Sloan's First ("Real") Film Shoot

My dear little pumpkin and BFF Sloan spent last night (and early this morning) at the Purple Hotel here in Chicago working as an Assistant Director (and smokin' hot actress) in a video for Josie Aiello, Warner Brothers recording artist. Sloan writes about it here. (And, in case you're wondering, she's going to ditch the ridiculously scribbly URL she's been putting her stuff up on so far and move her blog over to the much more neatly named SloanTaylorFilms.com soon.)

Lots of fun details to fill in here later (how did this come about, what did she learn and do, what creative connections did she make while there, etc.), but it's such a cool exciting thing that I had to make a brief mention of it.

Go Sloan! Just to remind you, my brilliant little niece isn't even done with school yet. She just bought a Mac and editing software a few weeks ago. Only a few months ago did she start saying "I want to be a writer and filmmaker" out loud.

I can't even imagine where life will find her a year from now. It's so wonderful to see all that she's making possible in her life and in mine. I am so thrilled for her, and it's not just the opiates talking.And, as if to illustrate once again how synched she and I are in our nascent creative evolution, I dreamt about her, and a film shoot, several times last night (even in between episodes of waking up to sip water and take meds). Of course, since it was my dream, it was a comedy project we were working on, but still, we were there together, having fun and being creative with the friend she worked on this project last night with. It's nice to know my subconscious, at least, is getting on board with all the opportunities opening up in my life.

The Benefits of Bedrest

Okay, so I'm actually on medical leave. I mention this because it feels weird not to be writing about it, and because there's a lot of funny stuff that's happening. Also, I'm starting to wean myself off of the powerful pain meds, and my increasingly clear state of mind means I'm going a little bonkers with the near-bedrest conditions of my medical parole right now. (Okay...maybe a lot bonkers.) As always, writing helps me figure stuff out, and cope better, so get ready for a few posts about Bella's Bedrest and Its Inherant Hilarity.

It's not a health-threatening situation, per se, but I had major surgery Monday, the biggest I've ever had, and I'm going a little nuts with the pace of recovery right now. You can only re-read the latest issues of all those slick junky celebrity magazines so many times before you begin the descent into existential despair. It's a slippery slope, and it starts with Britney Spears.

Also, I'm human, and I wouldn't mind a few well-wishes (and maybe a few boxes of Godivas - milk chocolate only, please) from my loyal hordes of readers. Boxes can be sent to: Bella's House, Chicago, IL, in care of her mommy, who's taking the best possible care of her. Comments are also accepted, although somewhat less appreciated.

What's driving me most crazy? Not being able to work out. It will be several weeks before I can resume the intense cardio again, which my brain chemistry requires for proper levels of feel-goodiness, and three months before I can hit the weight machines again, which is a LONG damn time for someone who loves weight training as much as I do. Also, not being able to be present for a lot of cool comedy developments happening on my scene is frustrating - comedy festival stuff, TV shows, management deals, new media plans for the Bastion - all are happening without me.

On the plus side, being required to be lazy and helpless is kind of fun (for the first few days, at least). And I have to say, the flannel PJ uniform is a pretty sweet part of the deal. I'm wearing them everywhere, even during my brief forays into the "real world." Look at me weird all you want to, waitstaff of Andersonville. I'm wearing jammy pants, and I'm not changing for you. Also nice is the freedom to go weeks without shaving (except the pits, those gotta stay smooth), and days without the usual requirements of feminine upkeep. Shampoo? Eyeliner? What are those? I don't care anymore.

What else is nice? Having all day to loll around watching the tube, playing with my cats, joking around with my mom, doing lots of pleasure reading, and nibbling my way through fruit baskets that thoughtful friends have sent my way.

It's a major treat to be hanging with my mom so much, even though I'm sure she's bored out of her mind most of the time as well. I also worry that I'm picking up more and more of her habits and thought patterns the more time we spend together. I will be writing more about that in the next few days in an attempt to halt my transformation into a tiny sixty-something blonde woman who is as obsessed with cat hair and methods of removal thereof as she is with the fiber count of every food product she introduces into her digestive system. Whee! It's going to be a delightful few posts. And, don't forget, it's G-O-D-I-V-A.

