this isn't "the" end result, but "an" end result of me taking the family photo this morning for the christmas card. the one we're going with is similar but not as fun. seated left to right: me, mike, anne, laur, jenna. there are a whole series of these, but this is my favorite by far.
the picture is blurry, unfortunately, because i was trying too hard to get this content expression on jen's face (cousin-in-law sitting at the fireplace) and took the picture before the camera had a chance to focus all the way. anyway, that's our monster tree pre-ornaments, and the back of papa's lovely head in the foreground.
so the day after thanksgiving, in our family, is a hangout day but also the day to decorate the house! so we started with the tree and the famous leftovers meal. then the mass napping, THEN the boxes and boxes of snowmen, santas, nativity scenes, lights, etc etc etc
we actually tried (and achieved!) tying the, what, eight foot tree? to the top of the JETTA and got laughed at by the guys working the nursery. the garland made it to the back seat with me and my sister anne. we managed it just fine, thank you very much...
soon after i decided that if (when?) i move to minneapolis i'm gettin' me a jeep. with a rack. for to carry the big things.
Taffy Apple in her natural state. the day after thanksgiving should be the national leftovers napping day. that's all there is to it.
not sure if that's how you spell it. Dakin street is a block north of sheridan and irving park, a street where a trio of wonderful men live that are the college buddies of my cousins. they all know each other from University of Illinois. if i'm downtown and it's not church-related, chances are i'm with these boys and chances are i'm not getting home until 5am.
so there was a party tonight, a tree trimming party where the attire was declared "business casual" and everyone brought ornaments to decorate the boys' tree.
of all shapes and sizes, a fireplace mantle to be proud of...
they have indeed hit the status of legend.
he claims he got it as a gag gift from a party.
we all play along, but we know better.
so, tarantino's, spoken and spelled in the fashion of Quentin of Kill Bill Tarantino, is a fantastic restaurant on Armitage. had a "date" with my dad and a friend in which we met for drinks at the infamous Tiny Lounge and then wandered over to Tarantino's. this is like, one of those places that i take people when i want to show off and thought i'd share the picture.
my friends Aimee and Shonda held a Thanksgiving dress rehersal last night and it was fabulous. i haven't done a downtown dinner, like small dinner party with friends, in months. everyone brought food or wine, we had all the thanksgiving treats! eight of us sat down and shared a meal for about three hours.
it was a simple, sweet time. we decided to offer our collective martha stewart-ness to the church to plan the Christmas party, and we decided after two bottles of wine to go to africa together and work in orphanges for a week every year for the rest of our lives. these girls are fantastic. the night was fantastic.
we broke up around ten (it was a school night after all) and i ran over to Horseshoe on Lincoln and Irving Park because, get this: my cousin's--boyfriend's--sister's--ex boyfriend has a bluegrass band that plays there thursday nights. no cover! great music. got home around 12:30. no borders today, so the job hunt is back on.
in other news: possibly news on target soon.
my all-time favorite band was in town last night. owen got my sister and i on the guest list (THANK YOU, btw). the set was fantastic. chad actually had a bit of a cold, so his voice was a little more harsh than usual... maybe he doesn't realize that it's not necessarily a bad thing for their music! they played my favorite song in the encore ("keepsake") and i got to hang out with chad and the entourage afterwards - chad is one of the dispatch boys i worked for last summer. it was really great to be able to talk to him without the whole dispatch backdrop, just two people talking on the street. state radio is my favorite because it's more than music, it's a belief system i'm agreeing with. it's about promoting educated decision making and standing up for something, realizing what we have to stand up for, putting into motion the desire to do so.
this totally suits the revolutionary side of my personality.
in case you can't tell.
chad was asking how i've been since coming home from Boston and i told him that things are fine, i love being back in chicago but can't find work and started up at Borders. he suggested that i start building a niche for myself in musician websites, which i agreed would be great but secretly felt so inadequate... i'm not a web designer. that's the bottom line. i just don't know the programs to do it quickly enough to offer anyone something for money. it's like this: i can art direct, i know enough to say "make it look this way, make it do this, etc" i can talk with a programmer very well. but until i can do it, it won't be enough to go out on my own.
pretty sweet, though, to know that someone i admire thinks i'm talented.
end result: i'm starting to look at grad schools.
web, video, motion graphics, here i come.
more on this later.
another pict from the show.
