Hopes don't exist so that you can get them down

As preface to the following interaction, retired Detroit Red Wings goaltender Chris Osgood is my favorite hockey player.  He entered the 2010-2011 season (his last before retirement) four wins short of becoming the 10th goaltender ever to record 400 NHL wins.  For a 3-time Stanley Cup champion and probable future Hall of Famer, it seemed like a given that he would get those four wins over the course of a season, but he was relegated to backup status that year, and the 400th win proved frustratingly elusive.  It finally came at an overtime, career-high-46-save game that aired over Christmas when my fiancé was in Detroit, and with 13 minutes left in the third period, he stuck a videotape in his mom's VCR, pressed record for me, and walked away.  The videotape sat forgotten for four years (I don't remember ever learning of its existence) until my fiancé came across it yesterday and we played it.  Knowing he had only pressed record towards the end of the game (in which Osgood makes hardly any saves) and not knowing when the recording had ended, he was far more nervous watching the tape than if the nail-biter of a game were live, because he was unsure how much was on the tape and if he had recorded any post-game interviews, including the all-important interview with the goalie.  Once Osgood was finally interviewed following the win, he breathed a huge sigh of relief, asked me to confirm that this meant our engagement was in fact still on, and got up off the couch. Then I heard the announcer say that the game would be re-airing at 2am following the Pistons game.

Me: Wait! He just said it re-airs at 2! Did you get that? You might have the first two periods after all!

Jonathan:  Don't get your hopes up.

Me: Of course my hopes are up. That's what hopes are for.  If you went to bed after you pressed record, you might have accidentally gotten the beginning of the game in the re-air.

J (zipping forward on the tape): Maybe, but just don't get your hopes up.

Me: Hopes are up.  Hopes are there to get them up.

J: Well yeah, but this isn't an instance where you should get them up.

Me: Tough. They're up.

J: I'm just saying it's unlikely it recorded that long, so the game's probably not there.... so if you get your hopes up, you're just going to be disappointed.

Me: Yeah, but if you never get your hopes up if you might be disappointed, then you'd never get your hopes up.  Then what are you supposed to do with them? That doesn't work for me.  My hopes are up.

J, laughing: Ok, fine......................     Just don't get your hopes up.

(continues to fast forward)

Me: OOOOOOHHHH -- WHAT'S THAT?! That's the GAME! Mmmhmm. Yeah.

J: Are you glad you got your hopes up?

Me: Yep.

The importance of staying alert in rehearsal

From my journal archives, during rehearsal of a show on which I was the production stage manager:

I tuned out of rehearsal for 30 seconds, and when I came back, a whispered, nighttime bedroom scene was now going to be performed while eating carrots... I feel like I'm being Punk'd.... 

(Sadly, I left this show a few days later for another project and never saw the finished product, so I'm left to wonder forever not only if the carrots made it but why they were added in the first place and if eating carrots is, in fact, the extra touch that every bedroom scene needs to make it magical.... The moral of the story: Never zone out in rehearsal if you don't want produce mysteriously added to a scene.)

In which I work a link to Patrick Stewart's "quadruple take masterclass" into my post

Sometimes you just know, even before you hop out of bed, that your day is headed in the direction of Alexander's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day…. Your alarm clock malfunctions on a morning you’ve got a batch of auditions (or I just pressed snooze a dozen times without realizing it, but I'm gonna go with it malfunctioning), so you’re already running late when you discover that your wristwatch has stopped, your shoulder and neck are sore from that dance class yesterday where you had to roll around in floor work, and the little tickle in your throat from the night before has turned into a cold that seems to be stuffing your head with cotton and closing up your throat, and just as you’re trying to overlook these problems as you make double-tea-bag black tea because you're out of coffee filters, you’re hit with a full-blown cataclysmic disaster -- your iPhone, your lifeline to the world… is dead.   Not the little burps and hiccups that whisper of a future problem, but the won't-respond-to-anything black screen that screams that your 15-days-past-warranty phone is nothing now but a cold hunk of metal, glass, and plastic.  So you try to rearrange your schedule to find time for a Genius Bar appointment at the Apple Store, finish trying to organize for the day as quickly as possible, and set off for the city, late, irritated, feeling ruffled, and wondering what the next disaster will be.  This was my morning -- made worse by the realization that with both my phone and my wristwatch out, in order to be connected and know what time it was, I’d need to lug around my heavy laptop through the snow and wind and periodic rain during a day that promised to be full of a lot of walking burdened down by my already-heavy dance bag with four different types of dance shoes and different audition outfits.... 

