddings are very specific to the couple getting weddinged.

For example, the weekend before last I flew to Ohio to attend the wedding of my friends Ben and Rene. (Who, incidentally, created this spectacular film, galloping soon to film festival theaters near you.) The wedding was in October, for one thing, which was perfect, because in Ben's ideal universe it would never be any month but October. And the rehearsal dinner had a movie theme, complete with a larger than life sized cardboard cutout of Ben and Rene, which I think embarrassed Ben pretty badly. And then the entire wedding was set to soundtrack music, which was very cool and made it seem like something extremely dramatic was going to happen at any second. There was music from Cider House Rules and Joss Whedon's movie Serenity, and Rene walked down the aisle to music from Battlestar Galactica. And then these were the wedding favors:

Last weekend, I went down to Anaheim to attend the wedding of my friends Joel and Kate (who as of yet do not have a joint project that I can plug.) The music for their wedding was also appropriate (especially the recessional, which was the Linus and Lucy rag) and their favors (Jones soda bottles with their picture on them) were very cute.

But my favorite just-right bit was the fact that the groomsmen were dressed exactly how Joel dresses, from the argyle sweater vests down to the flip flops, which unfortunately can't be seen in this picture:

Congratulations, Bays(es) and Millers. I am so happy for you. And only a tiny bit jealous.

personality crisis

2008-10-13T21:40:00.001-07:00

I had to take a personality test the other day as part of some training that I'm doing.

This test gives you sets of four personality traits and asks you to rank each set from 1 to 4, from "most like you" to "least like you." For example:

Cheerful
Precise
Courageous
Merciful

So you have to go, like, "OK, I'm very cheerful, so that's a 4, I'm not courageous, so that's a 1, I'm pretty precise, so that's a 3, and I'm not so merciful, so that's a 2."

Except - and correct me if I'm wrong here - couldn't one person be very courageous, very cheerful, very precise, and very merciful? Or very cowardly, very morose, very vague, and very cruel? But you can't put all 4s or all 1s. You have to pick one number for each trait.

So I had a lot of trouble with the test. I think in one answer I said I was 4, very detailed, and then two questions later, said I was 1, not at all meticulous.

My results were outside of the range of any of the personality types. It said something along the lines of, "You have no personality. Come back and try again when you know who you are."

justice is what love looks like in public

2008-10-12T21:34:00.000-07:00

Tonight Heidi, Brie, and I went to see the "rockumentary" Call + Response, which is a look at slavery and human trafficking, directed and produced by singer/songwriter Justin Dillon. The musical segments were directed by our pastor, Brandon Dickerson.

The movie is heart-wrenching, and it's impossible to watch it and not want to do something. In one scene, five or six-year-old girls in a Cambodian brothel proposition a man with a video camera posing as a client, telling him they "do good yum yum," the brothel's word for oral sex.

Gary Haugen, the head of International Justice Mission, says in the movie that it's easy to be caught in either apathy or the paralysis of despair. To be so overwhelmed by the pain of the world that you shut it out.

This is one small thing I can do today: I can tell you that if you live in one of the following cities...

Atlanta
Denver
Portland
Seattle
Austin
Los Angeles
Redwood City
Washington DC
Boston
Minneapolis
San Diego
Chicago
Nashville
San Francisco
Dallas
Orange County
San Jose

...you should go see Call + Response. (100% of the profits from theatrical release, DVD sales, and soundtrack are going directly to efforts to stop human trafficking. The website is www.callandresponse.com.)

I promise you will not regret it.

This is not my voice
This is not my choice
This is somebody's baby
They don't know my age
They don't know my name
They just call me
Baby

~"Baby Blue"
Lyrics by Justin Dillon

things i learned last sunday night

2008-10-09T12:17:00.001-07:00

1. Babies do make cute accessories. (This particular piece is called "Avery" and is available on loan from Josh and Erin.)

2. If you want a do right all day woman, you apparently have to be a do right all night man.

3a. You should check the lyrics of karaoke songs before you get on stage; and...

3b. The lyrics for "Wait" by Huffamoose are dirty.

babies are the new black

2008-10-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

One accomplishment I didn't mention in my list was the creation of life. This particular achievement is no less spectacular for its (increasing and worrisome) popularity in my group of friends.

Today I met Haven, daughter of Karla and Aaron, six and a half pounds of finger sucking adorableness. I like babies. But I'm a little scared of them. I think when Bethany was small my parents spent an inordinate amount of time warning me about her "soft spot" and telling me I was "going to pull her arm out of the socket." I used to have a recurring nightmare that I went to pick her up and ended up with just a little baby arm in my hand.

I made Aaron hand Haven over very slowly and explain to me what to do, like I was a little kid who had never held a baby before.

I didn't get any pictures, which is too bad, because I look good with babies. I'm thinking of carrying one around as an accessory. Maybe with one of those cushiony tutus.

l'enfer, c'est les autres

2008-09-30T17:51:00.001-07:00

The thing about coming back to Los Angeles after a long time away is that everyone has been really busy doing incredibly interesting, productive things.

As I sit here in my 90 degree apartment wearing boxers and a tank top and feeling totally languid and kind of worthless, I'm watching the season premiere of Chuck (edited, by the way, by my friend Matt, who worked a shot of our church into one of the establishing aerial shots) and thinking about all the impressive things my friends accomplished this summer while I was eating shrimp po' boys and having a romantic relationship with a mouse.

The following is a partial list:

- My friend Justin finished his short film LA Actors, which got into Palm Springs Shorts Festival, a festival that has personally rejected me more times than I care to count. I met Justin a week or two ago to watch a screening of the film at the Santa Monica Film Festival, which also, I'm pretty sure, has rejected me in the past.

- My roommate Stephanie had two pieces of her artwork on display at the "Untitled" art show in the warehouse district last weekend. Which I attended with Steph's brother Jason. We walked around and had deep insight into the photographs on display.

- My friend Terence produced an independent feature film (you thought those didn't exist anymore, but they do) starring Hal Holbrook this summer in Tennessee, and not a single person died of heat stroke.

- Tim, younger brother of Stephanie and Jason, got a job with Roadtrip Nation while he was living here in my room this summer, and is, as I write this, embarking on a cross-country road trip in a big green RV. FOR MONEY.

- My friend Katie, after raising funding and putting everything together herself, went to South Africa for five months and taught a film class for a group of South Africans, and is now co-directing a documentary about the film school. I will be writing more about this later.

- Last week, Katie drove down to San Diego with me, to attend a screening of Short Term 12 at the San Diego Film Festival. Katie cast the film, and I produced, and the uber talented Destin Cretton wrote, directed, and produced. Despite the fact that the film played without sound for about five minutes, restarted, played without sound again, and finally restarted and played with buzzy, blown-speaker sound, the screening was great. I hadn't seen the new cut of the film yet, and I thought it was incredibly good.

The star of the film is Brad William Henke (whose movie Choke came out in theaters this weekend.) He plays a staff member at a group home for teenagers. One of the cast members is his daughter Phoenix, who lived in a group home about a year and a half ago, before she was adopted by Brad and his wife Katelin (also in the film.) Destin rewrote the part for Phoenix, who is amazing in this, her debut performance.

Tania Verafield, Destin Cretton, Phoenix Henke, Katie Taylor, James Hansen, Brad William Henke, and me:

Here's the trailer, and you can check out the website at www.shortterm12.com:

After the screening, we celebrated with ice cream at Ghiradelli's. Brad Kester, the 1st AD, Destin Cretton, and Brett Pawlak, the DP:

Brad's making that same face in every picture I have of him.

You may think that I would be discouraged by all this rampant accomplishment. I'm not. Even though the only thing I've managed to accomplish so far this week is to get my iPhone to actually sync with the calendar on my computer. And to finally see Dark Knight. Because what you don't know is that Tim the Lawyer and I are meeting tonight to work on our outline for the Louisiana script. AND WE HAVE INDEX CARDS.

Plus I'm learning French.

home again, home again, jiggety jig

2008-09-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

The next morning, we had breakfast in Holbrook, Arizona, at Joe and Aggie's Cafe. Brie got an omelette, and I got a burro, which is like a burrito, only more donkey-sounding. We kept looking at these two guys in another booth dressed like cowboys and debated asking for a picture with them, but decided not to.

It was nice to see Los Angeles finally showing up on the map:

Near Joseph City, Arizona:

Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona:

Near Flagstaff, The Walnut Canyon National Monument has preserved cliff dwellings built by a 12th century tribe referred to now as the Sinagua people, probable ancestors of the Hopi. It was incredible to stand on the edge of a canyon that's 600 feet deep and imagine what would it be like to live in one of the homes built into the steep cliffs hundreds of feet above the canyon floor.

Unfortunately, the trail leading down into the canyon and past the dwellings themselves was closed, as a huge boulder had fallen on the trail and crushed the little path and the rails. Instead we walked along the beautiful rim trail above the canyon:

After Flagstaff, we stayed on Route 66 where it diverged from the interstate, and drove through miles and miles of empty desert. A couple of times, we saw a series of Burma Shave signs. The first batch said, "TRAIN APPROACHING/WHISTLE SQUEALING/PAUSE!/AVOID THAT/RUNDOWN FEELING/BURMA SHAVE." The second said, "YOU CAN BEAT" and then "A MILE A MINUTE" and then:

Outside of Peach Springs, Arizona, we pulled over and climbed on top of a roadside mound of dirt to catch a glimpse of the Grand Canyon in the distance:

It was evening by the time we reached California and the Mojave Desert:

And night by the time we reached the official end of Route 66, at the corner of Santa Monica and Ocean. Driving into Los Angeles on a Saturday night after three months on the road, mainly in the South, and a week on an old road through tiny towns, was a lot more overwhelming than I expected it to be. There are so many people! And so many cars! And lights! And ads! And skinny jeans! I kind of wanted to pull a blanket over my head. But we mustered the energy to make it to the end of Josh's 30th birthday party and I wore a dress and pretended to be from Los Angeles, and it was nice to be home.

A couple of days later, I walked to the Grove shopping area near my apartment to buy a gift for Bethany's birthday, and I stopped on the way to watch the fountain in the middle of the Grove. The streams of water are choreographed to music. There was some teeny song playing, with a chorus like, "Let's dance," and when it went into the faster-paced chorus, the fountain streams went crazy, like little water sprites rocking out to Miley Cyrus. It was really amusing and impressive. I looked around. A few people walked by, concentrating on their cell phones or their shopping, not noticing. But the fountain just kept dancing, putting on a show for no one.

I walked back home, trying out the New Orleans custom of saying, "Hey, how's it going?" to the people I passed on the sidewalk. They just looked at me blankly.

westward ho

2008-09-19T11:44:00.001-07:00

Thursday morning was September 11th, the seventh anniversary of the worst terrorist attack ever on US soil. We spent the morning in Oklahoma City, the site of the worst terrorist attack on US soil perpetrated by one of our own.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial stands on the former site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which was destroyed in the bombing on April 19, 1995. Outside there is a chain link fence, originally installed to protect the site. Over years thousands of mementos have been left as tributes or tokens of remembrance.

Inside the fence, two huge bronze gates frame a long reflecting pool. The East Gate is inscribed with "9:01," which was the moment before the bomb went off, the last moment of innocence. The West Gate is inscribed with "9:03," the moment after the bomb went off, the first moment of terror and simultaneously of recovery as people flew into action to help one another.

To one side of the reflecting pool is a field of grass, the actual location of the Murrah building. 168 chairs made of bronze and glass stand in the field, each with the name of a victim inscribed on the base. The chairs are grouped in nine rows, representing the nine floors of the building, and located on the floor where each person lost their life. Nineteen smaller chairs represent children.

Another poem that I love by Wendell Berry:

To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust
Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.

~ "Untitled"
by Wendell Berry

In comparison to our sober, reflective morning, Brie and I had a kind of silly rest of the day. For lunch we went to County Line Barbecue in OK City, formerly a speakeasy called Kentucky Club that held poker games in private rooms. We had amazing barbecue sandwiches, and I don't think I ate the rest of the day.

We drove through Oklahoma in the pouring rain, stopping in Clinton to see a Route 66 museum. Each room was decorated for a different decade, and you could press a button on the wall in each room and a song from the era would play, Elvis Presley or the Beatles, etc.

Not a single one of the people in the gift shop (who wore Route 66 T-shirts and rode the slew of Harleys parked out front) spoke English:

We were trying hard to get to Amarillo by sundown so we could see the famous Cadillac Ranch, the row of upended graffiti covered Cadillacs buried in a field. (That's right, we drove from Oklahoma to Texas to Oklahoma to Texas.) When we finally located it, through an unlocked gate at the edge of a field off an access road, it was only sprinkling, but it had been raining steadily all day. We started to walk down the muddy path leading to the cars, and passed two men coming back. They were struggling to not fall down and told us to watch out for the slippery mud.

