Jellwagger - Episode 5: Is It a Friend or a Foe? It's Pat!

Just look at this Jellwagger, would ya? The poor bastard had been caught with his pants down, an apt metaphor considering he’d just stepped out of the shitter. No, he hadn’t actually taken a shit. As you saw at the end of the last episode, he’d parked himself in that stall just to get some privacy while Carla read him the riot act. Speaking of that stall, it just occurred to Jellwagger that it wasn’t remotely as nice as he thought it would be, considering this was Spago, the joint that had tiny pieces of napkin lint that made more money than Jellwagger. He’d expected, this being a place like that ‘n all, that the bathroom stall doors would be made of platinum or something. Or at least gold. But nah, these were just your average bathroom stall doors.

Whereas he hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom a second ago—hadn’t felt the teensiest bit of pressure in either his bowels or his bladder—suddenly our very own Jellwagger had to crap cinderblocks. Yet he couldn’t exactly go back into the stall. He’d just stepped out, giving the impression that he’d just finished putting the kids in the pool. If he went back in and actually did his business, this guy at the sink would’ve no doubt thought he was a weirdo. Of course it was this guy whose presence had kicked Jellwagger’s lower GI tract into high gear in the first place. And as far as his thinking Jellwagger was a nutjob, it was no doubt too late for that. How much of his conversation with Carla had Pat Dinner heard? While Jellwagger stood there like a moron, waiting for Pat to say something, to look up at him—anything!—Pat was tapping on a pill bottle like it was a salt dispenser until two tiny pills tumbled into his palm. Jellwagger focused on the pills for a second to see if they were blue. Was the richest man in the biggest city on the planet unable to get it up? But no, Jellwagger wasn’t that lucky. The damned pills were white. The bottle was that kind of brown translucent type that prescription meds come in. Pat popped the pills in his mouth, pocketed the bottle, and used his hands as a cup to slurp some water. He then splashed his face. This was the first time Jellwagger noticed bags under the man’s eyes.

So what the hell was going on here? Had Pat really not heard any of Jellwagger’s conversation? Did he not know who Jellwagger was? If he’d even heard just the last part of the conversation, it would’ve been enough time to recognize his ex-wife’s voice on the other end. Those goddam walkie-talkies were louder than hell. If you’d heard Carla talk just once, from there on after you could’ve instantly recognized her voice coming out of a walkie-talkie through a stall door. The things were that loud, and her voice was that distinctive. Maybe he was playing it off, though. Maybe the smug bastard was only pretending not to know. If so, he was a terrific actor. Look at him for Christ’s sake, pretending to be all worn out and in need of medication. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but Jellwagger somehow knew that those nondescript little pills weren’t just for something temporary. Those were meds that Pat had been dropping on a regular basis since forever ago, and he’d be on them for the rest of time. So that part of his performance was authentic. But that whole splashing his face bit and looking beat to shit? Come on, Pat! Who are you fooling? There was no doubt he was a smart bastard. You didn’t accumulate his level of wealth by being a bad actor. So fine. Jellwagger would play along. He’d pretend he had no idea he’d just been made by the man he was supposed to be stalking.

Jellwagger puckered his asshole to push the turtle’s head back in, walked up to the sink next to Pat, and started washing his hands. Pat, meanwhile, splashed his face a few more times before drying himself off. He didn’t dry himself with paper towels, mind you. Or with the auto dryer. This was when Jellwagger first felt a twinge of admiration for the old man, a twinge which, as you’ll see, grew over time. Patrick Dinner wiped his face and hands with his tie. Jellwagger figured that shiny silver and black tie cost the goateed carrot top dumper a small fortune, probably more than Jellwagger had earned since birth. Lots of men in Pat’s position would’ve been anal about the cleanliness of their wardrobe. Jellwagger had been working around high-priced attorneys for years. They never in a million millennia would’ve been caught dead drying their face with their tie. Yet here was Pat Dinner not giving a shit. He was too lazy just to reach over a few feet to the paper towel dispenser. Jellwagger could empathize with that kind of laziness. We all could. Who hasn’t had one of those days when, at the end of it, you’re just too God damned tired to exert yourself even by a few feet? Say, maybe this Pat Dinner guy wasn’t acting after all. Jellwagger took his time lathering up his hands and rinsing them off, every few seconds shooting a furtive glance at Pat’s face in the mirror. Pat was still acting like he had the bathroom to himself. How was Jellwagger supposed to continue following this guy? First he’d been terrified that he’d lost him. Now he was right next to him, but had to figure out a way to continue the tail without giving it away. Assuming Pat hadn’t already made him, that is. Jellwagger held his hands below the auto dryer. Did Pat really have no idea who he was? He was pulling out his pill bottle when the dryer turned off. While reading the label, he said: "Dump ‘er, my man."

