All I Want for Christmas is You, Steve

Steve Jobs, that is. I just became a Mac girl. It’s a beautiful thing to be a Mac girl. At the risk of sounding like a Mac ad, I will just note that Macs are pretty, they greet my peripherals like old friends, without the need for disks, downloads, or constant rebooting, but most of all, they give you, to quote Blur, an enormous sense of well-being.

See, to be perfectly honest, I don’t even know how to use 90% of my Mac’s functions yet. But it seems like a lot of my favourite people have Macs. Creative people. Intelligent people. Beautiful people. Stuff White People Like explains the shallow appeal of being a Mac person better than I can, but basically--I feel a little bit cooler now.

Just Say No

My job involves me doing silly things sometimes. Which wouldn’t be so bad—we all do silly things sometimes, right? Except that they all seem to end up getting broadcast on TV. This isn’t even so bad except when it involves being in an ad that gets shown over and over and over again.

The first time I was in an ad, it was very Hollywood. Well, it was IN Hollywood. We were shooting out there for budgetary reasons—we had period sets and costumes, and wheatgrass juice, and those are easier to find in CA than UT. I got to have my face spray-painted with foundation, had porn star lashes stuck on my lids, and it was all very fun until I remembered how much I want to scream when people spend more than about fifteen minutes messing with my face and hair. And when I realised I couldn’t sit down in my dress. My presence in that ad was unremarkable except for the (negligible) length of the dress, and people usually don’t know it’s me in the ad unless I (or a “kind” friend) tells them. I get a little teasing a.k.a. sexual harassment about it once in a while, but the ads are coming to the end of their run, at least in Utah, so that’ll be that. It really was kind of fun, I was glad I did it, and said at the time that I probably wouldn’t want to do another.

Ha.

If you work at an ad agency, you are apparently fair game for “friends and family talent” (i.e. the budget is really small, so they can’t afford real talent for any but the essential roles).

I was at a shoot, minding my own business and chatting to my client, and asked the creative director who he was going to use for the last ad. “You,” he said. “In that case, I want make-up, and lots of it,” I said. It appeared that he was serious, so I got a bit of powder, lipstick, hairspray, and a jacket from wardrobe, but not the dark glasses and wig that I was rather hoping for.

The bit I’m in is over very quickly, which is all to the good. The worst of it is, I’m doing an American accent. For those of you who have heard my American accent, you’re probably smirking right about now. My American accent is not really for public consumption. It is not good. It’s more of a party trick, and, quite frankly, sounds a lot better if you have a few drinks inside you, which means it’s wasted (ha) at most of the parties I go to. It is definitely not the sort of thing that should be sprung on an unsuspecting public who may be prone to strokes.

[If I were GOOD at doing an American accent I would use it to order water in restaurants, thus avoiding the “what?” “water;” “huh?” “WATER,” both-of-us-stare-pleadingly-at-my-dinner-companion-until-he/she-translates sequence that typically ensues. ]

But our creative director seemed to think that doing an American accent must be easy because of Minnie Driver and Hugh Laurie (cheers, mates), and so I mumbled my way through a line that didn’t have too many tricky vowels and hoped that speaking softly would disguise the flaws.

I dunno. Maybe they can dub it later.

Thanks in Boston

My friends Margaret and Chris decided they wanted to do things a little differently this year at Thanksgiving: No pumpkin pie, no turkey, no overly fussy plans, no massive family gatherings. As I am not particularly emotionally tied to ye olde yankee traditions of Thxgiving, they asked me to grace them with my company. They had me at “no pumpkin pie.” I’m tired of pretending to like that muck.

Here's the product placement couple.


We made delicious food, including Bakewell Tart for dessert, their gracious and charming friends Seth, Karen, and Adam joined us, and much fun was had. We talked about politics and sex and religion, and sang a festive song or two.







The aperitif hour ended up being the most non-traditional. Wee Alice had been sick all week and not in her usual sunny frame of mind. Chris took her for a drive as a last-ditch (successful) attempt to lull her to sleep, and when they got back, I sat in the car with her and a book while he attended to the meat in manly fashion. After a while, there was a knock at the window --- Mags was standing there with stem glasses, a bottle of sparkly, and a plate of Brie and its accoutrements. We sat in the car and had girl talk in whispers, and finished off the Brie. One of those things that you can’t and wouldn’t plan, but wonderful.

There was lots of lounging in pyjamas, and eating tart at inappropriate hours of the day, and more talk, and music, and cheesy movies, but we also got to see the sights of Cambridge and Boston.

I had tea with my old college friend, Duane.






We went to the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art), which had the most fabulous exhibition(Click on slideshow at the left). Beautiful things from ordinary objects. Paper plates formed into what look like balls of chenille wool. Semi-hemispheres of mylar that looked velvety, but also like coastal boulders, and on which I had an almost irresistible urge to dive and climb.







We visited the Gibson House, and even though we waltzed in without an appointment, we got a personal tour and I experienced the most gratitude of the weekend when I compared my washing machine and dryer to the boiler, mangle, drying room, and other nightmare apparatus that represented wash day back in the Victorian era. Though of course the house owners had a washerwoman to come in two days a week and do all the scrubbing and ironing. That wouldn’t be so bad. If you weren’t the washerwoman.

We wandered round the Back Bay area a little and researched chocolate croissants on Charles Street. And then it was time to hoof it to the airport.





Is too a colony. See.



These people were posing their dogs sitting on the ducks. Surprisingly successfully.



They really love their ducks.



I am thankful for friends.