the breathing memory

with the east coast deluge, my wedding season comes to a close. it is fittingly dreary for an "end of things," though i had hoped to grasp a tiny bit of summer here in the south. alas, i waited too long. instead of lounging by the pool, i have ample time to putter around my home town. to visit the spots of those enduring moments in my brain. probably too much time.

that being said, the last of my weddings was beautiful. vastly different--actually, they were all very different from each other. yet, everyone managed to plan something very fitting. i love how different they all have been.

sometimes on the other side of the fence you mush all marriages together. it becomes a blur of TLC episodes and wedding magazines. when most of your friends are single or family-less, you start to re-imagine  "domestic bliss" from fragments of your memory, real, imagined, from that last pulp novel to the 3d family film...

my sister Julia and her husband got married at their new house, which they have been refurbishing themselves all summer. and we are not just talking a little paint--not only the walls, but everything from  a complete upheaval of the yard, to the plumbing, to the freakin roof-- yes, they laid the beams!! in the ceiling!

not only was the wedding perfectly simple, but allowed all the friends and family to really appreciate how much work they have already put into their new home.

alyssa's wedding, on the other hand, was incredibly elegant last week. the ceremony was at a beautiful mansion, overlooking LA. all the fancy guests hid beneath delicate, matching parasols to fend off the blaring sun.

i didn't know a lot of people at the wedding--a far cry from the plans we made as teenagers in high school, daydreaming about our lives together. the houses we'd have, the baby strollers we'd push, the husbands we'd torture... it wasn't so much the "what" but the fact we'd be doing everything at the same time, so we could share the suffering and the joy, could gossip and bemoan together.  but times change. and we grow up. i guess some of us do.

her wedding was officiated by another of our friends who got one of those "day passes" to legitimately perform the ceremony. a very sweet idea.

my mind is full of twistable turnable thoughts that i have not yet decided if i should let in or i should just pack away.

however, i am very glad that i took the time, money, and effort to make it to all of the weddings this summer.  living the status quo is a terrible place for an artist.  you must stretch yourself in some way as much as you can. whether reading new scripts, attending scene study classes, trying out different ideas or having wild adventues.  sometimes, esp when things are emotionally stressful, stretching can mean a simple, rote physical warm up. but it can also mean this overindulgent "exploration" of "feelings."

and as i am falling asleep typing this, i'd better sign off for now.

zombie wedding: we have feelings too!

i have been inundated with weddings!

this one, however had nothing to do with me. that being said, now that i've been alerted to it, i may need to beg one of my affianced step-sisters to rethink their plans. zombie wedding!

not only did the bride and groom get all dressed up for the big day, but friends on hand made sure the entire party was appropriate for the outing. they paraded to the official's office in all their glory, then spent the rest of the day drinking about town. i don't think TLC's wedding battle could have done better.

though my russian is a little rusty--thank you google translate-- these crazy kids are both on their third marriage, so i guess it was time to spice things up. and maybe after all those previous spouses, they needed something a little more permanent than "till death do us part."  strangely, when the interviewer asked if "the last time is special too,"  they replied " Oh yes!   It was a punk wedding - trash and refuse in our money instead of throwing beer caps, would still buy the grubs, but have not found."  --yeah, um thanks google translate... :/

perhaps they are zombies everyday and only put on the punk part specially... if so, i guess i can excuse both julia and rebecca from altering their current design scheme. i'm not sure i want to be a part of the trash and refuse. nor would i be particularly fond of the bridesmaid trash-bag dresses.

then again, it pleases me to see people who have found each other. all of us have a little bit of crazy in us, some more than others sure.  but despite my sometimes cynical outlook on love and certainly on marriage, the romantic in me warms, if only for their momentary happiness.

these guys know what i'm talking about. thanks mr. gosling. My Body's A Zombie For You by Dead Man's Bones

sometimes nothing is sweeter than falling asleep on someone's arm. even when you're a zombie.

she used to be a classy lady. and then she met me.

in her mother's dress. beautiful.

so the question i've been asking myself since The Wedding is: is blacking out the gods way of giving you a free pass?

