nakedjen

The Weight of It All

I lived last winter without a furnace.  Without heat. 

I slept with gloves and a fleece hat on, bundled with both dogs on the bed, under I don't even know how many down comforters in an effort not to freeze. 

I love my little house in Salt Lake City, but what I didn't bother to do before actually agreeing to live in it was to determine that it actually had heat.  I know it seems a tad improbable that a house in Salt Lake City, a city where winter hangs on and parties like an 80's glam rocker until well past the spandex and hair spray are out of style, would not actually have proper heating, but my little house did not. 

That is why my cat literally slept on top of the electric radiator I had running 24/7 in one room and why both dogs were curled like a yin yang around the bottom.  We all lived in one room last year curled around one another, our breath sometimes freezing right in front of our faces, and I know it was a sign of my own insanity that I insisted it just was not that bad. 

It was that bad.

Yesterday, I was informed that I was getting a proper furnace for my little house. The location for the furnace would be a closet that had, until this very moment, been used to hide the detritus of a much of my past.  Skeletons of all sorts.  Things better forgotten-- bones and trinkets and smudged half-burned dreams. 

Piles of ticket stubs to Grateful Dead concerts.

A copy of one of my plays. 

Journals and more journals.  Even more, after those.

Photos of me with a bunch a dirty hippies.

More photos and scribbled cards and notes and set lists from a long life on tour.

All the emails from my earliest days with DearSweetDave.

I should have known better.  I really should have.  We know where this is going, don't we?  Yes, of course we do.

I sat down on the floor and I read all those emails.  Every.last.one.

Our hearts made such promises, uttered such incredible vows, spilled such secrets in those first early days of our new love.  Every moment stretched for an eternity and it felt all so brand new, all so very special, so incredibly delicious and ripe with possibility.  I truly believed, in those very early days, everything we said to one another. We really did say all the right things.

We also crashed and burned in a rather spectacular fire.

The love I've found this time can't go hide in a closet because I've got no closets left.

Love is so complex.  It is so very easy to say all the right things.  Words are simple.  They roll off our tongues, right out of our mouths and into the hearts of another without so much as a pause for a yellow light.  It's the showing up, the living of love, the actual wrapping of your own heart tendrils with his without pulling too tightly, without tugging too hard, with a gentle caress that is the most difficult. 

It's that love that I'm showing up for this time around.

The weight of him, all of him, on top of me, inside of me, my heart changing shape simply because of the entangled and messy and beautiful and crazy love that keeps me wide awake with wonder even when I'm fast asleep, that's the love for which I've gone all in.

 

 

 

Ready? Set? Go!!

There is so very much that I wish to chat with all of you about, but first we had a contest. We did. 

The winners were chosen by the little widget from Random.Org and it turns out that Stephanie and Stardustdawn will each get the teas for their dogs.  But, remember, you're all going to receive a sample of Honest Kitchen Food (and they have a new, completely grain free food coming in September for both Cats and Dogs) and so if you get an email from me asking you for your mailing address it is simply so I can get the information to Honest Kitchen so you all can get your FREE STUFF!  So please don't think I'm sending you porn.  This time, it's not!

Meanwhile, though, I feel like I'm about to burst at the seems with all the goings on and things I want to talk to all of you about because there's good and there's bad and there's funny and there's sad and it feels like I haven't typed with my fingers flying across a keyboard just to share the words swirling inside my head in so long that my head now resembles a hornets nest that was designed by Tim Burton with help from Edward Scissorhands.  Who, yes, I realize is the darling OF Tim Burton, but he has the Scissorhands!  There are missing bits and pieces you see.  It is his design.  Courtesy of Mr. Burton.  All swirling somewhere above my neck where a head is supposed to be. 

That's me. If you were to see a photo.  There isn't one.  Use your very beautiful and active imaginations.

Let's leave you with a list.  Of the topics to come.  Just, so, you know, there's something to at least keep us all honest and perhaps maybe you all want to write the blog posts instead?  There's a thought.  At this point, given the Tim Burton Hornets Nest state of my head, you all might do a far better job.  You're all brilliant writers!  Here, have a go!

• Eating Raw and Yoga Every Day
• Cherry and Sasparilla Kombucha
• Guerrilla Drive-In ~ Salt Lake City style
• There's Enough Phish for a Feast
• Google Is Trying To Kill Me
• If I'm Not Nakedjen, Then Who Am I?

