Food, Theater and Old Friends

As a result of my post on Hot Chocolate, I just discovered a great food blog - Peter's Mostly Food Blog. It's primarily about 'Restaurants around Seattle and Bainbridge Island, and other food-related nonsense,' but there are also some posts about places in San Diego, and an absolutely adorable kitten named Sushi.

Peter left a comment on my post...and I realized, after exploring the blog, that this is the same Peter who a: married my high school pal, Debbie, and b: nearly got arrested while playing a mysterious 'lurker' outside a restaurant during MFH's Molly the Trolley event. The fact that he was wearing a trenchcoat and peering through the windows of the restaurant probably had something to do with it. A damn fine lurker, that Peter.

Debbie was also involved in our theatrical endeavors. When Mo and I decided we'd try our hand at making a movie, Debbie was our camera operator (with the exception of one day when she wasn't available, so my sister filled in). When I say 'camera', I mean singular. We only had one camera and one light. But she made the most of both.

Our film efforts were very much along the lines of "Hey, I've got a barn!" and "I've got costumes!" "Let's put on a show!" Just substitute: "Hey, I know someone with a camera!" "And we've got actors!" "And we can go shopping for clothes!" "Let's make a movie!"

Mo and I wrote the script, "Lovebound in La Jolla"; about a woman whose obsession with romance novels makes it difficult for her to find a relationship 'cause she's too busy fantasizing about swashbuckling heroes. We had a blast writing cliché fantasy scenes: gypsy wildcat, pirates, gothic, film noir...we even had one especially dorky ‘30s upper class Brit sequence with our heroine and her best friend (played, respectively, by me and Mo) impressing the crowd by tickling the old ivories and singing “Rule Britannia.” It seemed like a good idea at the time.

We pulled the rest of our cast mostly from Murder for Hire’s revolving troupe of actors, all of them excited at the prospect of making a ‘real’ movie (I know, I know…but we really were that naïve). We made the mistake of assuming that just because the actor we’d used on stage as our brooding gothic hero projected extreme masculinity and magnetism in that particular over the top role, that he’d project the same on screen as the object of our heroine’s fixation. Wrong-o. While a lovely man (both in looks and personality) and a talented actor, Greg was totally wrong for the part. He came across as sweet and…well…kind of effeminate. Which could have been because he was gay, a fact that totally slipped below our self-involved and vanity-obscured radar.

Oh well. Like all of our MFH projects, Mo and I bumbled along in true ‘Two Stupid Girls’ fashion, got three VHS tapes full of footage…and then lost our lead actor. I like to think that we would have finished shooting the entire script if that hadn’t happened. Not that we had any means of editing it if we HAD finished…but I’m sure we would have given it our best shot.

I still have the footage, much to Mo’s dismay. She’s more embarrassed by it than I am, although I’m not quite sure why. I’m the one playing the ditzy heroine having to mouth some truly bad dialogue. True, there’s one scene where Mo is playing with her hair and you just KNOW she’s enamored with the way she looks, kind of like a little girl with a new dress. Y’know, the way they swish the skirt back and forth, and just looked SO pleased with themselves? That’s Mo in this scene.

I, of course, have no embarrassing moments.

At least not that I’m gonna tell you about.