I knew I was a jittery mess, so I tried to self-coach myself off the ledge every morning, Be happy! All the work we’re doing is so good! Remember? That chauvinist comment from Bladezz yesterday went over like gangbusters! But as a superstitious Southern lady, any second of enjoying myself felt like I was deliberately inviting disaster into the production. So any positivity backfired.
The whole time on set, I was convinced that something terrible was going to happen. So I coped by visualizing every horrific scenario possible and playing it out blow-by-blow in my mind as I tried to get to sleep at night. I saw the police shutting us down when a PA double-parked outside, a tsunami hitting Los Angeles before we got to film episode two. I had a recurring dream that one of the actors, Jeff Lewis, would have a heart attack. Or an aneurysm. He was the highest-risk cast member. Almost forty, practically a corpse. So every morning I’d look up “instant death” diseases on my phone in order to say them out loud to myself in the bathroom mirror and prevent disaster from killing him and ruining my show.
“Blood clot.”
“Aneurysm.”
“Heart attack.”
“Stroke . . .”
Knock on the door. “Felicia, are you ready to roll?”
“Sure!” <whispers “morphine overdose” into mirror> “Okay! I’m ready!”
This sounds insane, I know, but I do this ritual a lot. When I’m driving in a thunderstorm, I say out loud to myself in a very musical theatre voice, “Gee, I sure hope this rain doesn’t make me spin out of control and make me die on this highway!”
Laugh if you will; I’ve never had a spinout. Or had an actor die of a web-series aneurysm.
[?5: Making Things with Friends Is Awesome?]
Even though every single second of filming was stressful and panicked and done completely illegally and the very hardest way, I’d never felt more alive doing anything in my life. There was a joy that I’d never felt before, because I was PLAYING with my friends. Many times during shooting, my fellow cast members were so funny I had to chant, Dead kittens, dead kittens, dead kittens for twenty seconds in my brain to get through a scene without giggling. Those were the moments I’ll never forget. (Partially because of the traumatic visuals, partially because of the fun.)
We filmed for four days in the summer of 2007 and completed everything we aimed to do with the first few episodes of the script. There were complications, of course, like when I discovered that most of the cast had never played a video game before, but I just put on the hat of “gamer consultant” (in addition to lead actress, show runner, and co-caterer) and plowed ahead.
“What does this term mean?”
“You won’t understand. Just think, ‘He has a Marc Jacobs purse and I want it.’?”
“Got it!”
Looking back at those first episodes now, I see all the rough edges in the acting and the writing and the editing I never noticed at the time. But the fun we had making it blasts away the imperfections. Kim, Jane, the cast and crew, and I created something together that didn’t exist before. Without permission. Without regrets. Hell, yeah.
-?8?-
WE MADE SOMETHING! #lookit
The fine art of grassroots “getting all up in people’s faces” with The Guild. Tweetin’ and pioneerin’ and awards! Oh my!
When I was in music school in college, everyone had to perform a senior recital in order to complete their degree. But it was a serious pain to get anyone to ATTEND the events. Enduring a classical saxophone concert for more than fifteen minutes is a private hell NO ONE wants to live through if you’re not dating the person, believe me.
As the tiny prodigy of the building, I entered my recital semester with an ego the size of a Mack Truck. There was no way I was playing to an empty house! Did I put eight months of work into learning a Henryk Wieniawski showpiece with twelve million notes packed into three minutes for nothing? Hell, no! People were gonna show up. They had no mother-frakkin’ choice!
Ahem.
I did all the regular things you were supposed to do to get attendance. I ordered tons of food and picked out a skanky dress that my professor gave two thumbs-up to, but I knew I needed something extra. Something special. Maybe something to do with the fliers everyone posted around campus to advertise their events? I asked myself, What can I make that stands out from the boring “John Smith plays an evening of Brahms at 7 p.m. Tuesday” kind of thing?
Hmm, what could I do . . . ?
Yup, that’ll work. That’s me as “Xena, Princess Violinist.” I whipped it up in the computer lab one evening, and, MAN, was I happy when I figured out how to engulf that violin in flames. An evil genius “muhahaha” kind of joy!
I printed up about a hundred of the fliers and blanketed the music building at 11:00 p.m., right before the place locked up. I couldn’t wait to see what people thought when I got to school the next day.
Good news: THEY PAID ATTENTION.
Bad news: I got pulled into the dean’s office and was forced to take the fliers down due to “questionable taste level.” But at that point there weren’t many left anyway. People had stolen them. All the stoner percussionist majors tracked me down to say, “Badass, man, I’ll be there!”