Ready

I been away a long time.

I have absolutely horrific timing.  I'm a terrible dancer, for starters.  You do not want me as your dance partner.  Ever.  Do not even ask.  I will embarrass both of us, more you than me, even, and you'll wish to the heavens that I'll just hurry up and take my clothes off and get naked just to create a larger and more dramatic distraction that actually gives people a more reasonable purpose to point and laugh. 

You think I am making that up.

I promise that I am not.

Next time, just ask me to dance.  Then, see how fast you beg me to get naked.

The timing business is crashing down around me today and it has nothing to do with dancing and it has nothing to do with being naked.  Wait. Actually, maybe it has everything to do with dancing and everything to do with being naked.  My heart is so full of the sad that my head can't even wrap around what it is that I need to say.

I know I need to absolutely say this: The Oregon Country Fair begins tomorrow and as the fates would have it I am not going to be there.  Naked and dancing and covered in glitter with my fine fairy family celebrating the best that is me.

I just typed that sentence and I'm not going to lie to you.   I'm now the naked girl at her computer screen with tears streaming down her cheeks.

SUCK IT UP, NAKED GIRL. 

(That was from all of you, Internet.  I hear you, loud and clear.)

I'm sucking, oh goddess, yes I am. At a whole lot of everything in quite spectacular ways right now.  But, yes, Internet, I promise that I'm sucking it up, too.

Born to Fest

I will tell you that I was born to festival.  Emily Gilmore will counter that I am, perhaps, just a tad OCD.  My father, if he was participating in the conversation might share that I was born a very curious child who was insistent about knowing everything about the things about which I especially knew nothing at all.  In other words, I asked a lot of questions.  All the time. 

I appreciate stories and I love the people who are brave enough to tell them to me in new and exciting ways.  The magic for me happens when my mind is taken to uncharted territory, split open and asked to reconsider everything it has thought before. 

This is why I festival.  For those magical moments of discovery of new information about my fellow human beings, about my world, about me.

My best magical moments from this year's Sundance, with no particular rhyme, reason or importance:

* Sharing my thoughts about CONNECTED with Odessa, the film-maker's young daughter, who seemed to understand way beyond her years that we all are very much connected and that love binds everyone of us at our core.

* Hugging, deeply, the journalist from Germany, who shared her own story of loss with me as tears streamed down her face and we both realized that it sometimes take a profound loss to connect you to the living world around you.

* Bonding with Brian as we navigated the very snowy streets in Park City putting up posters on kiosks for two different films. 

* Meeting Billy Carter in the lobby of the Marriott and reminiscing about UNC Basketball and then bonding over independent film. 

* Sitting next to the same woman from Italy who was here for last year's festival and sharing films with her again.  She's a joy.  I'm so glad we connected again this year.

* Dinner with Dave and Jodi and Libby and Christian and Heidie and Trent.  Wow.  Just lovely.

* Pariah

* Meeting Neil from Florida and sharing the MAGIC TRIP with him.  I'm glad he came and sat with me.

* The love.  Plain and simple.  There's a lot of it at Sundance.  You just have to poke around.

* Hugging Mickey Hart and Bob Weir with tears streaming down my face and thanking them both for my life, such that it is.  Truly grateful for that moment. 

* Watching the premiere of How to Die In Oregon with those two young Mormons from BYU who were perfect movie companions for me for that film because I do live in Utah and I wanted to understand what that film would mean for my Mormon friends and community.  They helped me sort that out. 

* Getting a ticket from Julie of the Telluride Film Festival just because I asked her about it.  She's truly lovely.  I can't wait to go to Telluride this year.

* Giving away my extra tickets.  One to Michael Rappaport.  Whom I had no idea was Michael Rappaport.  Because, hello, I never know who anyone is, especially if they're famous. 

* Of all my films, having only one film, just one, where I thought, "REALLY??  How did this get into SUNDANCE?!?" 

* Sobbing, yes sobbing, all the way through THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED.  That film is truly personal for me.  Thank goodness for the kind Italian woman.  She was so very generous and loving to me.

* With three days left, getting just a little bit depressed that the festival was almost over.  Because, well, I was born to FEST.

* Celebrating my birthday with 10,000 other people in a snowy city in Utah in the dark watching movies. I can not think of a better way to say, Happy Birthday! to me. 