Folks, they were not joking. Walking down that muddy path was walking on black ice. Plus, the mud was slowly caking onto our flip flops, each step making our shoes heavier and heavier, so eventually it was like trying to lift a five pound weight with your toes while trying to not flick mud up onto your (and by "your" I mean "my") white pants. Brie looked at me and said I looked like I had hobbit feet. I was also laughing so hard I thought I might fall over.

My foot:

Brie's feet:

I had a lot of trouble getting into place in time for this picture, because I would set the timer, and then slog through the mud to get to Brie, and then the shutter would click before I got there:

I'm not even going to go into the story of trying to clean up with Wet Ones in the rain on the frontage road, sans pants, before getting back into the car.

That night we drove to Tucumcari, New Mexico, where we stayed for the night at the Blue Swallow Motel, a restored Route 66 motel. This time the proprietor turned the sign on for me:

Isaac's room:

The owner walked in with us to show us how the room had been restored but kept original materials, whenever possible, like the original bathroom tile and the original rotary phones from the 30's.

The owner, Bill, was so nice. He had his son help us with luggage, and lent us Windex when I needed it for something. I responded by Windexing him in the eye. Not on purpose.

Some other views of Tucumcari (which is, by the way, a Comanche word which means "to lie in wait" and is pronounced to-come-carry):

The route through New Mexico could be a bit rough at times:

Near Cuervo, New Mexico:

The dogs in the last picture were barking their heads off at me, but didn't attack. I was afraid I was going to have to make a run for it. We got back in the car, and were tooling down the little highway, when suddenly Brie yells, "Holy crap!" Which was a little disconcerting. She said she thought she had just hit a tarantula, so big that it was clear from the driver's seat, but so close that she couldn't stop. She wanted to go back and check, so we turned around, scanning the road for a gigantic spider corpse. And found it. It's probably already too late, but if you're squeamish about such things, I wouldn't look at this next picture:

And so Brie added to our list of things we've captured and killed on this trip. Sorry, Santiago. May your little spider heart rest in peace.

Tarantula guts notwithstanding, in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, we stopped for lunch, lured by effective wall advertising:

In Sandia Park, New Mexico, we stopped at Tinkertown Museum, the work of a man named Ross Ward, who was a carnival sign painter and whittler. The museum had walls made of thousands of glass bottles and exhibits like an expansive Wild West town, full of racial caricatures and manly women, but impressive nonetheless:

In one of the rooms was Esmerelda, one of those fortune teller machines like in Big. I dropped in a quarter and she jerked around for a minute or two and a card dropped in the slot. It had an Ace of Diamonds on it and read, "The diamond comes to tell the tale, that for you good luck will never fall." I thought, "Wow, that's... depressing. And doesn't rhyme." But then I realized the "i" was smeared, and it actually said, "good luck will never fail." Brie dropped in a quarter and it told her to stop sleeping in late.

I did all this while you were watching TV.

~Ross Ward

Also in the Sandia Park area, we decided to ride the world's longest aerial tramway to the top of Sandia Peak. As we were walking across the parking lot, I dropped my camera and jammed the focusing ring, so I spent most of the tram ride trying to shake off my bad mood. It was very pretty, and very quiet, which did help a bit.

In Albuquerque, we crossed the Rio Grande (not looking so impressive) and took the wrong frontage road leaving the city, and ended up dead-ending on a dirt road near a penitentiary. This was my fault; Brie had voted to go the opposite way.

An awesome old Route 66 bridge that's no longer functioning but is preserved by the state highway authority:

Owl Rock, west of Albuquerque:

We had to get off the winding desert Route 66 and get back on the interstate once the sun set. We were in a hurry to get to our wigwam before it got too late.

For a concrete wigwam, it was pretty comfy. A little chilly, and you couldn't really stand up straight in the shower, but what else would you expect? It's a wigwam. I couldn't get a decent picture of the inside because my wide-angle lens was broken, so you just have to imagine it.

easy riders

2008-09-17T11:01:00.001-07:00

Tuesday morning, we left our damp little room and set back out on Route 66, determined to make better progress than a state and a half in two days.

A mural in Cuba, Missouri:

One little shop in Fanning, Missouri was a taxidermy drop-off, archery range, and a resting place for the world's largest grandmother:

Rolla, Missouri was named after Raleigh, North Carolina, with the southern accent spelled phonetically:

Calf on the road near Devil's Elbow, Missouri. He about had a panic attack when the camera shutter clicked:

"Frog Rock," near Waynesville, Missouri:

We decided to stop for breakfast in Waynesville, and first tried a German deli, which turned out to be pretty authentic, as everyone in there was speaking German to one another, but they weren't serving breakfast anymore. In a thick German accent, the owner of the shop directed us to Westside Cafe for breakfast. She said the cafe was on the way out of town, said you can't miss it. It turned out to be quite missable, in my opinion, but we did find it, tucked away in a little strip mall. We had coffee, Brie got an omelette and I got hotcakes, which came out burnt. Brie and I both thought the waiter looked like an LA actor/waiter, but the rest of the cafe was all Missouri.

Lebanon, Missouri:

A sort of morbid display in an outdoor store in Springfield, Missouri:

Spencer, Missouri:

Heatonville, Missouri:

The Precious Moments Park in Carthage, Missouri:

All through the trip, we had a rule that we couldn't stop to eat at any chain restaurants. Then we decided to bend the rule, because I miss going to Steak 'n' Shake in Muncie and studying all night, and we don't have Steak 'n' Shake in Los Angeles. The last time Brie and I ate at a Steak 'n' Shake together, we were studying for our last day of finals freshman year. We split a Frisco Melt and both got food poisoning. Ah, memories. So, we stopped in Joplin, where Brie had an inordinate amount of trouble deciding what type of shake to get. Here's the waitress trying to help:

Route 66 only goes through Kansas for a tiny thirteen-mile stretch, but it's a very picturesque thirteen miles.

In Galena, Kansas, I stopped to take a picture of this cool wall:

When I finished taking the picture and turned around, I saw:

Tow Mater! Just hanging out in front of this cute little restored gas station. I was so sad Sean wasn't there. I was taking a picture of Tow Mater when this woman came out of the little shop and said, "That's the real Tow Mater! He inspired the character in the movie! Come in, I have proof!" I went and got Brie, and we went inside and the woman showed us her scrapbook of the Pixar art directors taking pictures of the tow truck, and told us how they got it, and showed us an award she and the other three woman who run this shop received for restoring the gas station. She also had us sign her guest book, which was actually a petition to save a nearby Route 66 bridge scheduled for demolition. On the page we were signing, I looked at the various names, and all of them were from Australia and Germany. As we were talking, a couple walked in, and the woman asked them where they were from, and they didn't understand the question, but after some slow-talking and miming, they answered "France." The funniest thing I learned on this trip is that driving Route 66 is not a big thing with Americans, but it's a big thing with Europeans. Especially, for some reason, Germany and Holland. I would say only about 20% of the people we saw at various sites were American.

Later we drove through Commerce, Oklahoma, where Mickey Mantle grew up. This was his house and the barn he used as a backstop:

Near Miami, Oklahoma, we found a stretch of old 66 that was paved in the early 20s. Money was tight and the state didn't have enough to pave the road completely, so the decision was made to make the highway the right length, but half the normal width. This stretch of highway was barely wide enough for one car:

After Miami, it was getting late and we wanted to get to Dallas to see our friends Heather and Bruce, so we had to get off Route 66 and take another highway into Texas. We didn't get in until 1 am. We are very rude house guests. Heather was very kind and let us stay in their beautiful guest room anyway.

The next day we just took a break from driving and hung out with the MacFadyen clan. Price, the baby, did his impression of the little girl from The Others for us:

Brie put on a little show of her own. We were all enthralled:

Quade loved her so much he decided he wanted to be in the band:

When Bruce got home from work, he offered to watch the kids so we could have a girls' night out. Heather was teasing her hair in the bathroom, and Bruce said, "Oh, so you're going to go Dallas, then." Because it's a rule in Texas that you have to have big hair. I think I might get kicked out of the state.

Heather and all of her boys:

We went to a cute restraurant called Sangria and ate tiny bites of tapas. Later we walked around the corner and had huge bites of frozen custard at a place called Wild About Harry's. It was a fun evening and so nice to catch up with Heather.

Thursday morning, we wanted to get back on track as much as possible, so we left Texas and drove straight north for three hours, back to Oklahoma and Route 66.

getting our kicks on route 66

2008-09-11T06:50:00.001-07:00

Sunday morning I went to church with my cousin Jason and his wife Katie and met my two little first cousins-once-removed (I think,) Maggie and Charlie. Afterwards we went out to Portillo's, who make the best hot dogs in the world, hands down. I think I've had Portillo's on every trip to Wheaton so far.

After lunch, I went back to Brie's and Mr. and Mrs. Van Conant accomplished the virtually impossible task of packing up Isaac with two suitcases, two carry-ons, various handbags and camera cases, several boxes of books and scripts, a guitar, and a cello. And we can still use the rearview mirror. I never thought a well-packed car could be such a thing of beauty.

After saying good-bye, we were off!

And then I remembered that I didn't have Route 66 directions, so after going back in, and taking about an hour to print out directions that would later turn out to be wildly incomplete, we were off!

First of all, a little history. Come on, you knew this was coming. Route 66 was established in the late 20s as an official US highway, using existing roads that jagged across the country linking rural communities. By 1938, it was "continuously paved" from Chicago to Los Angeles. When the Depression hit, over 200,000 people migrated to California from the Dust Bowl Midwest via Route 66 to have another chance at the American Dream.

Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66 - the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from Mississippi to Bakersfield - over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich Californian valleys.

66 is the path of people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

~ from "The Grapes of Wrath"
by John Steinbeck

As the country came out of the Depression and more and more people owned cars, motoring became a hobby, and Route 66 represented freedom and adventure. But if you've seen the movie Cars, you know how it ends. Interstates were built in smooth long lines near Route 66, and the Mother Road became less and less traveled, becoming officially decommissioned in the 1980s.

Route 66 technically begins in downtown Chicago, so the first leg of our trip was east into the city. The official beginning of Route 66:

Then we drove around downtown and got a little lost, and ended up on I-55, which wasn't exactly correct, but was sort of the general right idea. We finally got straightened out by Willowbrook, and got off the Interstate and found Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket, which opened in the 1930's as a gas station lunch counter on Route 66.

The hilarious thing about this was that we had packed the cars hours ago at this point, and the sun was starting to go down, and we were 18 miles from Brie's house. It was like leaving Los Angeles on a road trip and stopping for the night in Burbank.

We did push on a little further that night... to Springfield.

Along the way...

Joliet, Illinois:

Wilmington, Illinois:

The next day we drove into Springfield, which was described in something I read as "the culmination of the state's obsession with Abraham Lincoln." Lincoln lived in Springfield from the age of 28 until he was elected president. The street where his home was was closed, but we walked past his law offices, where he wrote his inaugural address, and the Old Capitol building, where he argued cases as a lawyer in Springfield, and where he laid in state after his assassination so the people of Springfield could pay their respects.

Then we forgot where we parked and got caught in the rain, and ran into a coffeeshop to get breakfast and wait out the weather.

Sky View Drive-In Theater in Litchfield, Illinois (I was hoping to make it to a screening here but we were too late the night before to make it):

Union Miners Cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois:

Restored gas station in Mt. Olive:

Staunton, Illinois. In 1923, this high school lost a football match to Gillespie High School, 233 to 0:

Granite City, Illinois. Supposedly, Al Capone used to frequent this cafe. Brie and I sat in the parking lot for a few minutes trying to decide whether to go in, before deciding just to go in and then finding that it was closed:

Collinsville, Illinois:

St. Louis, Missouri:

We stopped for frozen custard:

And then drove back to the Gateway Arch, but it was too late to ride the elevator-tram-thing to the top, so we just went to the Museum underneath the arch:

And walked around outside:

I called ahead to get a motel room at a mom-and-pop place called the Wagon Wheel Motel in Cuba, Missouri. Here was our conversation.

Man: Hello?
Me: Hi, do you have any rooms available for tonight?
Man: Yeah. I have one left.
Me: Great, could I reserve that?
Man: (Pause.) Well, what time will you get here?
Me: How late can I get there?
Man: What time will you get here?
Me: Well... I'm in St. Louis...
Man: Well, that's... eight... nine... yeah. OK. I guess that's ok.
Me: Oh, ok, good.
Man: Just make sure you're on your way. (Click.)

We drove through the pouring rain and a beautiful sunset, taking the interstate because I didn't want to make the man wait up late.

We knocked on the door to the office, and the man, who I took to be in his mid-80s, opened the door and let us into his office, which was also his living room. He had stacks of cash laid out on the desk. He handed me a little card to fill out with my name and address and phone number, and then took the card back and wrote "Room 11 - 20.00" on it. I was watching him and thinking, is this really going to be twenty dollars? And it was. I gave him a twenty dollar bill, and he told us he would meet us over in Room 11. So we drove over and parked by the room, and he scooted over in his golf cart, checked the room, and left us the key. The room was so 1930s classic. Kind of dank, and yet awesome. I felt like Ma Joad. Or maybe Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. Only Brie wasn't Clark Gable.

