2006 – Miss Blue Moon
“As part of the integration process we have re-aligned several of our businesses to better leverage our opportunities for growth and to drive client-segment level solutions that will catapult us to even greater levels of success.”
- Corporation X
My bright and sunny days of Vietnam mutated into fluorescent lights of a grey cubed office in Portland. I found a job monitoring ATMs and VISA networks. Being a 24 hour call center, I signed up for a hazy graveyard shift existence wanting to avoid traffic and the general daytime culture of corporate offices: “brown-nosing”, weekly stand up meetings, casual Fridays, free corporate T-Shirts, hiding your internet browsing from snooping bosses, etc. It was a quiet and a somewhat lonely existence – a station out in space monitoring and securing the flow of money down on Earth.
It was not a job that excited me, but it was a comfortable haven that wasn’t too stressful and provided me enough income to survive and save for the project.
Ah, my project… it lay like a half done jigsaw puzzle, strewn about in files on various hard drives. I wasn’t anxious to don the weight of the incomplete project again. It was several months since my return before I finally forced myself to sit and watch my unfinished movie.
I winced here and there and nodded occasionally with pride. Though some scenes still played well, weak elements of the story stuck out like acne. I felt the mythology of the chess set needed to be introduced in the beginning and a particular character needed more fleshing out and given more relevance to the plot. Additional scenes needed to be shot. I thought hard, debating whether this was absolutely necessary, trying to ignore the alarm bells going off in my head.
In order to shoot these scenes, I would have to contact our very elusive Ms. Blue Moon. I was afraid to pick up the phone to call her. I had no idea if she was even in town anymore. It had been six years since I last saw her, when I had to fly her up from L.A. Where was she now, and would she pick up the phone? Would she even look the same?
“How much French is it?”
“It’s that paragraph I emailed you.”
“Do you have a copy of it? I need to be back in my apartment in 20 minutes.”
We were hurriedly walking from a Starbucks near her home to another Starbucks near her home where my French-speaking friend awaited us. This mix-up contributed to her agitated state at being bothered with this task, a task that required her to learn a paragraph of French. I told her it would take about 2 hours, but upon my arrival she informed me of her busy day and that it had to miraculously be done in 20 minutes.
We had no time to teach her the lines, so I had my French-speaking friend speak the words into my mini-recorder and gave it to her.
On the day of the shoot, she couldn’t say the lines and I had to settle for the first couple words in French, then the rest in English.
I tried to get her for one last scene. To make it as convenient as possible, the scene required her to sit in a café by herself and act as if she had been stood up; no French, no words at all. I even worked to get permission to shoot it in a café a few blocks from her apartment.
“I don’t have time. I need to be here in case someone emails about my stuff on Craig’s List.” She was selling her furniture and moving to San Diego ASAP.
And just like that our Ms. Blue Moon no longer graced our skies. That’s the danger of casting non family members.
Thank God my brother didn’t have that luxury. It was 11 years ago when we first cast him. Now it was about time again for him to get a hair cut and don his Sully garb. Sully still needed to die.