Yet as I rushed from my apartment building, head down, grouchy, I heard the building employee filling in at the doorman position call out, "Hey, I saw you!"  I have never had a conversation with him and had no idea what he was talking about, but since he was grinning, I smiled back absentmindedly as I continued to bluster on through, thinking he simply meant that he saw me through the hat and scarf I was bundled up in. 

"I saw you!" he repeated.  "I caught you!  That movie!"  As I turned around and cocked my head, curious but continuing to walk backwards out the door, he said, laughing, "On the airplane! That movie on the airplane! I saw you!"

That finally stopped me and got a real smile. "What?! No way! Really?!"  "Yep! I saw you!!" he barked with a full grin.  I laughed as I left the building, flattered and stunned to be recognized by my "there's a bomb!" head-turn in Non-Stop that had made it into the film and preview (I mean, it IS a pretty great head-turn… not necessarily on the same level as Patrick Stewart's masterful takes, but hey, we can't all be Patrick Stewart).  My rotten, no-good, very-bad day suddenly took a little turn for the better.  I was still tickled pink by the notion that the doorman could possibly have noticed and recognized me in that film as I battled through the crowd of umbrella spokes threatening to poke out my eyes on my way to the Apple Store (after an audition for which the monitor was someone I had once fired. Twice.  Gosh this industry is small.).  And then as I finished the purchase of my new iPhone and handed the salesman who had helped me my credit card, I noticed him staring at the USAA insignia on it, and he finally asked excitedly, “Jessica, were you in the Air Force?!” (I was not -- it's my dad's military service that qualified me.)  He then proceeded to tell me about his dad flying in the Air Force, his love of Top Gun, and how he almost made a huge mistake by joining the Air Force because he didn’t realize that Top Gun was actually the Navy…. What had been a slick, almost scripted tech/sales conversation turned suddenly personal and into a human moment… because of a credit card.

Much later, near the end of my very long day, with my back killing me and my head feeling like it was going to explode from my cold, I wound up at a small, full-of-character coffee shop (complete with a bunch of guys who looked like they more belonged in a tough Irish pub -- I felt like Amy Adams in Leap Year when she first walks into the bar in her significantly-worse-than-mine day), waiting for a train back towards the city after a train schedule mishap resulted in me overshooting my train station and winding up at the wrong station in my attempt to get home.  (Again, I could say this was my fault and that I didn't notice a track change at Penn Station... but much like my alarm clock malfunctioning, I'm going to say the train schedule malfunctioned.)   After striking up a conversation with me, the very friendly counter guy with a Duck Dynasty beard took the trouble to make sure I didn't miss my train.  With my sore throat, stuffy head and nose, and a bag that now felt like it weighed 100 lbs, that small gesture meant the world to me.

As I rode back towards my correct train station, it struck me that in what was otherwise an exhausting, physically painful, and all-around rather unpleasant day, three people who initiated little connections made me feel human and made me realize that even in a grey day much worse than mine, there might be colorful little touches of humanity all around us to brighten it up.

When your day starts with Liam Neeson, it's going to be a good day.

From my journal archives, about 7 weeks into the filming of Non-Stop (on which I worked as core background for a very fun three months, five days a week, 12+ hours a day, during which time I survived on the adrenaline of feeling like I was inside the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular at Disney World all day long every day, surrounded by a fantastic cast and crew), December 2012, when I was clearly in a rather sentimental mood:


Things included in my 15.5 hour work day:

Watching Liam Neeson run down an aisle towards me with wind blowing his fabulous hair and being unable to get the Baywatch theme song out of my head.

Being yelled at to "cover your mouths and close your eyes!!" as an enormous amount of debris was blown at us at high wind speeds, resulting in my hair looking like someone shredded an entire roll of toilet paper on it.  [Note from 2015 -- If I had known that at a future date the hair department was going to pour black soot, fake blood, and some weird-smelling paste into my hair and then rat it, this whole shredded-toilet-paper thing probably wouldn't have been such a big deal...]

