Wow... driving in flip flops is hard
So I learned on Saturday that driving in flip flops is hard, particularly when you're driving a manual transmission. As I was driving to a movie theatre on Saturday, I noticed that my left foot was not nearly as agile in flip flops as in a regular shoe because the heel of the flip flop kept getting caught on the floor and bending this way and that. I ended up taking off the shoe on my left foot only, finding it much easier to clutch barefoot than in flip flops. We learn something new everyday.
So anyway, it was a really late night on set on Friday. I actually didn't get home until after 6 a.m. on Saturday, having spent all night on set. It was great, though. Wednesday through Friday we were shooting on location in San Francisco at 6th Street between Market & Mission. It's not the best area of town, but it looks really good since we're shooting San Fran for east village Manhattan. Among the more interesting events of the evening was a series of gun shots that rang out at about 3 or 3:30 a.m. It sounded as if they had come from Market Street, but in fact they had come from Mission - it was just the echo and reverberation of the shots that made everything think the shots had come from the other side. I'm not entirely sure what happened or if anyone was hurt, but it didn't really impact the production at all, except that we paused for about 10 minutes and got all of our extras under cover in their hold building. There was rumor that two girls were taken out of a car by the police down on Mission, though how they were involved is not clear.
After sleeping until 1 p.m. on Saturday, I spent some time reading before driving up to the Kabuki theatres (see above) where I met Susie and we saw Sin City. For those of you not familiar with her, Susie is the travel coordinator on RENT and she sits right across from me in the office. I called Brad (another of my co-workers) to see if he wanted to come along as well, but he had other plans. Rosario Dawson (who plays Mimi in RENT) is in Sin City, so it was particularly interesting to see her performance. After the movie, Susie and I went for sushi (Brad also declined to join us for that) and then after that we hit up two bard, Harry's Place and Winterland (Brad declined our third invitation for this as well). At Winterland we met a bartender named Kendrick. He is originally from Wales, though he has been living in the States for 20 years... he says he's thinking of staying. Apparently, this Winterland place has only been open for business for 1 week, but by the number of people there I would have guessed it was a long-time popular destination. OH... a bit of an embarrassing moment at Winterland. Having had three drinks between Harry's and Winterland, I decided that it was time for me to visit the men's room. Winterland happens to have only one restroom for each of the sexes as opposed to a room with multiple stalls and what not. So approaching the men's room I was aware that I would either find the door locked (occupied) or unlocked (unoccupied). Unfortunately for me and the occupant, that was not the case. The door was unlocked, but occupied, and to make matters worse, it was occupied by a female. Apparently she wasn't able to wait for the women's room to become vacant. Needless to say, I made a quick retreat, and avoided making any visual contact with her when she finally emerged from the restroom, done with her business.
This morning I finished reading Angels & Demons by Dan Brown. Overall, I was very pleased with the book, though I felt like the last 100 pages or so could have been a little better. The first 450 pages of the book were brilliant - very smart and calculated - but the last 100 pages just seemed a little haphazard, redundant, and easy. It was too easy, and not near as smart as the rest of the book. But, overall, I enjoyed the read, enough that I will be sure to check out The Da Vinci Code at some point.
Well, I'm about to hit the sack... back to the more normal work schedule this week.