more available on my flickr site (click on the pict to go there)
zox was the opening act. they're pretty sweet too. that kid on the left is playing on an electric violin, which sounds like a guitar most of the time until he actually plays it like a concerto and it sings like you're used to a violin singing. either way, it's amazing.
sunday was great. went to church, hung out with betsy, then went to a hockey game with rob and renee who are two college friends of mine. they are so amazing because each of them are amazing, and together they're super duper double whammy amazing. our seats were in the front row of the third balcony where we could see EVERYTHING. the game was great, i forget sometimes how much i enjoy hockey. now i want season tickets. the traffic and crowd were easy too, because of that pesky baseball series that was over at Comisky Park... i got home just in time to catch that GRAND SLAM, how sweet was that?! i don't even like baseball and i was jumping up and down.
today was full and fast paced, just the antidote for my recently talked about sourpuss state. crankytime is now fading, thankfully. time to work on the manifesto.
i just can't explain it. i feel amazing when i'm downtown. everything seems so much lighter and easier. i feel so free. it's where i go to, you know, do things and be somebody.
also wonderful about camp: where i reconnect every year with two lovely college girlfriends of mine. they're awesome.
so this conference is like any other; workshops, keynote speakers, 325 attendees, your name on a badge. this particular conference has been around for 25 years now and i've been going for five. anything more i can say about how cool it is would just be redundant to all my friends, who hear me talk about it all the time :)
otherwise known as the apex of my design year.
three cheers for Fall Out Boy, who won the MTV2 award at last night's VMA's!!! here's my celebrity connection: bass player Pete Wentz and my little sister are childhood, oldest-and-dearest friends. so i knew this kid pete back in his awkward phase... when he dyed his hair blue and started rocking. now he's all in the iTunes top 100 albums, interviewed by Risen Magazine, has an article in Rolling Stone. good stuff.
nice job, Pete. i'm amazed. rock on.
my parents got involved through a friend of theirs,
and now i'm pretty moved by it, too. these kids are great.
what else is new? cubs lost today.
all five of their runs happened in ONE INNING. lame.
but it was a sweet game - i went with a group that was sponsoring people from Lawrence Hall, an organization that works with DCFS to care for children taken out of their homes. from their site: "Lawrence Hall is a not-for-profit child welfare agency established to assist at-risk youth and their families through a seamless delivery of services designed to develop the self-worth, knowledge, and skills they need to lead independent and productive lives."
basically, i met a bunch of cool kids and two cool directors, and we chatted it up in front of the best view ever of a cubs game. i spent most of the game talking to director Henry about various not-for-profit strategies and awareness programs. i explained the Elias Fund, and he was pretty excited about that too. the kids seemed to have a great time, we brought presents for them, toys and candy. it was a beautiful day.
too bad about the cubs, though.
when i go home i have to see the water. i love chicago, and i love that i grew up within a mile of water that i can't see across. it spoils me, especially after being on Semester at Sea and getting to be on oceans. man, i just get near that water and i want to float out and out until there's nothing but blue below and blue above.
i worked at this beach to help pay for Semester at Sea for two summers, working 9 to 5 as a beach cashier, then 6 to 12 doing security. they were ninety hour weeks and a year later when i had my feet propped up on the ship railing, watching the pacific ocean roll around me, i was thankful for every minute of it.
today i hung out there with my best friend mandy, and it was like the microscopic righteousness of everything that ever was good in high school, all at once. totally euphoric.
it's like Christmas, it's the constant apex of my design education. three hundred designers around a campfire, talking about design. people i see once a year, for three days. this is my fifth year going.
there are college girlfriends, special camp relationships, mixer dinners, name badges, workshops, speakers, flirting, red wine, cabin lodgings, walking home through the forest. a ten hour drive each way to think about how and why i love this, the work i do.
who's coming with me???
click here to go to AIGA Minnesota and check it out for yourself.
i'm currently ingesting a new idea: that time and alcohol are the two of the last true currencies around. money comes and goes (mostly goes); words are only as good as the actions behind them; and work does not equate to, nor require, morals.
time and alcohol.
there's nothing like spending time with family and friends. the phone is good, but not the same. i'd rather have fifteen minutes on the front porch rocking chairs than an hour on the phone. "let's catch up sometime" is useless. words are not the currency.
alcohol is the bridge builder of our times. as far back as there's been beer, there's been "let's go get a beer," or "let me buy you a drink." it's the door opener, the smoothing over, the unraveling of personal mystery. and when you're me and don't need a beer to loosen up (when you're fairly nutty to begin with), it STILL works because that's how you get other people to catch up to your laughter...
