Some cofee to perk up your morning?

No, not coffee, silly.  Cofee.  Apparently it's the new rage at my local Dunkin' Donuts now....

There are a few other things going on with this sign, but I think cofee wins.  I mean it's not like they got the name of their store wrong, too, or anything...

Oh, wait....

Day trip

My fiancé and I have some strong similarities.  We're both very much in touch with our "little kid" sides; we're both goofy; we're both sharp-witted and soft-hearted; we both love animals; we both prefer dive bars with darts to clubs, and jeans and sneakers to the most recent trends; we're both grammar nuts and particularly cringe at the current trend of incorrectly using "I" as an object like in that horrible Ikea commercial where the voice-over says, "you never told your dad and I about that"; we both are very accepting and give people a lot of space to do their thing and be themselves....  But in some ways we're also complete opposites.  He's OCD, and I'm spontaneous and embrace messiness, both literal (in its time and place) and metaphorical.  He says he has no creative instincts, and I crave creative outlets.  He doesn't read, and I love reading.  He hates ballet, and ballet is my biggest passion.  He can sit through an REO Speedwagon concert without covering his ears and going out to the lobby, and I can't.

When it comes to paid recreation, we also tend to have somewhat different views.  To my fiancé, paid recreation (other than rock concerts), like a vacation or going to the theatre, is generally an opportunity to save money -- by not doing it.  To me, those are some of the reasons you save money elsewhere.  Like Belle in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, I want adventure in the great wide somewhere.  So I've been bugging my fiancé for over a year now to take a weekend getaway with me.  Someplace exciting.  Someplace different.

...But when that fails, I get him to take day trips on the Long Island Rail Road with me. (Yeah, I know, in an ideal world the rest of this blog post would be about that wonderful adventurous weekend getaway.  That blog post is coming some day because I am nothing if not persistent, and I WILL get my weekend getaway... but not yet).  One of our great similarities is that we take pleasure in the small things in life.  An "adventure" to me doesn't mean skiing or ziplining -- it can simply be exploring someplace I've never been and knowing nothing ahead of time about our randomly chosen destination.  I love all the small differences between the character of different towns and their inhabitants.  Walking through a little town in the middle of nowhere where each lawn speaks of a family who lives and plays there and each house promises hidden harbored stories and lives can be a wonderful way to spend an afternoon.  Each town is a little mystery to be partially unraveled in the few hours I get to spend there.  I love seeing lawns with swing sets and slides that speak of endless fun-filled summer days; or well-cared for gardens as a woman kneels in her sun hat and gardening gloves, making the visual landscape full of beauty by saturating it with life-affirming color; or a teen making some spare money mowing the lawn as the fresh scent of cut grass fills the air and he bops his head to whatever song plays in his ears.  The characters of each town become real to me as my imagination fills in their backstories and ponders how different life is for the inhabitants of one geographical location to the next.

Last Sunday we spent just such an afternoon in a tiny town an hour and twenty minutes away on the LIRR.  We didn't Google it beforehand or look at how close the nearest shopping district was; we just got off the train and started walking.  Within two minutes of getting off the train, a jogger passed us, throwing a smile our way with a wave and hello, and my fiancé commented, "Well, we're clearly not in New York City anymore!"  Not long after, we passed a lawn with a few children playing in front of a lemonade stand.  My Detroit-born-and-raised fiancé could hardly contain his excitement at seeing his first-ever real-life lemonade stand and hurried to buy a cup, tipping our seven-year-old entrepeneur quite generously (to a seven-year-old) for his excellent product.  As we walked with our lemonade, a Ford motor car that looked like it drove straight out of the 1920s passed us, the driver giving us a nod as he passed -- a nod that silently said, "Yeah, I know, it's the coolest car ever -- smile and stare to your heart's content."  After the Ford, I realized the shapes under tarps in several driveways were other old cars from many decades past.  What about this particular town led to so many households owning vintage cars?  As we approached the main shopping drag, we passed an old dilapidated house with boarded windows and doors.  What Christmases had the house once held?  What laughter?  What did it look like the first day some happy family moved into it, ready to make it their home and fill it with memories?  How had it come to be deserted and left to rot? 

Passing a coffee shop provided the most curious part of our visit: As a young Asian woman exited the shop, an old lady approached the door, and as the two ladies passed, the older woman gave a huge grin to the young woman and very loudly and deliberately, as if speaking to someone who's both deaf and doesn't speak English well, said with a nod, "Welcome to our neighborhood!" leaving the young woman wide-eyed and perplexed, staring after the older woman.  I turned and stared for several beats as we kept walking past, before turning back to my fiancé and asking, "Jonathan....?"