Pat’s voice practically threw Jellwagger against the cold wall for two reasons. First, it had been totally unexpected. That son of a bitch! He really had been paying attention to Jellwagger that whole time. He knew the score. Give the man an Academy fucking Award. No, really. Jellwagger wasn’t being facetious. The man’s acting had been impeccable. As for the second thing that hurled him against the wall, this dude Pat Dinner didn’t sound at all like what you’d think. You’d think, right? That he sounded mature and distinguished. That he’d have the voice of, you know, a man or something. A human adult male in his forties or fifties or however old you have to be to have that much frost in your goatee. Instead, he sounded younger than Jellwagger. In fact, if Jellwagger had had his eyes squeezed shut when Pat had said "Dump ‘er, my man," he would’ve seriously thought the guy was a college frat boy. No joke, Pat Dinner did sound that young.

While Jellwagger remained pressed against the wall, Pat shoved the bottle back into his pocket and chuckled. In the bathroom’s enclosed space, his laugh sounded more annoying than ever. And then, finally, at long last, he looked at Jellwagger. Wow, the dude’s eyes were green. With his dark hair and all, they stood out like whores in a nunnery. "Can’t bear to be apart from her, can you? I know how that feels."

"She told me to do this."

Pat slid his hands into his pockets, looked down at the sink, and chuckled once again. Damn him! "I know how you feel, my man."

"Dude, I am so not kidding. She told me to do this. This whole fucking thing is her idea."

"And I say again, I know how you feel." Now he turned his body to face Jellwagger. He maintained eye contact but tilted his head to the side just a smidgen as if still not entirely sure from what species Jellwagger hailed. "She’s controlling you, my man." He shook his head and made a tsk-tsk sound. "Another tool."

"What are you going to do to me?"

"I should string you up by the nut sack for being a disgrace to the male species."

Jellwagger’s heart became a bowling ball that sunk him to his knees against the wall. Oh Jesus fuck, he thought. He’d never complain about being a law firm marketing department data entry clerk again. That is, if he could get out of this mess. If by some miracle he did, he’d never complain about being lower than mud, too low to have reached the bottom of the totem pole. Jellwagger imagined himself back at his desk in the Sanwa Bank building. He was an anonymous peon, sure, but there was something to be said for that. It didn’t involve breaking the law, for one. And it afforded him time to listen to Bruce Willis reading Sigmund Freud so he could nail the dialogue for Exit the Danish. That life, which Jellwagger had been bemoaning not so long ago and was no doubt about to vanish when Pat called the Beverly Hills cops, sounded so sweet right now.

"Do you even have a nut sack?" Pat Dinner was saying. "Good God, my man. On your feet. On your feet! What are you doing down there?"

"It’s her fault." He didn’t care about betraying Carla. The bitch had left him out to dry. Sure, maybe he did stalk her for a week. But what harm had come of it? She obviously hadn’t been too irked if she knew about it and still led him on for seven days. Hadn’t he paid his dues by now? Apparently not, judging by their most recent exchange. So fuck her. If he was going to sink, she sure as shit wasn’t going to stay dry if he could help it. "She organized this whole thing. I swear to God."

