ham fisted theatrics

I have to shave my beard for the commercial and I leave my hotel room on Tuesday afternoon in search of a razor. It is very hot and the mostly empty street opens up at one point and there’s a highway running underneath it. I haven’t left myself enough time to get to the grocery store and back and shave a whole month or more’s worth of scraggle off before I’m supposed to be picked up at 3 PM, not enough time at all, so I decide to stop off on the way back from the grocery store and get Chic-Fil-A. Something in my eyes must scream “I’m in a hurry because I need to not look like such a hippie in a commercial but I am one of the worst time managers walking the Earth and I’m starving,” because the guy gets me my food fast. I rush back to the hotel sucking sweet tea and eating waffle fries.

I end up making it downstairs, shaved, with a few minutes to spare and an only moderately embarrassing amount of stray beard-hairs sticking out at weird intervals on my face. I nicked my adam’s apple, but it has mostly stopped bleeding. I remember that I never ate my sandwich from Chic-Fil-A. It is still sitting in my room.

On set it’s great. There is something plain awesome about Southern film crews. They have the fluid competence and camaraderie that geeks me out so hard about all film crews, plus they’re genial as hell and if you close your eyes you can imagine they’re all NASA engineers. There is something about a Southern accent that just wants to be rattling off complicated technical information, to my ears, anyway. I have a blast and I’m done pretty early.

On the way back to the hotel, I think, “Aw crap, my room is going to smell like Chic-Fil-A,” but when I get upstairs, it doesn’t smell like that at all. It is then that I realize I secretly wanted it to smell like Chic-Fil-A.

I am very very hungry. It is getting late and I decide to go across the street for dinner without washing the day’s makeup off. I will experience the characteristic thrill of thinking, “I am eating a steak in a sports bar and no one here knows I have makeup on.” It is one of life’s main pleasures.

After dinner, I walk past an enormous empty mall parking lot to get back to the hotel, and it’s a really really good empty mall parking lot. It makes me wish I had two or three friends with me and was 14 so I could go play in it. At that moment I would like to ride a shopping cart off of a grass embankment.

Going back up in the elevator I am joined by two people I am reasonably certain are on their way to a threesome.

Back in my room, the bathroom is a disgusting crime scene: someone killed a beard in here.