 

 

 

 

Audit Me This

I know that he knows that the one thing in the entire world that upsets me more than anything else, truly, is the IRS.  Well, I suppose animal cruelty and sex crimes perhaps are even more upsetting to me, but truthfully, as silly as it sounds, anything involving me with the IRS causes palpitations and anxiety and my typical ostrich response of burying my head deep under the covers and hoping it will all just magically go away.

When it comes to the IRS, it never ever ever magically goes away. 

When I met him, thirteen years ago, I had just, literally JUST, extracted myself from a long and complicated affair with the IRS that had stretched back to the early days of the late 1980's and a missed opportunity to file a proper 1040  for paltry earnings earned at a variety of part-time jobs while touring with the Grateful Dead and living on random floors in flats in San Francisco.  My bohemian life of never having one address for longer than a month or two, no permanence, and no real bank account resulted in my wages being reported to all the right government authorities but the associated W2's and 1099's never actually getting to me. 

Yes. Right. I do know it is my responsibility to obtain those documents and submit them properly.  I especially know that now.  In 1988 I was hugging trees so fiercely and following in the footsteps of my liberated brothers (and smoking what they were smoking) that I truly believed I was not "required" to pay taxes because they were voluntary.  I wasn't putting zip codes on my enevelopes so I didn't have to pay the government anything.  

I really am that stupid.  I admit it.

My non-compliance with one of the basic tenets of being a truly contributing working member of the United States of America resulted in fines and fees and more fines and more fees and penalties and then compounded interest and oh god by the time the bill finally reached me at my more than one month permanent address nearly seven (yes seven!) years later it seemed astronomical by my poor hippie girl standards who had just finally landed in one place only because Jerry had died and it was time to stand still and grow up.

Grow up and pay the man.  All my dollars.

I did. I paid the IRS absolutely every last dollar that was owed.  Including all penalties and all interest.

My complicit and savings draining affair with the IRS ended in 1998. 

Since June, I've been getting bills addressed to me that do not belong to me from the IRS. 

For taxes owed for 2008 by a certain former husband.

Dollars that need to be paid.  Lots of dollars.

Finding that envelope in my mailbox every month fills me with anxiety and dread, quickly followed by sadness.

The IRS insists I need to be informed.  I insist that this is an invasion of privacy, both mine and his.

There's this broken part of my heart that just wishes I could call him and ask him to please fix it.

I can not. He will not.  

It's until death do us part.

 

 

Moment's Notice

We're there, far above the clouds, more than 14,000 feet above sea level, and I am trying my best to count all the stars.  There are more stars in that sky on that night than I have ever seen in my life before, or since, but I am determined to count every single one.

Occasionally a satellite whizzes right by and I gasp at the intrusion and wonder that there's all that junk in our skies and insist that we can't be polluting the skies in this way, that it can't possibly be that important. 

You're strumming your guitar, the guitar that you've carried up the side of that mountain, because you've just discovered that you might even be able to play and it gives you such joy.  You may only know a few chords, but you know all the words to all the songs that matter and all you want is to be able to sing the songs that people want to hear. Forever.

We're there, atop the Garden of the Gods, you with your guitar, me with nothing more than my smile of satisfaction that I actually made it to the tippy top without toppling right over the other side and tumbling down like Jill after her Jack when a helicopter appears and someone with a bullhorn demands to know if we're all right?

All right?

We're golden.  We're sitting on top of the world.  We're also just, perhaps, a little bit crazy.  A stern sheriff informs us that tumbling down is far more common than not and we're lucky we're even alive.  Our hearts have never really been a place where fear has dared to tread, however.  Not even for a moment.

The walls of the auditorium are breathing heavily and are soaked with sweat and on stage, on that small stage, the band, our band is gathered around and is carrying all of us together on yet another psychedelic journey that goes on and on and on.  We round a corner and smack right into a gay disco fairy complete with platform silver boots and rainbow tights leading an aerobics class for the beat challenged.   Without even an exchange of words, we join right in and kick three steps right, two left, high five the person behind and pump our fists as if we've just won the golden gloves.   The band kicks it into some higher plane and I can't even imagine how I'm ever, ever going to come back down.  I'm grateful you're there to keep me from disappearing completely.