so i've narrowed my list of "places to apply" down to three big winners. i feel that if i say them here i will jinx the whole process irrevocably. call me and i'll tell you.
i ran into someone from one of them today!!! i was in a cab on my way to meet my cousin louie for dinner, and right out my window at a red light was this guy brian, who i haven't seen in two years, who had one of those "is it? i know you, right?" looks. then i smiled, then he smiled, and if i wasn't in a car i'd ask him how his baby daughter is, how things at the office are going. he looked pretty good, but not in a "hey, there" kind of way. like he just looked like he'd had a good day.
dinner was a blast. we ate at the bar / grill just outside the pritzker pavilion at millennium park. lou, brad, roscoe and i shared a meal and then walked over to what will be lou and erin's new condo. erin met us there and i walked them to their church, where they're meeting the priest that will perform the ceremony in about a year. these kids are just growing up so fast.
my church is amazing. my friend patrick spoke today instead of pastor jon or pastor dave, which was a treat. patrick is an amazing speaker, very natural on stage, and here's an unusual talent: he uses big words. patrick doesn't sacrifice his vocabulary to make his point, which is a hard line to draw for any public speaker (consider, if you will, that newspapers are written at a fifth grade reading level).
we're following the book of ecclesiastes, which is kind of a dialogue from king solomon. some background: he's regarded as the wisest and probably one of the richest kings of biblical history. so this morning, patrick led us through solomon's ideas of the world: that this life and this world are crazy. they don't make a lot of sense. they really, really don't. but it's up to us to not get caught up in it, get caught in realizing how often it's the cheaters and liars that get ahead in life, and the kind get suckered and kicked around. nice guys finish last, et cetera. but that can be overcome by realizing that while we can't control what happens to us, we can control how we react and process it. life is as beautiful and complicated and excruciatingly wonderful as we let it become.
after church i headed out to my grandparent's birthday party (they're both august babies), and spent some quality time with the family. we had a huge meal at maggiano's and just basked in each other's company for a few hours. my cousins' kids are starting to remember me (they're all under five), so that's kind of cool. they still don't, say, know my name or anything, but they also know i'm not a stranger. so they know it's cool with the parents to play with me.
today was the monster engagement party, where we finally hung out with my cousin's finacee's family. they ARE AWESOME, which is no surprise given how cool erin is.
i spent a lot of time talking to her parents' neighbors, who are foster parents to a couple kids, aged four and two. i was excited to learn that they have no intention of raising these kids. instead they work with a program that takes children out of situations until the situation improves. because the neighbors don't have kids, they open their home time and time again to all kinds of children who more or less need a place to crash until their guardian gets their act together. i was in such awe of the shape that love has taken in their lives.
our own family is crazy and beautiful. jeff and his wife effie are expectant parents and are building a house. tommy and his wife jen are hoping to get pregnant soon. earl and his wife angie just had their third child. andi and her husband johnny just got married and hope to move into a new house and start a family in the next three months. my sister anne is applying to law schools. my grandparents both have birthdays this month, and my parents, as of monday, will have been married for 29 years. it's a great time to be around. everything is so vibrant!
today was a big day - i read over our 1023 form that lawyer Pat fed-ex-ed me for the Elias Fund. then i picked up eric, who was in town driving to denver from boston, and the two of us took Pat out to lunch! eric had never been to downtown chicago before, which is such a foreign thing to me by now. we found Pat's building without a problem and the three of us went to a small thai place around the corner from her office. it was really, really cool to meet her in person. Pat's energetic, smart, and agressive. she is excited to help us out. i'm glad we can give her a sense of giving, and VERY glad to be on the recieving end :)
eric and i parted ways after the lunch meeting, he still has hours of driving ahead of him. i went back home and caught up on some emails until my sister jenna got home and suggested that i move downtown with her and a friend into a three-bedroom apartment. this is such a big maybe. i don't know what my income will be, i don't know if i care to have roommates anymore. i'm kind of really looking forward to having my own walls, my own art, my own crap everywhere. but then again, with studios going for about $600 to $800 per month, saving money would be great. splitting rent sounds kind of nice.
finished off the evening having dinner with the family and blogging late into the night after everyone else goes to bed. sometimes that's the time to get things done, in the stolen hours of the house in its quietness.