Ten Years Behind

Went to class at Second City today. Had a ton of fun doing group writing - I love my classmates so much. Even the dumb and smelly ones. (Ha. That's a joke.) After so much time together, we are now all really comfortable with each other, and the in-jokes and familiarity make a lot of cool, energizing free-flowing stuff possible. Group writing is such a high, and way more fun (and productive) than sitting in front of my laptop staring at a blinking cursor. I'm starting to understand that writing is not a solitary activity.

One idea I had as we brainstormed ten raw sketch ideas, while working in pairs, was "very good," according to my teacher. So good, in fact, that Steve Carell wrote it about ten years ago. Basic premise - a wife is prodding her husband to take care of some boring household chores, and each time he responds: "I can't (menial domestic task), because (global political issue)." You know, "Honey, I can't take out the trash, children are starving in Uganda." Goddamn Carell. Last class the same thing happened, but it was Stephen Colbert who beat me to the punch, also by about ten years. Big, rich, successful jerks! Someday I'll catch up to them.

Anyway, I'm on leave for a little while, hopefully back online around November 1, maybe sooner. Check back with me then. Take care, faithful readers.

Ultime Parole Famose

Famous last words. Some favorites:

"Get these f*cking nuns away from me." - Norman Douglas.

"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring." - Richard Feynman.

"Dammit... Don't you dare ask God to help me." - Joan Crawford.

"Thank God. I'm tired of being the funniest person in the room." - Del Close.

(And don't even get me started on Chicago comedy legend Del Close's post-mortem adventures. I feel like every other thing I write for the Bastion is about the man's skull.)

Tattoo You? If You're Feelin' Self-Hatey

Only women who hate themselves get tattooes. "No superficial charm can conceal the darker truth: that tattooing is a close cousin of self-harming, and that distorted self-image, eating disorders and destructive urges are now being made manifest in the tattoo parlour." So says a writer at the Herald.

Sorry, lady, but you're talking out of your rear. (No, not "ear," "rear." I'm trying to be polite. Okay, fine. You're talking out of your ass.) I could agree with you if you simply said that tattooes are now so widespread and bourgeois that they now telegraph the opposite of what they may have fifteen years ago, but you're full of crap if you think that hard core self-mutilation and daisy 'n' angel tatts are born of the same impulse.

Of course, this chick goes on to utterly destroy her credibility by describing Donald Trump as a "wonderful creation."

Currently on My Reading Table

How To Write a Book Proposal - Michael Larsen. Thanks to my Second City teacher and friend Nancy for terrifying me with this one. Yes, your dear Bella is working on a book, and therefore a book proposal. What's it about? You'll find out.

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers - Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. It occurs to me as I finish this one up that I've never actually read a book about blogging before. It's sort of annoying to see footnotes with URLs and not be able to click on them. Damn the static nature of printed paper. On the plus side, the way these two wrote this book has changed the way I'm going to approach both writing and marketing my own book. Stay tuned for more details on that.

How To Read And Why - Harold Bloom. A loaner from my little peanut Sloan, who is a terribly good influence on my reading habits. She's also prompting me to read as much Bill Bryson as I can get my hands on. (Aw...I just saw a picture of him for the first time...he's adorable. And he's ginger. It's love.)

Latest issues of Wired. In a recent issue, Beck discussed his fun with multimedia. A few nights ago Sloan woke me up at 1 AM to report on the Beck concert here in Chicago, and, to summarize her initial explosion of enthusiasm, "The band had dinner onstage, and then there were puppets that looked just like the band, and then they had dinner, and then you realized the puppets were backstage, and it was like a movie they were shooting live, and totally coordinating all the movements with these puppets, and it was awesome! And THEN..." (Oh, and she blogged about it, too.)

Latest issues of Discover. I love, love, love me some science. I have Father Leo back at Marian College in Indianapolis to thank for that. Besides giving his students a thorough and well-rounded history of scientific thought, and requiring his students to read and report on one science fiction novel every month, he also had us regularly report on articles from Scientific American and such, and I was immediately hooked. For years I crammed my cranium with subscriptions to all the general interest science magazines as well as several pricey journals, like Science and Nature. I've let up on that recently only due to budgetary constraints (and, of course, the fact that comedy is now running my life).

