My Prison Stay

Well, actually, it turns out that for some of us, prison is quite restful.

Apart from getting to the van pickup point, that is.  The only problem with living over here on what is essentially the edge of civilization is that it's damned hard to get in and out without a taxi.  Or at least it is early in the morning or on weekends.  On Wednesday, I had to be at the northwest corner of 96th and Broadway at 5:42 am (oddly specific that, isn't it?).  Well, the logical way to get there is to grab the M21 bus over to Varick and hop the subway...reasonably quick, and quite efficient.  Unfortunately, the M21 bus doesn't start running until somewhere around 6 am...and I would have had to catch it at 4:30 am.  Scratch that.  OK, the next option is taking the M14D bus over to 14th, which would have ended me up at the subway just as easily.  Except that the M14D bus stop is directly in front of a large housing project.  Well, I yield to no one in my espousal of good liberal principles and the essential goodness of the common man...but I'm also equipped with a fair amount of street smarts, all of which sat up and yelled at the notion of a more than middle aged lady with a purse standing completely alone in front of a large housing project at 4:30 am.  That's not liberal...that's friggin' stupid.  And as it turned out, none of the above methods would have done me a goddamn bit of good anyway, since they were doing track work on the subways, and the train I needed wouldn't start running until 5.  You'll be glad to know that I spent $24 on a cab.

So we had a lovely drive out to Bedford Hills, NY...I do like to get out in the country on occasion, as long as I know I'm not going to be, you know, STUCK there.  We were decanted into a nice, sort of heated, dirt floored tent and fed.  My boots may never recover from that dirt (and mud, here and there...it was spitting rain every now and then).  And there we sat.

We had breakfast.  Then we had lunch.  Then finally we were taken over to the actual prison and put through an airport type screening, complete with shoe removal, and given a hand stamp, and let into the visitor's room.  This was an open space, not one of those things you see in movies with the glass between the prisoners and visitors, because it's a minimum security prison.   And then we interacted with our fellow background actors playing prisoners (I was a visitor) for an hour or so and were done by 3:30.  I got about an hour and a half of overtime pay, but then again, it was still light when I got back in town.  At our table, it was me and another gal, and a guy of about my own age who seems to have led a very sheltered existence, by the way.  We were given a deck of cards and started playing a form of rummy, and I swear this guy had never seen a deck of cards in his life.  Then the crew came and took half the deck away because they evidently hadn't brought enough decks, which really screwed up the card game.  Ah, well.

Also, if this thrills anyone, I wass standing right next to Steven Soderbergh, whose movie this is, when I checked in at the prison.  And Rooney Mara is quite a pretty girl, shorn of all those piercings.  Channing Tatum looks like a small town garage mechanic...I don't see the allure AT ALL.

But this Tuesday!  YAY!  Back to my beloved Boardwalk!  And this is going to be a REAL first for me...I am actually going to appear on camera without my teeth.

Yes, I wear a full set of dentures, and have for many years.  I had perfectly lovely white teeth, but unfortunately they were of the same consistency as the chalk they resembled.  I went through years of caps, and root canals, and damned expensive dentistry, until I finally found a dentist who said "This is ridiculous."  So I had the whole mouth done, and it was the first time I'd been completely pain free in forever and a day.  I've never regretted it. 

So last week a call went out for Boardwalk for people with missing teeth.  I jumped on it, of course, and Melissa from Grant Wilfley Casting called yesterday, seemingly quite confused about why I would agree to do this...to which my reaction was, "Um, I'm getting paid, right?  You want people with missing teeth, right?  Missing teeth I've got!"  She was still confused.  However, I'm going to be doing what sounds like a terrific scene...a VERY low class/dive bar in Chicago with a lot of toothless drunks hanging out in it.  I can't wait.  It sounds like so much fun.

I'm presuming we'll be out at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, that being where most of the interior scenes are shot.  I really am excited about this one.  I can just see it...a whole career built on, "Get that great toothless broad!"

Love, Wendy