Mommy, what does dying feel like?

The answer to that question, kiddos, is "A bit like watching THE BLACK DAHLIA."

As we begin to move into my favorite season (autumn) (but... not in Los Angeles because we have no real damn ass seasons) and my favorite month (October), I feel a need to catch up a bit. So here's a few things that I've done in the past few months (whilst in "back drama recovery mode").

I've continued watching numerous movies both in theaters and on DVD, VHS and television for the GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) movie nomination committee that I am. I joined this group and began attending the meetings in part to fulfill my New Year's resolution to "be more gay" but admittedly I'm a little gayed out. I would like to see some nice movies with NO QUEERS! But alas I must continue to kill many birds with a few stones and so most of my outings and free periods of time have been filled with gay gay gay. Now this is not all bad (or even "very bad") ... there have, in fact, been a few bright shining stars on my GLAAD movie list. IMAGINE ME AND YOU is probably my favorite of the year so far though I've given TALLADEGA NIGHTS my highest score followed, closely, by V IS FOR VENDETTA and LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. (And LOVING ANNABELLE was good but that's not on my official view list.) But just to recap you on movies I've seen (and the scores I've given them)(and I'm now known as "Erin the low scorer" at the meetings) - here they are:

(Scores are out of 40 possible points and are not necessarily reflective of how much I actually enjoyed the movie or not)

-Imagine Me and You (29)
-MTV's True Life: I Have Gay Parents (22)
-Duck Season (19)
-V is for Vendetta (31)
-Rosie's All Aboard Cruise (28)
-Kinky Boots (28)
-Lucky Number Slevin (20)
-Summer Storm (30)
-FAQS (15)
-Billie Jean (on HBO Sports show)(27)
-Poseidon Adventure (23)
-April's Shower (22)
-Adam & Steve (19)
-Art School Confidential (19)
-In Their Own Words with the music of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (30)
-Devil Wears Prada (15) (I actually LOVED this movie but scored it low on the GLAAD criteria because they never SAY that Stanley Tucci is supposed to be gay)
-The Break-Up (15)
-Fabulous: The Story of Queer Cinema (26)
-The Sisters (23)
-Keep Not Silent (29)
-Strangers With Candy (26)
-A Year Without Love (30)
-Little Miss Sunshine (31)
-Standing Still (22)
-Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (39)
-She's the Man (16)
-Don't Tell (22)
-The Power of Harmony (17)
-Say Uncle (26)
-Red Doors (not yet rated)
-The Black Dahlia (not yet rated BUT IT WAS A BIG FLAMING PIECE OF POO)

Oy and there are so many more on the horizon that I have to view... here's just a smattering: Shortbus, Infamous, 20 Centimeters, For Your Consideration, History Boys, Three Needles, Paper Dolls, Race You to the Bottom, Guys and Balls, Quincenera, The Groomsmen, Changing Times, Another Gay Movie, When Do We Eat, Go for Zucker, Trust the Man, Friends with Money, Basic Instinct 2, The Night Listener, Crank, The Great Pink Scare, etc. etc. etc.

Moving on - I had a birthday. I turned 28. I celebrated at an irish restaurant called Tom Bergins where I enjoyed a dish called "Chicken Erin." (It was actually good.) I then plotted and planned a beach bonfire (despite my dislike of the beach) with a couple of other girls and dealt with that. (The day put my back BACK into "level three" which is what it was to begin with - though with my rehab excercises it did not pull on a disc therefore it was not quite as bad. Though it meant I had to restart my chiro treatments when I WAS practically just ending them.)