Pat jingled the keys in his pocket and smiled down at him. It couldn’t have been more bizarre. The man’s smile was so paternal and warm, but Jellwagger couldn’t shake the fact that the man sounded like an underage frat boy trying to find the next kegger. "First of all, my man, get the hell up. If you and I are going to have a man to man, I require you to stand on your own two pussy feet. Now up!"

Still feeling like a block of granite had made its home in his chest, Jellwagger pushed himself up until he felt blue in the face.

"Easy, my man. I know how you feel. You feel controlled. You feel like however much time you’ve been this woman’s tool will amount to nothing more than time you will never get back. That’s all you think it is right now, right? A waste of your life. True, I don’t have much respect for you at the moment. Not for some puss who’s going to be some bitch’s tool. And what a bitch she’s obviously been to you, judging by that little bit I heard when I walked in."

"Obviously." Jellwagger’s voice was shaking.

"You’re crying?"

"What are you going to do to me?"

"I’ll tell you what. If you cry, then whatever I was going to do to you before is going to get far worse."

Jellwagger somehow managed to stem the tear flow before a single drop trickled out. Whatever Pat’s intentions were, his saying that last bit was just the impetus Jellwagger needed to gain control of himself and man up. With a calmness that surprised even himself, he said: "Are you going to call the fucking Beverly Hills cops?"

"The what?"

"What do you think I said, you brilliant rich bastard? The Beverly Hills bastard cops. Are they your best friends or what?"

"Wait a minute. My man, are you drunk?"

"Just call them and get it over with. I’m a sicko stalker, apparently."

Pat bent over and deafened Jellwagger with his howling cackle. Jellwagger wanted to punch him. Just as that frat boy sound-a-like was bending over and slapping his knee, Jellwagger could have easily leaped up with a fist to his jaw. "I get it, I get it. She dumped you before, and you were following her. Then she caught you and called you a nutjob. And then you came to this place to drown your sorrows. You obviously don’t belong here, judging by the way you’re dressed. Still, you’ve got taste. Either that or you wanted to go somewhere where no one would know you. I’m sure Simon took care of you."

"You know that money-milking asshole?"

"Hey! Watch it, my man. Simon’s all right. He’s good people."

"He ripped me off! And who in hell’s ever heard of Spaten? Did I ask for Spaten? Fuck Spaten!"

"How much have you had tonight?"

"I had Spaten. And he also somehow brainwashed me so I’d order broth that must been laced with gold judging by how much it cost. And I inhaled—"

"I’m not interested in what you ate. I want to know how drunk you are. How many beers did you have?"

"Two. No, three. That fucker served me three."

Pat’s smile looked like it was about to explode into another heaving laugh. "And you’re drunk on that? My man, you are what they call a featherweight. Simon went easy on you. Well, that’s understandable. He probably pegged you as a puss the second he saw you."

"Get down there and blow me, Mr. Trump. Or call the police and get it over with."

Pat cackled and slapped Jellwagger’s shoulder. "Tell you what I’ll do. You ready for this? I’m with a group of guys out there. We had dinner here tonight and were just heading out when I had to rush back here to take my meds. I’ve got to take this stuff every night after dinner, no exceptions. But anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is that we were heading out for a little post-dinner cocktail hour. Happy Hour’s before dinner. My gang and I do Happier Hour. Why don’t you come with us?"

"You mean like to a titty bar?"

"I absolutely love the way you think. No, just a regular bar. I think you’ll like it."

"You’re not going to call the Beverly Hills cops on me?"

"Why are you such a glutton for punishment? That bitch may think you’re a psycho stalker, but you’re good people with me. By the way, what’s your name?"

"Jellwagger."

"Jellwagger. That’s an incredibly interesting name. I’m Patrick Dinner. You can just call me Pat." An elderly man came in to use one of the urinals just as they were shaking hands. "Now listen to this, Mr. Jellwagger. Why don’t you come with us? You got somewhere you need to be?"

"Only my job."