Having a 20 minute conversation with someone I've never talked to for more than 5 seconds at a time despite the fact that I've had the opportunity to for hours every day for the past 7 weeks, and realizing it's a shame I didn't take advantage of the opportunity earlier.

Choreographing a dance for someone's show during lunch.

Having a long, serious, teary girl talk with a girl I hardly know.  [Note from 2015 -- I remember most everything I read from my old journal entries, but I have no idea what this girl-talk thing is about (probably because I had had about 8 hours of sleep that week).  I don't do long teary girl talks, so I'm really curious how I got roped into this one and what I could possibly have had to offer...]

Making glitter-and-bead-laden gifts and cards and crayon pictures (and airplanes for the PAs and ADs) for everyone and generally getting to be a kindergartener.  [When you're on set for 15 hours a day there is a LOT of downtime... so I and a few other creatively minded girls decided to take advantage of the Christmas season by turning this downtime into craft-time. This is detailed extensively in other journal entries (and photographs!) and resulted in 3-D model-airplane Christmas ornaments with cartoons on them for the ADs and Background PAs, made out of paper plates and coffee stirrers from the craft services table.  If you ever need to decorate a Christmas tree using nothing but materials swiped from craft services and the PAs' table, I'm your girl.]

Laughing uncontrollably with some new friends in between takes of screaming and crying 15 hours into my work day when I'm normally fighting to stay awake.
 
Having a knife-yielding stuntman

Note from 2015 -- Having a knife-yielding stuntman WHAT?!   Surely I don't mean I just HAD a knife-yielding stuntman....  What a disappointing place to stop writing....

My role model

I love getting a story from a 90-year-old that begins with "One time when I was out clubbing (but this was back when I was about 65)...."

I want to be like her when I grow up.

No drugs of any kind preceded this dream. I promise.

If you want to read my crazy, trippy dream that I woke up remembering in remarkable detail, involving a famous director with an almost-Shakespearean name, a childhood crush, Pablo Schreiber as the uncle of a child baker, and a foresty slum in Detroit whose trees' limbs might or might not have been of the human variety, then read on.  If not, then you can just skip this one....

It was about 10 a.m. on a hot summer morning, and school (at my high school back home in Indiana) didn't start until 11 a.m., so I went to a bar (as one does before high school classes) near Lincoln Center in NYC to hang out for a bit before class.  As I walked into the super-dark, smoke-filled bar from the blinding mid-morning light outside, my eyes took a long time to adjust.  When they did, I tried to decide if I had time to sit at the bar and order a coffee or if I should just sit at a table and hope no one noticed me so I could sit and enjoy air conditioning for a bit before leaving.  I sat down at a table and noticed a good-looking, distinguished gentleman in his 50s a few tables away.  He looked a lot like Carson Drew (Nancy Drew's father in the old Nancy Drew mystery books -- not that there exists a picture of Carson Drew or anything.  But nevertheless, I was sure this guy looked like him.).  There was also a beautiful Italian actress at another table nearby (I'm pretty sure this bar was in the 1940s).  I recognized the man and realized he was the famous director Juliuf Ceasar. (Now, in my dream, I thought nothing of this name; it was just a name.  Awake-me knows that centuries ago an "s" sometimes looked like an "f."  So my dreaming subconscious just spelled the name in old-timey writing, but dream-me misinterpreted it as an "f."  Ignorant dream-me.)  He and the actress starting chatting/flirting, and I got engrossed in listening to the actress figure out she was chatting with the famous director Juliuf Ceasar.