I walked up to the front where the old neon sign was, but he had turned off the power, so I had it get it in the morning when it wasn't lit up:

Our room:

Well if you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway that's the best.
Get your kicks on Route 66.

Well it winds from Chicago to LA
More than two-thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on Route 66.

Well it goes through St. Louie, Joplin Missouri,
Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty.
You'll see Amarillo, Gallup New Mexico
Flagstaff Arizona, don't forget Winona,
Kingsman, Barstow, San Bernardino.

Won't you get hip to this timely tip
And take that California trip.
Get your kicks on Route 66.

~ "Route 66"
Lyrics by Bobby Troup

on the road again

2008-09-08T07:01:00.000-07:00

After spending a fun long weekend catching up with friends from high school and their loved ones, I spent an evening with my brother and mom celebrating his birthday. We were at his house in the afternoon when a neighbor knocked on his door to tell him that his demon dog Addie (short for Adolph, no lie) was in the backyard with a snake. But when he went back to check, it was not only not a snake, it was the opposite of a snake. (The opposite of a snake is two baby squirrels. You can write that down.) They immediately started following us around everywhere, in this adorable "pick me up, I want to be loved" sort of way. Ryan wouldn't let us, he had this weird theory about bacteria. But we were trying to get them to go up a tree or something, and so we were calling them and they would just run over, like puppies! It was one of the cutest things I've ever seen in my life.

Tuesday morning (okay, afternoon) I left for Nashville. My friends Sara and Kenny were arriving from a Labor Day trip of their own that night, so I was kind and allowed them about ten minutes to get back and freshen up before I intruded. The next day Kenny and I had lunch with Sara, who is the event manager at the Grand Ole Opry. We walked through the hotel there (maybe the Grand Opryland Hotel) which is a ridiculously huge, with shopping areas (including a section designed to look like New Orleans) and ponds and gardens all under a giant atrium. After lunch Sara gave me a tour of the Opry. This is the studio where they shot "Hee Haw":

Sara in one of the Opry dressing rooms:

And me onstage at the Grand Ole Opry (the wooden circle is cut out from the stage floor of the Ryman Auditorium, where the Opry began):

That night Sara, Kenny, and I met their friend Cameron out for dinner. Randomly, I had read one of Cameron's books a year or two ago. We had delicious fattening food and went back to Sara's place and watched random internet clips, including one about The Mighty Boosh and the Legend of Old Gregg, which was easily the weirdest thing I've ever seen from the BBC.

The next day I worked during the day while Sara was at the Opry, and that night we hung out and caught up on things. We also stopped by to see Kenny's band doing a photo shoot. In case you were wondering what a rock band photo shoot looks like, it looks like this:

The next morning I met my Aunt Cindy and Uncle Bob at Red Lobster in Franklin, Tennessee, which was nice. (Tip: get the lobster macaroni and cheese.) I was late because I somehow managed to lose Sara's spare house key. And yes, I do wear this shirt a lot.

That afternoon I left Nashville and drove north, watching the pines give way to cornfields. I was hoping for a dramatic Indiana sunset because I’ve been missing them since college, but it was a gray, overcast day.

I drove up to my friend Tim’s house in Indianapolis, where I met his lovely wife Katie. They made me a wonderful home-cooked vegan meal and were generally very cute, cooking together in the kitchen.

Despereaux has been following my blog and seemed to think I would be unhappy if I didn’t have mice with me wherever I went, so he sent some family along ahead of time to meet me at Tim’s house. Tim and Katie had been trying to catch Floppy (so named because he seemed a little uncoordinated and tended to crash into walls) for a month before I got there. This is them on a hunting expedition. You notice the humane mouse trap set up in the bottom of this picture.

At one point we heard Floppy in a basket on of their shelves, and I tried pulling the basket onto the floor while Tim dropped a big Rubbermaid-type container over it, but before it fell all the way to the floor, Floppy shot out of the basket, through Tim’s legs, and into the gap between the dishwasher and the cabinet, knocking into the cabinet on the way. So that was a near miss, but apparently just my lucky mouse-catching presence made a difference, because that night was of their traps went off and Uncle Floppy was captured. (The Dorseys believe Floppy himself is still at large.)

The next morning I drove up to the Chicago area. The third memorial for Tyson’s wife Leslie was held Saturday afternoon in Bolingbrook, which is only about twenty minutes from Wheaton. The service was beautiful. Tyson had designed a structure for three memorial services around the folk story that Leslie had liked, in which three trees dream about their future. One wants to be a treasure chest and becomes Jesus's manger. One wants to be a great sailing ship and becomes the fishing boat that Jesus is on when He quiets the storm. One wants to remind others of God, and becomes the cross. Tyson and Leslie's pastor said that Leslie wanted others to see God in her, and in her life and death that has been true. Tyson told us that when Leslie was very sick, in bed with oxygen tubes and unable to walk, he sometimes would look in on her and find her in bed, with a worship song playing on her ipod, her eyes shut tight, and her hands lifted in the air in praise of God. Tyson is a member of the worship team at his church, and he stood up on stage and sang and played the guitar with a few others. They sang, "Blessed Be Your Name," the lyrics of which are, "Every blessing You pour out I turn back to praise. When the darkness closes in, still I will say blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be Your name... You give and take away, You give and take away. My heart will choose to say, Lord, blessed be Your Name."

The problem of pain and evil is so difficult for us as we search for meaning in the universe and wonder if we can possibly believe in a God who would allow horrible things to happen. But in that moment, watching a man with such sorrow pour out his heart in praise of God, it seemed entirely evident that God is there with him, that He was and is with Leslie, and that our suffering and loss in no way signifies God's apathy or absence. I'm writing this down in the hopes that I will remember it.

rain

2008-09-01T17:57:00.001-07:00

Hurricane Gustav seems to have spared New Orleans, but I don’t know what the scare might do to the residents there. I spoke to Paul last night; he was at a hotel in Chattanooga. He said it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify living in a city that he’s had to evacuate eight times in the last ten years.

I saw that Eglin Air Force Base in Florida had some fatalities and damage from tornadoes caused by Gustav. I texted my friend Andrea, who lives there with her husband Erik and son Jonathan, to see if they’re ok, but I haven’t heard anything back yet.

Before I left New Orleans, I called Andrea about coming by to visit, and we were talking about some difficult things that were going on, and she said, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” It reminded me of a song I used to (and still) love: “Dinner with Ivan” by Big Head Todd and the Monsters, the chorus of which goes, “Welcome to the wild world, brother, sometimes it’s gonna rain on you. It rains all over the world, brother, sometimes it’s gonna rain on you.”

At the risk of sounding like the voiceover in Grey's Anatomy, a big part of what this summer has been about is learning some things about life, about myself. Lesson #1 was about living in the present instead of the future. Lesson #2 was about finding value and self-worth primarily in relationship with God (sub-lesson: God is not Voodoo.) And Lesson #3 was about letting go of control.

Lesson #4 has had to do with the song, more specifically that bad things happen to everyone, it’s just part of the world. Which is a reminder we need sometimes. But this summer reminders haven't been necessary... there have been so many examples of the fragility of life and the pervasiveness of loss. I’ve been struggling to figure out how to let the shadow make the sunlight more precious… without spending time in the sunlight being fearful of the shadow.

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on killing the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally, but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.

~ from "A Moveable Feast"
by Ernest Hemingway

My friend Tyson from Taylor lost his wife Leslie to cancer in July. (His blogs can be found at forleslie.blogspot.com and tysonaschliman.blogspot.com.) My friends Adam and Chrissy Curry from Raleigh lost a young friend in a drowning accident two weeks ago. Heidi and Josh lost Josh's best friend Joe a week before their wedding in May. (Joe and his girlfriend Rachel's amazing road trip blog can be found at van-down-by-the-river.blogspot.com and a memorial blog for Joe can be found at johnsonsmauiohana.blogspot.com.)

These losses have weighed heavily on my heart. Lately Heidi and I have been talking about how it can be hard to not be afraid of the future when you know the kind of pain that may lie in wait. How can you be ready for it without living in fear of it?

I suppose the only answer to that is found in the first three lessons. But those lessons are difficult to learn.

Last Tuesday, Josh’s youngest sister Emily was hit by a car while crossing the street in Maui. It was so frightening not to know what was happening. Josh and Heidi flew to Maui the next day and have been there ever since. Emily's been in an induced coma all week but today her breathing tube was successfully removed and she's asleep, breathing on her own. Despite multiple skull fractures and swelling in her brain, she's shown incredible progress. Hundreds if not thousands of people are praying for her, but she can always use more. A family friend is keeping a blog with updates at prayingforemily.blogspot.com.

In Tyson's blog, he writes about being grateful for his two-year-old son, and said that "every day is a blessing." This is true for us all of the time, but we don't always see it. I've been so grateful for the blessing of spending time with the friends and family I've seen on this trip, and the ones I have yet to see.

Tomorrow I leave North Carolina and head west, towards home. I’ve been here a month, it’s just taken me this long to catch up on the New Orleans section of the trip.

I left Louisiana on July 31. Andrea and Erik were supposed to be flying home from a trip to Colorado that night, but they ended up being delayed in Atlanta for the night, so I just made a short trip to Mobile and stayed the night. On the way through Biloxi, Mississippi (where I attended my first prom when I was 16,) there was a beautiful sunset.

The next morning I drove to the Reites’ place in Shalimar, Florida. They were nice enough to let me hang out with them even though they had just gotten back themselves. It was so nice catching up with Andrea and meeting their little boy Jonathan for the first time. That evening we went out for Italian and went down to the beach in Destin to walk on the pier:

Despite glimpsing an ENORMOUS number of jellyfish in the water from the pier (which you can sort of see in this picture,) Andrea and I decided to brave the ocean the next day. Jonathan was pretty cute in his SPF suit that looked like a throwback to the 1920s. We swam for a while until we saw a jellyfish and decided that was enough.

That afternoon I said good-bye to Andrea and Jonathan and drove home to Fayetteville. The next week I spent with Mom and my sister Bethany, which was great, although I did have to do more arbitration work than I would have liked. One morning my Taylor friend/Coddagemate Stephanie and her husband Drew were driving from Ocean Isle to Minnesota, so we met off the highway in Lumberton. I was trying to find a unique little southern breakfast place for us to go but we just ended up meeting at Cracker Barrel. Not that there’s not something to be said for Cracker Barrel.

And of course there’s much to be said for the Baileys:

The next week I went to New Bern, where my grandparents (who incidentally just got back from a three week vacation in China) had a timeshare for the week. I had to work too much that week as well, although I did make time for daily games of “Robot” with my seven-year-old brother Sean. “Robot” has been Sean’s favorite game since I made it up on a trip to Uganda several years ago. I keep thinking he’s going to get tired of it… but he doesn’t. He never. Gets. Tired.

A couple of days I took a break and convinced everyone (Grandma, Grandpa, Dad, Micky, and Sean) to come see some of the historic stuff in New Bern, which was North Carolina’s capitol in the 18th century. We went to one house that had belonged to a cabinetmaker, and the guide at that house did that thing where they pretend it’s really the time period they’re in, and they don’t understand why you’re dressed the way you’re dressed, etc. She showed Sean how to shave a table leg (or something) using something called a drawing knife (or something.) She told him he did a good job and invited him to become an apprentice at the house. Later I heard him saying to my dad, “No, I don’t want to work here!”

On the way home we stopped and got Pepsis in a little corner store that was the site of the pharmacy where Pepsi-Cola was invented. The woman asked my grandparents if they remembered the Pepsi jingle, and they pretended they didn’t, but when she started singing it, they joined in: “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, Twelve full ounces and that’s a lot, Twice as much for a nickel too, Pepsi Cola is good for you!”

Since we got a late start that day and it was raining, we went back down to the historic district the next morning to walk through the gardens. Here were Sean’s feelings about that:

He took my hand and basically told me that we needed to make a break for it at his signal. He kept saying, “Now!” at various points. We did see these very cool spiders one of the first gardens, including one actually spinning a little death cocoon for a kicking beetle. We were enthralled. My dad took this picture, I can’t take credit for it:

Although I did get this little snapshot of nature:

Sean cheered up when Micky lent him her camera and he could take hundreds of pictures of the gardens, his feet, my feet, all of our faces from a very unflattering four-foot-high vantage point, all of our derrieres, worms on the sidewalk, etc.

The high point of the week for me was on the next-to-last day (the very last day I spent in the New Bern library working) when we had a family-wide game of Keep Away.

