Southland and the Portuguese Pothead

Late call today, which was great cause I had time to go hiking and fix lunch and what not. I must say...when I left my apartment this morning, there was an angelic glow about me. Not sure if it was the exercise, pride in my cooking skills, or my pink silk top, but I looked rather pretty like an angel. I stress this only cause about an hour later, someone asked me if I ever tried acid. This guy was cute...like Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise- I could get any girl I want-cute. And he decided to sit across from me. I thought...hmmm...maybe he is interested? Nope. Within 5 minutes he tells me that he thinks the girl at the other table is really hot and that he wants to move to Brazil and is learning Portuguese in order to seduce Brazlian women. He doesn't like any of the Brazilians here though...they are too smart and independent and full of the "American Dream" so he has to go to Brazil. Then he asked if I ever tried acid. Do I look like a drug addict? I thought I looked so angelic today....but apparently me looking angelic could pass for acid dropper. He went to Burning Man last week and is still high on the experience. He thought there were too many gays there, but he managed to find some straight ones. The woman he went with is apparently a religious lesbian who taxidermied her pet dog. He is 25 too and told me about how he made out with and hooked up with this 49 year old woman he was renting a room from. He made out with her on camera though in the movie Valentine so he got a SAG voucher out of it so look for him! He was crazy weird...but still really hot....but stupid...very stupid. During a break he decided to go smoke pot. When he got on the bus everyone could smell it. We called him out but he acted dumb as to not get in trouble. I'm actually surprised they didn't send him home...other sets would have. In fact, the only comments he got were "did you bring enough to share?" He didn't.

NCIS and the SAG Voucher

Working NCIS has finally paid off. I remember there was a time when I wanted to request to not work the show ever again, but I'm glad I didn't. Four months after receiving my first voucher, I get my second. Here's hoping I get the third in no time at all. Hacker (the 2nd AD) pulled me aside and asked how many I had and told me he was about to make my day. He did. It was awkward though cause he was trying to be discreet yet he also felt that I wasn't showing my gratitude enough. Make up your mind! I don't know how many thank yous he required but evidently saying it twenty times wasn't enough. I think I'm supposed to be more buddy buddy with him now cause he did me this favor. For some reason I feel like I owe him something now cause he is totally holding it over my head as if he saved my life. We shall see.

Monk and the Reunion

Dear Monk,

Without you I would not work at all. Thank You.

Sincerely,

Mary


It has been 5 weeks since my last extra gig. Depressed, poor, and willing to do anything for money, I was called in to work on Monk at Paramount with my car. Of course my car is too noisy for those spoiled sound guys (what on earth did they do before hybrids??!!) so I was a pedestrian for the most part. It was perfect timing too because I just returned from San Francisco/Berkeley visiting Kate just yesterday. (God I needed that). What is really funny is that I was reunited with this guy Chip who was the stunt coordinator for this independent movie I worked on called S.E.R.E. I told him how the old gang was doing and he offered to work for free on this horror script I'm writing. I'm shocked how much faith people have in the project. It really motivates me to keep on working. Our identities and how we knew each other was bugging us for hours, until he laughed, then I knew that I knew him from somewhere. His real name is Lee, but his friends call him Chip...that's when it hit me. So glad we figured that out. I told him I'd mail him a copy of the movie..must get a hold of Jonathan. It was so fun reliving the S.E.R.E. days right after graduation when I thought this was only the beginning......haven't done much since though.

The guy who plays Mr. Eko on "Lost" was the guest star...I don't think he is really Nigerian...but damn, he can play it really well. (Okay..I checked on IMDB and his parents are Nigerian, but he was born in London, which explains why he spoke perfect English at Lunch...he also looks like a football player)

Monk and the SAG VOUCHER!

"Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day, I've got a wonderful feeling, everything's going my way" Today seemed just like any other day on set. I worked for maybe 3 hours yesterday which was brilliant because I needed to go by Universal Studios to pick up a free ticket that I got when I purchased my annual pass. I was so afraid that I was going to miss out on a great deal. I was a jury member so basically I sat down for 3 hours and then was let go. The next day they recalled me however, and I guess they didn't have enough SAG people so what did they do? THEY GAVE ME A SAG VOUCHER!! My very first one..and it only took me a frickin year to get! One down, two to go! Also, I was done by 1 pm...another short day, and decided to go to Universal Studios afterwards with Ashley to celebrate. Such an amazing day.