yeah, yeah. i know your answer to that one. however, this time (not that i make a habit of this sort of thing) it kinda feels like it was. a little gift from above, saying, you made it here, it's done, you can let go.

i mean, really. i am a damn fine imbiber. i enjoy a cold beer. love a cocktail on the beach. i lust over a perfect bloody mary. i dream of sweating Kilimanjaros in the African twilight. while i don't often go crazy, i have had my share of wild nights all over the world.  so why, on this occasion, with barely 4 drinks over an 8 hour period did i manage to lose an entire evening?

well, let's just say there was a heck of a lot of stress on this wonderful televised weekend.  some i brought with me-- though the "gay hell" :) of my dear friend's first fashion show all night before was not one of those stresses and is a story for another time.-- most i walked into disembarking at LAX.

there are too many awful stories to tell, somehow squashed into 72hr period. and some are not my stories to share. the main lesson though, is tv producers have only one priority and it won't be yours.

the "real" wedding ceremony was beautiful. almost the complete opposite of the wonderful event i last attended. a complete, honest to goodness orthodox ceremony, full of pomp and circumstance.

from the ornate church, to the greek cantor singing, and the careful attention to procedure, my biggest concern was not being struck down for all my wickedness.

not that it was free from the TLC debacle touch. there was a moment of impending catastrophe when one of the TLC photogs  started to cross into the inner alter sanctum that literally no one but the priest is allowed to enter or fear the wrath. i hesitated a moment too long for maria's parents' sanity, for fear of crossing the magical line myself, before reaching in and pulling him to safety.

we had some time after the church ceremony to reach and prepare for the second course. i maybe should have taken a nap in the limo. having pulled an all-nighter, then a very late night with the rehearsal dinner and catching up with long missed UI lovies, a very early morning with the stylists, not to mention jet-lag, a nap--even in my bridesmaid dress--might have helped in the whole let's-remember-this-evening plan.

ah well. hindsight.

instead we took the limo to the cali favorite In & Out. i had half a milk-shake. again, smart? no.

the second location for the day was a mansion high up in the hollywood hills. the guests had a large open lawn to mill around while waiting -endlessly- for the ceremony. the cliff side pool served as the open air alter. guest rooms made for bridal party respite and the wide courtyard made for bar, dinner, and dancing.

on television, i'm told, it looked like a dream. i haven't yet seen it myself.  my outlook on the place, what little i remember, is marred by the series of disasters, from stupid scripted mess-ups, to down right life endangering f*ck ups.

guests hike the mountain after 2nd bus breaks down

it probably would have helped if someone on that production crew had realized prior to the actual event that the mansion was in a cell-phone dead zone and that the crews' walkie-talkies would only work within a few feet range.  maybe some of the mess could have been easily resolved before it affected the rest of the evening.

the "party bus" waits patiently for the firemen to fix things above

but that is seemingly a lot to ask for from TLC. for some of the guests, including our wonderful UI family, the mistakes just added to a fabulous story. but maria and jeff repeatedly begged the crew to get things under control.

i often write here about memory and the creation of reality.

what is more important? what is more true?

is a list of "facts" more real than what we remember? and when the memory fades, polished by time, is that true? if we agree that what we remember to be real is more important than bare fact --"Maria Pallas wed Jeff Dyll on May 8th, 2010"--whose memory wins?

is it lisa's, who brought a calm touchstone in the midst of girly hysteria all weekend? is it mimi's, who overran incompetent caterers from poisoning the bride's family? maybe brent's, whose full bottle of maker's mark was an empty bottle before the over delayed tv ceremony even began?

i hope it is not my fellow bridesmaids', whose drama erupted, melting everything in its path.  surely maria and jeff's parents get some say, though they might not want the paramedics or panic attacks marked for all time.

the "happy" couple's memories should get most weight. and there are lovely pictures of the stunning bride and handsome groom to help cement those memories. though, as my best friend, i would wish away the heartbreak, the frustration, the sobs from maria's truth.

of course my own plays like reel-to-reel, where the projectionist has lost the second case.

