the would-be writers guild

I have about a million spiral notebooks. I use them for writing practice, for jotting down grocery lists, keeping track of food I’ve eaten (when I’m feeling dedicated) and for drawing darling stick figure likenesses of my friends and family. Unlike any of the others, my newest spiral notebook with a black, red, and yellow plaid cover has a title page, “The Moving Across the Country Book.” I plan to use it to keep track of all the agonizingly complicated details of the move, but the second page has been dedicated to a running list called, “Things to do in Utah before we move.” One of the items on the list: Visit Park City during the Sundance Film Festival.

Obviously, we had to act quickly to be able to cross this one off the list, so we headed up to Park City Saturday night with our favorite up-for-any-hare-brained-scheme friends, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. First, we ate at Butcher’s Chophouse and did not see any celebrities, but did sit in the very booth that had been occupied by Danny Glover just a week before.

In an effort to feel part of the festival, we started acting artsy-fartsy every time anybody from the waitstaff came near the table.

“So, have you signed with the studio yet?”
“I think we’re close to a deal.”
“Oh. We signed this morning. Twice.”

and

“Actually, I was uncomfortable shooting that scene.”
“Why?”
“Well, it was my first love scene.”
“With a man?”
“No, with a woman.”

I know it’s hard to believe, but we successfully crack ourselves up time after time without the use of alcohol.

Then Mrs. Smith and I wandered Main Street for a bit while the guys checked on the availability of tickets at the Egyptian Theatre. Imagine their surprise when they learned that there were tickets available to a movie starting in an hour! When Mr. Smith asked the ticket booth employee if he had seen the movie film, the employee handed him a booklet with synopses of all the movies films and recommended that they read about it.

They quickly rifled through the pages until they found the movie title and began to read the brief condensed version of the story which was—and I swear on my life this is true—about the identity crisis of a troubled young, gay zombie trying to star in a gay zombie movie and reconcile his memories of his pre-zombie life.

We decided not to see the movie film. Because if you’ve seen one gay zombie movie film, you’ve seen ‘em all. (At least that’s what I’ve heard.)

Mr. Smith went back to the ticket booth and asked if there were any other movies films we might be able to catch.
“Did you read about it?” the employee asked.
“Uh, yeah.” said Mr. Smith.
“Good. We’re not allowed to say anything about the films, so we always recommend that people read about them before seeing them.”

Let that be a lesson to you all.

Anyway, as it turned out, we did end up seeing a Sundance movie film after all. In fact, several of them. We finally scored tickets to one of the screenings of short films. After a free shuttle ride and a walk across a dark Albertson’s parking lot, we sat in the top of the theater and watched five short films, two or three of which were pretty freaking amazing. And two which were completely and totally weird artistic.

Here we are in the theatre.

I made the picture black and white and darkened it, because I wanted to give off a totally artsy-fartsy feel. (And because Ryan’s hair looked kind of weird in the original.) And also because I think we look a lot like zombies. But not gay zombies with identity problems. We look like self-confident, happily-married zombies out on the town with their friends at the local movie film festival. There’s a BIG difference.