On My Own
DIARY
Pretty Dresses & ‘Provisational Pastas
Backyard picnicking & inappropriately-sized seating choices.
I spent all day Saturday shooting what felt like millions and millions of segments (eight, actually, but that's a lot for one day when you take into account all the close-up shots, b-roll shots, et cetera that go into them) for a project that I've been teasing here and there over the past couple of months, and that I will be able to announce…later today! (Check back in just a couple of hours and it should be up.)
The shoot was followed by a BBQ with three couples who live near us and who we've become close with since we moved, and who also happen to each have two children: one Indy's age, and one infant (apparently I wasn't the only one who saw their child hit age two and immediately had the MUST HAVE MORE BABIES gear kick into overdrive). We're the Last Couple Standing with one child in this particular friend group, which is funny and cool: funny because when we're all hanging out we're basically sloths compared to our friends, who are doing things like burping and feeding and rocking while we're just sitting there like little guacamole-eating pharaohs - and cool because…I mean, babies are so cute. And it's so adorable to see all these two-and-a-half year olds with their little siblings, half not caring because babies are sort of boring (especially in comparison to the prospect of filling a bucket with rocks) and half loving being a big brother or sister and being super proud.
Weekend Snapshots: Mother’s Day Edition
Isn't this INCREDIBLE? Saturday morning we took a walk, and scenes like this were all over. After a few months of not being especially enthusiastic about living in this part of the world, what with the sub-zero temperatures, insane blizzards, getting snowed in practically every week and all…our town is busy making me fall in love with it all over again. It's just so gorgeous.
If you're in the NYC area, I highly suggest you come up for a day trip sometime (ideas for how what to do are here). Maybe next weekend, while these cherry blossoms (or are they apple blossoms?) are still hanging around.
A Peculiar Thing
The below is an excerpt from Ramshackle Glam. I wanted to share it on the site because it explores a topic that I've touched upon a lot here - the anxiety that I felt during my pregnancy, and in the weeks after giving birth - but that I felt like I never really got to the bottom of until I wrote this essay.
(Read the full book on your Kindle here.)
Early on in my pregnancy, when I was busy tying myself up in knots about things like strollers and closets and finding room for bottle drying racks on our nonexistent countertop, one of the things I actually didn’t worry a ton about, oddly enough, was . . . the baby. I just kind of figured he’d be okay. I mean, of course I went to all my doctor’s appointments, ate decently well, and avoided the stuff you’re supposed to avoid, but mostly I just sort of got on with it and trusted that everything would turn out fine. He’d be born, and be loved and happy and ours, and our little family would roll on into wherever it was we were headed.
A Stroll Down Memory Lane: YooHoo Chocolate Drink Commercial (1998)
I've posted old commercials that I shot back in the '90s before just for fun…but today I found this clip, and now I need to show it to you, because it's kind of awesome.
I was just talking with a friend about advertising and slightly-ahead-of-their-time campaigns that don't work particularly well because audiences don't "get" them (even though they would in just a few years, or even months), and in the course of this conversation I mentioned a YooHoo commercial I shot many, many years ago. The commercial was part of a larger campaign that never got a ton of screen-time because it referenced things like threesomes (my commercial) and cults (this commercial, starring Tammy Lynn Michaels, who later became Melissa Etheridge's wife). And while threesomes and cults are hardly eyebrow-raisers now, back in the '90s I guess people were kind of weirded out by sexual innuendo in their soft-drink commercials, and this series didn't do particularly well with focus groups.
But that's not the point of this post.
The point of this post is that I couldn't remember what, exactly, happened in the commercial, and so I went hunting for it, and:
