1954 Trailer | Pasadena, CA
...But I have a feeling I'm not going to succeed.
OK, so I was really late to the AirBnB party - I stayed in my very first one during our house-hunting trip last March, which is approximately fifty years after everyone else started staying in them - but...I mean...that's how I want to travel.
Some of my favorite memories from when I was growing up are of the times we drove upstate to visit my parents' friends at the 1950s-style family resort they owned. All day (and night) long the grownups hung out in the common room and drank wine and played chess and talked and laughed while the kids played a board game, or searched for Tiny Toon Adventures on the old TV by the bar, or hid under dining room tables telling secrets, and it was all just so...communal. Not just family units in threes and fours braving the waters in rickety little boats; an actual village full of parents and children and grandchildren and babies, everyone doing their own thing, but together just the same.
I remember the sound of it, you know? The sort of grownup buzzing that's the soundtrack of so much of your childhood; those conversations about politics that you can't even begin to make sense of, those jokes that make your parents laugh until they turn red and that you don't understand but laugh at anyway, just because they're happy and so you're happy, too. It's the same sound that you hear late at night when you're in the backseat of the car driving home from somewhere, and your parents start talking about work or something else your kid self doesn't care about, and you fall asleep to the sound of their office frustrations and traffic reports on the radio, and feel warm and peaceful and safe.
It's cool, seeing how happy our kids are when we have friends over. Not because anyone's doting on them, especially, but just because I get the sense it's exciting, getting to be a part of what Grownup Life is like. The other day we had a few friends over for lunch and swimming, and when the sun started to set we decided to take a mini-picnic out to the trellis-covered tables by the playground down the block. We swung on swings and climbed hills and ran around with the dogs and just sat and talked, and the kids stayed up late and ended the night watching cartoons on the bed while we ordered Thai food and talked some more, and it reminded me of those weekends at the hotel way back when.
Photo by Indy
So I think it's safe to say we're more or less settled in now. I know where the closest Trader Joe's is; our son is happily enrolled in summer camp; we have an account at the dry cleaner. There are still a bunch of boxes left to be unpacked, but that's mostly because I have to wait for the renovations we're in the middle of to be finished before I have anywhere to put the rest of our things. We even have a couple of playdates with potential new friends on the horizon (always scary, this making-of-new-friends-in-a-new-town thing, but I did it once before, and it turned out pretty great, so).
And so I thought I'd just share a few snapshots that we've taken over the past couple of weeks; just some bits and pieces of what we've been up to.
Back in the day, I wrote a whole bunch of movies and TV show pilots. It's a byproduct of being an actor; you spend your days reading script after script after script, and at some point you start thinking to yourself: "Dude. I could TOTALLY do this." And so you pick up a copy of Final Draft and start tapping away on your keyboard, and sometimes what comes out is an extremely unfortunate (but not autobiographical at all, oh no no) tale of a girl who moves to Los Angeles to be an actress and ends up wildly disillusioned (oh yes; it was as bad as it sounds). And then sometimes you end up with is something that's actually sort of...okay.
I've written a lot of stuff over the years, but I still think that one of my favorite things that I've ever written is a script that I wrote for a college course I took on the 1950s, and that was read by exactly two people: my professor and Kendrick (the latter only because he found a copy of it at some point and asked to read it). It's a coming-of-age story (because that tends to be what people who are still coming of age themselves write), but it's - shockingly, I know - not about me, which is a bit of an achievement in and of itself.
Something you learn very early on in Hollywood is that every script has to have a "log line" - a punchy, easily-digestible, 1-2 sentence explanation of what, exactly, the film is about (or what, exactly, you think will make people want to pay money for said film). So Armageddon, for example, could be "Die Hard meets Independence Day, with asteroids." Pirahna 3D would be...well, actually in that case the title pretty much does the trick. My script, Meridian Planet, was The Wonder Years, but with a girl.
Here we are just before the race, all clean and stuff (and practicing for the "carry your partner" obstacle).
I was so nervous the night before Mudderella that 10PM found me pacing around the house, packing and re-packing my tote bag, checking and double-checking whether I actually owned running sneakers (somewhat surprisingly, yes), and obsessively drinking water just in case I arrived at the location of the run only to discover a desert filled with race organizers who had been replaced by water-depriving gremlins.
I was actually less worried about the obstacles themselves - climbing over walls and mud-hills, crawling under nets, sliding into pools of water (mud) - than I was about the running...because for real: I am not a runner. I feel like I look ridiculous doing it; I'm virtually guaranteed to get a stitch in my side after .5 seconds; treadmills are my Angry Place; et cetera.
