Jedayla

Spanksgiving

Sun, 25 Nov 07 12:21:00 UT

Another year, another turkey, another apple pie won the hard way:

Thanksgiving dinner is THAT much sweeter after you've run a five-mile road race. Ain't that the truth. I strut in every year, rosy cheeked from the exercise, holding up my apple pie in triumph.

I brought my boyfriend to our celebration for the first time (NOTE: he is NOT pictured above, in case you were thinking that--the fellow pictured there is my BROTHER). It was total family overload, but RM handled it like a champ. Thirty-plus-person dinners are normal for our Thanksgiving/Christmas/any holiday gatherings, and tripping over all of the cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents running about any given house is part of the fun.

Not only that, but our family gatherings always feature a whirlwind three days of driving all over Eastern Massachusetts to visit different relatives' houses. We live in NY, so it's hard to get out there and see family very often. The only way to make up for it is to go insane at holiday time, and cram it all into a single visit.

I missed my family's celebrations last year for the first time in my life and it was good to be back.

Fame in the past tense

Wed, 14 Nov 07 02:33:00 UT

I was googling myself, like any intelligent, arrogant journalist would and should, when I came accross these gems. Back in the day when I was the news...

Figure Skating Competition Should Be Fierce at Empire State Winter Games

Followed up by:

Kelly Ryan From Troy Wins Gold in First Empire State Games Try In Singles Figure Skating; Three Other Figure Skaters Repeat as Medalists, Only In Tougher Competition

I am quoted in the second one-- The 15-year old Bloustein won last year's intermediate gold. "I'd like to
make it to Nationals next year and maybe someday the Olympics but I'll take it
one step at a time," said Bloustein.

I remember being interviewed and saying exactly that. I'd just come off the ice from the skate of a lifetime, knowing full well that I had the gold medal in the bag. What an arrogant little shit!

Well, something like 11 years later, and no Olympic Medal to show for it, I suppose I got what was coming to me. Those were the glory days...sigh!

Chocolate, watch your back

Wed, 17 Oct 07 15:53:00 UT

Chocolate terrorism>

Now this type of terrorism is something we can quash. Literally.

I find this all the more amusing, seeing as I work part-time at a chocolate shop and all...

I am ninja

Wed, 10 Oct 07 22:54:00 UT

I was randomly flipping through the channels, half expecting to land on a crazy Japanese game show, when low and behold, I did! "Ninja Warrior" is officially my new favorite show.

The rumors are true.

Sat, 29 Sep 07 12:09:00 UT

Indeed, I am, as rumored, a super hero.

I can't talk, I'm too busy and important

Sun, 15 Jul 07 00:56:00 UT

Truth is, I'm neither too busy nor too important. But I am lazy, as the absence of posting on this blog has made abundantly clear.

I'll get to telling all the stories I've been meaning to tell here...tomorrow...I swear.

Sagging

Fri, 29 Jun 07 02:24:00 UT

In case anyone was really wondering, my whereabouts for the last few weeks have everything to do with my membership in a certain union, which has afforded me ample work in the "biz," as it were.

Two weeks, four movies, one TV show. Sixteen-hour days, four hour commutes, a whole lotta free food and a little bit o' "prominently featured" screen time. I don't feel glamorous, but I do feel like ass. I fall asleep standing up. I eat nothing but swedish fish and pretzel rods (thanks to on-set offerings). The constant need to apply stage makeup has irritated my fragile complexion. I've got bags under my eyes that sag down past my mouth. But it has all been worth it, considering some of the talented actors with whom I've had the privilege of working, and the priceless experience of being an actual working actor. A little bit of concealer and moisturizer takes care of the bags under my eyes, anyway.

It's a crapshoot, of course, if you want fame and fortune. But if you want to make some money and some good friends, just enjoy the ride.

Supreme Idiocy

Fri, 1 Jun 07 00:12:00 UT

I had the honor of attending a lecture at Court of Appeals Hall in Albany (NY's highest court, for you out of staters), featuring Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer. To put it mildly, the man is an amazing speaker. He took a routine first-year Con-law lecture and turned it into a hearty discussion of what happens when we have no clue what the hell the Forefathers were thinking when they drafted the Constitution. Here he makes a good point though, in saying the very openness of the Constitution that perplexes us was completely on purpose. Twas not the result of a huge generation gap, but rather a built-in assurance that the power is with the "People." But when the "People" don't participate in their communities, politically or otherwise, it all falls to shit, and the Court ends up with the fractured opinions that reflect a serious lack of unity in our country. He didn't quite say that in his lecture, but it is the implication I took home.