Then I looked at my watch, and, much to my horror, it was already 10:58.  School started in two minutes, and I knew I would most likely be late.  It was definitely not a problem that the school was half a country away, because I was home at our house in two seconds, but apparently that extra 15 miles just couldn't be done in the remaining minute and 58 seconds.  So now I was at home getting ready for school (maybe I should have done the "get ready for school" part before I went to a bar?).  I realized I would be super-late, so I debated whether I should just call in sick for the whole day or only part of the day.  It was one of the last weeks leading up to finals, so a lot of the classes were review sessions rather than learning anything new, which to my mind made them not important, because I already knew everything they'd taught (dream-me is apparently very confident).  I wound up asking my Mom to call me in sick for the morning, but then I realized that I didn't know what class I was supposed to be in when I arrived.  My schedule had different classes on different days, and I knew that the class I would be arriving there for was either French or Art.  But I didn't know which was Mon/Wed and which was Tues/Thurs.  And I didn't know who was in any of my classes, so I didn't know whom I could ask.  And I wasn't sure if I could remember where all the classes were because I hadn't actually been there in 10 years.  But despite the fact that I knew I hadn't been there in 10 years, I was still very confused about how I didn't know my schedule, because presumably I had been going to classes recently.  So I wondered what I had been doing the last few weeks.... 

Anyway, after a lot of trouble with my hair (it was very greasy, and I couldn't get it to look nice), I left for school.  Going to school apparently involved racing a boy (whom I went to school with off and on from 1st grade through the 12th grade and had a secret crush on for most of those 12 years) up the hill to the house opposite ours.  When we got inside, he disappeared (wait -- couldn't he have at least asked me to prom first?  It is my dream, after all), and there was a Swiss (or Swedish) family there with a little girl (4 to 6 yrs old) who was a famous biscotti baker.  She had an apron with a big kangaroo front pocket, and the top of the pocket was lined with biscotti crust.  She explained that it was supposed to just be a regular crust, but it didn't turn out quite right, so she used it to decorate her apron.  She showed us some of her biscotti, and then she pointed to the big painting on the wall (which was blue and watery) and asked her Swiss uncle (played by Pablo Schreiber, who in real life was very nice to me when I subbed on a show he was in, and who Google tells me is in fact part Swiss, so my casting is not entirely off-base here) where the wavy things had gone. 

Not-Pablo-Schreiber replied, "Oh, you remember that?" and took down the painting and flipped it over to show another painting on the back that also had water, but the water (along with everything else) had a lot more detail.  So this time the water had waves, and the trees had leaves, and the ground had flowers.  The girl nodded that yes, she remembered it, and she said she had been wondering what happened to it.  He hung it back up on the wall, this time with the detailed side facing out, and as the girl nodded with satisfaction, all of a sudden I was with both of my parents and we were driving through the backwoods of Detroit (bet you didn't know there were backwoods in Detroit, huh?).  

It was forest, but it was a slum forest….  We passed a Bath and Body Works attached to a Natural History Museum.  I wanted to go in (to both -- Dream-me is interested both in learning and in smelling like flowers and berries), but I thought it probably wasn't a good idea since it was such a slum.  But somehow our car morphed into driving through the museum, and then all of a sudden we were inside.  I was carrying my monstrous backpack with all my stage management stuff in it.  There were lots of homeless people everywhere, many of them acting more like residents of an insane asylum.  One of them started doing a pat-down on my dad (like the guy thought he was a cop doing a pat-down of a suspect).  I took out my pepper spray, but we were clearly outnumbered by crazy homeless people, so I watched him to figure out what he was up to.  He turned his attention away from my dad, came over to me, looked at my giant backpack, and said, "I know who you are. You're one of those reporters from the Pittsburgh Gazette.  Well, I wasn't going to hurt him.  I just like to pat guys down and then throw their limbs in the forest."  So then we bolted out of there and got in the car and kept going.  And then I woke up.  We never did get to go to Bath and Body Works, and I never did speak to my 10-years-ago, 12-year-long secret crush.  But everyone left with all their limbs still attached, and I never had to go to school, so I think it was a success.

