9/2

This was an extraordinarily busy day, and I'm still tired from it.  I worked, then mowed the lawn, then went to get my nephew out of school, because they emailed last night at 1:34am to tell us the calltime had been moved to one pm (from four pm).  The school secretary didn't ask my name or how I was connected to the boy, just went to the class and got him, then wanted to know details about the movie we were working on.  It's another Halmark Christmas movie, this one seemingly called THE HEART OF CHRISTMAS*, this one starring Lacey Chabert, Wes Brown, Ellen Travolta (who played the mom on, that's right, "Joanie Loves Chachi"), and Stephen Chobotsky.  It was far up in the hills nearly an hour distant, where folks have mansions bigger than anyone should, unless the resident is a U.S. congressman who enjoys hunting human beings for sport.

This was such a true 180 from the Christmas movie I worked on last year (where they wouldn't even let us stand in the shade by the "real" actors, and that poor old lady collapsed from the heat) that I wonder if there wasn't some blowback at Hallmark over it, maybe even a (well-deserved) lawsuit.  There were P.A.s running around making sure people were hydrated and cooling off, and they kept insisitng we wear light t-shirts and banana hammocks when we were not shooting, only putting on our winter garb once the camera started rolling.**

I took this picture because it looked like the reindeer were piled roadkill.  Sorry.

We shot everything in a cul de sac where all the houses were decorated for the holidays, including lights and fake snow (they had a big, industrial-sized snow-sprayer on set, that would spray jets of white chemical paste wherever they needed fake snow.  The most fun part of the shoot was the faux snowball fight we had, that we did over and over again, and got the blood really pumping every time we reset, gathered up all the snowballs (they were made of wet cotton-like material), and started again.  It was my nephew's favorite part too, even after someone hit him in the ear with a real one (they had a snow cone machine).

I have at least an hour's worth of anecdotes to share here about the day, but it's hard to know if it's worth it.  For example, there was a little black kid, around five or six, who seemed to be on the set alone (later I noticed that he had an older brother who was watching him, and as it got later, his mother showed up, with an even smaller kid, who looked--literally-two years old, yet spoke and acted like a five year old), and toward the end of the night, I heard him talking, saying that he's in the fifth grade (which makes him ten), but he's always being cast as a kindergartener or first grader.  That, to me, is fascinating (along with the idea that all of his siblings have the same . . . unique characteristic [I nearly said, "affliction," but didn't mean it in a rude way], which Emmanuel Lewis and Gary Coleman could've told us all about).  To you?

There were so many attractive or semi-attractive people milling around, it was kind of remarkable.  And there were a couple of child actors that were just staggeringly beautiful, and in watching one of them, who looked like an actual angel personified, I thought, "I'll bet she'll have a really cool life," and felt warmth not only toward her, but toward all mankind.

It was a very long day, especially for an eleven year old who had never done extra work before, but the pay was good and the activities varied (they must have shot five different scenes that day, four with us in them), and the boy told people he had a good time, which I found to be a relief.  

I haven't decided whether to talk about my experience in (yet) another Outcast episode.  Let me know if you would enjoy that.

Exercise Day: No (oh, I originally considered putting "Yes," because of the exercise of being on my feet for hours and participating in a mock snowball fight, over and over.  But hey, I didn't set aside time to specifically exercise, so I'll not count today...though at the end of the month, I may wish I had)

*I think I read somewhere that movies with "X-mas" in the title got streamed 2.3 times more than the movies without it, so I shouldn't blame them for having such an unmemorable title (I keep forgetting what it was called whenever people ask me), even though I still do.

**Okay, part of that was a joke.  I just find the term "banana hammock" to be amusing.  Too bad you don't.  Maybe the problem isn't with me, good sir or ma'am . . . maybe it's with you.