Happy Friday!

I love Fridays. I do mini-celebrations including wearing silly clothes, drinking exceptionally snooty tea, driving my Viper to the grocery store, sharing an apple with my desert tortoise…all sorts of fun little things.

I’m not sure if the following picture was taken on a Friday, but I’m guessing it was. My clothes are a little on the silly side and I appear to be in a good mood out to dinner with my best friend Eddie. My husband had picked up my phone and started snapping pictures for no apparent reason.

I married into friendship with Eddie and for that I’m quite thankful. He and my husband Jason have been friends since junior high just like I’ve been best friends with Jen (the other half of Ashleigh Raine) since eighth grade.

The Starter Wife (3)

I got lost. I can’t freakin’ believe I got lost, but I did. And not in the conventional, wrong turn kind of way, either. I followed the signs as usual, but at one point there were three production signs, the top two were for a different show and the bottom one was for the one I was on…but they were all pointing to the same driveway and I didn’t see that bottom one in time.

Oh well… I called casting and they helped me get where I was supposed to go. I was only ten minutes late and they weren’t pissed off about it at all.

In fact, I still love this show. The first time I was on was great and so was the second. This third time was no different–well, no different in general, but completely different in practice. Last two times, I was an upscale recovering drug addict. This time, I was a pedestrian with my 1968 Mustang Fastback and it was 1970-something.

I’d dragged a ton of clothes to this gig because, well, I have them, I might as well use them. And for a great change, the costumers loved me.

It was a simple scene, but since there was a flipped car and a bunch of water involved, the set-up was kind of involved. I ended up driving my car to the set before going through hair and make-up.

Since my eyebrows and the front of my hair had been burned off in a small kitchen explosion brought on by team effort stupidity between my husband and I, my hair is a little shorter than usual. When I stopped by the hair trailer, she just sighed and said there wasn’t enough for her to really do anything with it. I just kind of smashed it down and pretended I was Janet from Three’s Company. It’s too short, but I felt the need to try.

Then, in the make-up trailer, the lady started going nuts with me. She drew on eyebrows to hide my stubble and even put fake eyelashes on me to lengthen my burnt lashes. She really had a great time on my eyes and good golly, that’s the best I’ve felt since the explosion. It’s been a little over a week and it just seems to take forever for hair to grow back when you have none. At least the burns on my eyelids, lips and nose are done. They took about five days to heal. Now they’re just a little tender, but no big deal. I just want my facial hair back!

Anyhow, once I was out of there, we sat around in holding for awhile (which was air conditioned…it was getting freakin’ hot and humid outside and we were all thankful for the opportunity to stay cool) before heading to the set. I was saved as a driver and they’d planned on having me drive my Mustang, but it was too loud. Of course. Happens every time.

Instead, I drove one of the other picture cars…through a towering water effect on the first take before they toned it down for the following ones. It was another miserable black vinyl, no air-conditioning car just like my Mustang, so I kinda felt right at home. I just drank a ton of water so I didn’t dehydrate.

Basically, after those four or five takes, we were done, but they were still filming and a few of the other extras worked. I ended up reading a book and/or talking with others there. It wasn’t a bad gig at all. I just wish it wasn’t so hot. That was no fun at all.

Traffic was so bad getting there, that it took me a full two hours. I changed my route on the way home just to change the scenery a little and it took me an hour and a half despite the actual mileage was longer. I’ve certainly learned my lesson!

I got to keep the fake eyelashes as a souvenir and just before actually working, I snapped a picture with my phone. I’m really not supposed to do that, but I was careful not to get anything that’s supposed to be some big secret in the background, so hopefully I won’t get chewed out. I just really wanted to capture the brilliant make-up job I’d been given. It was kind of Twiggy-esque.

This is more like it

More often than not, when I go in to my husband’s office to work my little bits of magic every month, I make a bit of an occasion of it. Let’s face it, most office jobs are boring. When I’m there, all I do is stare at a computer. It’s boring…even multitasking, it’s still boring. So, if I gotta get my lazy ass out of bed and down to the office for a day or two, I might as well make it interesting…

This was another time my friend just had to snap a pic on my phone. She even told me I HAD to blog it. Well, here ya go, Denise!

Disregarding the 3D glasses that were gifted in honor of my poor choice in clothing, the shirt and pants I’m wearing do not go with anything else in my wardrobe as well as they go with each other. Yes, that’s really saying something since they really only have the flowers in common–although one’s got 4 petals, the other 3. A flower is a flower. The blue and red almost match…almost.

I tell ya, though, everyone in the office had to stop and say hello or comment on my horrid outfit and the shock on people’s faces as I walked to lunch across the street was priceless. A little bit of wackiness goes a long way and I’m happy to do my part–even if it’s not Halloween!

Am I Together?

Every now and then, I appear to have it together. Everything matches and all is well. I just found this photo from earlier this year. I had a bit of a vampire/gothic twist going on that day for reasons I no longer recall, but a friend of mine thought I was so well put together that day, she just had to take a picture.