I'm afraid the implication he took home of me may have been a little less astute. The end of his lecture was more or less a hint that America needs to beef up it's civics lessons. The youngin's need to learn early on that they need to work with society, not against it. In saying that, he looked straight at me--probably because I was likely the youngest in attendance. And that was solidified when he approached me after the lecture in the reception room and said politely,

"You must be one of the young ones!"

I was stuffing my face at the time, caught unawares with a piece of cheese hanging out of my mouth (on which I subsequently choked). I managed to stammer out an affirmative response.

"Are you a lawyer?" He asked.

"Um, uh, um, no....but my dad is?"

I wish I'd taken civics in highschool...But those who witnessed my first and probably only interaction with a Supreme Court Justice assure me that I was more graceful and intelligible than I'm crediting myself.

I'm hoping that's the truth, because I just joined the Screen Actor's Guild and the ability to make my idiocy pass as cool would be a credit to my skill as an actress...

Wreckless abandon!

Sat, 19 May 07 13:17:00 UT

I've become one of those pathetic, lazy bloggers who post only when the moon is full and they feel the flood of smart-alecky inspiration that comes from that myth-laden astronomical phenomenon! Damn the wretched gibbous moon!

So what's up?

I went to see Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons last night at Proctor's. I can say, with the exception of a few younger children who were dragged by their parents, I was unequivocally the youngest person in the room. The youngest fan anyway, by at least 27 years--which is how much older my mother is than I, and I calculated she to be the second youngest.

But age didn't really matter last night. Little Frankie--now pushing 70-something--crooned his hits to us as if it were still 1962, when "Sherry" brought him chart-topping fame. His flawless falsetto brought everyone in the room back to their youths, and the sights, sounds, smells and general feelings that accompanied the nostalgia.

And then there was me. The woman sitting next to me, a jovial, aging baby boomer, at one point asked, "Aren't you a little young to remember this?"

"I grew up listening to a tape," came my reply. But just because I'd been born 40 years later and had listened to a tape, doesn't mean the music didn't hit me in the same way. If given a choice between the complex and epic lyrics of my own generation's music and Frankie Valli's simple "I can't take my eyes off of you," it's really not a tough decision. Maybe I am a traitor to my generation for saying so, but the music has this sense of originality that today's love songs severely lack. Forty years ago they put the words "baby" and "lover" and all those cheesy things in the songs because they wanted to. Nowadays, when bands like Fountains of Wayne are forced to use a certain number of those words per song per album. Takes the feeling right out of it.

Stepping down off my little soapbox now...

Oh what a night!

Mack on some cupcakes

Sat, 31 Mar 07 22:17:00 UT

I've talked some smack in my day. Some of it good, some of it bad. But I've never been as dumb as the 10-year-old who tried to take me down in the Official "Cooking Mama" Cook-off Challenge in Rockefellar Center today.

Cooking Mama is Nintendo's newest game release for the Wii. As mentioned in my previous post(s), I think the Wii is awesome. So naturally a weekend contest at Ninentendo's World store with first prize as a free game was appealing.

First round, I'm paired with a shit-talking fifth grader. He bounced up and down next to me,waving the game controller and shouting "woo!" Then he turns to me and yells, "I'm gonna KILL YOU!" "I'M GONNA KILL YOU!" Then he turned to my boyfriend at the next game console and said, "I'M GONNA KILL HER!"

And then he followed it up by turning back to me. "I'M GONNA TAKE YOU DOWNTOWN, ALL THE WAY DOWNTOWN!"

Hey kid, did we mention it was a COOKING game? As in, the object is to cook things like popcorn and scrambled eggs without burning them? And you get points for presentation? What are you gonna do, scald me on the stove? Mess up my face on a burner?

The game started and frankly, neither of us had any idea how to play, and both ended up screwing up the popcorn level. But in the end, Player One was declared the winner. Who was player one? Neither of us knew. So he was like "hahahah, I BEAT YOU, I KILLED YOU!"

Turns out, I was player 1. By the time the second round started, he had disappeared. I ended up playing Wizard Brian, whom I Wii-shivved both before and after he beat me in a bout of making scrambled eggs.

Other ironic moment of the day...we were waiting in the oft lengthy line at Magnolia for cupcakes. (A hard contest followed by heavy drinking always merits a cupcake.) When we finally reached the door of the bakery, the young woman in front of us asks the guy who was working the door, "do you sell stuff without sugar in here? Like stuff for diabetics?"

