| June 17, 2006 - My brush with stardom |
| Dear Friends, a couple of weeks ago I went to the Legitimate Theatre to see a musical extravaganza. One of the characters on stage seemed very familiar to me and after a few minutes I realized it was the actress who plays Felicia Tillman on "Desperate Housewives". So I leaned over to my theatre companion and said, "I think that actress is on 'Desperate Housewives'". Well my theatre companion doesn't watch the show so she didn't know who I meant. During intermission I looked in the theatre programme and sure enough, it was Harriet Harris AKA Felicia Tillman! So my theatre companion said, "Do you want to meet her and get her autograph?" I was a little reluctant, because I don't know how people will react to clamoring fans. But as we were leaving the Legitimate Theatre, my theatre companion ran into the director, whom she knows personally. He told us which exit "Felicia" would be going out by. So we went outside and around the building. Aftrer a few minutes, out she came and I was able to get her autograph and chat with her a bit. I told her that I liked her performance that day and that she was my favorite character on "Desperate Housewives", which she really is; you just never know what stunt she's going to pull next. If you watch the show and aren't sure who I'm talking about, she's the one out to avenge her sister's murder. In the season finale she cut off her own fingers and left them in Paul Young's van for the police to find. Isn't that just creepily delicious? So I'm off to Scotland this Thursday for a long deserved vacay. I had a month of leave approved to go to Sweden again, but because renovations will be starting in my apartment for the conversion to condo, I decided it would be better to stick around the Big City. Anyway, I found out that some friends are going to London. From there they're driving up to Manchester, then to some Scottish lakes, and then on to Edinburgh. So I wrote to my friend, Laura, whom I've talked about before and asked if I could come visit. I will stay with her three days and then move into a guesthouse, because Laura is packing to move to London on July 3. I'll help her out a bit, but I'll also have time during the day to hit some of the museums. My friends aren't arriving in Edinburgh until 6/27. Laura has made reservations for us at a restaurant called The Outsider. We're going to have a table by the window so we can look up at the castle and the roofs of the houses cascading down below us. I don't know why, but for some reason I got it into my head that the restaurant was called The Outhouse. So I've been running around telling everyone that we have reservations to eat at The Outhouse. I kept thinking to myself what an odd name that was. It's not like I haven't been there before, because I have and I kept wondering why I never found the name peculiar before. Well, obviously, I had just forgotten its real name. Just like I can never remember whether tiles on a kitchen wall are called backsplashes or splashbacks. I was talking to one of my co-workers about renovations and I kept saying that I wanted splashbacks in the kitchen. I gradually realized that splashback is water that splashes up on your butt when you're taking a hellacious dump. So when I'm talking about backsplashes, I have to choose my word carefully or I'll get it wrong. Just like when I was a teenager, I always mixed up "shoulder" and "soldier" and "virgin" with "version". I was once teaching a class and told the students to press the "shit" key and to run a "bitch" file at the end of each day! Oh dear, when I was in high school we were reading "Moby Dick" (one of the worst books ever, in my opinion). Anyhoo, the teacher asked me to read aloud. One of the sentences was something like "The sky had a violet tint", but I read it as "The sky had a violent tit". I burst out laughing, but because no one had been paying attention, not even the teacher, no one had caught what I said, and I was too embarrassed to repeat what I had said. When I had a job in Germany, the people in my office always referred to the stapler as a "Bumser". So, of course, I assumed that was the word for it and used the word all the time. Months later I found out the word actually means "fucker"! I understood then why people always looked at me so peculiarly when I asked for the stapler or asked where the stapler was. Another time I was in a drugstore with friends and they were talking about buying Vicks coughdrops, but they kept pronouncing it "Vick". So I started going on about "Vicks" coughdrops. My friends were doubled over with laughter and quite red in the face and all the customers were staring at me. My friends pushed me out the door and explained to me that the pronunciation "Vicks" actually means cum in German! Next entry Previous entry Go to diary entries Go back home |