plus: an entire week of catch-up.
Oh yes -- there's one other thing you need to know about Tracy Flick.
Today: 3 miles.
Yesterday: nothing.
Wednesday: 5.3 miles.
Tuesday: 4.1 miles.
Monday: nothing.
Good God. If not for the Palm Pilot, I wouldn't know what I'd been doing the past few days. If you want to read what I have to say about Election, skip ahead.
Monday
In the morning I got together with my college roommate, Donna, who's just bought a new house with husband Angel and their two boys, Benjamin and Robert (who are so big now -- I'm astounded). We sat in Starbuck's in Pacific Palisades and discussed children and how you find good schools and what Donna's going to do now that Robert's in preschool and she has a teeny weensy bit more time on her hands.
I read Aaron's and Gonzo's stuff in the afternoon for writing group.
Then we had writing group. We spent a lot of time on Gonzo's full-length draft, and I don't know how the comments were received -- we were pretty tough. (Followed by really, really liking Aaron's new stuff...)
On the other hand, there's no point in beating around the bush -- Gonzo's script needed work, and we were trying to be helpful. Whether or not the work was our cup of tea, there were serious flaws that needed to be addressed, because what he was trying to say wasn't coming across.
I hate sessions like that though.
I came home and slept like a log.
Tuesday
No idea what I did in the morning.
Had a doctor's appointment in the afternoon in Beverly Hills and rather than go home over the hill, only to pretty much turn around and come back over the hill for class, I headed over to the Borders in Westwood to have a coffee and read a book while waiting for novel writing class. Turns out Borders is UCLA's study hall away from home, and I ended up on the balcony with a bunch of smokers -- I didn't know there was anywhere you can smoke in California any more, including your own home.
Novel writing class went well: I got a lot of feedback on the first two chapters of my novel. The three main comments were:
- I haven't gotten enough to the story yet -- everyone's enjoying the characters; they want to know what the story is. Well, I know that I am famous for meandering my way to the story, so I will take this under advisement.
- Not enough description of the setting. This is true. I never describe setting enough, mostly because I always feel like saying, "Get to the story!" Or at least a scene with emotional conflict between two characters. I don't spend a lot of time on atmosphere, and I need to work on that more.
- I don't say right off what the psychological problem of one of the characters is. Well, no duh. And I'm not going to, either. Some things the audience is just going to have to figure out for themselves. My main character is not going to be sitting around saying, "My poor sister Stevie, the agoraphobe," she's going to be angry that she can't do what she likes because she has to go home to check on her sister. I do not do expository nonsense.
I came home and slept like a log.
Wednesday
I had lunch with my friend Tori and her boyfriend. Tori has finally found her first on-set job here in Los Angeles, working on a student feature at AFI for which she will be paid. Pretty darn amazing. It's not much but she'd rather do that than telemarketing, which is what her current gig is.
From there I drove over to Hollywood to visit Tamar, Damian, Daniel (now on hiatus from editing! Tamar gets to see him again!), and Tamar's mom, who analyzed my horoscope and did two Tarot readings for me. (The reading on my career said things were going to be great; I'm just going through a rocky patch for the foreseeable future. Oh fine.)
I was supposed to go to Sneak Previews class to see Tea With Mussolini, but it dawned on me that the only reason I considered forcing myself to go was a sense of duty. The movie is supposed to be good, but I was so exhausted I knew I'd struggle to stay awake and then I'd dash out after it was over, not staying for the filmmakers's discussion afterwards.
Tamar kept asking if I wanted to sack out on the couch, but I told her that if I actually managed to fall asleep, I'd be out like a light for hours.
So instead I came home, noticed a pattern emerging, and slept like a log. In fact, I forced myself to stay up until 9:30 (it was hard) and then slept until 8 the next morning.
Thursday
I had lunch at Disney with a group of online buds -- this lunch was held to say hi to Ed and Rita, who were in town for the week. Rita is one of the movie reviewers at the Washington Post and a feisty lady, and Ed is simply a hoot -- I liked them both a whole lot. Rita was overwhelmed by the number of food choices in the Disney cafeteria. She described what fare is like at the Post cafeteria, and if I worked there I'd brown-bag it every day.
On the way home I swung by Phidippides in Encino to get some new running shoes, because I've had my current pair about a year, which should be roughly 500 miles. As always, I bought a pair of Nike Air Pegasus (Pegasi?). I always get Nike. Both clerks asked me, "No injuries?" and I said no. I don't know if Nike has a reputation for injuries or not, but since I didn't have any with these shoes, they said sticking with the same brand was probably a good idea. They even both talked me out of getting a second, non-Nike, alternate pair of running shoes.
In the afternoon I figured I would short-circuit the whole exhaustion thing by taking a nap, but this appeared to be the signal for everyone in Christendom to call me, so I ended up dozing fitfully for only an hour.
Darin was over at the Guys', so I joined a smaller subset of the same people from lunch (including Ed and Rita) at the Newsroom in Beverly Hills (across the street from the Ivy) for dinner. I was not wearing enough layers -- it had been such a hot day but the night was cool, we were out on the patio, and the heat lamps appeared to be focused somewhere other than the table. The Newsroom is very good though -- I've now been there twice and enjoyed it both times.
It's time to start seeing movies again, dammit, so Darin and I hied ourselves over to Burbank to get Fernando and go see Election, which we all had heard was good. And it is. It really, really is. There is, however, something you should know about it.
It's a dark comedy. And boy, it is both dark and very, very funny. (Most black comedies think it's enough to be off-beat, off-putting, or just weird. It's not. The important word in black comedy is "comedy," which this movie remembered.)
Some reviewers have compared this to Rushmore, which is also off-beat and set in high school. We were split on whether Rushmore or Election was better, and I think it's comparing two incredibly different movies: Rushmore is the study of one incredibly weird individual, and Election is an indictment of society. I think.
Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is the kind of student most other students hated and I was probably like: she's bright, she always has the answer, she overachieves at everything she does. Everything. Her civics teacher, Jim McMillan (Matthew Broderick), is having problems of his own, and Tracy is the last straw, so when she begins to run unopposed for Student Council President, "Mr. M" convinces another student, jock Paul Metzler (Chris Klein), to run against her. Things get more confused when Paul's lesbian sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell) decides to run too.
Election is a story in which everyone acts like a human being -- that is, they fuck up (except for Tracy), they're assholes, they do terrible and stupid things. They also do good things. But most importantly, you understand why everyone does the things that they do. There are no evil villains in this piece, and even though there's an obvious ending we'd all like to see, the movie tells us right off we're not going to see it. It's not that kind of movie.
So go see it if you can take it, basically. Black comedies hurt the ones who are watching, not just the people in the movie.
Roger Ebert's review of Election is dead on. And his stories of what kind of obnoxious kid he was are pretty funny.
And while we're making short, shameful confessions of what kind of obnoxious kids we were, there's a scene in Election of what Tracy is like in her college dorm. A bunch of college students are hanging out in the hallway, laughing, having a good time, and Tracy yanks open her door, wearing a nightgown and curlers, and yells at them to "Be quiet!" It's funny and it's also really sad. Well, I did that exact same thing (albeit without the hair curlers). Sigh.
We had dinner at the new Gourmet 88 restaurant in Burbank, and then we all came back to our house to watch A Bug's Life, which Fernando hadn't seen. Then we watched Homicide, which as always was just enough of a bummer about the human condition (and one of the better episodes of the season), before Fernando went home and I -- yes, you guessed it -- decided to sleep like a log.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com