Sean making a rookie mistake:

My Grandma leaping impressively high to get the ball:

And my Grandpa getting ready to make a line drive:

We weren’t sure that my grandparents were going to be able to come down, so I was very thankful that it worked out, even if I did have to work for most of the week. The next week I spent mostly with Mom and Bethany. I guess we didn’t do anything photogenic because I don’t have any pictures, but I really appreciated the chance to spend so much time with both of them.

Last week I spent at my dad’s house, still working, with breaks for Robot. One day my Dad asked me to help him carry supplies into one of the labs at the VA. I walked in with my arms full of paper towel rolls and realized that he had failed to mention that it was the cadaver lab. I didn’t get any photographs of that, either.

It’s always hard leaving family. Sean came in to hug me good night four separate times the evening before I left Fayetteville, even though I was going to see him again Saturday when they came up to Fayetteville for Ryan’s birthday and we went to the Museum of Natural History. They’re hosting a tour of portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was really interesting and cool to see, though the fragments were much smaller than I had expected. I think I had Torah-like expectations.

This weekend I’ve been up in Raleigh (technically Morrisville) staying with Fawn. I finally got to meet her boyfriend Bryan, and Saturday night Kyleigh came over and we sat out on Fawn’s porch and watched the thunderstorm and got our legs wet.

In most of the poems or songs I’ve heard, rain represents pain or tragedy. But even when rain is destructive, it’s beautiful, and I’ve missed it so much living in arid Los Angeles.

While I was writing this post, Heidi sent me a text to say that Emily has spoken a few words. We still have many, many prayers to offer up on her behalf, but I have to thank God for what healing has already occurred.

In their wedding invitations, my friend Tim and his wife Katie (who I hope to see on Friday in Indianapolis) included this poem by a writer that I love:

The woods and pastures are joyous 
in their abundance now 
in a season of warmth and much rain. 
We walk amidst foliage, amidst 
song. The sheep and cattle graze 
like souls in bliss (except for flies) 
and lie down satisfied. Who now 
can believe in winter? In winter 
who could have hoped for this? 

~Wendell Berry

do you know what it means to miss new orleans

2008-08-23T23:09:00.001-07:00

By the time I got to my last week in New Orleans, I was finished with arbitration work, so I got to do most of things I had left on my New Orleans list. (Yes, I had a list. I'm a person who makes lists, ok?) A few highlights:

Brie and I went out for one last drink at Pat O'Brien's. I don't think I even had a quarter of my "Skylab," so I couldn't blame POB when I completely bit it on the sidewalk walking home. One second I was walking along fine, the next I was on the ground. It was like I teleported there. Painfully. Brie was like, "Are you okay? No one saw."

The next morning I took Brie to the airport. We drove through the Ninth Ward on the way there. Many houses were still destroyed. Others were obviously new, and groups of people worked on several.

Another day I went to dinner on Frenchman Street with a guy named Michael. We went to Adolfo's and I had some amazing salmon with "ocean sauce" on it. Michael brought a bottle of wine that turned out to be champagne. When the waiter uncorked it, the pop was so loud everyone in the room jumped. The waiter said, "Sorry, folks. Bad neighborhood." Later we went zydeco dancing at Rock 'n' Bowl, which is a bowling alley with a dance floor. I was no good at the zydeco eight-step but I did manage the cajun waltz.

In this picture you can kind of see the zydeco band, which includes a guy playing a washboard tied to his chest:

I went to a few museums, including the pharmacy museum on Chartres St. I've already mentioned their voodoo stuff, but they had some other remedies as well:

One day I walked down to Central Grocery on Decatur St. to get a muffuletta (pronounced muff-uh-lotta.) There was a bit of a line outside:

And inside:

I ordered half a sandwich and sat at a back counter to eat it. I ate half of the half. It was gigantic. And very olive-y. Afterwards I went to a museum, where they had an exhibit that very defensive about the whole "Let's just not rebuild New Orleans" idea, stopped at a little shop to buy pralines, and saw this guy, who was a street performer, like the frozen silver robot guy you see sometimes, only he was a frozen construction worker forever crawling out of a manhole:

Another day I went across the river to Algiers with Paul, who said Algiers was named that because the heat and mosquitoes reminded soldiers stationed there of Algiers, Africa. Besides the closed hoodoo shop, we walked along a levee (at right; this is not what I thought levees looked like... I thought they were like big mechanical dams) and drove by the warehouses where they make the Mardi Gras floats:

We also went to an art store in Metarie so I could buy postcard stuff. and stopped for one last snoball (blueberry/strawberry.)

On my last full day in New Orleans, I was feeling sad about leaving, so I decided to walk around the quarter and take random pictures.

I said good-bye to the good ol' postal emporium, where I almost had to strangle people to get them to let me receive mail:

And to CC's Community Coffee House, where Brie and I drank "Mochasippis" and worked on our laptops:

And to Bourbon St, which I wasn't too fond of:

And to the rest of the Quarter, which I loved:

The next day I packed up the apartment, did some cleaning, and headed out. I decided to stop by Anne Rice's old house in the Garden District before I left. It was huge. It used to be an orphanage, and now I think it's condos:

I needed comfort food to make it through the big break-up, so I stopped by Creole Creamery for some ice cream (creole cream cheese and strawberry, if you were wondering) and headed east.

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day
I know I'm not wrong, this feeling's gettin' stronger
The longer I stay away
Miss them moss covered vines
The tall sugar pines
Where mockin' birds used to sing
And I'd like to see that lazy Mississippi
Hurryin' into Spring

The moonlight on the bayou
A creole tune
That fills the air
I dream
About magnolias in bloom
And I'm wishin' I was there

~"Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans"
Lyrics by Eddie DeLange and Louis Alter

ghosts, clowns, and other things that tap/scratch in the night

2008-08-13T21:59:00.000-07:00

The setting for our screenplay is a big Louisiana mansion… isolated, creepy. You know the type. Initially I wanted to have the house be in a swampy area near New Orleans, but historically speaking, it just wouldn’t work for the dual time periods our story takes place in. So, after a week of working on arbitration stuff, I did a little southern plantation location scout.

First I drove west, through swamps and sugar cane fields, to New Iberia, Louisiana, which I think sounds kind of cool. Kind of a rural southern cool. The first plantation I went to was called The Shadows. Perfect creepy name. It’s called The Shadows because it sits in the shadows of big oaks around it.

The house now:

The house at the turn of the century (the first time period of our story):

The tour guide was 19, had this classic Louisiana accent, and knew all about the house. He was adorable, I wanted to put him in my pocket.

A little backyard cemetery at the Shadows. I'm sure you have one just like it:

I toured another house in New Iberia, called Joe Jefferson after the actor who built it in 1870. I got there about 4:05, five minutes after the last tour began, and the woman was totally not going to let me join. Finally after some pleading, she was like, well, I don’t know, I guess we can see how much you’ll disrupt the group. So I caught up with the tour… which had two people in it. After the tour, I watched a video on the house, and it was basically a “get married here” ad. I so wish I could show you the video, because it most dramatic wedding ad I have ever seen. The music was, like, from a war movie or something. There were these brides wandering around the gardens in soft focus, and I kept expecting a scary clown to jump out, or there to be a subtitle that said, “Kimberly’s body was discovered the next morning, but they never found her head.”

I drove home through a pretty sunset. Ah, clouds, how I miss you. Brie and I got pizza at Mona Lisa, I think, and fortified ourselves with Hand Grenades from Tropical Isle (which we didn’t even finish, we just wanted to get drinks “to go” at some point… New Orleans has really mastered the drinks that taste like kool-aid) so that we could stand to watch Skeleton Key. Not the greatest movie ever, but scary enough that we decided Brie should sleep in the bedroom with me that night. I had trouble sleeping because there was this intermittent scratching, tapping noise coming from somewhere in the room. I thought it was Brie messing with her phone. Until she said, “What’s that noise?” And I, in classic Scooby Doo fashion, answered, “I thought it was you.”

And then a scary clown jumped out. We never found Brie’s head.

Actually, we never figured out what the noise was. I like to think it was an army of giant roach ghosts. I especially liked hearing it after Brie left and I was in the apartment by myself.

The next day Paul and Brie went with me to tour plantations on the River Road. We took a tour at Laura Plantation, a Creole sugar plantation. The word Creole, I found, refers to several different people groups in Louisiana, but the oldest, most traditional definition, and the one that’s intended here, is a person descended from the French who settled in Louisiana before the Louisiana Purchase. There were a lot of interesting details on the tour because it’s based on the memoirs of Laura Locoul, whose family built the plantation, and who got annoyed when Gone With The Wind was published and wrote a book to show her family what plantation life in the 1800’s was really like.

Near Laura Plantation was the B&C Seafood Market and Cajun Restaurant, where we stopped to get lunch. Paul insisted that we get a Cajun sampler platter, which included many, many fried things. Including fried alligator, which we all tried. You could also get an alligator po’ boy, but none of us were up for that.

We drove further up the River Road and saw a few more plantations, but didn’t take any more tours.

Me in front of Oak Alley, which I plan to buy and use as a getaway from the harsh Los Angeles winters:

We also did some sleuth work and found Felicity Plantation, which was where Skeleton Key was shot. We were perhaps not technically allowed on the property, but I really wanted to see how it looked. It was actually a sugar cane plantation and is surrounded by fields, so they created swamps with a hose and some CG.

It’s a cool location, I can see why they picked it. It would be so fun to direct a movie in a great authentic building like that. Someday.

Through the pouring rain, Paul showed us an old house he broke into once with friends. It’s not inhabited, I think they were just being hoodlums. It actually wouldn’t be too bad for a movie, either.

After this house, Paul said we could take the bridge over the Mississippi and head back to New Orleans. But we kept driving… and driving… and no bridge. At some point it became clear that we just needed to turn around and go back the way we came, but it was one of those things where you would rather drive literally two hours out of your way rather than just admit you missed something and should just turn around already. And by you, I mean Paul. Personally, I was not voting for continuing to drive and drive and drive and drive until we hit Baton Rouge, but that’s what we did. We finally crossed the river at Baton Rouge and headed home on the interstate instead of taking the River Road on that side.

That night Brie and I walked down to Preservation Hall to hear jazz. We got there during the second set, and had to sit in the hall, where we could hear but not see. During the break, some people cleared out, and we were able to move into the main room and snag a bench. It isn’t air conditioned and it was kind of ridiculously hot, but so fun. I didn’t think I liked jazz. It always seems kind of rambly and pointless. But I loved the jazz we heard. Maybe it was Jazz for Dummies. Requests cost two bucks, five for standards, ten for “The Saints,” which they ended up getting two twenties for. Two I can remember were “Do You Know What It Means” and “St. James Infirmary.”

Paul had mentioned a plantation called The Myrtles that is creepy and supposedly haunted, so the next day, after eating praline bacon (pork candy) at Elizabeth’s in the Bywater and attending mass at St. Augustine’s, Brie and I decided to drive up to St. Francisville to see it.

Here’s the story told at the plantation:

The house was built in 1794 by General David Bradford, whose daughter, Sarah Matilda, married a judge named Clark Woodruff. Over the years, Woodruff began having an affair with one of the slaves, named Chloe, who he brought into the house to watch the children. But Chloe had a habit of eavesdropping on her lover and his wife, so, as a punishment, he cut off her ear and sent her back to the fields. She wore a green turban to cover her missing ear and began scheming to get back into the house.

She decided to poison the children by putting oleander in the birthday cake they were served. She just wanted them to get sick enough that she would be called back in from the fields to care for them, and when she was able to make them better, she would be back in the good graces of the family. So she carried out her plan, but ended up killing both children and Sarah Matilda. The other slaves, afraid of being blamed for the deaths, killed Chloe and threw her body in the river. Ever since, the house has been haunted by an apparition wearing a green turban. And this apparition likes to pose for photos:

Apparently, says the guide, this photo was taken when the house was completely empty, and a super special “shadow density” filter was put on the photograph, which then showed the outlines of two children playing on the roof. Ghost children like to play on the roof, you see, because it doesn’t matter if they fall.

It was a custom, the guide told us in a serious voice, for mirrors to be covered after a death, because it was believed that if they were not, the soul could escape the body and be pulled into the mirror, where it would remain trapped. Forever! And on the death day of Sarah Matilda, the two children, and Chloe, the house must have been in too much of an uproar to cover all the mirrors, and so their souls were pulled into this mirror. You can see their ghostly handprints, where they tried to get out!

It’s a good story. Too bad Sarah Mathilde and the children all died of yellow fever. The one murder that did actually occur at the house - William Winter was killed on the porch in a horseride-by shooting in 1874 - was not even mentioned on the tour. I think they were saving it for the Friday Night Mystery Ghost Tour.

The grounds were really nice. There was a little swamp island that I could barely tear Brie away from, and a lamppost in the lawn.