It is you. It is me. It is Clyde.  It's one very old couch in a farmhouse far from California.  It's an old rotary phone and a call from TB that has shared the tragic news that Jerry Garcia has died.  There are tears on my cheeks.   What frightens me more are the sobs that wrack your body.  I had never seen you cry.

There are firemen in the house. Men in yellow coats and a paramedic and I can not tell you my own name. I have no idea who I am or what day it is or where we are.  I just know that I know you.  I am certain of you.  The rest is a complete mystery and even as I travel the winding slippery mountain roads to the hospital in our sea coast town I have trouble sorting out how I got there, in that ambulance or why it was necessary or where it is that they're taking me.  The only thing, the sole thing, the very single thing that is certain is you.

We're in the middle of a corn field. In the middle of Iowa. In a car that no longer seems to want to run.  Broken. Down.  In that car, in the middle of that corn field, in the middle of Iowa, in the middle of the night, with no where to go and no way to get there, we share secrets and dreams and stories.  After all these years of life entertwined like a very tangled ball of twine it almost seems impossible that there would be any stories or secrets left to share. 

But there are always more.  Layers to take off.  We're never, ever, truly revealed.  Or naked.  Until we absolutely must be.

I am certain, quite, that you will never read this or know that as so many years have finally passed, that as so many years have come and gone, the crisp and jagged edges of my memories of us have softened and turned truly rosey.  The real love I always had for you is all that is left for me to hold. 

I still do. 

Moment's Notice came on the radio tonight as I drove through the dark craggy hills of Utah.  I hesitated to turn the station so I wouldn't remember.  I turned it up and allowed myself to really remember.  Like an old favorite film.  All the good.  All of You.

 

 

The Best of My Life

Happy New Year!

Last night, as the sky faded from snowy gray to dark, and the temperatures truly plummetted here in Salt Lake City, I thought back to all those New Year's that I spent dancing away while Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead played me right over from one year into the next.  Balloons fell from the ceiling, the Dead always played at least three sets (sometimes four), Bill Graham assured us that the party would go on forever and I never really stopped moving to even contemplate that life might take me in any other direction than being carried down a road with a glorious band of merry pranksters.

They were my tribe.

Then, of course, Jerry died. The music didn't exactly stop, but the songs definitely started sounding a bit different and my tune definitely needed to change.  Just a bit.

I tell people that what happened is that I grew up. 

What really happened, though, isn't so much that I grew up as I got off the caravan (not the bus!) and let the circus carry on without me for a while.

I am not going to lie. 

I miss the circus.  I miss the caravan.  I miss my tribe. 

However, here's the truth of that matter.  It's no one's fault but my own that I'm sitting here with the flu in Salt Lake City wishing that things were different.

Wishing never makes it so.  This much I know.

So, let's talk about the New Year for just a second, shall we?  That long stretch of beautiful days that stretches before us with all kinds of potential for all kinds of things? 

I also realize a New Year can come on any day of the calendar that we choose.  There's no stake in the groud that says January 1 of any specific year needs to be the time for specific changes and grand resolutions.  Every day that we wake up, that we find ourselves alive with a smile on our faces and laughter in our hearts, is a brand spanking new gift and opportunity from LIFE to absolutely create whatever it is we want. 

So for today?  This gift that I've received?  With joy and a real smile and laughter?

Time to create my tribe.  Not find it, not sort it out.  Create it.  One smile and hug and random friendly unexpected gesture at a time.

I'm planting the good seeds. 

Today is the beginning of the best of my life. 

The love is in the giving and I've always got so much more to give

I mentioned that I am a very blessed and lucky and well-loved woman.  I also will share that I love fiercely, as well. Without any real rhyme or reason or in any true particular important order, a few of the magical heart awakenings that occurred during my little trip to the fair.

* There are many angels among us. You may bump into one or two or even seven of them while wandering the myriad of paths. Keep your head up.  You don't want to miss them.

* One of those angels is most certainly named Ichabod.

* It's okay to blush when security calls you Tinkerbell.

* Medicine comes best when it's wrapped in a hug served by a friend along with some really good food. 

* Boys like breasts. It's just how it goes.

* There is no way on this Earth to ever have too much glitter.  Ever.

* False eyelashes actually do melt if it is hot enough.  Eyelash glue is an allergen. Remember this.

* After twenty-four years it is still possible, oh yes it is, to have your mind completely blown at the fair.

