Where Dreams Really Do Come True
He keeps the marriage fresh with hip hop-esque phone texts:
From: The Husband
I wuz late4 work–got n trubbl.
Mar 15, 2:44 p.m.
I mean, what is that? He’s a virgo, he’s so meticulous about words, and then I get this random message. It’s too cute. I can’t handle it.
I like Will Ferrell. I think he’s funny. Big deal, right? I mean, liking Will Ferrell is like liking peanut butter. Yeah, I like peanut butter. Who doesn’t like peanut butter. Everybody in the U.S. likes peanut butter and then some.
But I was watching an old SNL episode (yes, my husband and I are the only two left in America still watching ER and and SNL, even when it’s not funny, on a regular basis), where there was an Oracle conference skit and Ferrell plays a motivational speaker. The premise is simply he’s supposed to kick off the conference, has some equipment failure, gets mad, and falls off the stage, and you know what? None of the lines, as written, were particularly funny or witty. It’s just him. He is just a funny guy. He’s just so committed to the moment without any irony, so just when he goes “Welcome to Oracle 2008! Who’s ready to get this conference started?” with whole-hearted enthusiasm, you can hear everyone in the studio audience peeing in their pants.
Mini Ferrell Career Review
I loved “Talledega Nights” (the hits that followed a little less so, b/c the screenplays weren’t as jam-packed with ridiculousness), again, the way he commits to the kiss with Ali G was one hundred percent. (My favorite scene is when he’s with Michael Duncan and he stabs himself in the leg — and he curses Michael Duncan’s son, and Michael Duncan says his next line with such believeable anguish and heat, I fell out of my chair. It’s so intense, I couldn’t stop laughing.) When he ventures into more serious material — not so good.
Remember “Stranger with Fiction”? There’s a scene where he cries, which is supposed to be some kind of turning point for the character, but I could have given a rat’s arse. It didn’t work. There’s something that’s not expressive enough in his face and doesn’t work for the intimate moments. He’s not Steve Carell, who really knows how to act, but can also be big and small. Will Ferrell just knows how to be…which is a.o.k. He’s excellent at ridiculous and big.
My friend Becca heard an interview with him on NPR how he was temping at a bank when he first got started and his “Stranger Than Fiction” character is actually closest to his real personality and the life he could have led. Terri Gross also asked about his body, how his flabbiness is key to his comedy. And he gently responded that, “You know, reviewers keep making that comment, but the truth is I jog all the time.”
I took a week in Zihuatenejo, Mexico with my husband, Joslyn, Martin, and her dad and various other characters. Before it completely fades from my memory, here are a few of my favorite moments:
* Going to sleep at 9 p.m. and waking up at 6 a.m.
* Having margarita happy hour and ice cream every night
* Watching Law & Order before bed
* Doing my taxes on the beach
* Getting the top of my feet sunburned
* Watching my husband, understandably p.o’d when our luggage went missing, actually speak Spanish (he said “Hay una problema” rather heatedly, which was so cute)
* Having a fish taco for lunch on the beach and falling asleep afterward
* Watching a clown make his dog run through hoops at night in front of rows of tiny children. Oh, and I was eating ice cream.
* Watching Joslyn’s dad, who looks like Ernest Hemingway, flash his tan belly to a young, pretty salesgirl he knows.
* Not having that stressed out — nuclear meltdown in my stomach — type of attack that is normal at my day job.
* Going jogging with my husband, deciding it was horrible, and not doing it ever again down there.
* Going in very tenatively into 50 degree Zihuatenejo water and feeling sorry for the actor I watched last week dive into Manhattan beach water, which must have been about 20 degrees.
* Order eggs well done for my husband with a lethal combination of my ancient Spanish and Charades skills.
* Being grateful Joslyn shooed a dog away from me at breakfast, because she knows they paralyze me with terror.
Thank you, thank you.
oh yeah, you remember eight tracks, right? I think they lasted about two days. when you played cassettes, you could play one till the tape snapped or got twisted in loops (I still have them and play them and love them). We had two eight-tracks when we first were getting our feet under us as a family in Brooklyn in 1976. Dad would play “Hello Dolly” or “Grease” in our sky-blue, Chrystler Sierra or Skylark with its dirty white interior when we would go pick Mom up at her pharmacy internship at Bellevue. Then we played them so much the tracks started to fuse together and became like one big globby medley.
If you’re like younger than 30, you might not remember actual eight track in your life and that’s okay, but the time gap might freak me out a bit. Like when a young colleague asked “What’s the KGB? What’s the Berlin wall?” Aaaaack!
okay, there are moments of life where I feel like a tourist on planet earth and i felt it when I recorded a voiceover audition in Spanish this week, the headphones, soundproof room, and mondo mic — it’s just not part of my normal routine. Neat. I love and am ALWAYS grateful for experiences that feel NEW. I took Spanish from age 12 to 21 (uh, in large part b/c I wanted one easy A), so I should be really better it than I am, but there you go.