I went in for a scan of my brain. Another MySpace acquaintance is studying at UCLA and needed a willing participant (who was as desperate for twenty bucks as I was/am) and I volunteered! (Secretly, being a hypochondriac, I signed up for the free scan so that I could see if there was possibly some big obvious "thing" that might explain why my memory sucks BUT I was informed that they, being students, wouldn't really know if they saw a "thing" anyway.) (The second ulterior motive was the "free picture of my brain" which I thought would make an awesome MySpace default picture.)
So I went in and met the three girls who would administer my MRI scan, read over the "have no metal in your body" warnings and filled out a bunch of paperwork. Then I layed on a table while the girls explained that they were about to stick my head in a cage and I wouldn't see them do it. Y'see they plugged my ears, then put headphones over that, covered my eyes with goggles that viewed a Mac desktop, filled my hands with squeeze balls (for panic) and a button box (for answering test questions non-vocally), stuck a pillow under my knees and then covered me with a blanket. And then while I was completely sensory-deprived - they put a cage over my face and slid me into the tube. For about three minutes I thought, "MY HEAD IS IN A FUCKING CAGE!! MY HEAD IS IN A FUCKING CAGE!!! WHAT IF I NEED TO SIT UP! I CAN'T BECAUSE MY HEAD IS IN A CAGE!! AND I CAN'T SEE THE CAGE!! THIS IS SOME FUCKED UP SHIT!!" and then I breathed a sigh of relief. And then they pulled me out because apparently my head wasn't in the right place and they had to do it all again. This time, however, when they put me back in the tube the tube itself yanked on the goggle cord and after it tried to yank my nose off (I said, "Hey! Help! Nose!") they re-adjusted it. (But it got all askew on the way back in again.) So I'm still not sure what the test was exactly about but I can tell you that they showed me a bunch of people making angry faces. First they showed me people just smiling or staring blankly and I had to match the faces with either names (like "Amy" or "Bruce") or descriptions (like "wide-eyed" or "frown"). They would take pictures of my brain during these mental acrobats. Then they got all voo doo weird on me and during the second batch of tests they changed it up by showing me angry faces instead of blank or smiling faces. Do you think it means something that everytime one of the people made an angry face... I laughed? They did the same test over and over again - taking pictures of my brain each time and in between the tests I would close my eyes because the askew goggles left me with an askew view of the monitor which if I continued to stare at - would have given me a bad headache. So... with my eyes close, laying down, in a tube... with a non-visible head cage... I started to fall asleep. I'm pretty sure by the last test I was calling "Amy" by "Bruce" and saying someone with a frown was wide-eyed, simply because I was drifting to sleepyland. Eventually they pulled me out and we rushed out of the room (apparently they only had it for an hour) and then I was handed a bunch of follow-up tests. These personality test styled things seemed to have the theme of "do you have anxiety" but in the end they didn't tell me what the test was for because I said I'd be willing to do it again and they didn't want to spoil me for future potential use.

Mert instituted what I like to call "Write Night." (Write Night = a night in which we force each other to sit down and compose fiction simply by being there) We've had two "write nights" and I'm pretty sure we took more time deciding what we were going to snack on than actually ... writing (but at least something got done!) He began writing a script. I began writing a ... well I think it's a novel. But who knows. The second write night was cheese night. We went to several locations to procure interesting snack cheese (I got a blue variety, he got something a little more on the white side), olive spread, crackers and the "just perfect" beverages which we enjoyed on a bread board next to our back to back laptops. (Write Night, after just two installments, is on hiatus. I had finals at school. He had a houseguest. We better get back to them though.)

And along the lines of friend-instituted things - Monica has been coming over for a nightly walk. I'm on school break and bored as hell so she rolls over after work (which is where I go to school, which is like three blocks away) and we walk. I need to do this as, again, part of my "rehabilitation" and she just needs the company. So we walked on Monday. And we walked a little further... maybe a mile... on Tuesday (saw a raccoon that night). And last night we walked A LONG ASS WAY AND BACK... ruined our feet... and we'll probably never walk again!! (Which equals - maybe 3 miles.)

Backing up... I went to see a filming of CELEBRITY DUETS with Amy. I was that girl you didn't see on TV... the one drooling over Lucy Lawless. I think I said, "DAMN!" aloud maybe three or four times during the taping. I was also that girl clapping out of sync with the rest of the audience because I have no rhythm. You should see a TV taping once in your life but really - once is enough. Afterwards you're like "well that was a lot of trouble... I could have just watched that at home." (TV Tapings I've been to: The Single Guy, Reba, that show with Nancy McKeon - Can't Hurry Love, Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Kimmel.) In this case, the audience was on-camera so we had to "act" like we were really into the performances. And when you're busy acting... you kinda forget to actually watch and enjoy the performances. (FYI - I was there the night Lucy sang "Footloose" and Leah Thompson got the boot.) The fun part was seeing Wayne Brady fear for his career after he told Carly Patterson that she was safe and then had the stage manager run up and say "there was a mistake, she's not safe" and then he got scared but then they let Carly be safe anyway. When I watched in L.A. they had edited that part out. (Because, y'know, one of the sucky things about the Pacific time zone is that you never ACTUALLY see anything LIVE.)