Magnolia. Home of orgasmic, cocaine-laced cupcakes, peanut butter icebox cake, coconut creme cake and chocolate mousse pies. A friend of ours put it simply, "a diabetic would go into shock just from smelling the inside of the place."

No matter though. We finished the night macking on cupcakes.

Grapples and Wii-shivving

Sun, 4 Mar 07 23:03:00 UT

How are these seemingly random things related? It all comes down to two crazy days, one borrowed Nintendo Wii, lots of alcohol and genetically mutated apples. Well, not really genetically mutated apples...more like apples injected with artificial and natural grape flavoring, to give a little twist to a fruit that is otherwise fairly boring. But it sounds cooler if you say they're genetically altered.

In other words, we spent the weekend exploring the world of Wii, drinking wine, sangria and Mexican beer, and eating apples with a distinct grape flavoring. And let me just admit, unabashedly, that the Wii is really freaking fun. I knocked out dudes bigger than me, I bowled a personal best one hundred points higher than I've ever bowled in real life, and I hit a 538-foot home run. Oh, and I got to shiv bad guys in the Marvel Universe.

To understand why this is ironic/unusual/uncharacteristic of me, I'll go back in time. I have spent most of my life on this planet not giving a hoot about video games. My Mama said they was the devil...she will deny that, of course, but in so many words made that clear when she refused to buy us a video game system. Even when all of the other kids at school had 'em. Their vocabularies bulged with the growing jargon that accompanied them. Meanwhile, my sad little lexicon lagged hopelessly behind.

But just like evolution and life, kids find a way to partake in the things they are denied. Having a computer-saavy brother who knew his way around the internet before it was even created was helpful for me in that regard. The juice from Mortal Kombat and Doom on our home computer was sweeter than the arcade versions. In the college years, a resurfaced PC version of Ninetendo's first Super Mario Brothers provided good fuel for procrastination. But overall, the absence of mainstream video games and systems in my life expressed itself within me as a pervasive apathy.

I knew video games had a theraputic quality--the properties of certain games are helpful in integrating the senses of children with autism or pervasive development disorders. That is spectacular. But the gratuitous violence of many of the marketed games and the fact that it fosters couch-potato-ism did nothing to convince me that it was anything in which I needed to indulge. Occasionally, a good bout of popping caps in zombies with a tommy-gun could be cathartic, but only for a few minutes.

But the Wii...it's genius. Solves the couch potato problem immediately. You can't play games on this thing while you're sitting on the couch. No. You end up drenched in sweat, and wake up the next morning with aches all over your body. There are already urban legends floating around about guys who've lost serious poundage from using the game system daily. The sports games actually help you develop technique. And you can make up characters that look just like you!

Ok, I'll stop my pointless rambling. Point is, the Wii is worth a try. And that's coming from a non-conformist in the world of video games. So if you can get your hands on one, do it!

Alas, I'm exhausted from wii-shivving and my tummy is full of grapples. Time for bed.

Traffic jamz

Mon, 19 Feb 07 22:20:00 UT

I know it's been a while. Don't judge.

For reasons most people cannot understand, come outrageous rush hour traffic or potholes the size of Texas, I must drive my car to all of my appointments and obligations in Manhattan.

It sure ain't the ample parking situations abound on that miserable stretch of concrete jungle. And it isn't the pure joy of givin' my shocks a little jolt. I refuse to explain myself. It would take too long. Just suffice it to say I've figured out six ways to get to downtown Manhattan without having to pay a single toll. Sure beats taking the overpriced commuter rail.

So I drove down from my newest abode in comfy Westchester, to my most recent audition this evening. Since it was a national holiday, I didn't run into the usual amounts of traffic on the Deegan, the Saw Mill and the H Hudson. I sped down the West Side Highway listening first to the soulful gargling of the Stereophonics, and later to the epic tune of Placebo. The choice of music in my car often reflects the state of the road, the scenery and how impatient I am to get where I'm going...which in these parts, is definitely always in the red.

And while we're on that subject, my vehicular vocabulary--I think I'd like to coin that term--has expanded significantly during my many jaunts into the Big Apple. Words of the dirtiest, most vile nature have sprang from my lips. Words I didn't even know I could utter without blushing, let alone without thought! Like straight out of a "Deadwood" script. Those of you who have known me, I have a dirty enough mouth as it is. I worked in radio, for cryin' out loud. Most of the more colorful expletives came out during the two weeks earlier this month I had to travel all the way down FDR Drive for rehearsals. If FDR could see the state of the pathetic road that bears his name, he would be turning in his grave. (Of course, I think he may have many other reasons to be spinning like a top down there.)

