Star Route, New York City
In a show of remarkable restraint (at least for me), I decided not to tell Pat about the dream I had a few days before we flew to New York last week for the East Coast premiere of my short film at the Rural Route Film Festival. There wasn’t a lot to this dream. Mostly just the image of an airplane with the front end torn off and the name of our air carrier painted on the side. I’m sure this was probably brought on by my deep fear of flying, but it took a lot of effort to rein in my superstitious nature, particularly when the flight out there was suddenly rerouted south due to bad weather and someone in the cockpit came on the radio to tell us we had to land in Richmond, Virginia, because we were about to run out of fuel. About five minutes later we hit the runway with a loud and somewhat surprising thud. All of these things sort of seemed like bad omens to me, and yet here I am. I guess it’s time to officially give up on my hopes for a career as a crime-fighting soothsayer.
The flight delay meant we would miss Homemade Hillbilly Jam and a shorts program we were planning to attend that night as part of the festival. Instead, we headed straight for the Tribeca Grand, where Pat had booked us a room. I can be kind of cheap and normally stay at Hotel 17 when I’m traveling solo, but Pat had his fill of shared bathrooms and twin beds during our backpacking days. I like to tease him about his pampered lifestyle, but secretly love it when I get to tag along in his chauffeur-driven Town Cars.
It turns out, though, that it’s not as easy as it looks. Checking into the hotel required a lot of decisions. Do we want synthetic or down bedding? What kind of breakfast do we prefer? Bose sound system or iPod? New York Times or USA Today? Goldfish or sans goldfish? I found myself wondering what demographic profile we fit based on our answers--especially since Pat filled out the first half of the form and then became so weary he asked me to finish it. It must have been the complimentary champagne (which I embarrassingly accepted a little too eagerly) that made me decide that a Jack and Coke paired with oysters in bed would be preferable to dinner in the neighborhood. Surprisingly, this combination worked out OK for me the next day.
On Saturday, we cabbed over to the American Museum of Natural History to check out the dinosaurs and then took a brief walk through Central Park before catching a documentary narrated by John Waters called Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (when we got home, I saw this story about another massive tilapia die-off there). Later we saw Muskrat Lovely by Amy Nicholson about an almost too-good-to-be-true combination beauty pageant and muskrat-skinning competition in Maryland. That was followed by Women Who Hunt by Carol Wagner and Theresa Davidson, which featured the skinning and gutting of several critters and turned out to be a little much for the urban audience. There seemed to be a lot of snickering and gasping in the audience (at least near where we were sitting), and I even overheard one man saying to another as we left the theater, “That was totally offensive.” I thought to myself he should consider himself lucky he couldn’t smell it.
I guess people’s reactions shouldn’t have surprised me, but in the middle of the film I suddenly felt keenly aware of how different my two worlds are and even a little confused about which one I belong in more. My sister and I are probably the first of many, many generations of women in my family not to hunt, although I like to accompany my dad and help with the butchering. Sure, there were a couple things that bothered me in the film, such as the mother and daughter who go trophy hunting for buffalo on a private reserve (something akin to shooting a cow in a field with a high caliber rifle), but for the most part, the movie reflected a reality I’ve known most of my life. It made me a little sad for the New Yorkers that their cellophane-wrapped view of the food chain allows them to think their hands aren’t bloody. Unless, of course, they are vegetarians...then I just feel sorry for them for being masochists and attending the movie in the first place.
On Sunday, we caught the Cowboys and Aliens program that featured my short. It was fun to see Boot Camp in the context of the other wonderful films, and to see how differently the New York audience reacted to it compared to the cow folk out in Elko.
Good Site . Nice work.
Posted by Joslyn on 05/16 at 05:23 PM
Next entry: Grandpa Would Have Loved the Web
Previous entry: Birthday Celebrations