Taysha's Disneyland Half Marathon

September 16th I went to hang out at Disneyland! My first time since the 50th anniversary celebrations had begun! (Actually Taysha later pointed out that we had been there recently but it was one of those all night park events and there were no "50'th Anniversary Celebrations" actually happening.) It was also my first time since they put Jack Sparrow (and others) into the Pirates of the Caribbean and the new bride into the Haunted Mansion. Well no luck on the bride because the Haunted Mansion was closed (probably putting the Nightmare B4 Xmas gang in for the holidays - DRAT!!) but I did get to meet Jack and Davey Jones and the Black Pearl. And it was pretty cool. I would be a little more UPSET about the changing of my rides .. MY RIDES THAT I REMEMBER but I've recently discovered http://www.extinct-attractions-club.com/ where I can buy documentary video of the rides the way I grew up with them. So I'm not so sad anymore. Anyway - that is entirely not the point! The day began with my parking fiasco as I tried to determine whether I should park in the big lot or at the Paradise Pier. The decision, you see, was whether or not I was sleeping at the hotel with Taysha or at Becky's... and the point in question was the amazing pyrotechnic 50th anniversary fireworks that I'd been hearing such good things about. I decided I had to park at the Paradise Pier! (Which meant that I had to get an "exit" pass since I was in the damn Mickey & Friends lot line and make a big loop. That was all fine and dandy because it gave Becky and family time to enjoy their breakfast.) We joined up in the park and little Jonathan (who looks eerily like is mother...his mother being my ex-girlfriend) determined where we would all go. So this equaled Buzz Lightyear and Innoventions (where I met ASIMO the creepy Honda robot). In Innoventions I was then relay-race-baton-passed to Taysha and Chaz (Becky and fam skipped over to California Adventure) who then put me in charge... so we went on Autopia (where something brown and terrible that stained my hand yellow fell upon me from somewhere in the sky! ewww!) and enjoyed our start/stop/start/stop ride as the little girl who CUT US and jumped in the car in front of Chaz failed to proceed in a timely uninterrupted manner down the track. Taysha and I, in a car together, prayed for something brown and terrible to fall upon her. (Not really but that makes a better story.) Next we dined at the Pizza Port (where I was impressed with my "crazy straw" that changed colors), got Fast Passes for Space Mountain (we never went back) and then I drug them to Pirates which had a long-ass-line. Luckily Taysha did not hyperventilate nor did she black out or "see white" as she apparently sometimes does in crowds. Next was a trip to the Disney Gallery where I purchased a PeopleMover poster (you'll see why later... in the RavenWolf Productions page blog). We had to kill thirty minutes while that got printed so Chaz found the smoking section (by the river), Taysha and I "powdered our noses" and then we enjoyed a fascinating mint julep. We were kinda laid back. And I was doing 90% of the talking ... which should say something about the Taysha/Chaz mood. Then we picked up my poster and left Dland for the hotel so Taysha could check-in, get her breakfast bag for marathon morning and so we could chill. We ending up chilling long enough for us to go to the marathon pep rally where we were met up with by Monica. We cheered. We bounced. We teared up because some people insisted on bringing the pep down by bringing up AIDS victims and why these select people were running this half-marathon to begin with. By now it was about 6:30 and Taysha had determined that we MUST BE BACK IN THE HOTEL ROOM AND IN BED BY 7:00pm. Thus my fireworks dilemma - because they weren't going to start until 9:15ish. Meanwhile my conversations throughout the day with Becky went like this, "You're staying at my house. There is no way in hell that you are missing these fireworks. I will drive you to the race in the morning. I don't care what time I have to wake up! You are seeing these fireworks damnit!!" (And as I enjoy being dominated by a woman.. it was really really hard to insist that I stay at the hotel and miss the fabulous display.) Well T ended up getting a little laid back and we all went to California Adventure (just as Becky and fam were leaving CA to go back to DL... we were not destined to meet back up). Taysha and Chaz went on the Tower of Terror (which I avoid at all costs, Monica as well), then we went to the Muppet 3D show and then we had to grab some food and leave so Taysha could get to bed. Chaz and I procured the golden god of food - cheddar cheese on a stick, fried in corn dog batter (Angels sing: AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH). Taysha and Monica got bread bowls. We went back to the hotel room to dine. After finishing up I somehow managed to convince Taysha/Monica that I needed to go back and buy a 50th anniversary souvenir so Taysha went to bed and Monica and I departed. Halfway back to Downtown Disney Monica said, "Erin, just go. She's sleeping now and she won't know. Just gooooo and see your fireworks! Run. Run like the wind!" So I hightailed it back to Disneyland and made in the gates and back on Main Street JUST IN TIME to see the beauty and magic that was the cool-ass-ride-themed fireworks. Which I filmed. Then I shopped.. and by the time I actually made it back into the room it was 11:00. I snuck in SOOO FREAKING QUIETLY... (so quietly) and while I was standing at the edge of the bed... Taysha raised her damn head, looked at me and then looked at the clock and then gave me a shame head shake. DAMNIT!! I DID NOT WAKE YOU!!! (I mouthed.)

