#106 - ready for my closeup.

back in the mid-nineties, i spent four years of my life & $100K in pursuit of a coveted boston university film degree. as previously noted, other than writing a handful of unproduced feature-length scripts in the late nineties, i've put the film portion of that degree to little use. the only time it led to the creation of an actual film was in 2003, when i documented a cross-country trip a friend & i took to yellowstone for a week of backcountry hiking & camping.

about two-and-a-half years ago, almost ten years after graduating, i found myself on a film set for the first time. i had moved back to nyc a few months earlier & was living the totally glamorous, totally bohemian no-apartment, no-job lifestyle & as such, had a lot of free time on my hands. a friend who i'd met through my girlfriend at the time was acting as producer on a short film & they needed somebody to drive one of the vans that transported the crew from union sq down to one of the sets, a school in new brunswick, nj. other than missing the holland tunnel one night & having to drive through an extra 30-45 minutes of traffic to the lincoln tunnel, i did a fairly good job. in fact, nobody died on my watch.

since my main job was basically two hours of driving to the set & two hours driving from the set with a full day of waiting on the set sandwiched in between, i finished a hell of a lot of crosswords but also provided random assistance here & there. i helped carry in gear, hung a few signs around the building to direct cast members to the appropriate rooms & given my food expertise, was obviously a part of setting up craft services/catering. in addition, since i still get carded for cigarettes & lottery tickets & whatnot and the plot revolved around a high school teacher & a few of her students, i filled in as an extra, playing the part of a high school student. basically, along with a number of extras who were actually high school students, i was tasked with hanging out in the background & reacting to stuff.

my big break came during a scene where the teacher (played by leslie lyles, who also played andy kaufman's mother in man on the moon) was selling fundraiser candy to another teacher (played by eric christie). they conversed for a bit over the candy transaction & then he stepped away & i stepped forward & uttered my one line--"hershey bar, please." this past wednesday, the film--LANDLOCKED--had its first set of screenings & my one line made the cut & was right up there on the screen for all to see. i might be slightly biased, but i really believed that i wanted that hershey bar...& i'm now four degrees away from kevin bacon. leslie lyles was in man on the moon with jim carrey, who was in the truman show with laura linney, who was in mystic river with kevin bacon.

#106 - ready for my closeup.
snack: hershey's mini milk chocolate bars
drink: heineken from a mini keg



along with the screenings, there was a reception that featured an array of tasty wines & beers & cheeses & whatnot. there was even a cake shaped like the state of oklahoma (where the film is set). since the plot largely revolved around the teacher trying to raise money for a class trip by selling candy, there were mini candies sprinkled throughout the reception area. given my on-screen preference, i made sure to make quick work of a few hershey's mini milk chocolate bars during the reception.

recently, i've become somewhat of a chocolate snob, opting for dark chocolate most of the time. regardless, there's always something satisfyingly comforting about hershey's bars. they take me back to my childhood, a time when the parow clan filed into a rented minivan & took a summertime excursion down to hershey park, the most chocolate-themed amusement park on earth. unfortunately, that memory doesn't consist of any actual events from that trip, although i assume that some chocolate was consumed at some point & we probably went on some rides & i probably punched my sister and/or brother at least once.

as part of the reception spread, there was a mini keg of heineken. since i was feeling celebratory & i'm a total lush, i had myself a few classy plastic cups of that along with the chocolate bars. even though it's the world's most popular lager, the best part about the heineken is definitely not its bitter ass taste. it's the adventure that accompanies pouring it from that cute lil keg into a small plastic cup, a task that i discovered is not as easy as it appears to be.

the mini keg is dutch engineering at its finest. for starters, the "tap" extends out from the top of the keg at a 90-degree angle, which, if you're not careful, leads to the beer shooting out of the keg, clear past your waiting plastic cup. luckily, the fancy spread included napkins, which i put to good use. on top of that, the mini keg produces a lot of foam, a development which is fine when it involves tasty beer, but not when it involves heineken. if i have to wait five minutes for my beer, it damn well better be a guinness or a boddingtons or some such draught beer. sure i could be a total heathen & like my friend who i was getting my beer with, swirl a finger covered in nose grease into the foam to speed up the process, but i'd much rather not. it might be fine for her, since she's not a film star like me, but i now have a reputation to uphold & a film star would never do such a thing.  that's not to say that i didn't stick my finger in the foam...i just didn't cover it with nose grease before doing so.