"I don't know, Jessica," he replied, laughing. "I don't know."

Did the older woman think anyone not Caucasian must be new to her neighborhood?  I have an image in my head of her telling all her friends proudly, "I welcome EVERYONE.  No judgment.  I like all people," as she unintentionally offends people left and right with her well-intentioned but misguided welcomes to everyone not Caucasian.

It was when we passed a Rite Aid and I walked in that my fiancé questioned my interest for the first time.

"Jessica.  I'm not walking around a Rite Aid.  Why are we in a Rite Aid? ... I'm not going to smell perfumes, if that's what you have in mind."

"Nooooo, I'm not looking at perfumes!" I laughingly replied as we passed into the seasonal aisle.

"Oo look! It's already Halloween here!"

"That's just crazy.  It's 85 degrees.  It's not Halloween," he said, looking at the fall wreathes and scary toys.

"Okay, can I tell you a secret?" I said conspiratorially, reducing my tone to a loud stage whisper as I bounced down the spooky aisle with a smile.  "When we went on vacations when I was a little kid, I loved going into drug stores and grocery stores.  Because when you think about it, what's the store you spend the most time at?  It's your local drug store and grocery store.  You know your drug store and your grocery store so well.  It's such a part of town life.  So I loved going into other small towns' drug stores and grocery stores because though they're foreign to me, they're someone else's home stores -- where they get all their daily things, where they gossip at the register, where they notice when the aisles get rearranged or when they change the scent of the air freshener....  The stores all have a slightly different flavor and character, cater to slightly different tastes....  It's like looking at a slice of their daily life.  It's the next closest thing to looking into people's houses."

My fiancé just stopped and stared at me for several seconds before saying, "Jessica.....  You're very special.”

I smiled back at him.  The truth is that, given the right perspective, almost any day can be an adventure, any place can be interesting, and any experience can be full of good lessons... because after all, life itself is a special adventure.

But I'm still going to get my weekend getaway.

Missing the golden rule

I worked on a tough set yesterday.  I was hired as a dancer -- outside in 80-degree sun all day wearing winter clothes.  I've worked in worse physical conditions, including heat, cold, and extreme dust and smoke.  I've danced in 90 degrees on a dusty set with fake snow, and I've gotten sick from set several times before... but I've never before worked in tough physical conditions without a crew that acknowledged the conditions and tried to make our experience positive.  On this set, however, no one bothered to ask our names or even introduce themselves.  No one asked how we were doing in the sun in our hot costumes all day.  No one attempted to boost our morale.  No one thanked us.  I was not offered water once in a 14-hour shoot or told where I could find some myself.  No one told us where craft services (the area with beverages and food) was located.  Wardrobe repeatedly snapped at us to keep our coats on between shots, for no reason other than that they clearly thought we were irresponsible children incapable of following the language of a set and putting on our coats in time.  During ten-minute breaks we were asked not to sit down, despite our three-inch heels, because the only seats were in the sun and they didn't want our faces to look burnt.  When we tried to oblige them by taking off our heels and standing in our hose on the shady sidewalk on our breaks, we were snapped at to put the heels back on so our hose didn't run....   So our "breaks" were to be spent standing in three-inch heels... (several of us simply sat anyway -- with our shoes off)....

Since the set was on a public sidewalk, pedestrians constantly took pictures of us, and I found myself literally turning my back on people who were sticking cameras in my face, including one particularly persistent paparazzo who, unable to find a movie star on set, harassed the elaborately costumed dancers instead and took much interest in my conversation with another dancer.  On a nicer set, I might have found enchantment and glamour in the attention and perhaps even felt flattered....  But here, it simply increased my crankiness as I tried to block my face from the intrusions into my breaks.  In fact, I found myself marveling at how many people think they have a right to invade someone's personal space with their cameras and phones without so much as a tiny thought of what that's like for the person of whom they're taking photos.  We were simply interesting objects to them -- opportunities to get unique Tweets and Facebook posts, no different from the Empire State Building or any other inanimate tourist attraction.