"Call and tell them you’ll be late. We can’t have you showing up to work this sober. Three beers? Please. I guarantee I’ll find you a better drink than beer. Something smooth and brown. You like Irish Whiskey? Or Scotch? We’ll get you good and drunk and I guarantee you’ll have a good time. You’ll like what I can do for you."

"Jesus H. God damned Christ," said the elderly man at the urinal, whose prostate had reduced his stream to a dribble. "What has Spago come to? I remember when this joint had class, I really do. Now look at it. Even the fucking bathrooms are falling into disrepute. Wait’ll I tell Simon about this."

It wasn’t until Jellwagger was walking out with Pat that he finally accepted the fact that Pat really, truly, unbelievably had no frickin’ idea who he was. He’d hurried into the can to take his meds and caught that last snippet of Carla and Jellwagger’s spat. So he probably heard her leveling the stalker thing on Jellwagger to blackmail him. Of course Pat couldn’t have deduced from that alone that he was working for Carla. And he hadn’t heard enough of her voice on the walkie-talkie to recognize her. Holy shit! Not only was Jellwagger in the clear, but one of the richest dudes the Milky Way has ever known was going to get him drunk. By the time they reached the front of the restaurant, Jellwagger’s step had a bounce that he couldn’t suppress in spite of the oodles of frowns aimed his way. To his right was Simon toiling behind the bar. And to the left, in that courtyard area, Goldilocks was waiting the tables as efficiently as ever. "Why are you skipping, my man?" Pat asked him while looking at everyone else. He caught Simon’s eye and nodded at him. Simon looked back and forth between Pat and Jellwagger as if he couldn’t believe it.

Jellwagger decided to exploit the living shit out of Simon’s bafflement. He stepped up to the bar, squeezed himself between two of the gorgeous older gals who’d given him a woody just a few minutes ago, and leaned across until his face was only a foot or so from Simon’s. "Thanks so much for everything, Simon. Now Pat Dinner and I are headed out to get drunk on his dime while you continue busting your starch-shirted ass here."

Instead of offering a comeback or throwing a punch, Simon continued drying the shot glass in his hand and smiled. "Enjoy the rest of your evening, pal, okay? Don’t show up for work too drunk or, trust me, they will be able to tell." He finished drying the glass, put it away, and helped the next customer. When Jellwagger rejoined Pat, he noticed Goldilocks bending over to pick up someone’s fork.

"Seriously, why are you skipping? It makes you look girly."

"Speaking of girls, aren’t you going to ask Goldilocks to join us?"

Pat looked over and spotted the waitress. "You mean Goldie?"

"You’re shitting me. Her name’s really Goldie?"

"I know her parents. Goldie’s good people."

When they reached the sidewalk, Pat’s three dinner companions immediately gave him grief for having taken so long to take his meds. They were waiting next to a limo that was all black, including the windows. "Everyone, let me introduce you to a youngster with the most unique name you’ll ever hear: Jellwagger. Mr. Jellwagger, these are my drinking buddies. Come on, we’re already late for Happier Hour. We can do formal introductions later."

"What about my Shitty Shitty Bang Bang?" Jellwagger asked. Everyone looked at him.

"Didn’t you just take a dump?"

"My Mazda, I mean. It’s parked here."

"The limo will bring you back. And I’ll give you cash for the valet. I’m sure money is what you’re really talking about here."

Pat started yapping away with his pals as soon as they all climbed into the limo. Jellwagger tried to follow what they said, but it was all about their work and the people they worked with. That, combined with the smoked windows which were all the blacker for it being nighttime, made Jellwagger feel lost in every sense of that word. This was all happening too fast. What in Christ was he doing in Pat Dinner’s limo? What made him think going out and having drinks with his new boss’s ex-husband was a good idea? Sure, Carla wanted him to continue the tail, but this was way overboard. Even worse, something told Jellwagger she knew this was happening. Based on that last fiery exchange alone, she obviously didn’t trust him. Neckman was probably following him. He turned around and tried to discern the faces behind the various pairs of headlights.

"So what’s she look like?" Pat was saying. "Hey. The Honorable Mr. Jellwagger."

"What?"