not so TLC's "reality." it has been captured, cut, and recombined. it has been smoothed to a glistening 47 minutes of dreamy perfection. where a couple's "wish" to have fantasy only hollywood can provide is maybe the only thing that was really delivered. a fantasy.

twenty years from now, which will remain?

as long as no one shares a certain tape, my guardian something-or-other decided my reality never needs to include a certain speech.

classy ladies always cry.

classier ladies save each other.

pour me another one

i havent blogged in months and yet i had so much to talk about. it's like being bottled up with thick, viscous sludge. even without a cap, the bottle neck is too slender for it all to escape.

but i must document the Wedding of the Year debacle soon...

love in the time of facebook

another February come and gone. and with it, another valentine's day. it is not something i care about that much, other than just the passing of another season, another year. i've never found valentine's day particularly meaningful. my interests begin and end around the time of cereal box mailboxes and folded cartoon note cards. that's not to say i haven't had memorable vdays in the past. a couple romantic, but mostly filled with good friends and, more often than not, good drinks. and because the day has never much mattered one way or the other, i never minded that i was always someone's second choice date-- a fellow female to lament the state of men, or as a standby girl-friend to substitute for the one-who-got-away.

while the juggernaut of vday marketing doesn't register through my hard shell (ha.) a wedding for two complete strangers left me gushing.  there i was, helping to cater, wearing a ridiculous "i love ny" tee-shirt over my dress, and i was grinning ear to ear and even tearing up.  i would question my hormones, except this particular stranger-wedding seemed geared right to my heartstrings. hand me the drink of the evening-- a bloody mary!- and let me look around.

the couple charmingly transformed raw space in midtown with just the right touches of humor and love. that's what you get with artsy friends and a photographer fiance. the best part was the projection screened home-made "chapel." i immediately fell in love with these people. from the time people started to arrive, a collage of beautiful photos flitted across the wall to the live accordionist's improvisation. if i ever get married, i think i have to have this.  when it was time for the ceremony to start, the photos segued into a short film of the couple cavorting through the city as they "made their way" to the wedding. the film ended with them rushing off to the site as the actual couple ran into the building.

i was pleasantly surprised by their officiant, as well. he didn't linger on religion or scripted parables, but spoke from the heart without being overly touchy feely. when he told us about the couple's "meet cute" i just about fell over. ("meet cute" : the moment in a rom-com when the fated couple first meet, however unlikely).  they met when they both visited their siblings working in south africa. his brother and her sister ended up getting married. 10 days together in africa and they fell in love. (watch them speak for themselves on NY Times  and sigh)

things like this never happen to me!

unsurprisingly, i find myself musing on the world of love as i go through my familiar up and down swings. the cross waves of engagements and love affairs, pictures i shouldn't see and books i'd sworn off in the fading hue of February's rose colored glare, i ask:

what is love?

in CNN's totally unoriginal article What your heart and brain are doing when you're in love journalist Elizabeth Landau gets it right out of the way "Poets, novelists and songwriters described it in countless turns of phrase, but at the level of biology, love is all about chemicals." well, that was insightful.

yes, indeed, study after study reveal that "love" literally stinks.

it's all in the pheromones, baby. i recently immersed myself in that pit of adolescent soft-core fantasy that is  Twilight. ms. meyer's can't resist beating us over the head with the pheromones of her lovers. page after page of how delicious both vampire and human smell to each other.  interestingly, she doesn't talk much about how they look. yes, the vampires are all exquisitely beautiful, but for our main girl Bella it's just scent. 

