In Space No One Can Hear You Scream....

...and in Australia, no one drinks Fosters....ever!

However, drink they do, and as the dinner I was at wound down tonight and one of the key crew members fell down the stairs, I realized that no matter how high up you get, nor no matter where you go - people are people and film crews are film crews (meaning good drinkers!)

The trip continues to be great and tomorrow, tonight, whatever depending where you are, Friday night I'm going to a Twenty20 Cricket Match here in Melbourne. It's India visiting Australia in front of a crowd of 90,000+ people. I've been doing my homework and as I type this am watching a cricket match so I have half a clue as to what the hell is going on. Regardless, I'm going to be a part of one of the most controversial, exciting, anticipated matches of the season. I intend to drink plenty of beer (not Fosters) and even have a meat-pie to have the full experience and enjoy the match.

Australians are incredibly friendly, fun, warm people and I am going to be very sorry to leave here in a few days. However, the trip has been great and I am already looking forward to my next trip back, whenever that may be.

Good on ya' dear reader and g'day/g'night

Meat Meat Meat & Future Wives

Forgive the ineqliquence of this post - it's been a very long day and now at the end of a night of a few drinks, then a meal that consisted of 4 courses (meat followed by more meat with a main course of more meat,...and then desert) I'm trying to keep with the writing resolution that I started before I left on the trip.

The trip has been fantastic thus far. After arriving and claiming a tourist visa entrance at the airport, I (and my boss whom I am traveling with) were accosted by the immigration officer who kept asking "why are you coming to Melbourne for 7 days, why not Sydney, why Melbourne? Why not some place else? What do you know about Melbourne?" Of course my answer was - shit, I didn't know a damn thing. I was lying to him, telling him I was just coming in for a visit when I really should have told him I was coming in for a few business meetings etc. Anyway, after expecting nothing but a huge warm welcome that threw the both of us for a loop. But we got over it and so far everything else has more than lived up to expectations.

Everyone is incredibly friendly and welcoming, the city is beautiful and as far as work goes, the production and people that are involved in it are great. Tonight, as mentioned before I had a great meal at a true steak-house that served a fixed menu that had three courses of meat: sausage, liver then filets. Needless to say, all of them were great and combined with a bottle of wine it was fantastic.

The real kicker, my boss and I booked tickets to a Cricket match going on this Friday night. I've never watched Cricket, much less watched it live with 80,000 other Aussies so it will be a great experience. One which I will write about soon after...but for now, I need to sleep as there is work to be done tomorrow....

p.s. the future wives part of the title simply means, well, exactly what it says, I am coming back here sometime very soon as I feel damn certain that at least one of my future wives is in this country!!! They're all beautiful and apparently love American guys - we have the accents here! More soon.

10 Feet Higher and Never Coming Back

I’m sitting 39,010 feet above the surface of the earth right now, a height that I had never been at. Partially because I am flying across the Pacific but more because I got to add 10 extra feet this trip as I am sitting in the upstairs cabin of a 747 in route to Australia, and I’ve never been upstairs before!

Sometime around seven months back, I took a job that gained me the nick-name “suit” – referring to a character on the TV show ‘Entourage’. Where I had once started on the crew side, even dare I say a short stint on the “creative” side, this job brought me to the corporate / studio side and as such gained me the nickname suit. And now as I sit here some 7 miles above the ground I’ve been thinking about that change, this job and where I’m at these days personally and professionally. Needless to say, there is far too much in those thoughts to fit into this entry, hell even this entire blog; but one thing did became clear to me right before this trip that that I think kind of symbolizes those thoughts.

10 years ago, while preparing for my first trip overseas with my friend, we spent months pouring over books, maps, plans, guesses as to what might come up and how we will react. I eventually took that 14 day trip, hitting 6 different countries in Europe, backpack on my back, and it’s a trip I’ll never forget. However, this time, Australia hit my radar only 6 days pre-flight. No planning, no process, no real time to think – instead it was “buy a ticket, you’re coming with me (my boss) to Australia for the week.”

Just like that I had a business class ticket in my hand and was on my way down under. Don’t get me wrong for a single moment, it’s great. I’m giddy to be here – as shown by the fact that it’s currently three in the morning in Los Angeles, 10 in the morning in Melbourne and instead lf sleeping on my lay-flat seat or watching the plethora of free movies in my fancy seat, I’m sitting with my laptop writing. Something I haven’t done in far too long. No, I’m definitely loving this, but it’s different this time. My world got smaller this week. Suddenly far away seemed a lot closer, far off lands seemed much more within my grasp.

This job, this trip - it’s something I’ve always wanted and looked forward to even – but in the same breath it’s a bit sad. Growing up, you’re rarely aware when something in your life changes, it happens and only time and growth allow you the hindsight to become aware of it. It’s a blessing really, growing up is hard enough, it’s too much to expect you to be aware that it’s happening at the same time. However this time I was wide-awake and felt it happen, am feeling it happen. It’s rare that you get that feeling anymore and so as I sit here, on the upstairs portion of an airplane somewhere over the Pacific, I am 10 feet above the level I’ve been at all the preceding 29 years of my life and I don’t think that I can ever go back down, or go back.

1 suit, 2 suit, 3 suit 4....

Blogger told me my last post was on August 15th of last year....that was a long time ago....but lets not dwell on the past.

That's right, I'm back, or at least am going to try to be. And what is spurning this revival - well in 4 hours I'm going to be getting onto an airplane and 15.3 hours later I'll deplane in Australia! Throw another Steddy on the barbee cause I'm heading down under. I've never been and am very excited.