Southland and Dac

I abandoned my dear friend Kate who was visiting to work on Southland for the night. The call was at 5:30 so Kate and I were able to spend the day in Malibu and at the Getty Villa before I had to head out. It was a pretty easy call at the Hollywood and Highland complex. I was a journalist/photographer. Ashley called me while at work because the guy she like Dac was there. Towards the end of the night I heard someone say Mary and he came up to me to introduce himself. He was not the dolphin that I though he was on CSI: NY. He told Ashley that I looked grumpy. You'd be grumpy to if you had Kai's look-a-like talking your ear off. Look-a-like asked me what was wrong and I just told him I was tired and annoyed...he asked me what I was annoyed with...I just looked at him. He never took the hint.

Alvin and the Chipmunks and the Naked Zac Levi

6:30 AM call time in Long Beach. Joy. I just LOVE waking up at 5. (eyes roll). Then when I arrive to set, they are out of eggs. This day was not going well so far (though later I heard that the eggs were almost inedible). Luckily I had friends on set. Becky was her usual self and then she befriended a guy named Brian who liked magic, but refused to tell me his secrets...especially to a certain poker chip trick which has been nagging me. Then there was Paul who went to USC and is a friend of Ashley's I met at a Superbowl party. It's amazing how well you can get to know someone in 16 hours. I feel like we've been friends forever and we created a geek scale to measure geekiness.....somehow I won even though HE watches Battlestar Galactica and loves Sci-fi. I'm not sure how that happened but I do blame most of it on the Chemistry Holiday called Mole Day (Which is on October 23rd for you non-geeks out there because a mole is 6.02 x 10 ^23).

The day turned instantly amazing when I realized that Zac Levi was the star of the movie. Since I totally have a crush on him and all. I even got to see him in his underwear for a dream sequence. I was smiling ear to ear. That boy has some thighs if I do say so myself. He was in tighty whities. Yay! (though I prefer boxers). Oh how I wish he weren't a man whore. It was fun seeing him act all awkward and he would try to be funny in between takes.

Then we had a choreographer teach us some dance moves and about 300 of us had to dance to the Chipmunks singing "Shake Your Groove Thing". My arms got tired of waving back and forth but seriously...how priceless is it to have 300 people dancing to the Chipmunks. The main song we had to hear over and over was this song called "Family" and we had to shout in synchonization F-A-M-i.l.y. I wrote it that way because we would scream F then A then M and then the i, l, and y were run together very quickly and many of us didn't get the letters correctly because of this. In fact, Becky kept saying l-e-y. It's also very difficult to chant the word chipmunk over and over again. I started realizing after awhile that I was saying shitmunk. It's much easier to say. Crazy times. Family was their song entry into the all high school talent show. Apparently Charice Pempengco, the famous girl from the Philippines who has been featured on Oprah many times, is from a local high school......also from a local high school...the break dance crew Quest which has Hawk and Dominick from "So You Think You Can Dance" in it. That was pretty amazing. They were doing flips and tricks left and right. It was phenomenal. When I wasn't jumping up and down shouting F-A-M-I-L-Y, I was sitting in the bleachers at the top where they had these crazy dummies. They all had man faces except some had makeup to make them look like women. It was amazing. Here is a pic of me and the best dummy there.

Criminal Minds and the Stairmaster

There are a lot of similarities between being really tired and really drunk. For instance - poor motor skills, slurred speech, and loopy vision caused by exceedingly longer blinks. However, it is known that people usually get more attractive if you are drunk, but when you're tired...the world is ugly and you just want to get home. We wrapped at about 2:30 am, which would normally be my bedtime one would say, except in my lovely apartment, I am not walking up and down stairs in a poorly ventilated subway station in North Hollywood. I may have been walking up and down stairs for a good 5 hours and I was exhausted. Every little thing that people would say that was stupid or any complaint would be like nails on a chalkboard. There was one guy who was not an extra but a North Hollywood resident, and he had a mohawk....except you could also tell that he was getting a bald spot on the back of his head cause his mohawk was very uneven and thinning back there. It was funny...but revolting at the same time. Ugh. The next few days, my boogers were black from the subway pollution.