"See something you like back there?"

"You’re right, Pat," someone said. "He is afraid of the cops."

"The Beverly Hills cops?" Jellwagger said. "They’re here?"

Pat laughed that stupid God damned laugh. How could his friends stand it? "You know, Mr. Jellwagger, I honestly think you want to be caught."

"It’s just Jellwagger."

"What did you do? Did you hurt that girl?"

"He obviously did something," said that same voice. It was coming from the other side, where the seats abut the wall separating them from the driver. "Look at him."

"You still haven’t told us what she looks like. Your ex-reason-to-be."

"She’s a carrot top for starters."

They all erupted in cackles. My God, just listen to them. Now there wasn’t just one, but four unbelievably irritating laughs, all within a few feet of him in this closed in space that only enhanced the whole grating effect. That’s exactly what it felt like, grating. Jellwagger’s ears were two hunks of cheese being shaved to bits. Was that the whole deal with money? The more you made, the more irritating your laugh became? Judging by these four fuckballs, the answer was a deafening yes.

"Jee-Zuss!" said the suspicious guy yonder.

"Now there’s your problem, my man," said Pat, draping his arm around Jellwagger. "Redheads. Hasn’t anyone ever told you to avoid them like the IRS? I happen to have some personal experience in that department." He lowered his head a bit to glare at Jellwagger like some old schoolmarm glaring at a student who couldn’t answer the most obvious question on a quiz.

"Don’t we all?"

"Ha ha ha!" Pat Dinner said. "Yes that’s true, I suppose. You really are my man. You really have your thumb on the pulse of things."

"Are you being a smart-ass, Pat Dinner?"

"It’s Pat, and no I’m not. You’re a bright kid, I can tell. But you don’t think you are. In fact, it’s never occurred to you that you might have more intellect than sponge fungus, but since people treat you like sponge fungus, that’s what you’ve come to believe. You’re one of those poor sonsabitches who actually takes. For granted! That he’s a worthless piece of shit."

"Not another speech, sir," the suspicious guy said.

"Where are we going?" Jellwagger said.

"When was the last time you got major league tanked, my man?"

"I have to go back to work." Jellwagger glared at the suspicious guy’s silhouette on the other side of the limo. "That’s why I’m worried, by the way. It’s not that I’m wanted by the law, I just have a deadline."

"That doesn’t explain why you looked out the back window."

No one said anything for a second. Jellwagger’s neck itched for him to do a one-eighty one more time just to confirm that he couldn’t see anyone behind him who resembled Neckman or, heaven forfend, Carla. But really, why bother? Why give that mysterious weirdo over there more fuel to harass him? And what difference would it make if he did spot Neckman or Carla? What would he do about it? It would mean they’d been following the limo since Beverly Hills, and now they were just getting to downtown. So the damage would already be done.

"You really are worried about your job, aren’t you?" Pat smiled at him. "Don’t worry, my man. You’re my man, right? Believe me, I understand the importance of deadlines more than most people. You won’t miss yours."

They drove to somewhere right smack in the middle of downtown, just blocks from the Sanwa Bank building. At least that was something, Jellwagger thought while getting out of the limo with Pat and the gang in front of a hotel. Once Pat decided to let him go, he wouldn’t have far to get to work. But wait. What about Shitty Shitty Bang Bang? Christ, what did it matter then? He’d have to take this God forsaken limo or a taxi back to Spago to get his car. As with worrying about being trailed, though, he’d have to play it off. Besides, shouldn’t he be honored to be treated to after-dinner drinks by these people? Wouldn’t everyone at Powell and Powler kill to be where he was right now?

The four of them tore into the hotel lobby as if they too had a tight deadline to meet. Even though Jellwagger was the last to get on the elevator, he somehow let himself get shoved to the back. Did one of these guys have a suite here? Was Pat entertaining out-of-town business associates? Maybe Pat had a suite here where he took his buds and hired strippers.