there are three places where i will first send my information
i am PARALYZED and STUCK (and totally afraid)
what if i don't get a job?
what if i'm really not good enough?
what if i'm really no good at all?
why do i suddenly have absolutely no confidence?
what if i DO find something amazing?
when can i move downtown again?
how do i know what to put in a portfolio?
what do i need to do to break out of this funk?
i am in a great mood.
everything today was great.
every person was in a good mood.
all our ideas were uplifting and had promise.
awesome. awesome. awesome.
my new best friend is the Director of Development for the Daley Center. this guy helps plan all the music festivals, marathons, farmers' markets, and any other special commemorations. he's a rockstar, and just so easy to talk to! i think we're going to have lunch next week. his take on the movie is really different from other people's, this guy wants to show it in an art house and make it a multicultural event (hello, Elias Fund?!). so that was sweet. this picture is from a play i saw last year that was hosted by the city. and THEN this guy that i mentioned before ("whoa there tiger" guy) calls again and is absolutely ready to come on board with all his resources and i still have to tell him that he's amazing, but hold off a bit!!!
that was my morning. in the evening, i met up with some church girls for dinner before heading to wednesday Bible study. dinner was fun, and Bible study is different than usual this month - it's movie month, and each week we watch a new flick and then talk about it afterwards. this week was "super size me," which i'm sure we're all aware of. church is a facinating place to discuss health and apropriateness in eating / exercise habits. and added bonus for my boundless narcissism: the same thing happened as did sunday where people i didn't expect to care that i'd returned... really cared that i'd returned. very cool. i love everyone. what a great day.
so monday: spent on the phone. all day, literally nine to five ON THE PHONE. i was collecting opinions to see if we can convince some key people to bring "last DISPATCH" to chicago. how much would that rock? so i called everyone i could think of to get the ball rolling. one person is like ten steps ahead of me and is ready to pull togther radio sponsors and a beer tent. i'm like, easy there tiger. at this point, all is strictly theoretical. but i like how you think.
ended the day by meeting mandy at baker's square for a slice of pie around 10:30. it's an old tradition. we get pie to go and take it to lake michigan, snack on the beach. it's amazing what a comfort traditions like those can really be.
tuesday. i'm searching frantically for a wedding present that i'll probably have to get online. but it's SO worth it. this present is the best present ever for weddings, and it's probably going to be my standard wedding gift from now on. so i won't reveal my secret here. it's a gem. so i spent the morning looking for that, came home empty-handed. spent the afternoon wandering with my mom, she wants to buy me shoes but i just can't bring myself to care. not about her desire to give me something, that's wonderful! but my desire for shoes? there just isn't any. i felt bad because i was a little frustrated, waiting for some of yesterday's calls to be returned, and it kept popping up like little pockets of crankiness. i try not to be that person, but sometimes it gets the best of me. sorry, mom.
our wind-up wonderbaby who leaves full grown cheetas in his wake
who ends up like this when she tries to do cartwheels. i love her.
today i went to CHURCH for the first time in a month, and i was home again at my Christ's Church of Wrigleyville, zip a dee do dah IT WAS GREAT! my church is amazing. pastor Jon spoke about King Solomon's view of money as laid out in Ecclesiastes. i didn't tell anyone i was coming back, i just showed up, and the warmth with which i was recieved was lovely. i sat with some of my favorite girls, and it's just so amazing when people approached me afterwards to say hello, people who i didn't think would miss me or even know i was gone. to be told i was missed made me feel so cared for, and in a way very free. i feel like i've begun to carve out a place for me in the world.
afterwards i went and checked out my friend aimee's new apartment, it's very nice and just around the corner from church. i came home to my parent's afterwards and some of my second and third cousins were over - i've explained to gary a few times that these people are as close as my first cousins, my family is HUGE and very in love with everyone in it - and so some cousins were over to share a meal and catch up. the kids were awesome. i suddenly had more babies to play with, and one of these little tykes was on the verge of walking and so crawled so quickly i was suprised there wasn't a trail of smoke in his path. very fun.
mandy came over in the evening, mandy is my oldest and dearest friend. we met the summer between seventh and eighth grade, at the wilmette public pool. i was amazed by her. she somehow thought i was cool. nothing has changed. we talked about our lives, she's also on the brink of many things like i perpetually seem to be. we talked about the nature of f**king up and i decided that to do that you had to give up and give in to things less than your capabilites. poor girl, she thinks that's what she's done. i don't believe it for a second. we fought off that fear of f**king up by making a list of things we need to do by age thirty.