* Even when you're absolutely sober.

* You really do like Pink Floyd. You just forgot that you really do like Pink Floyd.

* You've gotten really good at saying YES.

* Saying YES has, in turn, gotten very good at providing you with some beautiful opportunities.

* Gratitude is good.  So are hugs.  Long meaningful hugs filled with gratitude and love? The very best.

* Religious experiences can occur while you're naked and singing songs around a fire pit.

* There are magical messages to be gleaned in the glint of a child's wide-eyed wonder. Don't miss it.

* Your own palm tells quite an interesting story.

* Singing Shakedown Street with Bob Weir can, well, I'm a Deadhead people, let's just say there really are no words to truly describe what happened.

* Twenty-six hours together in one car can give you a myriad of reasons why you should never get married.

* To each other, that is.

* The more things change, the more that they absolutely stay just the same.

* A Tofu Tia is still one of the most satisfying meals on the entire planet.

* Your best friends will always continually surprise and delight you.  Don't forget to tell them you love them.  A lot. A whole lot.  Yes, even more than that.

* Sometimes the very best kombucha is wearing a beet.

* Bliss is wrapped in all kinds of packages.

* You might just be best suited to be a love slave to a clown.

* Don't forget to hug the trees.

* Your heart chakra radiates at 10000 volts.

* Love really does look fantastic on you.  

Now to go out, spread the joy and the love and give it all away.  It's all in the giving.  Dare to give freely and you'll be amazed at what beautiful and magical and special things can happen. 

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

I stumbled across this earlier this week.  I haven't been able to really stop thinking about it.

I do not mention in general conversation very often these days that I'm a deadhead.  Of course, I am a deadhead, but those days of my life on the road with them almost feel like a magical dream at times.  Also, it is just one facet of my life. Or who I am.  Of how I might, if pressed, define myself. 

Defining ourselves is always a huge challenge, I think. The stories that we tell ourselves and others, the bits of information we deign to share and acknowledge, the memories we cherish and the ones that are too terrible for light that are banished in dark closets, are still all there in our make-up and creating the person we present to the world.  Every.single.day. 

We can reinvent, we can move and shift and change, we can do whole personality and body makeovers, but the soul always remembers.  I do think that at our core we each have a distinct knowing of who we are and what we would like to become. We will all, each of us, grow into the beautiful person that we're supposed to be, some earlier, some later.

I realized last night that I'm having a bit of trouble conforming to the constricts of my chosen life here in Utah.  It is absolutely a choice and if I want to break free, to not be bound, it is up to me to do it.  There's no one holding marionette strings that are somehow keeping me from being the most authentic me I want to be and if there are strings that are binding me, I do hold the very scissors that will slice them clean.

It's my very authenticity that feels stifled, actually.  I really do know exactly who I am.  At least for today and isn't that the best we can ask?  That we wake up quite certain that we know who we are and that we go live our best possible day?

Here's to those fleeing moments of self-recognition and discovery. The ones that matter the most. The very ones that knock you over and remind you that you're fucking awesome and that there is really and truly only one you.

Live! Go be your very best you.  No one else can take your place in this world.  It's absolutely true. ♥

I have a second bedroom I don't use. I'm going to start the Second Bedroom Film Festival. You're all invited.

As we all know, or well, as I know, and maybe you know, if you bother to pay attention to such things, but you may choose not to pay attention to such things because they’re not that important to you and honestly you have far better things to which to give your attention, like say your children or political affairs or even who Tiger Woods happens to be boinking these days, you know, all important things that might need your rapt attention rather than, well, the minute planning details of your film schedule for a festival like Sundance.

Phew.  Are you still with me?  I hope so.  This takes some careful planning, you know?

Which is to say, honestly, that my plans for Sundance began months in advance. Long before January. As far back, truly, as August.  It is in August when, if you’re a person like me who must have it all, you throw your hat into the ring, the lottery, and then start all kinds of ritualistic sacrifices and dances and prayers to film gods only you have ever even known to ensure that you will, in fact, be given a golden ticket. 

That ticket? Oh that ticket assures you nothing.  Not.a.thing.  Not a single film is granted to you with that ticket.  Oh no.  All it does, truly, is give you a time slot.  The time slot, once granted, then allows you to purchase, if you’re ever so lucky and have performed all rituals to the gods' satisfaction, a pass of one sort or another for the festival.  The pass? The pass will then, perhaps, maybe if you’re so very blessed, allow you to choose the very special films that you so very much hope to actually see.