The short story is I was called into my bosses office on Tuesday and told that there were too many meetings for her to handle solo on her trip and so I should book a ticket and get on the same plane as her - the one that was leaving 6 days later. Oh, and book Business Class! Floored was a good way to describe my deminor, yet I did just as she told me to and now here I am about to take the longest plane ride I've ever taken.

So, there will no doubt be stories to tell from this trip and are many stories to recall that happened between now and August 15th (my last post...my bad). So I intend to do my best to get back to sitting down and doing a bit of writing each week. Also, this way if my plane crashes and I end up on the "Lost" island, this post will be all eerie! Ha...yes, I'm knocking wood right now.

Cheers, good-on ya and I'll write more soon.

10 Year High School Class Reunion

...this is what happened this past weekend. I arrived a little after midnight on Friday and spent the weekend putting together and living through my 10 year class reunion. If you haven't experienced this yet, then you won't understand when I say I think I need a few more days to process all of this before trying to write about it here on my little old blog.

I will say that it was a great weekend - a truly great experience from both a planning point of view and a participant point of view. We had great turn outs for 2 of the 3 of our events, and the one that we didn't was the Sunday picnic that was a wild card from the get-go.

Anyway, I really would like to write something about this weekend, but I'm just not ready - not yet. In reality, I should give it 2 years instead of 2 more days, but in the internet age we live in I just don't have that kind of time to draw upon that kind of distance. So for now I will simply say it was great, it's even a little bit better to have it finished and I will do my best to write about it soon.

Hanging on the eve of Beautiful Girls

Many of my closest friends will know my feelings about the movie "Beautiful Girls" - a simple movie about a nearly 30 something part time piano player who returns home for his class reunion. While at home he stumbles across all his old friends and their old drama, and a few unexpected curves in the form of a 14 year old neighbor girl and a beautiful late 20 something "cousin" who's in town for the weekend.

Closer examination of this movie and my life will draw many similarities, some too close to be laughed away perhaps - the lead (played perfectly by Timothy Hutton) is questioning his current lot in life, plays piano, returns home to a mother-less house and isn't sure how long he should stay in a world that once was home but now seems quite foreign. It's true, I play piano, I will return to a motherless-house, and things that used to make sense don't so much any more back in H-Town. However, I don't expect to fall for the underage neighbor girl next door, nor do I have the perfect "good solid seven and a half" to return to back in the big city. That's where the similarities of the Hollywood story depart my own.

Though tonight, while sitting at my desk attempting to write a screenplay that I have been working on for, well it can be said now "years" - I just had to sit down and reflect on the fact that either life is imitating art or vice versa. I really don't know what to expect from this weekend and the reunion, but I doubt it will compare to the Hollywood fireworks that go down in 'Beautiful Girls.' That said, I must say that as quickly as we often dismiss the stories that the Hollywood system turns out, as nonsensical and so removed that no one could ever relate, in this moment I have to wonder if Willie was thinking the same things I am, only hours before his class reunion, returning home and shining a spotlight on the past for a few days.

No doubt many stories will sprout from the weekend that is approaching, and I hope to relay at least a few here - but in the mean time, I wish you a happy weekend as I set off for Minnesota for my 10 year reunion. If you haven't yet, rent (or add to NetFlix) Beautiful Girls, crack a bottle of wine or a six pack of beer and enjoy and think of me as I'm maneuvering my way through the weekend.

Bed Knobs and Retirement Plans

Buying the first house, first full time job, perhaps the first time you think really think about insurance, or turn down a night out on the town to secretly stay in and watch TV instead. Something buried in these events sets off a small signal to us that the inevitable is happening: we're becoming adults. I write tonight because I had a moment like that tonight.

No, it wasn't a house, a 401K, a baby (yikes) or anything like that, no for me it was a headboard. Yes, you read that right, a headboard.

For the past 10 years I have lived a perfectly fulfilled life without a headboard - a piece of furnture that to me serves no purpose yet you find on all "grown-up" beds. Suddenly it's not okay to have your mattress pushed up against the bare wall anymore, you instead need a large piece of furniture to prevent you from spontaneously flying through the wall. (Get your mind out of the gutter Flom) Pulling your bed out of the corner of the room makes sense as if you're hopefully lucky that there is now a 2nd person having to get out of your bed (whether or not it's always the same person is a whole seperate conversation) but a head board really is only something that is put into bed rooms to make them seem - well more grown up. When we're young, if you're lucky you had a fun bed that head a firetruck headboard or doll house head board who's purpose was to play with - but then it goes away and we go headboard-less only to have it come back later in life much like so many other things.

Well this weekend, while surfing the internet sometime after 4am on Saturday night in search of a cheap dresser I found a "bed room set" on Craigslist that included a big dresser, two side tables and...gulp, a headboard. The price was too good to pass up and now two days later I find all the items in my bed room. The side tables serve a purpose, currently filled with junk and socks, the dresser rescued me from the wire mesh stackable crates I bought for my college dorm room some 7 odd years ago, but then there was the headboard, currently in place and beginning to collect dust and make it more difficult to change sheets.

Now I know what you're thinking, this really isn't a big deal - but for a kid who still fights back whenever anyone uses the term "settle down" and who gets itchy if he stays in any city for much longer than a month, this was a big hit. I used to try and keep my belongings so I could pack my life in two suitcases and two boxes, granted that was before the piano. Sigh, and now I have a headboard. I do wish I could call my mother and tell her of my purchase, and hear her tell me how it's good for me. And like everything else she'd probably be right, however I still fear that this kid will sleep uneasy tonight with that big wooden symbol of adulthood hanging over my head - literally!