so far the list includes:
• doing a cattle drive in the style of City Slickers
• taking a class in speaking italian
• getting some creative writing published
friday was spent unpacking lazily. then i threw a bunch of stuff out. and it was great. three cheers for more room in my room and in my soul!
i love taking bins of books to donate to the public library. i have some good stuff, and sometimes i'll look at a book and think, "i only, only have this so that someday, someone will look at my bookshelf, some man will look at the crap i have around while i'm getting ready for a date, and maybe this book will up my cool points." but what is that?! i don't do that anymore. those books, they get to go. citizen designer, the communist manifesto, short stories by kipling: i will read and re-read those. they have a purpose. they can stay.
between friday and saturday the whole summer dismantled into various parts of my parent's house, where i will be residing until i have an income again. i have a sudden epiphany understanding of nostalgia, the desire to keep things around that are so indicative of a different time and place. i spent a few hours on the phone today, catching up after i threw out the majority of my photos from junior year prom and that sort of thing. i kept a few to keep around and show my kids someday, if there ever are any. but what do i remember of that time? and what will i remember of now?
i woke up and there were BABIES IN THE HOUSE for me to play with. i haven't had babies since march at the nicaragua orphanage! so good morning, babies. let's chase around the house and make a big stinking ruckus. the moms forgot why they had me watch the kids, cause let me tell you it was not any less noisy with the big kid playing too.
then i went to grandma's. which i'm saying to be silly, but i call her my nana and i went to see my nana and papa and they are tons of fun. i brought the picture frame and it went over very well. we didn't stay all day, just all afternoon. after getting home, i realized that i'm still pretty darn tired. i miss everyone. every single person i've ever known, i miss you right. this. second. i can't go back to boston even if i wanted to because it's already different, gary and owen are gone and most of the rest of the house is too by now. c'est la vie.
today i woke up at 6:30. it was uncalled for. i took my sister anne to work - happy to be downtown again, if only for a couple hours! i hit a starbucks for breakfast and then headed over to the music box theater to talk to one of the managers. i'm trying to see what they thing about showing "last DISPATCH," what obstacles they would forsee, if they would want to work with us to make it a huge success. they are, indeed, interested, so that rocked my morning.
i was out of my mind after that, and took a nap for most of the day afterwards. in the evening, i worked with my mom to assemble a photo frame that holds forty pictures - a gift for my cousin andi and her husband johnny, whose wedding i photographed. i think we did a nice job with it!
today felt ten seconds long.
probably had something to do with all the sleeping.
the last time i titled a post "home sweet home" i had moved to boston. now i'm moving out. i woke up at nine to a wild flurry - none of it mine. i sat back and watched a little as the Elias team got some papers together and left to open a bank account and depsoit all the donations collected from the weekend. we ended up raising over $12,000!
there are certainly some mixed emotions here. i checked in with Lawyer Pat again, and realized that this is the end of one thing and the very beginning of another. Dispatch and Elias Fund have become part of who i am, and both have a future. with dispatch, i still have about a thosand pictures to go through as i start designing the Dispatch Coffee Table Book (working title...). elias fund will still be raising money and still be moving ever forward. my new location doesn't mean a thing. this will never be out of sight, out of mind.
so i had to call a cab to get to the airport as it turned out; the elias kids took longer than planned and i wouldn't ask to bum a ride from gary; half of his stuff was in his car, a quarter outside waiting to be loaded, and the last quarter inside waiting to be packed. i went upstairs around three, myself having been packed for about two days now, and kind of waited out the last hour with gary and jeff. well, actually mostly jeff, gary had to pack and i was annoyed. couldn't he wait? but then as the taxi pulled up, it turns out gary had been writing an inscription in a book he bought for me, a gift that is just beautiful: The Psalms of David, by James Freemantle. i read it the whole way home.
my parents and sister jenna were there to pick me up from the airport, and of course the first thing we talked about was the Next Step. when will i start looking for a job? for the love of pete. ride home was uneventful, i'm exhausted and emotional and about to collapse. hello, bed. it's almost 2am. nice to see you again.
i really did nothing today until about 5pm... the morning was spent packing, wandering in the mess and aftermath, and talking with our Elias Fund lawyer, my patron saint and friend Pat. i've explained to her what a glorious thing it is that we can rest assured the IRS isn't going to be able to seize our resources. so... this morning was a haze.