When show props come in handy in real life

From my journal archives -- February, 2013, while I was ASMing a show:

Last week a woman with waxy skin came into the lobby right before the show started.  I heard a "help" from the house manager over headset and came out to see the woman, who didn't speak English but didn't seem to know she didn't speak English.  She pointed at the show's poster, made a "pray" gesture, and kept talking in her language, clearly wanting to come in the theatre (to pray?).  Somehow, the house manager (also a former bouncer) got her out, and we thought that was that.  Then a couple days later, she came in with the production stage manager, who had heard the first incident over headset but had never seen the woman's face, and since the woman pointed upstairs when at the entrance door to the building, the PSM assumed she was going upstairs to the psychotherapist whose office is above the theatre (side note -- not a bad idea to have a psychotherapist in the same building as a theatre...).  So crazy lady came in, talking in whatever language it was like we could understand, not trying to give us any nonverbal cues about what she wanted other than pointing towards the door to the theatre and the poster and making her "pray" gesture.  The PSM and the house manager kept saying "no" and shaking their heads, but it didn't seem to be getting through at all.  I was in the middle of setting the props and came out to see what the fuss was.  I happened to be holding two swords and two daggers at the time....   The speaking stopped, she stared at the weapons in my hands, her eyes got big, she backed out of the building... and that was the last we've seen of her....   I wonder what the reaction would have been had I emerged holding the prop decapitated bloody head?.....

Howdy, Neighbor

My neighbor just broke up with his girlfriend.  I don't know this because he told me.  In fact, I've never met my neighbor.  I don't even know his name, and I'm not entirely sure I would recognize him if I saw him outside the building.  The closest I have ever come to speaking with my neighbor is joining in on singing Taylor Swift when I hear him blasting it through the walls and once shouting over a "Sorry!" after belting out the theme song to DuckTales perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.  You see, like many New York apartments, our walls are thin.  And so I know my neighbor's sports preferences by which games he holds parties for (football -- apparently best watched with lots of beer-guzzling guys' guys), his wake-and-sleep schedule by the music I hear (gotta start the day with 106.7 and end it with some classic rock), and his relationship status... by the fact that he is currently blasting sad 80s love ballads, where a requirement seems to be that the song must contain the word "love" about 50 times.... A particular favorite seems to be "Baby Come Back" (otherwise known as that song the discarded mop sings in the Swiffer ad).  I really feel like I ought to take over some chicken noodle soup or something.  "Hi, we've never met even though we've lived next door to each other for 3 years, but you sound sad and like you're probably stuck on your couch in your pajamas, so here's some chicken noodle soup and a board game to cheer you up."  No?  That would probably be awkward, huh?

Where I'm from in Indiana, when you walk past someone on the street, especially your neighbor, you say hello; where my mom's from in Detroit, when you see your neighbor you pretend you don't notice the black limos coming and going from their driveway or what they mean; in the small town in Canada where my Grandpa moved to from England, when you pass someone on the street, you get to talking and before you know it that was-a-stranger-10-minutes-ago has offered to come by your cottage and fix your porch, and the bank teller has invited you to tea.  In New York... well, you live next door to people for years without ever talking to them.  I frequently get in the elevator and someone who also lives on my floor and has already pushed the button for it asks what floor I want because neither of us recognizes the other, even though my floor is a single short hallway.  And I don't think the reluctance of tenants in my building to befriend each other is simply because my building seems to have its unfair share of the victims and perpetrators of high-profile crimes in the city (not that it helped my neighborliness when the subway killer turned out to be someone I'd ridden in the elevator with many times...).  As I think most people who have spent any time in New York City can attest, there often seems to be a disconnect between New Yorkers and the people around them.  It's what enables us to shove others to the side as we race to make our train, thinking nothing of whether our rushing elbows are preventing others from making the same train; it's what makes us plow through determinedly in the battle of the umbrellas on rainy days in the over-crowded streets of midtown, focused solely on our own progress through the sea of canopied dangerous spokes; it's what makes us so often treat others as faceless player-pieces to maneuver around in our living-in-the-big-city video game.

But when I hear a big, burly, football-loving, usually constantly laughing, beer-guzzling guy reduced to playing Celine Dion's "All By Myself" at max volume... it sure would be nice if we had some of that Indiana or Canadian neighborly friendliness.  I guess I'll just settle for blasting back some music to cheer him up.  Since he doesn't seem to mind the girl power pop.... perhaps some of Katy Perry's "Part Of Me"?

Sunday Morning Sunshine

6:10 AM Sunday morning on the subway and all three people opposite me have their brows all super-furrowed, looking either seriously confused or seriously annoyed with life.  I think it's their faces' natural resting position....  I'm not a very smiley person, but if your Sunday starts at six in the morning and that's how you're going into it, I think it's going to be a long day....