"They have a name for someone who smells the way Bella does to me. They call her my singer—because her blood sings for me." ~ edward

barf. why exactly are there hordes of screaming females following Robert Pattenson around town?

as a child, my mother says i used to describe people by how they smelled. while i don't remember this exactly, and my mother does have a tendency to hyperbole, i sense (pun intended) that i did and still do have a strong affinity for smell. mostly the smells of a person or place just stay in the background, once identified easily ignored. but every now and then someone hits me all together too strongly either good or bad.  and i don't mean just the unwashed crazy person on the subway  or the fancy person slathered with fancy cologne.

no it is something else. something elemental. it is very hard for me to get along with someone who's inherent scent disagrees with me, though i think an attractive perfume can disguise this a bit, just as i have been drawn inexplicably to men or women with the right smell.

one doctor puts it clearly: "For men the first point of attraction is always going to be visual. Interestingly, research shows that for women smell is their primary attractant to a man." but beyond just smelling good, there is also a suggestion that we can smell out the best genetic match.  a study in Switzerland had 44 men wear a shirt for 2 nights straight--with no aftershave, cologne, deodorant, etc. then they passed the smelly shirts on to 49 women who rated the shirts' attractiveness. they found that:

"Far more often than chance would predict, the women preferred the smell of T-shirts worn by men who were immunologically dissimilar to them. The difference lay in the sequence of more than 100 immune system genes known as the MHC, or major histocompatibility complex. These genes code for proteins that help the immune system recognize pathogens."

unfortunately, they've also shown that women's birth control hormones suppress our body's ability to accurately assess these instinctual responses. some doctors even speculate that this is a contributing factor to the rise in divorce rates.ah well.

and if love is just a smell, it can easily be faked.

i especially love the Journal Evolution and Human Behavior that showed that "strippers who are ovulating average $70 in tips per hour; those who are menstruating make $35; those who are not ovulating or menstruating make $50."

it is simply not fair that the event of love can be so damn addicting. one report showed brain scans of people "newly in love"  showed "a complex system in the brain is activated that is essentially the same thing that happens when a person takes cocaine."  i suppose our Utopian futures have all gotten it right--you gotta ban love right along with uncontrolled substances if you are going to have a stable society. you've gotta  institutionalize sex, babies... life and death, a la Huxley or William Nolan.

and it's just too damn easy these days to keep that dirty little love secret. even when you've kicked the major habit, its too easy to sneak a quick fix. it's like the friend who bums a cigarette, "but only when i'm drunk!"  well, it's still not good for you. still eats away at your lungs. those MRIs that show active pain response when a person is subjected to pictures of past lovers?

yeah, well, hello inappropriate facebooking! digital self flagellation!  hooray!

when did everyone else suddenly become an adult?

a couple weekends ago my besties was quasi surprised by her beau proposing. quasi because she has badgered him about it for months. so much so, in fact that when he actually did propose, she thought he was playing a joke.


it was actually a very sweet, spur of the moment change. too many friends were risking giving away the whole surprise, so he just called me- said come take the camera and hide, i'm doin' it now. and really it was the best. maria is a fabulous mix of fancy hotness, hiding in a pair of holey sweatpants and donald duck tee. so proposing in the middle of the farmer's market in union square was the best thing.


though i was hiding behind a statue and couldn't hear, my favorite moment was when he got down on one knee and she's like, "what are you doing? get up!" even when he showed her the ring, she was still busy shaking her head and gesturing around her, looking for the gag. it was incredibly sweet.


i unfortunately had to run to rehearsal, but before i did we celebrated with some champagne and oysters. my rehearsal was - ehem- well lubricated. ;)

the weekend was also a good excuse to see some people i haven't seen in a very long time, despite living at various times on the same island as them.

the only problem now, is i'm pretty sure maria is now an adult. boo.

does this mean she's now going to creep over to that third of my facebook friends who all have babies and pta and all sorts of other things i can hardly even imagine??? i'm not too addicted to facebook, but each time i'm on, i stumble across something from at least one person i last remember sauntering down the halls of high school, complaining about a crush or gossiping about an outfit or hanging "being cool," and now they are building houses and running carpools! this is meant in no offense to any of these people. you guys are still awesome. it just... your adults!

i may work a million part time jobs to cover my acting habit, my own apartment, a bottle of tequila in the freezer, and yes, i do have a spoiled cat, but somewhere along the way i missed the adult train. i'm still kissing on cute boys, wear way too many hippy clothes, and like my pigtails.

hmmm. i do live in new york. i guess none of those things really mean much one way or another.

can i buy my ticket to Where the Wild Things Are yet?