Brie, as Gene Kelly:

Brie, as Tumnus:

On the way back I had a huge craving for a snoball, so we drove around Baton Rouge until we found a stand. While waiting for my delicious watermelon-strawberry snoball to be prepared, I took some pictures of the little crop of tractors growing behind the stand:

And the sign for the restaurant next door, Fricken Chicken:

We drove the long way home from Baton Rouge so that we could take the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which at 24 miles is the longest bridge in the world. We drove across at sunset, and the sky was filled with Mexican freetail bats! My little buddies from Carlsbad! I thought it was pretty great. So great that I nearly drove into the side of the bridge.

Unfortunately, more creepy crawlies were in store for us, as Giacomo was hiding out in my hairband on the mantle when we got home. Brie found him and screamed. These pictures… they just don’t do him justice, but maybe you can get some sense of the vast roachiness of him.

Ah, Giacamo, you put up a good fight. Too bad I had to destroy you. Thanks for sending all of your kin to avenge your death.

To reward ourselves after the Battle of the Mantle, we tried Sazeracs at the Carousel Bar. Sazeracs were America’s first cocktail, invented in the French Quarter in the 1830s by a Creole pharmacist named Antoine Peychaud, when alcohol was hard to get and often poor quality, and needed mixers in order to be drunk. At the time a Sazerac was made of brandy, bitters, and absinthe. I liked mine. Brie not so much.

Good job hanging in to the end of the post. Here’s to you, Blog Reader. Here’s to you.

what you need is love potion number nine

2008-08-05T22:57:00.001-07:00

On Heidi's last morning, I wanted to go on a "Voodoo and Cemeteries" tour. I was interested in seeing the old St. Louis cemeteries, and one of the characters in the screenplay I'm writing with Tim- the one I was supposed to be writing in New Orleans instead of doing arbitrations - is a voodoo practitioner, so I thought it would be interesting. Brie wisely decided to stay home in the a/c and work, but I got Heidi to come along, wearing an appropriate long black sundress with skulls all over it.

Part of the tour went to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, built in 1826 as a burial chapel for yellow fever victims. Yellow fever (called Yellow Jack, the Black Vomit, or the American Plague by the people who suffered from the summer epidemics in the 18th and 19th centuries) is also part of our story, so maybe we'll... set a scene here or something. I don't know.

Then the tour went to St. Louis Cemetery #1, on the edge of the quarter in Treme. (This was the cemetery that I passed on my way to the pound.) I was interested in seeing because it's the oldest cemetery in New Orleans, with graves dating back to the 1700s, but I had been told by three different people that you can get mugged in that cemetery. Paul told me not to go in alone if I didn't want a bat to the back of my head.

New Orleans is known for its Cities of the Dead. Because of the high water table, you hit water digging only a few feet into the ground, especially before the city was drained in the early 20th century. Early settlers tried placing stone on top of the graves, but after rainstorms, the rising water table could pop the airtight coffins out of the ground. So the French colonists co-opted the Spanish vault style. Poor families are buried in wall vaults, or oven vaults, seen on the right side of this picture. Wealthier families are buried in a mausoleum, where coffins are stacked one on top of another. When the vault is full, and a new coffin needs to be added, the coffin on the bottom of a stack is opened, and the contents (ashes by that time... the vaults get so hot that there is a natural cremation process) are moved into a bag and placed at the back of the vault. Then that coffin is burned and room is made at the top for a new coffin. But the coffin has to lie undisturbed for a year and a day, and during epidemic years, sometimes the vaults would completely fill up within a year. In those cases, families would lease space from another family's vault until the year and a day is up. We saw one huge mausoleum, shared by forty families, that contained the remains of thousands of people. Even above-ground, though, the vaults slowly sink into the earth. This is a picture of the top of a marker in a wall vault, now at ground level.

I was really interested in the cemetery, but by the time we actually got in there and were standing between the whitewashed tombs, it was about a thousand degrees outside and I thought I might have actually died myself. And that I didn't go to Heaven. The guide kept talking and talking, and I was about to pass out so it kind of sounded like "tomb of Marie Laveau.... blahgerg mishnear flep... marngy prawl... voodoo priestess... grog nuffle." There were x's drawn all over her tomb (markings to bring luck) but according to the guide, this is "just Hollywood superstition." I've noticed in other parts of the country, "Hollywood" is sometimes used as a synonym for "ridiculous."

The tour ended at the Voodoo Spiritual Temple, where we sat in the courtyard and were given what seemed to be a sermon by Priestess Miriam, formerly of Chicago. I'm guessing it was a sermon because about 80% of the time I had no idea what she was saying. She kept laughing at her own comments and said stuff like, "You do the e-harmony, and then you wonder why your kids are doing the internet dating, and you say, 'what? what are they doing?' but it was you who did the e-harmony." And that was the part that I could understand most of the words for.

Then we went inside, to the altar room, which was full of tapestries and various statues and figurines, many with tightly rolled bills stuck in their mouths and ears and hands. A couple of the people in the group clearly did not want to enter the room, and tried to linger in the hallway outside, but Priestess Miriam insisted they come in and form a circle. Then she talked more. Some of this I got on Heidi's camera. I just opened it up at waist-level and hit record because I wasn't sure she would be ok with me taping her. After watching this a few times, I can follow what she's saying, and I have to say, I really think she was making more sense here than she was earlier, and I wish I had gotten part of her speech in the courtyard on video.

The yellow flyers she's holding in her hands had a prayer printed on them. I kept mine but can't find it now. It said something like "We ask the Father to grant us compassion. We ask the Son to grant us strength. We ask the Spirit to grant us love." Voodoo originates in Africa as a form of ancestor worship. When the African people were brought to Louisiana and enslaved, they were also forcibly baptized Catholic. Modern Voodoo reflects strong Catholic influence.

Since the priestess got through both of her talks without really telling us about Voodoo, when she asked if anyone had any questions (at which point the couple who tried to stay in the hallway shot for the exit) I asked her if she could tell us about the objects in the room. She looked annoyed and said, "I already told you everything." (About e-harmony.) But she told a story about how they got one of the statues in the room from a man who lived upstairs. A story that still had nothing to do with Voodoo. Then she said she wasn't "consecrated to talk about physical Voodoo." And that was it.

I was a bit disappointed. I did do some other research later, though mostly I didn't find much I didn't already know. Last Monday Paul and I tried to go to a hoodoo shop across the river in Algiers called House of the Seven Sisters, but it was closed. Shocker. Paul kept saying, "She went to a hoo-doo shop in Al-geeahs and ne-vuh came back" in an exaggerated Brooklyn-Southern New Orleans accent. Hoodoo is a local version of Voodoo... it's folk magic, superstition, conjuration. The spells without the spirituality.

To find the lucky numbers for gambling, take the Bible. Now, I want you to read the ninth chapter of Psalms - reads it over three times before going to bed. When you read it over three times before going to bed, open the Bible and sleep with it - sleep with that Bible right under your pillow and you'll dream of that lucky number. When you get up the next morning, you can tell a person exactly about that number. And if you throw that number then they'll catch it.

~ from "Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork: Beliefs Accepted By Many Negroes and White Persons, These Being Orally Recorded Among Blacks and Whites, Volume Three"
by Harry Middleton Hyatt (1973)

Various Voodoo remedies used to be sold in pharmacies in New Orleans in the 19th century. Potions were labeled by number so that customers could ask for "Number Six" without asking for "Love Success," for example. There's a pharmacy museum on Chartres Street in the Quarter that had some old voodoo stuff that was pretty interesting.

Voodoo was mentioned a couple other times on my trip, in sort of interesting ways. On Brie's last Sunday, we went to Mass at St. Augustine Church in Faubourg Treme. They sometimes have "Jazz Mass" there but I think we were there for a regular service. I had never been to Mass before, so I have nothing to compare it to, but Brie tells me that it's unusual to sing "When the Saints Go Marching In" and "This Little Light of Mine" at Mass.

At one point in the sermon, the priest said, "God is not magic. God is not gris-gris." Gris-gris (pronounced "gree gree") is a Voodoo talisman, a small cloth bag full of herbs, oils, bones, nails, hair, grave dirt, etc. that one wears to ward off evil or bring good luck. I noticed his comment especially because he didn't have to explain what gris-gris is... the congregation would have obviously known... but I didn't really think more about it, until two days later, when I was driving Brie to the airport. We were listening to a recording of Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, speaking at our church retreat this year (which I didn't attend,) and he said, "What happens in our religion, what happens in our faith, is that we want God to help us get the things (we want.) ...It depersonalizes our relationship with God. God is no longer a Father who we trust, who is guiding us to live a better story by shaping our character. What is He? He's a genie in a lamp. And if we do this religious thing, He will grant our wishes. You know what that is? It's Voodoo. The closest thing we have to Evangelical culture in America is Voodoo."

Sometimes I think when I'm supposed to really hear something, God will tell me several times. And here was a sermon from a Catholic priest in New Orleans and a podcast by a post-modern thirtysomething writer saying the exact same thing: God is not Voodoo. And I wonder if I've been trying to do things, things that are not literally magical but are like little head games that I play with myself, to make my life turn out the way that I think it should be. Rather than listening for God's voice and trying to follow it. And maybe God wants me to quit worrying about the future and just do the best that I can with what I have.

It's also possible He just didn't want me to get a tarot card reading in Jackson Square, which I wanted to do because I've always thought tarot cards were cool and creepy, and I could use it as research. So I didn't. Just in case.

I told her that I was a flop with chicks
I'd been this way since 1956
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign
She said, What you need is
Love Potion Number Nine

~"Love Potion Number Nine"
Lyrics by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller

cajun air conditioning, streetcars, and snow in july

2008-07-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

After our jazz brunch, Heidi, Brie and I decided to ride the St. Charles streetcar through the Garden District. The St. Charles streetcars began operating in 1835 (pulled by mules,) making them the oldest continuously operating street railway system in the world. When the streetcars were replaced by buses in the 19040s, the St. Charles line was saved by being designated a national historic landmark.

We got off in Carrollton and walked to a little stand in the middle of a neighborhood, and got snowballs, which are basically really soft snowcones available in a hundred flavors and dished out in Chinese takeout containers. I LOVED mine. I was so happy. I don't think Brie and Heidi were quite as excited about theirs as I was about mine. (I'll spare you the shot of my strawberry/raspberry-stained tongue.)

We walked around in Carrollton, which was kind of exhausting because of the heat. Heidi said she knows now why things are slow in the south... it's just too hot to do anything quickly. We looked around in a boutique in the Riverbend district, which used to be an open air market, and walked back to the streetcar, which we took back to the Quarter.

The Carrollton stop:

Self-portrait:

What happened back at the apartment:

We did rally later, and attempted to go to two restaurants (Port of Call = 90 minute wait, Napoleon House = closed) before settling on a restaurant in the Quarter with some generic name like "Quarter Restaurant," where Brie was tricked into ordering fried duck quesadillas. Everything here is fried.

"The Louisiana diet will kill a man as surely as the sword." ~King of the Hill

We also went to Cafe du Monde and got beignets and hot chocolate. And discussed politics. Just how we roll.

The next day we drove to Slidell (which took longer than it should have because I hadn't yet replaced the spare tire, but fortunately Brie's dad entertained us by singing Ol' Man River on speakerphone as we drove over the bridge) and went on a flatboat tour of Honey Island Swamp, which was about an hour longer than my attention span could handle, but still kind of fun.

An alligator named Yellow Jaw:

A dragonfly named Vilhelm:

A swamp resident whose name I didn't catch:

And cajun air conditioning:

On the way back, we stopped near Bayou St. John to get po' boys at Parkway Bakery, though I couldn't get either Brie or Heidi to get the fried shrimp one, as Heidi does not like shrimp and Brie does not like fried. Then we drove around that area a little to see the bayou and then on to Lake Pontchartrain.

New Orleans is on the river, but all connection to the river is as a port. For recreation, people go to the lake. We saw a lot of people with picnics and frisbees. Further along, cement steps go right down into the water. We drove through the Lakeview area, which was badly flooded during Katrina when the 17th Street levee was breeched, and onto Bucktown, a commercial fishing village that was destroyed. The high water marks here were near or on the roofs of the houses, and many, many of them were still boarded up or were obviously empty inside.

Then we went back to the Quarter, and drove around until we found 521 Governor Nicholls, New Orleans home of the prettiest couple in the world. Why did we do this in New Orleans when we wouldn't do this in Los Angeles? I don't know. It's a mystery.

In case you missed that issue of Star, this is the house, only a few blocks from my place:

After that went home and washed the swamp/lake off, and headed out to the Columns Hotel, where people actually sit on the veranda and sip mint juleps. Besides the mosquitoes, which were out with a vengeance, it was awesome. Oh, Mint Julep, where have you been all my life? The Columns is on St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District amidst a bunch of big old houses, so it was really quiet and peaceful. Every once in a while a streetcar would go by, the handful of people inside lit up like they were on a moving stage. In this picture you can see the blurred image of a streetcar, as well as the drunk white-haired gentleman who introduced his friend Nadine to us about six times:

After that, we went back to Port of Call, where Heidi and I split a hamburger and Brie and I tried their famous Monsoons. They like to name drinks after disastrous weather conditions here. We were trying to get to Preservation Hall by 11 in time to catch the last jazz set, and we did get there by 11, just in time to catch it closing. I could write an entire blog entry about the things here that are supposed to be open at various times and are not. I won't. But I could.