This is my life. This life of prayers and rituals and incantations to film gods of movies previously never seen.  I spend nearly seven months of every year in preparation for those ten days in January that I’ll spend in dark theatres before screens treading uncharted territory with bold companions who are sometimes willing to risk everything they own just to get there with their film.

When my catalog arrived this year, in my mailbox, from Sundance, the cover said, “This is your GUIDE to Cinematic Rebellion.” I’d like to think that what follows is my own guide, my own little gift to you, my readers, of my own rebellious journey.

I am not sure I have recovered, even now, all these weeks later.  The testament to a successful festival, honestly, is that I am uncertain if I will ever recover.  I am changed for the experience.  That is what always makes the difference.

*************

The first rule of festival is flexibility.  Actually, if I’m going to be brutally honest with you (and when am I not?), the first rule of festival is plentiful gallons of excellent and very strong coffee.  Without that? You might as well stay home. 

Coffee in the cup, the next rule is flexibility.  We already have covered the first day of the festival and what was a near impending disaster thanks to blizzard snow.  Everything, including the films, turned out all right in the end, but I awoke Saturday morning feeling less than happy about driving back through a snow packed canyon for more festival.

My Saturday film schedule originally looked like this:

Catfish: 9:00 a.m. at the Yarrow Hotel

Get Low 3:15 at Eccles Theatre

Cyrus: 6:15 at EcclesTheatre

All of these screenings were in Park City. Between me, at that bleary eyed coffee sipping moment, and Park City was a lot of snow.  Snow was falling on my head whilst I was standing outside my beloved Coffee Garden, purveyor of the best coffee in Salt Lake City, and it is at that moment that the whole yoga minded flexibility came into play and instead of heading to Park City, I headed to Trolley Square and found myself in a long and snaking line at the Sundance Box Office where I eventually handed the ever so patient and kind box office folks my tickets for all those screenings in Park City and asked (I promise I did not demand), instead, for tickets for screenings in Salt Lake City.

I’m uncertain that people realize that just because you have a ticket for a specific screening, it doesn’t mean you have to actually go to the screening.  No, you still have a choice in this festival world.  It isn’t quite like the airlines where you’re SOL if you change your mind.  You can change your mind and choose something else!  As long as there is a ticket available.  Which in this case, on this particular Saturday, for films showing in Salt Lake, there just happened to be.  For me.  So that’s exactly what I did.

The Animation Showcase was first. At 12:30 p.m. At the Rose Wagner theatre.  Because I’m nice, or crazy, or a mixture of the two (which is probably most likely the case) I actually got two tickets for this screening and invited the Outlaw (the same Outlaw that continually causes my heart to break and shatter into multiple shards over and over and over again) to go with me.  He said yes.  So he was my companion for that screening.

The Animation Showcase included nine short animated films this year.  If I were pushed to choose an absolute favorite among the nine, I’d choose One Square Mile of Earth which was directed by Jeff Drew.  I also loved Runaway, which was a whimsical entry from Canada about a runaway train.  And despite what everyone else said, I thought MEATWAFFLE, by Leah Shore was brilliant, even if it was not my absolute favorite.  Others really didn’t like it at all.  I really did. 

There was also a lovely entry from Bastien Dubois, called Madagascar.  It was thoughtful and visually enchanting and I forgot I was watching animation.  As the Animation Showcase is not something I would normally choose, honestly, I’m actually very glad that circumstances and flexibility caused me to end up there.  There is a marriage in those films of art and music and storytelling that doesn’t happen with traditional film and it was lovely to experience. 

Time was whiled away, for a bit, in the company of the Outlaw at the Beehive Tea Room sipping tea, eating sandwiches, checking out cute gay boys and hoping to score a wait-list ticket for Restrepo.  Despite being in the early numbers in the wait-list line, it did not happen.  Too many people decided, like me, that negotiating the canyon for films in Park City was just not worth it that day.  So they actually showed up for the screening. 

