Another repost from the filming of OCTOBER BABY in 2010. This post was from September 7.
The icing on the cake for the evening was when we discovered a cherished crew member of a name I will not mentioned showed he had an even weaker stomach than me and vomited on himself after a pretty awesome ride that I was able to join thanks to some people who surrendered some tickets. I watched him take off his shirt, wipe his face, and throw it away, and I felt empathy more than apathy because I know that feeling. Everyone watches you and feels sorry for you, and most of the time someone is smart enough to buy you a sprite or a coke to calm down the stomach. I wanted to be that person, so I got him a coke.
It felt good to know someone else gets it... someone else knows what it's like to get sick on a ride and throw up... to get sick in a 2o minute car ride in the back seat and throw up. I took with his vulnerability the opportunity to comfort myself in this knowledge.
We watched the "free circus" and I kid you not, it was one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen in my entire life. It wasn't your typical circus or your typical festival show. These people were from Budapest and they were on a mission to impress the audience, and it didn't matter if that meant surrendering their small children to do tricks on top of and in the mouth of an elephant. The kids could literally fold in half with acrobatic stunts and I found myself clapping without understanding why. The outrageous tricks and enthralled me to where I couldn't help but wonder how they trained the elephant not to eat the 11 year old girl hanging from her mouth as she circled the ring. It was fun to be confused. I was entertained.
So I've put on my favorite ugly t-shirt which is so old it bears holes but so soft I don't care. I'm ready to go to sleep. Being that I got around 5 hours last night, which is a ghastly amount for someone like myself who normally get's 8.5 to 9 hours a night, I'm doing pretty well to be up this late. Today, set was otherworldly. We filmed in the interior of what was supposed to be a rather run-down but well kept apartment and I'm telling you it was one of the most bizarre sets I've ever been on. We were in the metro-ghetto of Birmingham, Alabama, filming in non-air conditioned building that smelled of wet dogs and used bandages. The hallway in the apartment complex was laced with this moldy haze of what looked like a machine made fog and and you could literally see the musk floating in the air. Rhett said the location was "a last minute decision, " whatever that meant.
At this location, Hannah finds the apartment to the nurse who signed her birth certificate and asks her about her mother, hoping for some answers. What she finds is more than she was ready to swallow and it's almost too much for both of them.
Working with Jasmine Guy on the scene today was such a learning experience. She was sweating bullets on set, wearing a woolen sweater, and she complained not-a-once. I watched her facial expressions as she delivered the lines and it took all I had not to break down right there and begin weeping. She admitted to some pretty visually disturbing details about the failed abortion from which I survived and I couldn't help but imagine someone I loved in the moment. It worked, though, because I feel strongly that my performance wasn't fabricated and was in fact a direct response to the things she was sharing with me. That aided in the scenes authenticity and I was absolutely stricken with grief, frustration, and a rapid heart rate after each take of the scene, which is exactly what I believed Hannah would be feeling.
At one point I stuck my head outside of the door when I walked out of the camera's eye line, and right in front of me sat a man in an deep red Alabama sweat shirt who involuntarily became the recipient of my beautiful breakdown. I wasn't even suppose to cry in this scene, but I couldn't contain myself. The words, Jasmine's face, and the reality of the whole thing was so powerful that this man in the Alabama sweater was later on in the day asking if I was all right because of how he saw me react in the hallway. It's funny. You can be in the wrong place at just the right time. Turns out he really cared about how I was feeling and later asked me about it. I reassured him I was fine and that it was the intensity of the scene that broke me.
I hope I am always able to react this way to such shocking and disturbing truths as partial birth abortions. It's terrifying, really. A guy at the Starbucks drive-thru made a great point when he said that abortion is the most disguised form of genocide there's ever been.
After lunch and about half-way through filming something happened to my throat. I realized it was really sore on the inside, but in a different kind of way than when you have a cold. It wasn't just sore, it was tingling as if it were stretching or swelling and the back of my tongue had this weird sensation that I can't explain creeping up it. I was a few seconds into the discomfort when I realized I was having an allergic reaction to something I'd either eaten or inhaled while in that tiny building. The directors had a production assistant bring me a Benadryl to stop the reaction and thankfully I was able to go back inside and continue with the scene without any serious issues even though my pulse was beating around 100 times per minute. I could literally hear my heart pounding through my chest. I still haven't figured out what I was allergic to because the only time I've ever reacted to anything aside from sneezing was when I was eating mangoes off the trees in St. Croix (without washing them) and I had a topical reaction to the sap in their skins. Nothing but a rash though... no throat swelling or life threatening heart rate. It baffles me and I just don't know what happened.
Jon and Andy admitted to being completely exhausted emotionally and physically after directing the scenes with Jasmine and myself. This was a compliment because it meant what we did came to life and took form in a way that people weren't expecting. Even I wasn't expecting it.
That being said, it's time to recover and begin a new day. Goodnight.
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