gary took jeff around his workplace and the town there, apparently it's pretty sweet. when they got home, we hung out on the front porch for a while and then piled into gary's car and, on my mother's suggestion, went and saw harvard. we walked the quad, checked out some shops, and had some good italian dinner. we broke into the law school, wandered some other buildings, and while jeff wandered off by himself in one, gary and i sat outside and talked philosophy: this time, the nature of negativity. we headed home, but had some serious trouble - we got lost and passed by the same place we had dinner. FOUR TIMES IN A ROW. UNINTENTIONALLY. it was great. seriously though, the boys had great attitudes about finding our way home. they weren't stressed or annoyed, and it made it really funny. we ended the night nice and late, i gave gary a backrub and he gave me a hand massage - have we all done this? hand massages are unreal. i've never heard of it. it was awesome. but then suddenly it was 2am and i needed sleep. i'm sleeping tonight on the third floor - it's cooled down a little - and sleeping in a BED is GREAT.
we populated somerville. took it by storm. kids and guitars were everywhere. it was amazing.
today was a very full day.
and given my particular summer, that's saying something.
it began by waking up at the hotel at seven, getting to the somerville at eight. we started setting up everything for the autograph session: the merchandise booths, the Elias booth, the raffle prizes, line control, and the actual place for the boys to sign autographs at the stage. the line to get in for autographs was already running down the block before 8am.
brad was around and enthusiastically greeted my mom and sister; it was a calm spot in the middle of everyone being frantic. we opened the doors to autographs around 10am. i started by helping at the Elias Booth, the idea being that the kids could learn something while waiting in line. but the line was going too slowly, and i instead was recruited to take kids' pictures with the boys. around noon, all the kids in line had their chance and were shuffled up to the balcony for the raffle drawing. MY MOTHER won part of a mural, but she and anne had already left. i told shane to let someone else win, and now some poor kid has to cart home that huge piece of plywood. and probably loves it more than we ever will!
after the raffle, the noon show started and things wound down quickly. brad is playing a show in maine tonight, so some kids left for that. i went to find my family and get some lunch. after we ate, gary picked us up at the hyatt and took us to the airport, where we parted ways. gary and i were there to pick up a friend of his too, so we circled for what ended up being forty minutes looking for jeff!
jeff, gary and i went into the city to show jeff around. he's another good solid southern boy, so i immeidately liked him. we were too late in the day for church already, so we moseyed around boston commons, found some dinner. hamlet was playing, so we caught a little of that - VERY cool, modern play - and walked some more.
we ended up dancing at a reggae bar for a good part of the night after that. i kind of danced a bit with the lead singer :) after heading home, the three of us got some ice cream on the second floor. the rest of the house was empty. no one had called me, so i went to bed without knowing that my team was out at Chili's. they got home around 2:30am, i woke up to say goodbye to ryan and matt (who were leaving at 5 for the airport), and went back to bed.
the two halves of my day could have each been a day in themselves. i was exhausted, but every second was genuine and happy.
we started off the morning with an assessment of thursday and friday. spirits are VERY high, especially with the drum circles starting to form around Somerville... people are walking around singing dispatch music, and the community is building. it's pretty sweet. the day is spent mostly working the shows. i grabbed a slice of pizza with some kids for dinner, there's a nice cheap place down the street, but dinner seemed to come really early. where did the day go?
brad showed up for a few of the showings, which is amazing for the fans coming to see it. kids swarm him everywhere, and it's no surprise to me! he's great at making people feel special, and he's good on his feet - which came in handy when at the same time all the theaters started having trouble with the sound and picture. turns out it was an electrical problem, but basically the film went down for a good twenty minutes, and so what does brad do? work the crowd. among his other talents, he's a fairly good beatboxer?! so he showed of those skills from what i heard. he and helmut schleppi (the director) also interviewed the crowd a bit while the technical problems were overcome.
after the 10pm show, our team met across the street and got some ice cream. we sat together outside and proceeded to have as close a thing as we could have to a closing meeting. thankfully it wasn't too tearjerking, but it couldn't be helped to have a little nostalgia as the summer was quickly drawing to a close.
afterwards, around 11, i hopped on the T red line and rode downtown so i could crash at my family's hotel room. this bed is AMAZING. far cry from the loveseat, obviously. mom and anne are so great to be here, they saved me some dinner and we watched saturday night live as they told me about the comedy club they went to. went to sleep feeling good to have them around and excited for sunday.
