may 17 where are you now -- my wild summer love? Ever see Home Alone? Me neither. Except for the one scene where the adorable tousle-headed Macaulay Culkin (pre-overexposure to America and a failed marriage) realizes he's all alone in the house and starts running around like a maniac, arms flailing, sheer joy on a stick, probably just about to bang into something immobile. Sometimes, I feel like that's how I go through life. (Internally. Of course.)
Take this time. It's not often you can narrow things down to the exact moment you made someone hate you, but I think I've brought this into a fine point. I'm a writer. For a magazine which, although in a narrow niche, is still tops in that niche. I show up at a press event (which means, possibly, there will be four of us there) and blithely stride up to the press woman. (More about her some other time.) Picture Macaulay running around the house about here: "Yaaaaaaaaa! Yaaaaaaa!" So I walk up to the press chick and I'm all kind of psyched because sometimes all of this business still gives me a buzz, and I want to say something cool and off-the-cuff and blithe and sweet, so even though she's standing next to someone else I just bound right up and say, "So, any other press here besides me?" At which she looks askance at me and nods to the woman standing next to her. "Uh, yeah, S____."
S has a face like a fist on a good day; she's just one of those people who look like a lemon would run the other way, fearing too much sourness. Now, she fixed her withering, sour, fisty gaze on me and said nothing. I covered. Probably looking like I was covering, and that I'd meant to be weird and mean and clueless the whole time, but really just covering my butt: "Well, of course, I mean besides S______." I don't think it worked. But I only see S_____ on various press-related occasions that have to do directly with the magazine, so making an ass of myself in front of her wasn't exactly a life changing event.
But ever since then, she doesn't even greet me, and tends to walk in the opposite direction. Grudge appears to be too faint a word. Fast forward to the other night, which was not only a press-related event, it was on television and every bigwig in the world was there. (Including this one particularly sleazy actor who couldn't be arsed to put on the proper dinnerwear, and showed up in a jacket someone probably threw on him seconds before he walked on stage.) Even if you're partially jaded, like me, it's hard not to get into the swing of things -- there are gorgeous people in gorgeous dresses, sexy guys in tuxedoes, and a few, uh, eccentrics who wear white jackets or the announcer from the Price Is Right who wears God only knows what glittery, rainbow, Liberace-inspired jacket.
But it's all in fun. So I learn, last night, two things. One of my fellow writers tells me at some point, shortly after S____ has walked by both of us as if we were mere puffs of her imagination and I mutter to him, "I think she hates me," -- he says, "Oh, I have a story for you." I never found out how he learned this story, but it's good all the same, particularly if you're of the opinion that you're running through life like Macaulay Culkin.
About two weeks before this big major TV event, I attended a luncheon for fans of the show I cover for my magazine. While there, I did a classic MC move and headed right over for the table with most of the actors on my show. I start being all cheery/goofy/friendly/whatever to the one actor I know best sitting there, Jason, and not until I open my mouth in greeting do I realize he's with S____ and that S_____ has a tape-recorder going. Shit. Protocol says back off and come back later, which I do after apologizing for the intrusion. Shortly thereafter, S_____ takes her leave and I sneak back over to Jason, who I've always liked because he's an ex-high school footballer like my brother, and they both seem to have the same inflection and manner in their speech. So I have this soft spot. We do our thing, I get a nice quote, I move along.
The rest of the story is what my fellow writer, R_____ tells me as we stroll down the red carpet the night of the awards show. It turns out that as soon as I backed away from the table, S_____ made a snide comment to Jason that I was so rude, wasn't that rude of me to just walk up like that, and that she didn't particularly like me. According to R____, Jason "stood up for me" and said, "Well, I like her." At which S_____ took great offense and stalked off. Three cheers and a bon bon for me!
When I next found Jason on the red carpet, I complimented him on his pinstripe suit. Such are the vagaries of this business; sometimes you're Macaulay Culkin, and sometimes you're a princess.
Speaking of which, another event occurred on the carpet which isn't worth going into in huge detail -- the background is just too long and complex for now -- but I had a mild alien moment on the carpet, walking with R_____ and some other fellow writers. An alien moment, as I see it, is where I wonder if I was really born on an alien planet, because people around me don't act in ways you would think they would. I think what an alien moment really means is I've tried to glean too much socialization from television and movies, so when people don't act like they do on TV and movies, I get confused. What I haven't figured out is why people don't act like they all do on TV and movies, if we've all been socialized by too much TV and movies. There is a flaw in my alien theory.
So in any case, a star passes us on the carpet. This particular star, S____ (not to be confused with fisty S_____), managed to get a co-star pregnant while still wed to his wife, and we more or less stumbled on that detail a few weeks ago. It turns out that his sister is also pregnant (though, thankfully, not due to S_____). So S____ is walking with his mother, and one of our writers turns to him and says, "So, is this the grandmother-to-be?" Needless to say, S_____ decides she's referring snidely to his little bon mot in the oven, and gives her a death stare. Quickly, R_____ takes him aside and covers in the same awkward way I did with S_____ way back when, which all but says: I can't believe she really said that! When really, the writer had just meant to refer to his sister's forthcoming production, not his own. Well, it all happened in a matter of seconds. It was swift, quiet, and no one laughed behind a hand or looked particularly devastated at what went down. But as we moved along, away from S_____ and mama, they started hashing it out again. And they hashed it out again while we were in our seats. And everyone had to hear about it. And yes, I was surprised and taken aback and figured nothing had really happened because at the time ... no one reacted. No one looked shamed. It was so fast, like a jab in the side, in and out and bloodless. But later on you would have thought blood had spilled everywhere. I just kept waiting for someone to react. No one did. Until far after the fact, when it became the dramatic scandale of the evening. Talk about melodrama.