Latest issues of the New Yorker. I wrote about it on the Bastion, but it took those fancypants New Yorker writers to poke around and get Charna Halpern to finally spill her guts on the mystery of what happened to Del Close's skull. Hint: it hasn't starred in Hamlet at the Goodman Theater.

Shadow Divers - Robert Kurson. This one is a loaner from my dad, who visited me here in Chicago recently. We took a trip through the U-505 at the Museum of Science and Industry and marveled at the stories of the men who lived, fought, and died in these amazing pieces of military history. I'm going to read it, Dad, I promise. It's just a little intense, that's all.

Do You Need To Be Mary Tyler Moore'd?

Hit a bump in the road? Feeling sorta blue? Here comes my friend Coaster Punchman to the rescue. Send him an e-mail, with the name and telephone number (under strictest rules of privacy, of course - he's a lawyer, for damn's sake), and he'll serenade you or a loved one with the healing powers of his piano-and-vocal magic. It's cheaper than Prozac, and with considerably fewer side effects.

"Have you ever bashed your aunt in the face with a door?"

Sloan's take on our recent comedy venture: "...it was quite a close call, I assure you. Her eyelashes fluttered in

the breeze, eyes saucer-wide with terror, and had the gale not rocked her back on her heels ever so slightly, she would now be sans jawbone. Today’s valuable lesson: when propelling massive objects at maximum speed in the general vicinity of people’s faces, take the square root of the force used to chuck the object in their direction divided by the denominator of the Cartesian coordinates of their longitudinal position minus three times the length of their proboscis over pi, and put some goddamn tape on the floor to mark where they should stand to avoid certain death...The upside? The camera was rolling the entire time, so get ready for some spectacular outtakes."

In other words, my darling niece, in her directorial zeal, almost bashed me in the sniffer but good, which would have been regrettable, and yet will make for some high-larious comedy outtakes, once we get things edited and up.

Yeah, I'm that kind of aunt. The cool kind, who's close to you in age, more like a sister you didn't grow up with. The aunt who will gargle miserable vodka tonics with you when you're suffering boy troubles, who has a purse full of gum when you have bad breath, who encourages your creative explorations to the point that she's willing to act the fool in your comedy film and offer up her unbroken, pristine (if slightly freckled) nose in an offering to your demanding muse.

Looks, Ma, I'ma Ona Tee Bee!

Last night K-Rock and I went to the CAN-TV studios, where they film shows like The Bible Is True, Covered by the Blood and, of course, Talkin' Funny, starring Sasha and the Noob of Don't Spit the Water. They had invited us Bastion girls to be guests on the show. I politely declined to be on camera, but K-Rock was charming and delightful, plugging her favorite Chicago comedy hotspots.I did my best to keep my ponytail out of the shot and stifle my giggles, and hoped like hell I wouldn't get one of those unpredictable hiccup or sneeze fits that befall me sometimes.

Then the four of us (plus their nice call screener girl) trudged and shuffled around the rolling theater of comedy and drama that is the CTA. We talked about comedy. We talked about Chicago. We talked about a possible Bastion Chicago Comedy Festival (coming soon to a shady venue near you!). The Noob stepped on my foot. It was good times.

Then it was on to Gunther Murphy's (why do I feel like K-Rock when I type stuff like this?), for Chicago Underground Comedy. It was a rather quiet night, as if people were expecting a cold rain we never got, or, more likely, they were all stapled to the couch kicking off the crappy new tv season. But I got to pinch, poke, and otherwise say hello to Andy Ross, Tony Sam, Kumail, the Boosh, and others. We laughed. We cried. It was awesome.

So yeah, here we are on the tube. K-Rock sits down at about 10:30, and is lured into looking off-camera a lot as I fidget.

Does "Updated Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday" Have a Nice Ring to It?

It looks like Bella Rossa is going to be a thrice-weekly publication for the foreseeable future. I am dedicating more time to other projects these days, and while I don't plan on discontinuing this blog anytime soon, I do need to be realistic about how much time I can dedicate to it, so for now that's the standard, just FYI. Might be some bonuses here and there, who can tell.Yes, I'm spending time on Bastion stuff, and "other" writing stuff, and job type stuff, and Second City writing class stuff (soon to culminate in a student show), and silly little comedy film projects.