So, hot, dehydrated, and cranky, many of us were relieved when told that our part of the day was done and they were moving on to a completely different scene in a strip club and we would all be wrapped…   Well, all of but three of us would be wrapped.  As it turned out, they hadn't hired any stand-ins for three of the principals in the evening work and so needed three dancers to volunteer to stand in (stand-ins do the blocking of the principals during shot set-ups and camera rehearsals so the principals don't have to be on set then).  The logical thing to do would be to say nothing and let them wrap me.  But I'm not always logical.  Continuing that night as a stand-in meant (aside from a much larger paycheck, because union rules dictated the stand-ins would be working at the overtime dancer rate rather than the standard stand-in rate) getting to see how this set worked from a completely different point of view.  Plus I really like William Shatner's first rule in his book Shatner Rules: Say Yes.  So I said yes and volunteered.  And that's how I got to sit in "video village" watching a four-minute scene get methodically covered from six different angles, on a set run by the first ever female director/ female 1st Assistant Director team I've seen -- all while sitting behind the Director of Photography's monitor (the DP became the first and only crew member to introduce himself, and he made a point to learn the names of all three of us and talk to us about the show), where I took turns with the other two girls wearing his headphones as we watched.

Eventually we were kicked out of our seats by some strippers with really great names, but by then it was almost time to wrap us anyway.

So am I glad I stayed?  Absolutely.  If I ever run a set, will I make sure to thank everyone and keep a positive environment and make sure everyone feels like an individual person with worth?  You can bet your life on it.

The Little Tree That Could

Once upon a time there was a little tree.  The little tree told its parents and friends it wanted to live in the middle of Lake Huron.  All the other trees said, "No, that's ridiculous.  You can't live in the middle of a lake.  You have to live on the ground, like all trees.  Who ever heard of a tree living in the middle of a Great Lake?"  The little tree said, "Nope. I'm gonna live in the lake.  You'll see.  I'll make it."

And so the little tree lived in the middle of Lake Huron.

For the love of reading

My fiancé is not a book lover.  He'd much prefer to use his free time wearing his favorite set of headphones, picking apart various instrument lines and getting lost in the musical landscapes of his most recently bought album, than curled up with a book and lost in a story.  The last novel he read was in college.  As far as non-fiction goes, he's read two books cover to cover since I've known him.

I'm the opposite.  Every night for as far back as I can remember, bedtime was preceded by my mom reading from a book -- frequently a classic that would take several weeks to get through -- to my brother and me.   It was a tradition that we never aged out of -- the books just morphed over the years from Amelia Bedilia to The Wind in the Willows to The Hobbit to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Red Badge of Courage to The Scarlet Letter....  As we read, we would stop and talk about what we were reading -- the themes, the meanings, the metaphors, the characters....   It helped instill a lifelong love of reading in me, and when I was a kid during summer vacation, I would read a book about every day and a half.  Though my pace has dropped off, I'm still always in the middle of at least one book.  I love stories, both reading and telling them.  And I love discussing what I read, so I'm always trying to get my fiancé to read my favorite books so I can talk about them.  I know this is as futile as his efforts to get me to voluntarily listen to a Yes or Neil Diamond album, but I'll still bug him every once in a while to read the suspenseful ones I know he'd love, such as Lord of the Flies or In the Lake of the Woods or 1984 or Something Wicked This Way Comes....

His disinclination to get hooked on written stories made him an ideal person from whom to ask for an opinion about the horror story I'm currently writing.  Was it suspenseful?  Did he care about the characters?  Did he want to read more?  Since it took me a week of asking him to read what I have so far to turn the "sure" into him sitting down on the couch in front of my computer after work one evening with his chips and salsa at the ready, I had no doubt that he would unintentionally be my toughest critic when it came to hooking my audience.

So I'll take it as a good sign that not only did the chips and salsa not get touched once as he read but as soon as he finished, he looked up with big eyes and asked, "What happens next?!," bugged me all night about whether one of the characters survives, threw out story ideas for me throughout the rest of the evening in a desperate attempt to figure out how to let that character live, kept checking in tentatively like a child whose parents are vacillating between taking them to the fair or making them work on their homework to see where my head was about that character's fate, made a rational explanation to me while he made dinner of why it would be a bad idea to kill off the character, and then out of nowhere today texted me from work with "Do I need to start a Save Dave campaign, or are we good?"

Ah, the blissful preoccupation with a fictional character's fate and stressing while at work over that unknown fate....  I'm so glad I'm responsible for introducing this experience to him.  Because there's nothing else quite like that feeling of wanting to jump back into the pages and get whisked away with the characters who only live as you bring them back to life and return them to their paused adventures.  Transforming the world into readers one person at a time -- maybe that can be my superpower one day....

And oh yeah -- I haven't decided on Dave's fate yet....