Then we all proceeded to attempt to sleep. Monica kept shuffling around in her sheets. Taysha had the HEAT on. Everybody left this one lamp on thinking it was for someone else. Monica kept waking up in a panic thinking we had overslept the race. Etc. Eventually 3am rolled around (yes, 3am) and Taysha got up and started getting ready for her day. The rest of us started getting ready too - hell, we were awake and by 4:30 we were in the hotel lobby with a good hundred other marathoners. Taysha left with her pace group and the adventure began for Monica, Chaz and I as we had to find and get to the "cheer section" for AIDS Project LA before the roads closed. Oh and we had plenty of time y'see because we had to be out of the hotel by 5:15am but since we were up... we just head on over and got to the place by 5:00am.

And what was there really to do at that time? Nothing. Nothing at all. And it was cold. Very cold. So we did what any cold people would do... we went to the man who had strangely shaved his face into the shape of Mickey Mouse (intentionally?) and asked for free t-shirts. Oh and that man said the nicest thing to me... the nicest thing that anyone has ever said to me. He said, "Sorry but the smallest size we have is Medium." Bless that Mickey bearded man! Anyway - so the three of us layered up with our AIDS Project L.A. t-shirts and then went back into our vehicle for heat. Taysha wasn't due to pass us on this section of the route until about 7am. We had some time to kill so I read the "marathon cheering etiquette" rules aloud. Here we learned that we should cheer for everybody but "cheer louder" for the APLA runners and that it is in BAD TASTE to shout things like "JUST A LITTLE BIT FURTHER!!" and "YOU'RE ALMOST THERE - WOO!!" and "COME ON - KEEP IT UP!!" These are things that runners will run off the path to beat you for. We also learned that we should NOT cross the path - this put us in a semi-panic as we actually didn't know which way the path was directed because nobody had passed us and the water/Powerade tables weren't set up yet. So while Monica attempted to go back to sleep curled up in the driver's seat - Chaz and I (I think he was sleeping too actually) kept eagle eyes out for the first runners. Meanwhile - some extra cheery social people had already begun gathering with their signs to whoop and holler. And suddenly we saw activity. Chaz said, "Look! A runner!" And the corner people began to "Yay" and shake their signs. And we thought we needed to run out and get to the cheer line because if one runner was coming ... they all were coming and we NEEDED TO CROSS THE PATH BEFORE THEY GOT THERE. Soooo... I poked Monica. And he was just a jogger. Just a jogger on his morning run... he turned the wrong way and looked pretty confused as to why there were a group of people cheering him on. And Chaz and I laughed. And Monica beamed us with her death stares and continued to yell at me all day for "WAKING ME FOR A JOGGER!" But from then on she was awake so we stared at the people that were standing outside in the cold - including a man with his small child on his shoulders. Chaz and Monica joked, "How can they be out there in this cold?" "That little child probably doesn't know any better. They're probably dying." "Mommy, what does dying feel like?" And then we laughed...probably too much but that became our mantra for the day. "Mommy, what does dying feel like?"


Eventually the first runner did pass us followed by two or three more then bigger clumps and all of us onlookers that were waiting in our cars emerged to do our duties. We cheered. We whooped. We hollered. (Louder for the yellow-shirted APLA runners and also louder for the wonderful runners in costumes. We saw pirates, Tinkerbells, Mickeys, Snow Whites, a pink ninja and lots more.) We discovered that when WOOOing got tiring we could revert to a low "yay," the occasional whistle, some up and down jumping ... and more. But we kept a short supply of energy for Taysha's run past us which happened about an hour after the first runners showed up.