Anyway, back to my adventure today. I squeezed down West 18th Street, cruising across five avenues. I found a sweet ass spot between 6th and 7th, about 50 feet from the most recent exhibition site of Moda Manhattan. Looked like something was going on there. People were spewing out of the building onto the streets, dashing in front of my car with no regard for the fact that they could have gotten hit if I wasn't as vigilant a driver. Typical f-ing New Yorkers. I parked my car in sludge leftover from last week's storm--which by the way gave cause for the mayor to recind thousands of tickets for misunderstandings with alternate parking. Knowing that a kick-ass parking spot like that always has a catch (15-min standing for commercial vehicles only or some crap like that), I asked on of the bouncers at Moda if I could park there.

Well, I didn't get much of an answer from any of them. They were busy shouting at pedestrians and roping off half the block with yellow caution tape. Then I heard gunshots--which apparently weren't gunshots, but the sound of something exploding from exposure to fire. Then I saw smoke from the building across the street. By the time I overcame my rubbernecking moment, four or five FDNY trucks had pulled up, blocking my car in with maybe a half an inch to spare.

Now, a normal, well-adjusted car owner would freak the heck out. But I said, screw it, and went to my audition. Came back an hour later. Things had calmed down, there was only one fire truck left, and my car was intact.

Funny thing about the big city. Crazy, off-putting shit happens there all the time and no one bats an eye any more.

Y the last...?

Mon, 18 Dec 06 14:20:00 UT

Check this out.

It's a story about a competitive runner whose medal was stripped after failing a sex test. Yes, a sex test. As in, there was a serious question about the gender of this runner. Ostensibly a "she," the aforementioned Indian athlete won a medal at the Asian Games, but lost the award because "her" sex test turned up too many Y chromosomes.

Too many Y chromosomes? Am I incorrect to have assumed that by genetic standards, women don't have any Y chromosomes? That's what we all learned in biology class anyway.

A spokesperson for Indian athletics may have answered my question, in denying that the athlete had a sex change operation.

Instead, the official said XXX appeared to have "abnormal chromosomes."

Regardless of the truth in this statement, it illustrates that perceptions are a-shiftin'. It took a while for the academic community to latch onto the idea that sexuality is a spectrum rather than an absolute "I dig men" or "I dig women."

Now we have to consider that gender and sex might just be as well.

The deeper the human race gets into studying its own genetic makeup, the more we learn how complex we truly are. And how notions of what defines "sex" from earlier studies aren't necessarily absolute.

That probably means that sometime in the future, the International Olympic Committee is going to have to refine all of the rules that define separate men's and women's competitive sporting events. Or maybe they could just scrap all that. Adam v. Eve. Samson v. Delilah. Solomon v. Bathsheba. And if I recall my biblical studies correctly, the girls can hold our own against the men.

That also reminds me of a song...Anything you can do, I can do better...

Bring out the Pulitzer

Wed, 6 Dec 06 20:51:00 UT

This is the greatest story ever to hit the wires.

No wait, it's just a tribute.

Reminds us: we are but men. ROCK!!!

NOTE** I couldn't help it, I've only just stopped reeling from the insanity that was Tenacious D at MSG last Friday.

Useless trivia

Wed, 6 Dec 06 12:22:00 UT
I go to this bar every now and again--a hotspot in the pseudo-Bohemian part of town, regionally renowned for it's trivia nights. Not your typical, trivial pursuit, to be sure. Instead of the widespread bonehead sports or pop culture questions, whose champions only triumph because of the hard work they did sitting on the couch in front of the television.

I'm talking about that tip-of-your-tongue, "that sounds familiar because I've only seen it once" type trivia. The kind that really makes you feel intelligent for pulling it out of your addled brain. The guys that run the trivia contest really put a lot of thought into making it so that you can't go to sleep that night until you figure out the answer.

Perhaps unfortunately, the once post-college crowd that was actually stimulated by the trivia has been replaced by a gaggle of obnoxious college-types who generally don't know their asses from their elbows. I was never like that! At least I don't remember it that way...

Nonetheless! Kip from work and I schooled them in the second round. Under the banner of Spider Jerusalem (which prompted a rather obnoxious outburst from an unruly geek who actually knew the reference), we handed everyone's ass to them without using a bowel disruptor. (Note** for those of you who don't have any idea what I'm talking about, don't read anything further into that.)

TO BE CONTINUED...

Ohio State or Michigan? Monkey, Faith, NC

(Laughs) Northwestern over Illinois.