When the elevator door dinged open, Jellwagger immediately saw that it was none of the above. They were on the roof. Not only was there a bar up here, but a whole lounge area with brightly colored chairs. And a pool. Yes, a pool. And people were indeed swimming in it, here and now at eleven o’clock on a weeknight. While following the gang toward a bunch of banana yellow chairs on one side of the roof, Jellwagger looked at the backs of the other three heads and wondered which of these guys was convinced he was a fugitive. When they got settled around a low table, Pat sat opposite Jellwagger and started blabbering about money matters with one of his pals. When the waitress, barely dressed and barely legal, arrived to take their orders, Pat waited for his pals to name their nectars before he ordered for both Jellwagger and himself.

"Lava Rule?" Jellwagger said.

"Lagavulin, my man," Pat said. "You’ll love it. Single malt scotch, aged 16 years. One glass of that stuff’s all you’ll need and your productivity at work will skyrocket tonight. You’ll scorch that deadline. Spaten was a good warmup."

"You’ve heard of Spaten?"

"My God, my man. You really do fancy yourself a piece of shit. Stop asking such obvious questions. Anyone who hasn’t heard of Spaten can only be a retard. But anyway…" Pat turned back to his friends and continued to blabber.

"So you’d never heard of either Spaten or Lagavulin until tonight," said the one friend of Pat’s who was not taking part in the blabbering. He was sitting next to him, an Asian guy with hair perfectly combed and slicked back. His was the suspicious voice that kept taking jabs at him in the limo. Jellwagger tried to give him an indignant look, but thanks to the crushed-ice breeze up here, his face felt like the only looks it could make were either blank or baffled. "How’d you like Spaten? The Germans know how to brew the good stuff, don’t they? But just you wait. The Scots aren’t so bad in the spirits department. In fact, we might be laughing at you as you fall on your ass after you have just one Lagavulin. You’ve never had scotch before, have you? At all? It seemed at first that Patrick was taking a liking to you. I have no idea why, but who am I to read every single thought process in that nut’s head? Because you see, maybe I was wrong. If he’s insisting that you have a glass of Lagavulin with him, maybe he’s trying to undo you."

What the hell was this guy talking about? Jellwagger sure as hell didn’t have a clue. He looked out at the view that no doubt all the partners at Powell and Powler took for granted every day. This was the neighborhood he’d been working in for four years now, and he was just now discovering it. How was that possible? Did it reflect fundamental flaws in him? What was Pat talking about back in the limo about Jellwagger taking for granted that he was no higher up the food chain than sponge shit?

"He owns all this," the suspicious Asian guy was saying. "Not all if it perhaps. But most of it. He won’t admit it, but I think that’s why he likes coming up here. If you’re going to be his new best friend, get used to it. He won’t let a month go by without a view from this table. But don’t worry if you get sick of it. In fact, speaking of a month, that may be how long you last."

The waitress came back with their drinks. Pat clinked his glass against Jellwagger’s, and they each took a sip. Pat let out a gust of satisfaction and held his glass up with a look of adoration. Jellwagger gagged while a river of lava liquified his guts.

"Don’t let too much time go by without taking a sip, Mr. Jellwagger," Pat said. "You don’t want the ice melting and watering it down too much. You might think you do, but you don’t. Trust me. I’ve secured many a business deal because of this divine juice. And yes, relatively speaking, it is pretty much juice. Take it from me, my man." He laughed, damn him. "I’ve had my share of scotch and whiskey. You want fire, I can show you the real fire. This isn’t it. This stuff’s smooth as a baby’s belly."

And what? The belly comparison was supposed to thin out some of the lava? "It’ll keep you warm," said the suspicious well-coiffed Asian guy between sips of his light beer.

Jellwagger took another sip, stymied the cough, and entertained the possibility that the Asian guy and Simon were in league. Seriously. What a complete asshole.