Since we couldn't hear jazz, we had to content ourselves with just walking around looking really, really hot. Like this:

And we may have eaten more beignets. Can't be sure.

Dere's an ol' man called de Mississippi
Dat's de ol' man dat I'd like to be!
What does he care if de world's got troubles?
What does he care if de land ain't free?

Ol' man river,
Dat ol' man river
He mus' know sumpin'
But don't say nuthin',
He jes' keeps rollin'
He keeps on rollin' along.

~ "Ol' Man River"
Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

the last time i saw jesus, i was drinking bloody marys in the south

2008-07-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

Seeing as I'm 19 days behind on the New Orleans part of the trip, and taking advantage of the rain from Dolly, I thought it would be a good morning to stay indoors and blog a little, and maybe catch up to only 12 days behind.

Brie's first week here was nice and lowkey. We mostly worked during the day, sometimes at home and sometimes at coffeeshops. Working here has been a big improvement over trying to work in Rome last year, where I didn't have easy access to the internet and all the coffeeshops were full of loud tourists. I'm not necessarily working that much better, though.

Brie picked up a handy little skill while she was out here. Infused by the jazz soul of New Orleans, and finding that this little piano in Pat O'Brien's Pub is stuffed full of garbage bags so that people won't play it, she learned how to play guitar. In case she's planning on whipping it out at a party soon, I won't ruin the surprise by telling you that she can now play "Poughkeepsie," "Long Lost Brother," and a song with a refrain that includes a phrase that sounds like "free, free of the danger." This is Brie rocking out:

I'm a little jealous of her rocking-out hair.

The other thing we managed to find time to do was eat and drink, necessary activities raised to the level of art in New Orleans. Although, just as a warning for the future, the combination of seafood gumbo and hurricanes is a bad idea. Bad. Idea. So what if Brie learned how to play a new musical instrument? I learned a little something in New Orleans, too.

A much better combination of food and drink is beignets (ben-yays) and hot chocolate at Cafe Du Monde on Jackson Square. When I was 16, Adam Curry and I drove to New Orleans from Mississippi for one day, and this is what I remember. Beignets. Powdered-sugar-covered pieces of heaven. There are a mass of outdoor tables, and the floor is white with sugar, and you can get a plate of beignets and two hot chocolates for six bucks.

Brie's beignets:

When Heidi Spencer (née Hazen) arrived the following Friday, it was a nice excuse to completely stop working for a few days (read: stop attempting to pretend to work) and just see the city. We got dinner at Bywater Barbecue (where the street "Desire" is, as in "A Streetcar Named" though now the only public transportation that runs to Desire is a bus) and then decided to show Heidi the beautiful courtyard with the flaming fountain (and the hurricanes, I suppose... I did NOT have one) at Pat O'Brien's. When we walked in, it was ten times more crowded than it had been the weekend before when Brie and I went. We had to push through people to get through the courtyard. The other thing that was rather remarkable was that the crowd was almost entirely silent. Everyone was signing to one another. Apparently the National Association of the Deaf had a convention in town. It was kind of amazing. Fueled by hurricanes, we returned home to make a Happy Birthday video for Yvette 3.0, the missing member of our little traveling quartet.

Saturday morning we somehow managed to get up early (before 8!) to visit the Crescent City Farmer's Market in the warehouse district before breakfast. Because Heidi likes farmer's markets. This one wasn't too impressive, though. Maybe we're spoiled.

We finished with the farmer's market earlier than we thought we would, so we drove across town via Magazine Street and saw Audubon Park and the outside of the zoo. We also stopped at Whole Foods, because we needed water and cash, and because Heidi can't resist the mother ship. Then we came back to the apartment and got ready to go to jazz brunch at Commander's Palace, one of the nicest restaurant in New Orleans, serving tourists and riverboat captains since 1880. It was Yvette's birthday breakfast so we thought we should make it good. Brie had steak and eggs, I think, which she liked, and Heidi and I both had the "Louisiana Sportsman's Brunch." Because it was brunch, and we're sportsmen. It was, like... pecan pancakes with peaches and "duck debris." It sounds completely weird but it was actually pretty great. For dessert I had a cloud-like souffle. The spirit of Yvette had three Bloody Marys. Our toast:

I tried to drink mine for her sake but it was just too much for me at 11:30 in the morning. A trio of jazz musicians played for the room and serenaded each table, which was fun. The trumpet player sounded like Louis Armstrong. The guitar player had halitosis, according to Heidi, who was sitting across from him when he was singing.

The last time I saw Jesus
I was drinking bloody marys in the South
In a barroom in New Orleans
Rinsin' out the bad taste in my mouth

She wore a dark and faded blazer
With a little of the lining hanging out
When the jukebox played Miss Dorothy Moore
I knew that it was him without a doubt

I said the road is my redeemer
I never know just what on earth I'll find
In the faces of a stranger
In the dark and weary corners of a mind

She said, The last highway is only
As far away as you are from yourself
And no matter just how bad it gets
It does no good to blame somebody else

Ain't it crazy
What's revealed when you're not looking all that close
Ain't it crazy
How we put to death the ones we need the most

I know I'm not a martyr
I've never died for anyone but me
The last frontier is only
The stranger in the mirror that I see

But when I least expect it
Here and there I see my Savior's face
He's still my favorite loser
Falling for the entire human race

~"Jesus in New Orleans"
Lyrics by Karin Bergquist & Linford Detweiler

i'll meet you here tomorrow, independence day

2008-07-17T13:03:00.000-07:00

I realize that so far I've only written about the negative aspects of New Orleans... the missing cars... the adamantly not-missing vermin. I haven't written about the bright colors of the buildings, the oaks that lean over the streets dripping with spanish moss and strings of beads, the brief, furious thunderstorms, the amazing seafood, the Southern-Brooklyn accents, the sensation of walking through a world perched precariously between cultures and times.

I was here a few days alone before Brie arrived on the fourth of July. That day I hung out with a guy named Paul Andre, whose family has lived in New Orleans since his ancestors fled the Haitian slave revolts in the late 18th century. We ate shrimp po' boys at Parkway Brewery near St. John's Bayou and drove through the city. He showed me the shotgun houses Uptown, built with no hallways, one room after the other, the big houses in the Garden District, built by Americans to show up the French in the Quarter, and the high water marks on the sides of the creole cottages in the Bywater.

We stopped at a potter's field Uptown. Paul thought that slaves were buried there, but we got out and walked around and couldn't find any markers that old. The flooding and unevenness of even fairly new tombstones show why most of the graves in New Orleans are built above ground.

Later that evening I set off to pick up Brie from the airport. This about sums up that little drive:

I didn't get out of the car much, so I don't have a picture of me waiting for roadside assistance again. Although I do have the Roadside Assistance Guy:

I'm beginning to think Isaac is mad at me. Did she not want to go on this road trip? I mean, she could have said something two months ago, instead of just being passive-aggressive about it.

I also managed to break the strap on my flip flop while I was talking to the R.A.G. Though I can't really blame that on Isaac, so maybe it's someone else who didn't want me to go on this road trip and is trying to tell me something.

Isaac and I pulled up about 45 minutes late to pick Brie up from the airport. I still really wanted to try to make it to the fireworks on the river, so even though it was now past 8, I drove a fast 50 mph on the spare tire back to the Quarter, hunted around for a while for parking, found parking, borrowed shoes from Brie because of the flip flop debacle, walked to the apartment, sprayed on poisonous amounts of OFF, grabbed a tripod, and we set off down to the river to see the fireworks. The fireworks started when we were only a couple of blocks from the apartment and stopped when we were a block from the river. So, this is what they looked like to us:

(Thanks to Ry for help with the photos and to Steph for the generous lending of the tripod.)

We decided to go ahead and walk down and pretend we were watching fireworks. People were still sitting on the riverbank, drinking (you can drink outside here,) talking, and "cooking broccoli," as our pastor's daughter Mei Li says.

Me and Brie, doing none of the above:

After that we got dinner at Crescent City Brewery, where the bill came out to:

God bless America.

Everybody knows
You only live a day
But it's brilliant anyway

I saw you in a perfect place
It's gonna happen soon but not today
So go to sleep and make the change
I'll meet you here tomorrow

Independence Day

~"Independence Day"
Lyrics by Elliott Smith

the tale of despereaux: being the story of a mouse, a girl, some life cereal, and a netflix envelope

2008-07-08T21:29:00.001-07:00

Come closer, Dear Readers, and I will tell you The Tale of Despereaux.

Despereaux was a little mouse who lived Behind The Fridge in the kitchen of a girl named Michelle. Despereaux liked to crawl out on the counter while she was trying to work and freak her completely out. To tell you the truth, which I always do, he was terribly in love with her. He had been reading too many books on the subject.

But Michelle was wily and she had soon constructed a humane trap out of a paper towel, peanuts, and a waste basket. It looked something like this:

When she returned from getting her car back from the impound lot, she found that the trap had worked. Sort of. It looked like this:

But Despereaux was not there.

So Michelle tried another kind of trap, this time with LIFE cereal.

But Despereaux, known as the Houdini of Behind the Fridge, escaped again.

So Michelle tried a third time, this time with a Netflix envelope containing the last disc of the third season of a popular but now canceled television show, and woke the next morning to a THWUMP sound and a tiny mouse shriek. She leaned over the trap to see the mouse and perhaps take a victory photograph, but Despereaux was so overcome by her beauty and his great love for her that he LEAPT in the air with joy, nearly coming out of the basket! (Despereaux is also known as Air Despereaux in Behind the Fridge.) Thinking quickly, as she is wont to do, Michelle grabbed the closest thing at hand, which was, ironically, the final shooting script for The Tale of Despereaux! This story is so self-referential and hip!

Michelle decided Despereaux would enjoy a new home in The Dumpster On The Sidewalk, and left him there, with many tears and affectionate glances.

For a while, Despereaux really enjoyed living in The Dumpster On The Sidewalk. Friendly people threw him scraps of food to eat. But after a couple of days, Despereaux realized that what he really wanted was to be near Michelle, and he somehow found his frigging way out of The Dumpster On The Sidewalk and journeyed back to Behind The Fridge.

But Michelle knew in her heart that their love could never be, and she needed to take drastic measures.

Soon after this, Michelle heard the THWAP of the trap being sprung. She thought at first it was her heart, but then ran to the counter next to Behind the Fridge and found Despereaux there once again, staring at her dolefully through green plastic.

Despereaux, Michelle, and Michelle's friend Brie, newly arrived from Los Angeles, took a ride together. Despereaux, inside a bag from a rather over-priced clothing store, tried reciting a love poem he had written for Michelle, but messed up on the second stanza and fell silent.

They soon came to Despereaux's new home By The River In City Park. Michelle bid Despereaux a fond adieu, and Brie opened the door and cried, "Run, run, little mouse!" After a moment of cowering in the corner, Despereaux ran for the river, turning only briefly to send Michelle a look she would remember for the rest of her life. A look that said, "I honor you!" And also, "I crapped in your Anthropologie bag, so don't use it for clothes or anything."

The End.

Thank you for listening to my story, Dear Readers. Please come back next week for The Tale of Giacomo the Giant Roach.

(Just kidding, Heidi.)

(Not really.)

pound puppy

2008-07-04T16:33:00.001-07:00

Tuesday morning (OK, OK, afternoon) I left Jessica’s and hit the open road again. Unfortunately I was tired of driving and I kept making up reasons to stop (“oh, look, there’s a Wal-Mart, I need a dry erase board” or “I wonder if Jack-in-the-Box serves 'cupcake in a shake'?”) and it took me forever to get to New Orleans.

I arrived at around 11. I was intimidated about finding it at night, and about parking, which I knew was going to be difficult. But I found parking right in front of where it was supposed to be, and then couldn’t find the number or really figure out if I was even picking the right gate, but I guessed, and tried my key, and it worked. (My gate is the one under the flag.) So I opened it and there was this long narrow alley leading to the back, where my apartment door was. I didn’t figure out until later that there was a switch you could hit at the one end that would turn a light on over my door. This picture of the apartment and the alley looks much more cheerful at night. At the time, I was kind of spooked, and had to tell myself to just walk, to just keep moving forward and everything would be okay. I got to a doorway in the back of the building and tried another key, and that worked too, which was a relief. I'll post some pictures of the inside later.

The next morning I got up and mostly just worked on doing laundry and settling in. The grocery stores near me are little markets so I actually drove six miles to Metarie, a big suburb of New Orleans, so I could go to a Winn-Dixie with a lot of options and a big parking lot. That's right, I went out of my way to go to a chain. That's what I do. Later for dinner I went to a diner called "Clover Grill" where I worked on arbitration stuff and had a big hamburger that I watched being fried under a hubcap. To keep in the juices. I was later informed that this diner is a big drag queen hangout, but there weren't any there when I was there.