Still, there were plenty more films to be seen.  I said goodbye to the Outlaw (that’s the last I’ve seen of him, my broken heart is mending) and grabbed a waitlist ticket for the Shorts Program III showing at the Broadway at 6:45 p.m.  It is this program that included a short by James Franco.  Did you know that James Franco is also currently a film student at NYU?  He is.  He also, I think, should be my boyfriend, but of course he doesn’t know that and no one is going to actually tell him that and I’m certain that he has other far more beautiful women to bed than me and he may just be the type that would also leave my heart broken in lots of tiny shards needing to be carefully mended and put back together, so I’ll just sit and watch his short films (and longer films) and think about the really interesting and long and winding conversations the two of us could have if he would ever, you know, like call me.

His film? The short that was part of the Shorts Program III that I sat and watched?  Memorable. Herbert White actually was based upon a beat poet poem. One that James Franco discovered while doing research for his role as Allen Ginsberg in HOWL.   In fact, instead of the word memorable I should say it was just plain disturbing.  I haven’t forgotten it.  It’s a month later and I’m still, well, disturbed.  So, well done, Mr. Franco.  Your mind and my mind really should have a meeting.  Would you call me, please?

There were other films in that series.  Besides Mr. Franco’s.  He wasn’t the only one included.  One, entitled Chicken Heads, was, perhaps, my very favorite.  I can’t say enough good things about that film.  If you have a chance to see it, please do.  Another, called NEW MEDIA, spoke directly to the small person that lives inside all of us that believes that we truly understand the Internet and how to best optimize it for our own celebrity.  The truth is that we do not.  We’re fooling ourselves if we think we do.  The joke is on every one of us.

Filled to the brim, I walked out of the Shorts Program III.  I had now seen, total, 16 films that day.  Yes, they were all short films.  Still, that’s 16 artistic attempts at story telling in new and creative ways for me to inhale and absorb and digest and suck on and think about and dream about and not ever let go.  I’m still thankful they didn’t actually kill the dog.  If you see that particular film, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

There was a screening of Smash His Camera that followed the Shorts Program.  I decided I really needed to see it.  Did I have a ticket for this screening?  Well, no, I did not.  Was that going to stop me from seeing it?  Well, no, it was not.

Another rule in the rules of festival is to be willing to ask for and to expect the impossible. I mastered this art while on tour with those fine fellows, the Grateful Dead.  Ask for and receive and bestow enough miracle tickets and, well, you really do begin to believe that just about anything is possible as long as you believe.

It’s all in the believing.  I’ll share that.  You have to believe with all fibers, all cells, on all cylinders.  There’s no room for disbelief.  None.  “Believe it, if you need it, if you don’t, just pass it on…” Those words have served me very well for most of my life.  They’ll serve those of you hoping for a ticket to a sold out screening in a very small theatre at a given festival, too.  Trust me.

It took me about seven minutes, maybe less, to secure my miracle ticket to the screening.  I actually didn’t even ask.  It just appeared.  Like magic.  There it was.  So there I was.  For the 9:45 p.m. screening of the documentary about the original paparazzo, Ron Galella. 

Before seeing this film, I had no idea who Ron Galella even was.  But what I realized, while watching this film, was that I absolutely knew his photographs and that his photographs of the rich and famous and infamous had informed most of my childhood.  I also fell in love with Ron, the man.  He’s delightful in the ways that a quirky, passionate, focused artist is delightful.  He truly loves what he does, makes no apologies for it.  He’s my kind of guy.  He’s also the exact kind of photographer I truly wish would take a photo of Nakedjen.  Because, well, I know he’d get me.  As me. Even when I’m naked.

He was there. On that snowy Salt Lake night.  Answering questions after the film until well after midnight with a smile as wide as the lens on the camera hanging around his neck.  His charm was not lost on the audience and you just could not help but do anything but adore him.  Completely. 

Smash His Camera takes us deep into the world of one man’s quest to get the shot that defines celebrity.  Ron Galella doesn’t just want a pretty picture, he wants THE picture that tells a thousand stories and in his adventure to get it, he has a thousand stories to share with all of us.  His photographs over the years have informed all of us of a lives of the famous and not-so-famous moments of their lives.  His unabashed candor, his own brushes with the law and the first amendment, and his iconic photographs combine to give us a film that can’t help but make us smile.

Seventeen films and it was only day two of the festival. I still had eight days of festival stretching before me.  Tomorrow, I was headed back to Park City.  I had an early date with my boyfriend, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night would keep this festival girl from a front row seat.  I just needed more coffee.  Lots more coffee.