right now i am sitting in craftland waiting for artists and watching paint dry.
i got a text from deb last night who, while painting away in craftland, said that michael corrente poked his head in and said how excited he was that we would be opening up as a year-round store.
my response? 'hrm'
i was at home, collapsed on the couch...collapsed from working on the store that day and from my full serving of humidity, and i read her text and i thought 'hrmmm.' but in actuality it was more like a 'humpf!'
i thought about it moments later...wondered why i held some sort of subterranean grudge against a film maker that, on a day to day basis, i feel ambivalent about. and it occurred to me...well, it occurred to me this afternoon, not that i have been thinking about it for so hard or so long. no, it occurred to me today that, subterraneanly, i blame michael corrente for keeping me apart from my birthday twin, justine bateman.
see, a long time ago i worked at a gift store...a gift store where i first met deb dormody, which has little or nothing to do with this specific story, it's just information. i'm giving it out for free today. anyhow, the aforementioned store was selected by michael corrente himself, aka a location scout acting by proxy for mr. corrente, as a location for a scene in the movie.
i can't remember the ramifications of the situation, if we stayed open, if regularly scheduled workers had to show up, but i remember the lights being off in the store and i remember being bummed beforehand about the hassle of having to work around a film crew. that is until i was told that justine bateman was in the movie and that she was scheduled to be there that very day.
see, a long time ago, much longer before this time, my mind was blown that other people had the same birthday as you. it's a simple concept if you give it two seconds to think about the bajillion people in the world, but i didn't think about practical things. so, i'm super young, i'm grasping at the idea that not only regular joes have my birthday but famous people do too. famous people! which is when i discovered that justine bateman...along with copernicus, carson mccullers, smokey robinson, brancusi, steven nichols (patch from days of our lives! what!), seal, and benecio del toro...had the same birthday as me.
mallory. mallory and me. me and mallory.
i would sit and wonder how much we might be alike. we would get the same jokes and agree on really subtle things. she would just 'get' me. oh eight year old me.
so fourteen or fifteen years later this opportunity gets dangled in front of my face...to meet my birthday twin. while i am a relatively sane adult, the second grader in me sprang forth and tried to figure out what i'd say, how i'd try to play it cool and matter of fact that we have this one awesome thing in common...tying us together through the universe...through time even. it was going to go so smoothly.
(side note: in spite of being a relatively sane adult, there wasn't a part of me that didn't think that justine bateman wouldn't be impressed. it never crossed my mind.)
the big day came. there were trailers outside. large cables coming in and out of the store...as if we had it hooked up to life support. we, the workers who volunteered to be there that day, had to be quiet. i was maybe two hours into quietly hanging around in the dark, eagerly but nonchalantly looking around for my twin, when it was broken to me that justine wasn't coming in to the shoot. i can't even remember why. i think i stopped hearing for a few seconds.
while it probably has nothing to do with michael corrente there is no way i could put it on justine bateman. twins just don't do that to other twins...unless she's the evil birthday twin. hmmmm...
