The SoCal Years 22: Life Mimicks Sitcom
57
The Riveting Adventures of A Filipina-American Actor-Girl in the Southern California Jungle
The SoCal Years hubs comprise a series of narrative essays from the late 1990s, pre-9/11, immediately after grad school when, knowing she would run screaming back to the East Coast in the end, a young-ish Pinay New Yorker, armed with her new Drama MFA, decided nonetheless to dip her toes into the Hollywood swamp.
Love, love, love my studio. Square like a box, with a kitchenette alcove I've had to be ingenious in: a wooden shelf unit for the oven/rotisserie, the Toastmaster buffet range and a little microwave I'll get when I collect a little cash; a horizontal wooden hat rack with a walnut stain ($3.99 from Goodwill) to hang my brand new non-stick pots and pans on.
My colorful ceramic bowls on top of the fridge. A split-curtain hanging I brought back from Japan in 1990, over the closet door. Candles and bookshelves. A futon-bed-slash-sofa in a stylish plum-burgundy.
There are two windows, ceiling to floor, and a front door that leads to a teensy concrete patio, enclosed within ornamental bars painted a sort of slate blue.
Not much light, but I've filled the studio with lamps. And between two and five pm, the sun slants over the Baptist Church, filters into the studio through the leaves of the bush-tree outside—a-bloom this week with a riot of scarlet blush-brush flowers—and the stylish glass blinds (50's era?). Flings a soft light in languid, shimmering patterns through the middle of the space.
I've got use of the driveway to park my ugly little Mazda, but Mrs. Everkotski wagged her finger at me, "No oil, yuh?" and I've got a leak. Which I'll fix when I collect a little cash.
For now I slide a flattened cardboard box under the chassis to catch the drip, and try to remember to retrieve it before driving off again.
I'm set. All cosy. Now I need a yard, a big husky, and a boy to lounge around in his spectacles, reading the Sunday paper while I work.
• • • • • • • • • • • •
I've never mentioned Pongo, have I? Hope he doesn't mind the designation. I've had the most wondrous email conversations with a relatively new online friend—a bit of a kindred spirit. I don't know exactly how to describe our interaction, so I'll say what I told him:
We're total strangers, who are suddenly very close friends, with an interaction that combines the best of sometimes utter candor and sometimes utter mystery.
Well that didn't make things any clearer, did it?
One time he asked me to name the elements of my ideal mate. And I waxed verbose, and regurgitated my extensive list of required characteristics that the perfect man for me would have to possess (intelligence, wit, athleticism, education, etc., etc., ad nauseum...)
But then I realized that the complete bottom line for my ideal mate was this: that every time I saw him, I would have to want to ravish him.
(Did I lose anyone?)
• • • • • • • • • • • •
greenwich village "balconies" in the buchman's neighborhood
Aside from the months-long-and-deep obsession I had with Matthew McConaughey a couple of years ago, I seem to remember that my two recent infatuations of note with celebrities were with David Schwimmer and Paul Reiser. Smart, funny, and therefore almost unbearably sexy, men.
I love Paul and Jamie. I want to have Paul and Jamie's marriage. Two people so perfectly synchronized, with an interaction so endearing, watchable and resonant—not to mention more fun than a litter of pups on the beach.
Except that my marriage would contain far more pulse-pounding, ragged-breath kind of bedroom activity. (Yes of course the monogamous kind).
• • • • • • • • • • • •
Right now, the syndicated re-runs of Mad About You on Channel Thirteen are the episodes about the horrible rough patch they went through right before Mabel was born. Did you see them? I don't remember the last time I was so indignant.
In a nutshell, then:
There's stress between them. Paul meets some woman at a bar in a hotel where they're having an awards show. We watch in shock as he (yes, Jamie's Paul) actually contemplates, quite visibly and tangibly, going home with her and almost actually does. The encounter lasts probably a couple of hours. And he doesn't do it.
Some days later, during an emotional moment, Jamie's co-worker kisses her and—much to her own surprise—she doesn't pull away. To me, it looks as though she's in shock. The encounter lasts less than a minute. She gets up and walks out of the room.
Am I the only one who is completely baffled by the decision of the writers to make HER the villain?! They each spill their secrets, and SHE spends the next few episodes being the fearful, apologetic one, and he is all damaged and angry.
WHAT???
She lacked intent, boys and girls. He actually seriously considered committing sexual betrayal, and almost did, and she had no such contemplation.
INTENT, I said. It's part and parcel of the act of betrayal.
Should've fired off a heated missive to the network. Thought about it for days. But I was still slogging through the swamp that was grad school when it first aired.
Probably just as well.
(What'd I miss? I'm still completely confused.)
Well then the emotional hashing-out sequences, the almost-loss, those episodes in which we all hung on every scene, the sheets clenched between chattering bicuspids—oh God, please keep them together, don't split them or you'll lose us like Friends did, post-Ross-and-Rachel. These episodes were worth every bad hour in the history of television.
Pathos and hubris you thought could only exist on a theater stage. Such pure truth in the droplet that hovered in his eye, in the barely-restrained shake of his speech, in the deeply-cleft lines of agonizing fright on her face, in how desperately she clung to him using only her voice and words, unable to touch him during the final money scene, you knew that for a moment there wasn't a shred of acting on that set.
• • • • • • • • • • • •
Imagine balancing on the brink of losing your soulmate. The slightest mis-step and you tumble over the edge of the cliff. Hardly daring to breathe—poised on the tip of a scream.
Oof...
And by the way, they haven't re-aired that episode yet. Wednesday, I think (UPN, 6:30 PST). In case you need a pinch or two of enormously-satisfying catharsis in your otherwise sunny day. ◊
© capricornrising . all rights reserved