I don’t suppose it’s confidence inspiring that she was laughing while it was taken and that’s why it’s blurry.

Domino update

I don’t know what took me so long to get to this one. I mean, I saw it in the theater because a friend of a friend who doesn’t know me that well had mentioned he saw me in it, so I figured I must’ve gotten some really good camera time for him to actually recognize me.

Boy was that an understatement. So far, of all the shows I’ve been in and appeared on camera, this one takes the cake. Big time. I mean, my head is as big as the screen!

The other shots may not be close-ups, but I’m still totally visible for a change. I suppose it helped that they’d placed me in the front row for some strange reason.

My husband and I saw it together and the moment I was onscreen at all, we started chuckling. Each shot built and built until we were all out cracking up because, like, my head was so freakin’ huge! It’s one of the best laughs we’ve had. We really hadn’t expected it to be like that. We’d figured okay, since I was in the front row, perhaps I was visible enough. Noooooo… I even got a close-up!

This is also one of the coolest bits I’ve been part of. I was an alien on They Are Among Us, a dead nun on Angel (in which I also had a close-up, but my head wasn’t quite as big as the screen because I was laying down and they wanted to get more blood in the shot), an insane asylum patient on The Changeling and a hooker on Cold Case and Crazy.

But on Domino… I was a recovering nymphomaniac at a Nymphomaniacs Anonymous meeting, no less. Good times!

Where The Truth Lies update

I believe some of my best adventures were on this show and they didn’t happen during filming! From almost driving through the Red Sea to waving at tourists on the Backlot Tram Tour, this was quite an interesting gig.

Much of what burned on the Universal lot this year was where base camp and the set were, too. When I heard about that fire, I immediately thought of my time on Spiderman II, Superhero and Where The Truth Lies.

Here’s another of my smallest performances. It’s not quite as small as Hollywoodland, but it’s close! This is definitely the kind of shot where I wonder if I’ll actually be seen at all or was I just given a cross there ‘just in case’ the camera happens to see that deep. It’s always nice to make it in frame, though!

In these next ones, boy was I pissed when I tried to do the screen capture and there was some dumbass extra blocking the view of my car…

Yeah, that dumbass extra was me!

The way I could tell was not just by the colors on my dress, but that’s my own purse. I recognized my purse and then vaguely remembered doing this wipe, but hadn’t realized that it was part of my cross heading across the street.

I looked for myself in the other shot, but while I thought I saw myself, I wasn’t entirely sure, so I didn’t do a capture. The finished product was nothing like what was shot.

Serenity update

Okay, so this one’s a stretch, but scoured every frame during all the wide shots and while I could make out people standing next to me, I just wasn’t positive that the partial face I saw was me. I didn’t want to point my silly arrow to the wrong person. I really wanted to be more visible in this movie, but oh well.

What I’ve got is what I’ve got… Me in shadow and the only reason I know that’s me is because myself and one other guy were the only ones actually walking forward in this shot. There was a lady standing near the opening, but she was sideways.

In fact, my arrow is right over her head. Whoops! Sorry, but this was my one moment in frame on Serenity, so I gotta make the best of it!

Smokin’ Aces Update

I must admit…I had a lot of fun on this shoot. It wasn’t spectacularly fun or intense or anything like that, but even almost three years later, I’m remembering it as a nice, long-but-easy shoot.

Since then, I’ve worked with the same A.D. on G-Force, but due to the nature of the shoot, I think I only saw him three times and that was mostly during lunch!

It’s not the best shot of me, but it really is me back there. Not too shabby considering I doubted getting any screen time at all except maybe this scene and lo and behold, there I am!

Goofing off with a doll picture

While working on a different project, I got inspired to mess with one of my doll pictures. I’d taken the photograph as part of a “before” picture because underneath her dress, she’s got some very serious problems that need to be fixed. I guess it’s because the girl’s so cute or maybe because the picture was just there when I needed it. I don’t know, but I like to think I made something sweet out of it.

When I’m further along on the project, I’ll post the real “before” images as well as progress on fixing all the torn leather. A previous owner had put cotton balls instead of sawdust in her kid body and just the thought of that irritates me. Old rags from 1900, okay maybe, but not cotton balls. That’s just plain wrong. In my opinion, antique dolls need to have either antique repairs or period-appropriate repairs if they must be modern.

Carnivale Update

I’ve got a sizable stack of DVDs to go through in order to grab screen captures of myself in frame. Of a stack of twenty, I may only come up with five or so shows in which I actually appeared in frame. This time, I had a stack of about twelve and I came up with four. Not too bad.

Although, for the amount of running around I did on Carnivale, I really thought I’d get so much as a split second in frame, but I got a whole lot of nothing. However the day I was a prop magnet, I managed to make it in frame several times. The problem was mostly that in the various angles, I was blocked by other things. Oh well. At least I got this one:

As I get the rest ready, I’ll post ’em.

In the mean time, I’ve heard from a few people that I made it into a commercial for Raising The Bar. I have yet to see it, but that’d be awesome. Kind of like when my car made it into the trailer for Anchorman.

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