The parking in front of my building is two hours only from 7 to 7. The owner of the apartment told me this could be pushed a bit, so I decided to move my car every three hours, at 10, 1, and 4. This worked fine on Wednesday. But you may have noticed, in the complicated sign shown at left, a tiny little marker indicating street cleaning hours. If you did notice that, then good for you, because you probably wouldn't have come out at 10 am on Thursday and found your parking spot looking like this:

In New Orleans the nice areas are right next to the terrible areas. I'm living in the historic French Quarter, which is pretty nice and fairly safe. But two blocks up from the river from me is Rampart Street, and the Faubourg Treme, where if you walked outside and found your car missing it wouldn't be because it was towed. The owner of this apartment left a note telling me not to be tempted by the St. Louis Cemetries located in Treme, even though they're cool looking, because you will get killed in there. So I was pretty excited to see that the Claiborne Auto Pound, where the mean people took poor little Isaac, was on the other side of Treme, and that Google Maps thought it seemed like a good idea to take the path through the cemeteries to get there.

I decided just to walk down Bourbon St. all the way to Canal and then up to Claiborne and walk over. I was a little nervous about the Claiborne leg of the trip but I felt like if it looked really scary I could just stop and get a cab.

So I didn't carry a bag, and dressed scrappy looking, and set off. I took a picture of Canal Street with my phone and sent it to my mom so she wouldn't worry. But then when I got to Claiborne, it looked a little shady. The sidewalk bordered the walled cemetery on one side, which reminded me of going to visit Vicenzo on the east side of Termini Station last year. A old white guy rolled down his window and asked me where I was going in a disbelieving voice. But I just put on my best Napoli face and kept going, and found Isaac looking scared and alone (you can see the tops of the mausoleums behind her,) and bailed her out with $125. There was an option to rent a parking space for $200 with the apartment which I had turned down... so this went a long way towards not saving me any money on that decision. Now if I can just remember to move next Thursday.

we have met the enemy, and he is us: why you shouldn't eat junk food while watching wall-e

2008-07-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

After a long, tough day of blogging at Zen, I met Jess at her apartment and we went to see Wall-E at the Alamo Drafthouse. It's not at the real Alamo, though that would be pretty cool, and pretty sad from a historical preservation viewpoint. But it is at a movie theater with an alien theme, and a mural that said, "When aliens invade, remember the Alamo!" I think this means, "When aliens invade, remember to hole up in an indefensible fort against insurmountable odds until the aliens come in and slaughter you!" You can't fool me, I know my Texas history. I did that arbitration.

The other thing about this theater, besides the rather ominous mural, is that you can order food while you watch the movie. The seats are behind these long bench-like tables and there's enough space between the tables and the row in front of you for waiters to scurry by and take your order. The menu has salads, sandwiches, pizza, etc. and, in honor of Wall-E, stuff like "cupcake in a shake." This sounds like a great idea, and it is, until you're watching the movie and [MILD SPOILER ALERT] about an hour into it, you finally see the people of the future, and they're all really fat. And they sit around in their hover chairs and eat things like "cupcake in a shake." And you look down at your grilled cheese on sourdough and the waiters running around bringing people food, and you feel kind of bad about yourself, and really, let's face it, about mankind in general.

None of this is to disparage the movie. I loved the movie. The first hour, especially, is brilliant. I'm just saying, maybe you want to go jogging beforehand, that's all.

michelle does austin, or: don't mess with me, texas

2008-06-30T13:48:00.000-07:00

I didn't leave Carlsbad until 8 pm and still had to driveway halfway across Texas to get to Austin by morning, before Jessica left for work. I don't know what delirious part of me thought that this was a good idea. Probably the part of me that remembers driving 12 hours to Taylor, from 5 pm to 5 am, a DECADE ago, before I became suddenly and inexplicably old and weary.

The first couple of hours were on a very dark and very lonely prairie road. Along the side of the road I saw two foxes, four deer (three living and one on his way to a better place,) five cows grazing RIGHT on the side of the road, and innumerable rabbits. I am astonished I made it through the night without killing another living thing.

By 11 I was already tired and kind of cranky. I decided to stop and get some coffee at the Sonic in Pecos, Texas. (Jessica: "It's pronouned 'PuhAYcuss'.") I thought it might be closed at 11 pm, but au contraire, mon frere, it was JUMPING. It was THE place to go in Pecos in the middle of the night. I saw several people in cowboy hats. I wanted to take their picture but I decided not to get pounded. (Jessica: "Wise decision.") So I just ordered my "java chiller" and popcorn chicken from two surly teenage girls who neither spoke nor smiled and was on my way.

The coffee helped for about an hour. I stopped worrying about hitting rabbits and tore along singing David Garza at the top of my not-that-great voice. Then I hit another wall and really thought maybe I should just stop in Ft. Stockton. I would have, too, but I couldn't get anyone in Ft. Stockton on the phone. So I decided to keep going, especially since Isaac said I could buy this new and fun summer bag if I didn't stop and spend the money on a hotel. I listened to "On the Road" to stay awake. The thing is, "On the Road" is actually pretty boring. Later this weekend I listened to it on my ipod to put myself to sleep.

I thought I would have some respite at 1 when Tim called to talk over our New Orleans script. But I've had terrible reception on the road, and our conversation went like this...

Tim: I've been thinking about the beginning of the script, and I realized that -
Michelle: Hello? Are you still there?
iPhone: Call failed. Call back?

Michelle: Hey, sorry, the call dropped.
Tim: It's ok, I was just saying that I was thinking about the beginning of the script, and -
Michelle: I bet if I could hear you I would think what you were saying was really smart.
iPhone: Call failed. Call back?

Michelle: Sorry again.
Tim: It's ok, I'm just driving too. So anyway my genius solution for that problem we were discussing is -
iPhone: Call failed. Just give up, you know you want to.
Michelle: You don't know what I want.

Tim's Phone: Ring, ring, ring.
Tim: (asleep in bed with his wife) That's just Michelle calling from somewhere in Texas. Just hit ignore.
Caryn: (ignore)

The drive was made worse by the fact that the highway, which normally has an 80 mph speed limit, ratchets all the way down to 65 mph at night. And the last time I was in Texas - on my way to Austin in fact - eight years ago, these two cowboy cops stopped me and gave me a ticket for going 72 in a 70. SEVENTY-TWO IN A SEVENTY. I hated them so much. So now I'm kind of terrified of Texas cops and I went 65 the entire night, even though I barely saw another car, let alone a cop car, the whole time.

After what felt like half my life, I pulled up to Jessica's apartment in downtown Austin at about 6, catching her before she left for work. She had made up a little air mattress for me in her room, which I was so, so happy to see. I don't know if I was totally coherent. I stumbled into some loungy clothes and fell asleep, totally ignoring her cats who were scratching at the bedroom door and wondering why I was ignoring them, and slept until 4:30, when Jessica got home from work. It was amazing. We went out and got some food at a casual Japanese dining establishment and then sat on her little patio-ish type thing and talked and drank beer with orange slices in it, which is some great Texas secret. I don't even like beer and I kind of liked it. It still took me like two hours to drink one glass, but what can you do.

The last time I was in Austin, it was 115 degrees outside and all Jessica and I could bring ourselves to do was go to Dairy Queen and get ice cream ("I'll always have a place at the DQ.") So every time she's like, "Austin is God's kingdom on earth," I've had to beg to differ. But this time, I have to say, I have find quite a few delightful things.

A few highlights of my weekend...

Fried avocado stuffed with chicken and cheese and topped with sour cream. WHAT!?

Really fun coffeehouses with free wifi and interesting music...

... at which I worked on my blog and Jessica watched videos...

...of fainting goats...

...and laughing babies.

A massage for my poor, poor aching neck from a guy named Slate.

Game night with people from Jessica's church.

6th Street.

Trying to go hear music on 6th Street with Jessica's friend Brie, but actually just wandering around for an hour.

Vending machines with candy, coke, and independent music!

Brie giving Jessica directions to a place called Smoke 'n' Os.

Jessica feeling skeptical of Brie's directions.

Jessica disregarding the lessons learned by her friend Michelle.

Brie getting directions to Smoke 'n' Os.

Arriving at Smoke 'n' Os.

Fruit punch hookah.

Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas.

Texan table decorations.

The most amazing brisket sandwich ever.

My new favorite bar...

...with free wifi! Nothing like a Bailey's and a blog.

same bat time, same bat channel

2008-06-29T13:12:00.000-07:00

Thursday morning, I woke up in El Paso - which Jessica fondly calls "one of the armpits of Texas" - and updated the blog. Yea for hotels with free internet. I left at noon and drove the three hours to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. I thought for a minute about skipping it and going straight to Austin, because I was getting tired and it was out of the way, but then decided I should just go. It took me about three hours, not counting stopping at a border patrol station and explaining who I was and where I was going and how I really am seriously not Mexican.

I thought I had been to Carlsbad Caverns before. I have memories of my dad explaining the difference between stalactites (with a C for Ceiling) and stalagmites (with a G for Ground.) But I haven't been there; it must have been another cave. It was in the middle of the desert, with nothing for miles. I stopped a few miles away at a little shop that said it sold tickets for the caves, but I think that was just a ploy to get you to come in and buy fudge. The woman gave me four samples and was trying to give me more but I begged off. I knew it was a bad idea to have fudge samples as your first meal of the day and then walk for miles in a cave. But I ate them anyway. They were delicious.

Carlsbad Caverns were first explored in the early 1900s by a 16-year-old cowboy named Jim White who was out mending fences, saw a cloud of smoke in the distance, and followed it to find that it was not smoke, but a cloud of bats leaving the entrance of the cave. He started exploring the cave with a lanterns, and over the next few decades became the expert on the cave, naming the various features and leading National Geographic surveyors through the caverns.

I paid my six dollars to hike down through natural entrance to the cave (as opposed to taking the elevator nine miles down to the bottom.) I just made the afternoon cutoff for the latest you could enter, which ended up being really nice because for almost the entire way down I was alone on the trail. And it was... well, creepy, to be honest, but quiet and lovely too.

This is at the beginning of the hike, looking back up at the entrance. During the day, hundreds of swallows swoop around the cave, but they're too small to show up in this picture:

It took about an hour to get to the bottom of the hike, which ends in the "Big Room." The caverns are incredible and spectacular. I walked along in the dark and damp, water dripping off the limestone all around me, and occasionally on me, and thought how beautiful this world is.

Apparently a lighting designer from Broadway created the setup so that some features are highlighted while keeping the overall sense of darkness. Early visitors to the cave, led on tours by Jim White, had to be lowered in a guano mining bucket and explored the cave with lanterns. I thought about how thrilling that would be... and also how dark. It would be fun to have such a sense of discovery but I'm sure they also missed a majority of what is amazing about the cave, part of which is the sheer scope.

My pictures honestly don't do it justice, but here are a few:

After the hike, I had an hour or two to kill before the evening flight of the bats, so finally got something to eat to counterbalance the four pieces of fudge, and took a nap in my car, during which I think I wrenched my neck. It's still bothering me. Although maybe I'm blaming the nap when I should be blaming the hundreds and hundreds of highway miles. Both literally and figuratively.

A little after 7 I walked down to the stone seats built into the hillside in front of the natural entrance of the cave to see the bat flights. Most nights during the summer, thousands of Mexican freetail bats leave the cave at sunset to feed, returning at dawn. These bats are tiny, only three inches from head to foot, as you can see from the picture at right, which I have to admit, I didn't take. Those aren't even my fingers. I tried to catch a bat to keep as a pet, but I failed.

The sun was beginning to set, and a few swallows still flew and chirped around the cave. A little before 8, a few bats began to fly out of the cave, and in about ten seconds the whole entrance was full of tiny black swooping bats. It reminded of me of the scene in The Green Mile, when John Coffee opens his mouth and the black evil flies out.

The park rangers don't allow cameras in the areas during the bat flights out of fear that the noise will disturb the bats' sonar. I really wished I could have taken pictures. I have never seen anything like it. Hundreds of bats would fly out, in a constant flow, swoop around in a big cloud, off to the right, and fly off into the desert, a long black snaky line against a lavender sky. It was amazing. And then, in about fifteen minutes, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The thick cloud slowed down to a trickle of bats, and then they were gone, little black specks in the distance.

Happy Birthday, Jason!

i believe in a thing called thing

2008-06-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

To comfort myself for missing the cheesy re-enactment of the Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, I asked Isaac if we could stop at a roadside "attraction" called "The Thing," advertised on billboards 90 miles each way on the 10, much like South of the Border on I-95. She said "Only if it's under two dollars." She said it in her car voice but I can understand her.

