It's On

So Joe Janes linked to me on his blog yesterday, thus throwing in to bold relief my total lack of posts for, oh, the last six months or so. Agh, the shame.

Okay, I can do this. How hard can it be? I just can't blog about work (hi, Genny!) or my personal life (hi, Michael!), or rag on any tv show that I kind of want to work on someday (hi, David Shore!)

Uh. Hmmm.

Oh! I went to Chicago this weekend and saw 84 members of my extended family, including my cousin Kelly who TOTALLY called me on my snark towards the filmed-in-Toronto-but-set-in-Chicago "Dresden Files." I stand corrected -- actual, dyed-in-the-wool Chicagoans will in fact ride in an open-top vehicle in the dead of winter between Chicago and South Bend, IN.

On that note, I scored a ride to Midway Airport in my dad's smokin' 1972 cherry red Oldsmobile Cutlass 442. Top down, scarf over my head, plexiglas safety goggles to keep the road grit out of my eyes -- it was like something from the Golden Age of Hollywood, if Ava Gardner's dad had kept a lot of industrial safety equipment in the back seat of his car. My dad has a CD he made with his own two hands, exclusively for playing on the CD player of the Cutlass. I distinctly remember "Love Shack" playing at one point, and although I got out before it came up, I know "You've Got a Friend in Me" is also on the playlist. That's pretty much my dad in a nutshell.

I also made time to see a little -- a very little -- Chicago theater over the weekend, including the excellent ten minute play "Cheddar Moon," by Joe Janes. Everything you've heard about it is true and then some -- it's just like every other one act love story between a bearded cafeteria lady and the ghost of the boy she loved some twenty years ago.

It is, in fact, hilarious and full of the kind of lines that make me pull out my notebook and start jotting things down so I don't forget them. I will just say this: Best stage fight with a soup ladle and bouquet of novelty pencils *ever.* Also, it kind of defies belief that the funny, adorable Mike Johnson can also play an oppressive and unlikable high school principal, but so it is.

Mainly though, I just walked around. As in, around the eight million tourists and smelly marathoners who were wandering the city in slow motion this weekend. I realize now that I am using Chicago to get my NYC fix, much the way heroin addicts will drink cold syrup and eat honey right out of the plastic bear. I log a couple miles every day, opting to walk every possible route instead of grabbing a cab or bus. It's not that I'm shopping or running errands. I'm soaking in it -- the reasonably coherent urban planning, the public transit that I never respected until I lived in a city that makes the CTA look like the Paris Metro, the historical architecture -- all the things that, honestly, are not readily available in Los Angeles.

In very little time, I began to miss Michael; waking up to a face full of sunlight; falling asleep in a soft, slightly salty breeze; the satisfaction of another miraculous piece of research delivered, but it was a nice change of pace, and in another two days, I might almost be caught up on my sleep.

I don't know much about what the coming years will bring. I think I can pretty much count on two weeks off between Christmas and New Years', even if it's my only vacation of the year. And it seems almost unavoidable that I'll be working through every summer as far as the eye can see. If a show starts in January, it works until August (and that's just for a 12 episode run.) If a show starts in May, it works until December (ditto.) I suppose somewhere there might be shows that staff up in September and wrap in May, but I haven't heard of one yet. Also, as supporting evidence, I notice a ton of industry people take their families to Hawaii for Christmas, which has the strong whiff of parents making it up to their kids for years of missed summer vacations.

But what I'm starting to realize is that I can squeeze a crap ton of vacation into a 48 hour bag, make a Sunday afternoon in Anaheim stand in for the week off that I really need, and enjoy the hell out of three days in Chicago.