"What an asshole," the Asian guy said, holding up his beer and showing it the same affection Pat had shown the Lagavulin. Then he looked at Jellwagger and smiled. "Right? I’m not a telepath, but then again I don’t have to be. Your thoughts are more transparent than this beautiful brown bottle. The truth is, you’re not far off. But if it’s all right with you, I’d prefer you not address me as asshole. My name’s Sam T. Lee." Instead of holding out a hand to shake, Sam held out the over half-empty beer bottle. "Here. Pretend my right hand is a hook that looks like a brown bottle of light beer that makes you feel bloated but without all the carbs. Come on, shake it! Shake the light beer!" Sam was cracking himself up.

Jellwagger shook the end of the bottle and said, "You loaded already, Sam?" He was only being facetious, but Sam nodded.

"You have no idea, you poor lackey." He had a shit-eating grin plastered on his shiny, clean-shaven face. "Pat really wants you to sip that steadily, by the way. Come on. It’ll keep you warm. You need to stay warm or Pat’ll get worried."

Jellwagger obliged and found that Sam was dead on. Nursing this fire juice was, in fact, spreading a healthy crackling fire throughout his body. Either that, or it was dissolving enough of his brain so that he’d no longer feel the arctic gusts. Or maybe it was both. Yeah. In fact, the more sips he took—taking them with more frequency—the more he bought into that theory. The Lagavulin was keeping his innards warm, his stomach and organs and everything. But it didn’t stop there. Now it was spreading out to the fingers in his empty hand, then the fingers holding the guilty glass. And it was somehow getting up to his brain. How was that possible? His stomach redirected everything downward, not upward. Or was it sending signals or something? That’s how it registered everything, right? All the pain and all the pleasure that he picked up with sight, sound, taste, and all that? It all came from signals. Maybe that’s what was going on now. His stomach was enjoying the Lagavulin so much that it was shooting signals up to the gray stuff that said the juice was the shit.

So Patrick Dinner owned all this, eh? Downtown Los Angeles was the sandbox and swing set for one Patrick Dinner, ex-husband of Carla Houde the comet-headed madam whom Jellwagger had stalked and who was now paying Jellwagger to stalk this dude. It was beautiful. For the first time in his life, Jellwagger could see just how beautiful downtown was. The buildings were truly works of art. Wow, how long do you suppose it took to build those motherfuckers? Not to speak of all the stuff inside them. He himself worked inside one of them. You couldn’t quite see it from here, but it was there. Jellwagger didn’t need to see it. He could easily imagine the green Sanwa Bank letters on the flat side of the building facing the Harbor Freeway as Jellwagger and trillions of other commuters came pouring out of the Valley every weekday morning. Did Pat own that building? And had he been responsible for those fantastic cubicles they all worked in? Obviously he wouldn’t have actually designed them. He wouldn’t’ve done jack shit in terms of the actual work. But maybe he signed off on them. Maybe that gorgeous goateed man had to review each and every God damned schematic and drawing and whatnot.

The waitress arrived with the next round of drinks.

"I really shouldn’t," Jellwagger said.

"It’s on Sam here," Pat said.

"Okay, you’ve twisted my arm." Jellwagger winked at Sam. "You were right, Sam T. Lee. I feel all warm and cozy and whatnot. It’s like a magic potion."

Sam, meanwhile, downed half of his second light beer in one swig. Then he said: "And I can’t believe you and Patrick met in the fucking bathroom, man. You met in the bathroom."

"He told you that?"

Sam cackled. "You told me, sir. Just a second ago. Don’t you remember?" He cackled again. "My God, sir. You don’t remember, do you? You’re just babbling all kinds of shit and you have no idea. How long are you going to stay mad at Jo?"

"Who told you about my sister?"

"You did, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Right after you mentioned you met Pat in the bathroom and how Jo would’ve killed you had she caught you making a fool of yourself in the can. But then you said you wouldn’t give a shit because she was lying to you about how your dad died or something. You said all of this just a few seconds ago, you drunkard."

"You look like you’re about to topple over, my man," Pat said, scooting over to Jellwagger and clapping a palm on his shoulder while beaming at Sam. "Mr. Lee, what have you been doing to him?"

"Me, sir? Not a thing, sir. Ha!"

