Once More, With Feeling

Yes, well, I just wrote a wonderful informative blog letting everyone know what I've been up to...except that my computer elected to freeze and destroy the whole thing.  So we're going to try again.  While I save hysterically every seven seconds.

I worked all last week!  I do realize that this sounds like the world's most ho-hum remark, but you have to remember that I'm semi-retired, and very rarely work more than 3 days a week.  So a 5 day week is fairly unusual for me.

Monday, 2/4 - Frantic call from Andrew at the law office.  Nancy's got flu!  So off I went, to be annoyed all day.  Really, the boy is impossible. 

Tuesday and Wednesday, 2/5-6 - Freezing my ass off in Times Square for a movie called Black Nativity.  I have a horrible feeling they're going to make a mess of this.  I know the piece...it's a sort of tone poem by Langston Hughes which is the retelling of the Nativity story using gospel music.  I saw it in Chicago way back in the early 60s, and it was wonderful...I don't think expanding it is going to help it at all.  However, we all know my mantra...who cares?  I'm getting paid.

It was a ghastly couple of days.  First of all, the thing seems to be VERY low budget...damned little food, and NO COFFEE that anyone could find.  And the second day we had to forage for our own lunches, which is invariably irritating.  Admittedly we were in Times Square, so finding food was hardly a problem, but still...

And we were in Times Square.  We were in Times Square OUTDOORS.  In early friggin' February.  Should someone ask you about this, just tell them you don't want to.  Aside from the fact that we were freezing to death, the damn tourists and passersby will drive you completely insane.  They seem to feel that there's nothing wrong with cutting right across the filming and waving to their mothers or whatever the hell they think they're doing, so you have to keep stopping to shoo them away.  Tuesday was bad enough, but Wednesday was horrendous.  Tuesday we were shooting modern day, so there wasn't much to see, but Wednesday we were shooting Bethlehem (no, no, I have no idea how Times Square got to be Bethlehem...it seems unlikely in the extreme).  Wednesday we had two camels wearing all kinds of camel robes with cloth of gold and embroidery, two horses pulling a chariot thing, and three sheep, who were friendly types who seemed to love all the attention.  For all I know, the camels did too, but camels spit and kick and you don't want to go play with them.  Sheep seem to like being scratched and cuddled (which came in handy if you wanted to warm your hands...nothing like a nice woolly sheep).  As you can imagine, the onlookers were fascinated.  Oy.

Meanwhile, remembering what I said about low budget, the background wrangler (that's the guys who gathers up the background people and gets them to set and announces lunch and signs off on vouchers at the end of the day) was evidently either on his first job or congenitally stupid.  He called us out to go to the prop truck on Wednesday and when we got outside, I realized I didn't have my ID, so I said, "Where's the prop truck?  I'll grab my ID and follow you."  So he gestures east on 46th Street.  Four minutes later, I emerge with my ID and start off east on 46th.  Well, after a block or so I saw nothing that remotely resembled a prop truck, so I went back toward holding and ran into the makeup gal and my pal the hair guy (from Boardwalk) and they walked over to the set with me.  Turns out that A. the prop truck was on 48th Street, and B. just after I went inside, the background guy was informed that we didn't need props and should go straight to set.  Considering the amount of time I was gone, and considering that the set was immediately visible half a block west, don't you think someone could have waited those four goddamn minutes for me?  No, numbnuts realized I was gone and called my agency to tell them I was missing.  I wasn't in the least missing...I was doing exactly what I told him I was doing.  Idiot.

By the way, it was friggin' FREEZING out there.

Then it was two days at the law office again, Nancy still being felled with flu, and Andrew the lawyer being annoying...you know, if I'm finished with something, it is on the pile where the finished stuff is.  It is NOT next to my computer where I keep the not quite finished stuff.  So when you prowl all over the desk, confusing my papers and then telling me I don't follow through, I tend to get homicidal.  I KNEW those two items weren't finished.  THAT IS WHY THEY WERE WHERE THEY WERE, YOU DINGBAT.  And to add insult to injury, he didn't even close the office early on Friday, with a blizzard looming.  Although, as a born Chicagoan, I must say that New York City itself didn't get much snow at all...7-8 inches hardly qualifies as a blizzard.  Yes, I know the outlying areas got slammed...but I was in the city, which didn't, particularly.

However, as of today, all these petty annoyances have faded in a rosy glow...because TOMORROW I HAVE A COSTUME FITTING FOR BOARDWALK!  YAHOO!  Fourth season, here I come.  God only knows what ghastly bits of aging garb they'll throw at me this time...my beloved Lisa, the costume head, takes a positively perverted delight in making me look just awful.  Really.  She giggles.  It's been a running gag for ages now.  And we're being fitted for...wait for it...winter again.  If we have another summer like last year, I will die.  I don't care.  I'm back on the Boardwalk!  Yay!

Love, Wendy