Wednesday, January 18, 2006

I’m At a Loss

Oh, Tom, you shouldn’t have. No I mean really, you shouldn’t have. I’m working hard on a joke here reagarding what would be the gifting equivalent over here and, you know, there’s nothing, really. Well, the collected DVD of my acting career would at least make him chuckle. Which is pretty much the one line from the short film I was in that no one saw, in which I played a salesgirl: “Don’t you want your (excruciatingly overlong actory pause) – change?” Or I could give him the gift of all my diaries, but then he’d have to suffer through entries like this:

August 22, 1977. Here I am listening to Barry Manilow on the stereo. … Then out of one of the bedrooms comes John R., another lifeguard and a friend of Nina’s. Nina introduces us and he greets me not with a hi or hello but a ‘how ya doin.’… I met Danny P., who’s from Florida. He came off as a little too cool for me though. I guess. He greeted me with a ‘how ya doin’ also.

Okay, clearly at the appalling age of sixteen, I was yet unfamiliar with the greeting, “How ya doin,” and this is only one extremely brief moment in the life of E. Crane that I’d just assume not subject my husband to, especially, you know, as a gift. Because there are over a hundred volumes of this, and I’d like to say they get more sophisticated over the years, but really, not so much. I’ve always been a late, late bloomer.

The point is, there’s no equivalent.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aww.

Mistah Kurtz He Dead said...

OK. I heard that on the radio, and I thought it was a joke.

I feel very, very sorry for Katie Holmes now. I could feel very, very sorry for how clueless Tom Cruise is about... everything, but he's too far gone. I actually don't laugh at the sensory-deprivation jokes anymore. It's quite frightening.

I mean, I laugh on the inside. Bitterly. Experimentally. Writerly?

I hope nobody at Harper's catches on and tries to pigeon-hole me.

Anonymous said...

Sensory deprivation? Do I want to know?

Mistah Kurtz He Dead said...

It's a joke the journalist made in the article - that they took Katie Holmes back to her sensory deprivation tank after the party... To watch Tom Cruise's movies! The horror!

Anonymous said...

I think that even William Hurt would freak out in his tank if he had to watch "Cocktail" more than once.

/actually liked "Altered States"

// hates "Cocktail" so much that I have an epileptic seizure every time I hear "Kokomo" by the Beach Boys

Anonymous said...

Dan - omigod. o. migod.
Cocktail was the movie that made me want to make a movie containing nothing more than clips of people saying the line, "It didn't (doesn't) have to be this way!" Oooh, there's my movie!