It was like a team of 6 people who helped me with this — I consulted with a co-worker who’s a native speaker, my friend christine and Michelle for production, a voiceover actress who gave me tips on interpretations, my husband who directed it, plus the engineer in the actual studio.
The end result is, i think, fine. I don’t sound native, but whatevs, I did my part. My husband and i played it last night. Take a listen if you like. For some reason, the word “Nestle” comes out very sensually, which made us giggle. Although the copy is pretty well written, the product name, Juicy Juice de Nestle, is kind of stupid. It’s like if I called something fruity fruit or meaty meat. Like if your juice isn’t juicy…then it’s not juice, right? You feel me?
Click below to find the result of nine years of Spanish education.
I don’t know that I love charo — love is a strong word for the woman who was known for “cuchi cuchi.” But you know, through the misty, near-sighted gaze of hindsight, I can, sure, admit some affection for her now. (Dude, how addled am I by nostalgia?)
My friend Alex J. saw her in concert in upstate like a year ago, and she’s still wearing the mini skirts and low-cuts, but the photo he showed of her made her look like she were a claymation doll…a little scary. And while it’s sad she’s on the “Surreal Life,” maybe she’s not sad about it. Alex says that the girl was very much like I’m taking my guitar and my voice, and getting my butt to the U.S. and become a star. And really, she did do that, didn’t she.
But maybe what I really love here is “Love Boat,” that fabulous 70s show that added words like “Englebert Humperdink,” as well as cuchi cuchi, to my consciousness.
I love this movie. It came out in about the mid-1990s, when I met only about four other people who dug it as well. My friend Alex J. came with and fell asleep, so he is not among them.
After I read NY Times profile on the filmmaker — whose dad’s alzheimers led him to become obsessed with the idea of memories — I was intrigued (you know, b/c I’m obsessed with the nature of memories, since I keep losing them and for a host of other reasons.) The story is just about what happens after you die — the after life staff informs a room full of people that they have passed away, apologizes for their loss, and tells them they get to choose one memory to spend the rest of eternity in. People pick childhood moments, most frequently. There’s one guy whose life was so miserable that he couldn’t come up with one except for this time when he climbed underneath the back porch and got sucked into the darkness.
But aside from the memory schtick, the thing I really love about this film is its inherent theatricality. How do I explain this? Yikes. Well, in films, very often it seems to me that when you have a character who lives in the past, you literally show them in like a 1950s costume with period hair and costume and fuzzy lighting. Or if you have the past and the present interact, you might put some kind of funky lighting on the past guy. In theater, you just put two actors together, tell the audience what’s happening — and it just happens. It’s magical. (That’s right, I used the word magical.). Adn by magical, I mean, the use of mundane ordinary objects, people, and situations that suddenly transcend reality into a more profound existence.
In the flick, there’s a 20-year-old actor who plays an angel guide to a 60-year-old man. Once they get to talking, they realize they were in love with the same woman and that the younger guy is actually older than the old dude. (Yikes, did you follow?) Or the way they created the infinity memories, the after life staff literally served as a film crew — one man remembered riding on a train as a boy on a summer day. They got an old train car and rocked it back and forth, sprayed water on a boy on the train to create sweat, and filmed it. In that case, a regular film set became…an altering of consciousness.
Does any of what I’m saying translate? Not sure, but you can always rent it for yourself. I hope it’s as good as I remembered, but I don’t really know. I might find it super slow now…so maybe it’s better for me to stick with my memory of it.
My old co-worker Holly used to call me Crangston Hughes whenever I was cranky…which was like half the time at that job.
And not to outwear my welcome, but you know how when you’re on the subway, and the rush hour crowd is pushing you into the person in front of you, and that person turns around and calls you name? Running into that person is what it’s like to run into my boss, and that makes me oh-so-cranky.
And it also makes me want to move to Vermont and make cheese for living.
Okay, enough crankiness. I will blog next when I have something life-affirming and endearing to say.
You know what my job feels like right now? Like I’m driving a car on fire…through a field of dry brush. Seriously.
Yikes, states are starting to mandate schools run monthly emergency drills or “shooter” drills, where the kids all hide in the classroom and the principal might pose as the shooter to make sure all the doors are locked. I can’t believe it’s come to this, but I guess Columbine wasn’t an isolated incident, given that lethal combo of mental illness/access to guns seems to happen more frequently nowadays.
It’s just a little sad…and creepy. I don’t have kids, but do you feel safe sending kids to school nowadays??? Am I not neurotic enough, world?
If you’re curious, here’s the NY Times article “In an Era of School Shootings, a New Drill “ by Tina Kelley in today’s paper.