Fortunately, "The Thing" costs one dollar, so we stopped. Basically you go into this gas station gift shop, pay your dollar, go in through a door in the back, and walk on a sidewalk, painted with yellow feet, that leads through a series of three warehouses, where there was the MOST RANDOM COLLECTION OF WEIRD STUFF THAT I HAVE EVER SEEN. Some highlights, for your viewing pleasure...

A Rolls-Royce in which Adolph Hitler supposedly rode, though "it can't be proved":

Life-size wooden carvings depicting various torture methods:

A really dirty bedroom set with a mannequin of a Native American man:

And... the "Thing":

If you were really observant, you may have noticed something, which is that the "Thing" is not so much a "Thing" as it is a "Dead Person."

I left with these wonderful images in my head and headed to El Paso, where I stopped at a hotel, crawled into bed, and tried to convince Isaac to let me sleep the entire next day. She said no, emphatically, which was good, because that day I saw some of the most spectacular natural beauty of my life.

wyatt, i am rolling

2008-06-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

So it looks like I'm doing this thing. Two mornings ago I embarked on my Great Southern Road Trip Which Also Includes Some Midwest And Some Regular West, or GSRTWAISMASRW for short. This is me embarking with Isaac (my car):

If I don't die in a fiery crash on this trip as I did in the rather ominous dream of a friend who I hope is not a prophet, I'll drive to New Orleans by way of Phoenix and Austin, stay for a month on a writing sabbatical (which I am determined to protect after my experience last year in Italy, where I got no writing done) then hit Destin, Knoxville, and then Fayetteville, North Carolina, my home town, for a couple of weeks. Then New Bern, Nashville, Indianapolis, and Chicago, and Route 66 all the way back to LA by the fall.

After spending the night with my family in Reseda and saying good-bye to my aunt and grandma, I set out east. A few hours later, I took a detour off the 10 (though I think it's only called "the 10" in Los Angeles and the rest of the world calls it "I-10") to see the Salton Sea, which was fascinatingly photographed by my talented roommate Stephanie a few months ago.

The Salton Sea was created in 1905 when the Colorado River flooded and it took authorities two years to get it under control. Now the water is mostly agricultural runoff. Apparently, the tilapia in the water commit mass suicide every few years and wash up onto the "beaches," which would explain the strong smell of death and the very, very sharp fish bone sand that flipped painfully up into my sandals when I got out of the car to take a few pictures.

Where I walked:

Where I stayed:

(Just kidding, Mom.)

What I look like driving around:

I left Salton Sea, probably smelling like dead tilapia, and headed to Phoenix to see my old Taylor friend Pete and his wife Heather. They took me to dinner at a restaurant in Phoenix called Sam's Cafe, where they give you a little piece of white chocolate and pecan candy wrapped in a corn husk for dessert, and we caught up on our lives. They're moving to Durham next month so Pete can go to Duke for business school. And, as it has ever been and ever will be every single time I visit Phoenix, it was a hundred degrees out until the sun went down. That night I stayed in their lovely guest room, of which I am envious, and dreamt that my apartment was full of orange lizards and frogs. In my dream I thought, "Do lizards turn into frogs eventually? I guess they must." It's funny how our dreaming brains are sort of brilliant and sort of mentally handicapped.

The next morning started out well. I had breakfast with the VTs and set out for Tombstone, listening to an audiobook of Kerouac's "On the Road" and feeling grateful for my life. There was more good news - my doctor called to tell me that my heart murmur is nothing to worry about and I probably won't keel over any time soon - but that phone call happened to be timed perfectly to distract me from taking the last exit for fuel for hundreds of miles of Arizona desert.

Here's me waiting for roadside assistance:

For about ten minutes - which was just about 30 seconds after the moment that I realized that I really had better find a gas station soon to about 30 seconds before I actually ran out of gas - I had absolutely no service on my cell phone. I was having fantasies about walking for miles on the side of the road at noon in the desert and I couldn't help but notice that the scrubby desert landscape looked just about right for burying someone you never want to be found. But then, right as Isaac made a kind of clunky jerk and insisted that I pull her over (Isaac is a girl), I got one tiny heaven-sent bar of reception on my phone, and I was able to call for a truck. For the rest of the trip, I am going to be stopping for gas when I get down to three quarters of a tank. Or maybe just anything below F.

I figured I still had time to make it to the mining towns I wanted to see before stopping for the night, so I headed to Bisbee, an old copper mining town that was unexpectedly beautiful. I drove around the windy little streets for a while and then decided to be a true tourist and get a tour into the Queen Mine.

The tour was kind of interesting, because it was fun to ride on the tracks into the mine, but it was about an hour longer than I was interested in it. I think I actually know how to be a miner now. The guide had me hold two sticks of dynamite and a detonator for a demonstration, and told me not to let them touch. It seemed like a valid warning as he wrapped them carefully in separated cloth bags when I gave them back. Was it Milan Kundera who said the fear of heights is not so much the fear of falling as it is the fear that one will suddenly leap? I had an almost overwhelming urge to try to make them explode.

Because of the gas situation and the (inordinately long) tour, I didn't get to Tombstone until after 5, and everything was closing. I was surprised at how uncrowded it seemed... I don't know if it's just not a popular summer destination or if everyone else in the world has been scared off by the gas prices. It was still fun to walk the streets and imagine what it would have been like to have been Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday, or some rustler or a prostitute, just trying to get by and stay alive.

there's things i remember and things i forget (i miss you, i guess that i should)

2008-02-05T10:15:00.001-08:00

A year to the day after I stepped off the plane in Rome Fiumicino and tried to figure out how to buy a train ticket, these are a few of the things I remember about Italy:

1. The glowing pink trees in the Villa Borghese.
2. Carla's "American" accent. "I'm just, like, really glad to be here."
3. The dueling Chinese waiters on Via Cavour. They stood outside their respective restaurants trying to get you to come in and if you went in one restaurant, the other waiter would yell at you.
4. The dandelion that grew on the roof across from our bedroom window in Rome.
5. Heidi in bed in Vernazza with her ear plugs in. "Are you TALKING TO ME? I can't HEAR YOU. I have EAR PLUGS IN."
6. Yvette and I trying to cross the Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore for for the first time. I thought I was going to die.
7. Our weird tour guide at the Priscilla Catacombs. I thought we might die then, too.
8. The woman at the Greek gastronomia who taught us the names of the fruits in Italian, and the other woman who gave us pieces of chocolate when we couldn't pay for our yogurt.
9. Running to the National Museum of Rome with Brie while being pelted with hail.
10. Brie's gelato obsession.
11. Maria's shower breaking and not draining and making the entire apartment smell like something had died.
12. "I went to Georgetown. Maybe you've heard of it."
13. The bottle of wine my Pakistani internet cafe friend bought for me my last day in Rome.
14. Brie's top five: identifying scents, predicting waves, opening things, catching, and throwing.
15. "Con calma, con calma."
16. The pizza at the GranCaffe Strega (aka Santa Monica Pier,) and how when I first saw it, I thought, "There's no way I can eat this whole pizza."
17. Carla showing us how to get free drinks at the Irish pub on Via Nazionale.
18. The time I accidentally kicked a dog and got screamed at by an old Italian lady.
19. Yvette offering me food to pacify me.
20. How miserable Brie and I were for a couple of weeks back in Rome. I was working on an arbitration non-stop on Carla's laptop, and Brie had some mysterious wasting illness.
21. The guy at the gelateria near our apartment who always asked me to come out dancing.
22. Wearing two sweaters to bed in Rome.
23. Playing the movie game with Coma and Steve at that cafe in Trastevere where they gave us free beans, which we then felt obligated to eat.
24. "I think of yes."
25. How Vernazza was so quiet and small that it was news that we were there. One of the waiters there told Heidi he had heard that there were four American girls in town.
26. The waiter at the pizza place on Quattro Fontane: "I can't believe my eyes! You are full of magic!"
27. Choking on the word margherita, repeatedly.
28. The duck rape.
29. Going grocery shopping in the store across the piazza and keeping the fairly disgusting tuna kit I bought on the shelves above Yvette's bed.
30. Talking to Adam on my cell between cars of the train on our way back to Rome.
31. Crik crok sour cream potato chips.
32. "Oh, Meeshell, that is not a word!"
33. Walking down to Termini station with Carla to get noodles.
34. Brie journaling everywhere.
35. The lemon-scented rainy streets of Sorrento.
36. Reading "Harry Potter e il Principe Mezzosangue" on the train with the Italian guy reading over my shoulder.
37. "Piano, piano."
38. Going to church with Brie. There was a man there who kept staring at us during the sermon. One of the women in the church was trying to warn us about him, but said he was "non pericoloso." After church, we were walking back to the train station and he stepped out from behind a bus to say hello to us. We realized that he must have run diagonally across the field to be able to get in front of us.
39. Mamertinum, traditionally held to be the cell in which Paul and Peter were held.
40. Touring churches with Brie, and then more by myself after she left.
41. Fried zucchini flowers.
42. The Jewish ghetto and Bernini's turtle fountain.
43. Watching Walker Texas Ranger dubbed in Italian on the little TV in our bedroom.
44. "Gucci, prada."
45. Birds circling the domes near the Roman Forum.
46. The noisemakers sold in the piazzas.
47. Rain in the gutters in Pompeii.
48. The "passagiatta" in Florence.
49. The sound of the sea at the train station in Monterosso.
50. The feel of the sun on my face as I lay in the grass in the Villa Borghese on my last day in Rome.

david gives us another chance

2007-04-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

I am home now (yea!) but not caught up to real time on the blog yet, so I'll do a few more posts to finish up...

After Yvette left Venice, we headed to Rome, but decided to first give ourselves one more chance to see Renaissance art in the birthplace of the Renaissance, so we stopped in Florence for a night. The place we had stayed before was all booked up, so we found another place on the same street near the Central Market. As we were being let into the building, a big group of drunk guys came up on the street, singing "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" to us. Later, after we left to go out, they sort of reappeared and we tried to walk fast and take weird turns to lose them. It was a little odd, especially since it was still daylight out, and I kind of felt like we were inside some weird pushy drunk guy videogame.

We walked around Florence that evening, looking for some magical gelato place that Yvette had taken Heidi during their day in the city. We wandered around, trying some different areas, and finally found it, a little place on a funny little street in Santa Croce called Vivoli. And it was the most amazing gelato I ever had. It didn't even seem like gelato, it seemed like a different food group. It was so good that I wanted to go back immediately, and I saw everything else in Florence through a sort of post-gelato haze. That night we found a cute little mom and pop trattoria so that Heidi could have her cute little mom and pop trattoria fix. It was good. No Vivoli, but good.

The next day we were very productive. I had made early reservations at the Uffizi Gallery, so we got up and got ready and headed down there, picked up our tickets, had some coffee and pastries, and took a tour of the Gallery, which is basically a collection of all the significant Italian painters. I did the audio tour, which was interesting and helpful, although it did make me trail several rooms behind Heidi and Brie.

After Uffizi, we kind of wanted to go to Mario's again, but I had made 12:30 reservations at the David, and we were starving, so we just stopped for some panini and sat on the steps of the Duomo to eat them. A gypsy woman came up to us (which basically happens any time you sit down outside in Italy) to ask for money. She really liked the look of Brie's stuffed pizza sandwich, and stared at Brie and mimed eating until Brie split it with her.

After that we went to the Accademia, which houses both the David and Michelangelo's unfinished Prisoners from his unfinished Tomb of Pope Julius II. I was really interested in these, especially because they were unfinished and so they give you a glimpse into his techniques. Michelangelo supposedly said, "I saw angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free." That seems really true of the Prisoners, who look like humans caught in stone, trying to pull themselves away. I was so caught up in the sculptures that I didn't even notice for quite a while what should have been obvious from the minute I walked into the hall: the beatifully lit, coolly perfect, 17 feet tall statue of David.

The David, moreso than anything else that I saw in Italy, defies both description and photographs. It's such a familiar image that you think you know what it looks like. (There's a house a few blocks from me on 3rd that has about 18 replicas of The David on its front lawn... at Christmastime they put Santa hats on all of them.) But seeing it in the hall literally stops your breath for a moment. It's simply the most beautiful, perfect sculpture I've ever seen. It was considered a "badly blocked out" piece of marble by the Florence Signoria, but 26-year-old Michelangelo still had to fight to get the commission, and then carved the sculpture that would become the symbol for the city. We stared at it for a long time, walking around to see it from different angles, and then gave a cursory glance to the other art in the Accademia and left.

After that we had a couple of hours before we wanted to leave. I wanted to see the Medici chapels but they were closed that day. We ended up walking around San Lorenzo market. I bought an overdue Christmas present for Micky and a leather jacket for myself... I think I bargained pretty well. The guy who sold me the jacket told me if I could stay for the evening and go out with him he would have a surprise for me... as intriguing as that sounded, I had to pass. Brie and Heidi did their best to support the Tuscan leather industry as well and bought bags.

Without visiting Vivoli again, which saddened me greatly, we packed our ever-increasing number of bags and caught the train to Rome.