Sloan and I and two friends spent eight hours Wednesday night shooting what will end up being a three minute comedy short. We came up with the basic idea together. She then spent hours and hours mapping out the structure and setting up a set list, and whatever else it is that directors do. (No storyboards, as far as I know, but I've seen some she's done for other projects and they're really cool looking.)

I wrote a lot for my own part ahead of time but also did a lot of improv, which wasn't too tough once I let go of my ego, made peace with making an idiot of myself for the sake of (hopefully) making people laugh, and just let it fly.

Please remember if you watch it that I literally am acting for the very first time in the first scene that you will see. There is no nuance, no effortless awareness of the camera, no, shall we say, clue, or - what's that other thing? Skill. But it was fun. And we have tons of ideas for more.

Elsewhere, I Write and Create

Gapers Block and Jargon Chicago have both invited me to contribute to their publications, which is great. I'm not able to follow up with Gapers Block right now, due to time constraints, but it's flattering to have writing invitations coming my way only a few months after beginning to write in any sort of visible way. Before the Bastion launched, my efforts were largely limited to anonymous business writing and amusing myself with blogging here.

(Jargon Chicago is willing to receive intermittent missives, which may be all I can manage for awhile.) Here's my first article in Jargon Chicago, all about the delights of Chicago winter. I wrote it under my real name. There's not much point in pretending anymore, is there?

Also, yesterday I sent in a contribution to a blog about blogs (oh...meta), after being contacted by its editor. That should be up shortly as well. It will be called "Blogging For Fun and Profit (Mostly Fun)".

In other creative news, tonight, Sloan and I will be shooting our first comedy short film together. Besides being very arty-creative, she's also a logistical whiz, and has storyboarded and plotted every shot. I wrote my own part and am expected to improvise a bit as well. This is my first ever attempt at acting, so I hope I don't make a total moron of myself. In my favor are the facts that the film is very short (about three minutes), and that I'm portraying an annoying idiot, and not someone expected to possess any dignity.

K-Rock and Bella Meet Tommy Tiernan

I've been having a lot of fun with the indie-journalist thing and pulling whatever strings I have to interview increasingly famous comedy figures.Saturday morning K-Rock and I hustled our booties downtown to a schmancy hotel to snag some face-to-face time with Ireland's biggest comedian, Tommy Tiernan. He's won every major comedy award in the U.K., and, I predict, is soon to develop a huge following here in the States. He's hilariously energetic and playful. He was in Chicago shooting material for a concert film which will be released on DVD on St. Patty's day, and likely aired on HBO as well. (Excuse me, "Haytch-Bee-Oh.")

I'd been working with Tommy's very nice manager Yvonne to arrange a phone interview with him, but I kept missing him. I went into work Friday all frowny, and my boss (an Irishman himself) asked me what was up. (He and my other Irish friends have been talking about Tommy's Chicago shows all week.) I explained, and, by some form of Celtic telephonic magic, two totally unconnected Irishman chatted briefly, and before I knew it, I had the following day off to allow me to conduct a face-to-face interview with Tommy. (Thanks, Boss!) In the end, he graciously allowed us a video interview, and he was warm and friendly and fantastic. (Not to mention, his shows rocked.)

Tommy bought us coffee and shared his impressions of Chicago (friendlier than other parts of America), and told us about his partially successful Huck Finn-inspired adventure called Supertramp, wherein he walked the length of Ireland collecting and telling stories. He also explained that at comedy festivals, people like stand-ups (who usually work and travel alone) get a chance to hang out, play football, drink beer, and swap stories. Like camp for comedians, or like an insurance convention (except much more fun). He was funny and warm and open and philosophical at times, and made my week by laughing heartily at some of my dumb jokes.

K-Rock and I chased trains in our (totally unplanned but uncannily coordinated) indie-journalist uniforms of jeans, funky girly tennies, and black jackets, laughing that we felt like a Secret deodorant commercial. ("I'm a busy professional gal on the run! I need to get the story, and still feel fresh and dry. That's why I love Secret!") We marveled at the opportunities we've enjoyed with this whole silly web-venture. We toasted the Irish. And we stayed fresh and dry.

(Some of Tommy's delightfully profanity-laden comedy below.)