Secret Pop

Jun 13, 2005

A Hideous Cliché

I was in the women's restroom of the acting studio where my Saturday workshop is held, and I saw the following scrawled on the wall of one of the stalls: "The hard is what makes it great. -- Tom Hanks" With all those actors pacing on the sidewalk out front, going over their sides and running lines with friends or scene partners, I suppose it isn't surprising that the only graffiti in the john would be a movie quote. And one said by Tom Hanks, no less. That's actor graffiti if ever I saw it.

Outside the I.O., I admitted to Jessie, who is one of the ranks of friends of mine who likes to tease me about my apparent inability to smoke convincingly, that I am a bad enough smoker that I often manage to smoke right into my own eyeball. And Jessie encouraged me by responding, "Well, seriously though. You do have big eyeballs." That doesn't really excuse the thing I sometimes do when I use a lighter and then shake it out as if it was a match, though. I don't think there's any excuse for that.

The movie on my return flight was Racing Stripes. I could have told you that it was going to be a dung heap. I may actually have already done so. If only by reference to the trailers for it. But I can now expertly assure you that it is an awful, awful movie, and the fact that the end credits are accompanied by a Sting song written expressly for the film is not an unfitting detail. I also noticed on my return flight that, while I am not allowed to bring a pair of tweezers on the plane or a lighter or even to have matches in my checked bags, apparently the lady sitting to my left was allowed to bring a GIANT pair of aluminum knitting needles on board without any complications. I guess she must have been knitting some kind of freedom sweater.

I wrote in my notebook last week, "It's hard to feel sad when something is almost making you happy." Nothing that was true at that time is true any longer, but the truth of it at the time makes me want to keep exercising my hands, so that when another feeling of that kind comes along, I'll be able to hold onto it.

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