today my mom and sister came to visit. came to see lil' old me in my crazy DISPATCH world and meet my crazy dispatch friends. i was in the bathroom when they arrived, so true to form they started introducing themselves to the people around the movie lobby. when i came up and found them, we headed off across the street to Davis Square and got to hang out a bit. owen came by and met them, and soon thereafter learned why i offered to map out my extended family :) catching up on the family gossip can be a strenuous affair. there are, after all, a kajillion of us running around at the same time and talking with our hands at once. it's the italian way. the highlight, though, was learning that my cousin lou proposed TODAY to his girlfriend, who we all love. erin's amazing, louie's amazing, and they will be amazing together. i love them both. i'm more than a little excited about this.
today was spent working at various movie showings, after owen met my family i took them to the 2pm Dispatch showing - which they loved! that felt good, that they enjoyed what i've been working for this whole time. afterwards they headed out back to downtown boston, and i worked passing out fliers, putting out fires, generally putting smiles on faces until i got home around 3am. owen put a smile on MY face by wearing these glasses all day.
matty keeps the camera rolling and eric offers consolation to a sad, sad Wimpy. the smoke went on for about five minutes, getting thicker until we had to get a hose and spray her down. then with about a gallon of antifreeze and water, wimpy chugged on like the little engine that could. and she did, she could, all the way to somerville. after that point... well, let's not get into that.
THE MOVIE HAS PREMIERED
AND IT WAS GREAT
the day started with wimpy spewing vaporous smoke from the dashboard which became a thick white cloud at the gas station. i'll post pictures soon. it was seriously... i've never seen a car do that. wimpy has a problem where she cannot keep her cool. the engine overheats if you drive around the block. and it's in this condition that we took her to somerville to cart the Dispatch Trio to their movie premiere. she did surprisingly all right on the highway, but we bought gallons of water and antifreeze once we got to Somerville.
this was my first time in Somerville, and it's interesting to think of the Dispatch history that i missed there. it was the first show they ever sold out... it's in the documentary quite a bit, so it's really cool to watch the movie in the room where the boys' last rehersal took place! we got a mini-tour and some lunch before having a meeting. this part makes me sick - wimpy's smoke was unexpected, and getting her some attention meant that we were late and missed a suprise lunch that shane had set up with the boys for us! so instead of chillin with Chad, Brad, and Pete, we wolfed down sandwiches at our meeting.
spent the day mostly stapling packets to hand out to kids in line - kind of a weekend events rundown - and walking around asking people what they need. helping out everyone who needed it... there was one minor fiasco when i opened my backpack to change into my nice shirt and it WASN'T THERE. i had to greet people for the first ten minutes in my ratty work shirt (a pink softball jersey i first aquired when i was twelve, it has my name on the back) but that was fixed when ashley brought it for me from the house. it had been hanging in the basement to dry, so i'd forgotten it.
we seated all these people that i recognized from the movie, and that was pretty neat, people like the bandmates' parents, some music industry people, and the director and his wife. then around eight the boys themselves came in with helmut schleppi (director) and we gave them a standing ovation. shane jumped on stage, introduced a few key people, and we started the show. IT WAS AMAZING. i'd only seen rough cuts, so to see the sound at 100% and the picture fantastically crisp was a new experience. afterwards, as the credits started to roll, there was another standing ovation and more acknowledgements from shane. she recognized the intern team as well, and that felt great. everything since this little blog began was, in the bigger picture, for tonight.
afterwards we schmoozed in the lobby, all the kids from the second floor were there (very cool) and there was an after party a few blocks away. the after party was kind of strange, all the people there had been in the movie and so they all knew each other, and i only knew the intern team and the band. so i didn't stay long, but i did manage to tell brad and chad they were amazing. brad, true to form, was wonderful and made me feel like he was thankful that i was there. chad was extremely gracious and knew exactly who i was, and proceeded to compliment my design talent. i managed to get my wits about me enough to reply "for us, this is a fun summer, for you this is ten years of work. we're only trying to reflect back on to you how much we appreciate who you are and what you do." which is true. it's not like i'm playing down what i've done - i've worked my ass off this summer and it was great - but there would be nothing if Dispatch wasn't everything it was and is.
so that was cool. to see and be seen by a favorite of mine. went back and worked the midnight show after the party, and then got home around 3am. sleep is wonderful.