"You know, I was just thinking," Pat said. He downed the rest of his Lagavulin and flagged the waitress. Jellwagger slumped back in his chair.

"Oh God, not another. It’s so good. Not another."

"Third one’s the charmer, my man. Now listen up. While listening to my colleagues over yonder blowing hot air out of their bung holes, the most brilliant lightning bolt idea split my brain in two like it was some ancient centuries-old oak just asking for it. Standing all smug and shit as king of the forest, complacent with itself, those fucking roots just digging down into the center of the earth until it thought there was nothing in the world that could move it, all massive and dark and ancient and dominant and shit, just asking for a healthy dose of gigawatts straight through the noggin. And then, on a day when the sky otherwise looked clear, there come the gigawatts. There they come, straight down and frying the noodle quicker than flies flock to my late Cocker Spaniel’s shit."

"I’ve gotta dog too," Jellwagger said.

"Now here’s my idea. Get ready for it. This shit’s gonna knock you right off this roof. Hold him down, Mr. Lee, just in case." Sam put his light beer down so he could grip both of Jellwagger’s arms. Thanks to his tipsiness, the grip wasn’t very sure. If Pat’s imminent pronouncement was really going to rattle the earth, Jellwagger was a goner. "I want you. Mr. Jellwagger. To come work. For me."

Sam T. Lee cackled.

"Where?" Jellwagger said, effortlessly slipping Sam’s grip so he could take his third Lagavulin from the waitress.

"Anywhere," Pat said, immediately diving into his third Lagavulin and coming away with an ice cube crunching in his mouth.

"He’s asking you to be his gopher," Sam said.

"Shut up, Mr. Lee. Mr. Jellwagger? This is what I want. I want you to be my gopher. My jack of all trades, if you will. If and when I want something done, I’ll give you a ring-a-ding-do on your cell. And you’ll do it."

"But I work!" Jellwagger said. The Lagavulin had made him feel so good that it finally occurred to him what Pat had been up to. Take the impressionable young lad who lives check to check, make him nice and drunk, and he’ll do anything for you. "Damn you to the Valley, Patrick Dinner!" He sipped his Lagavulin and crunched some ice before going on. "I work all day Monday through Friday. In case you haven’t noticed from high up in your fairy fucking tale castle, that’s what the majority of humanity does on a daily basis."

"Naturally I wouldn’t bother you while you’re at Powell and Powler. Although I might ask you to do something on your lunch break if I knew you could go somewhere and back within an hour. Like somewhere downtown."

"Our boy here does quite a bit of business downtown," Sam said.

"Don’t worry, Mr. Jellwagger. I pay well."

"He could buy you a house, and his bank account wouldn’t even feel it."

"I’m sorry, Mr. Lee, is there a reason you’re here?"

"To get drunk with you, sir."

"And you’re drinking light beer?"

"You know my theory, sir," Sam said. "Light beer is an oxymoron. They call it that so you’ll convince yourself it is light and that your body can stand drinking more of it than regular beer. Then you do, and they make more money. Say, wait a second, sir. Are you sure you don’t own a company that makes this particular light beer?"

"I wouldn’t be caught dead with a bottle of that foamy piss if you offered me Mars for free. So why on my green earth do you think I’d own a God damned light beer company? Eh, Mr. Lee? And how you can purport to be a heterosexual human being and still drink that tap water in disguise with a straight face is quite simply beyond me. Mind you, I figure myself to be pretty smart. You see, that’s how I’ve gotten this far, by my fucking noodle upstairs. And still, to this day and after all the years we’ve known each other, I simply cannot figure that out. So if you really are here to get drunk, then why don’t you do it? Eh, Mr. Lee? Mr. Jellwagger, give the man your Lagavulin. You’ve barely touched it, and at this point you're so loaded that standing up'll be harder than calculus. The last thing I need is another casualty on my hands." He grabbed Jellwagger’s drink, sloshing a bit on the table, and gave it to Sam. "If this young buck can handle two and a half glasses of this divine nectar, I’m confident you can handle a pittance." Sam frowned at the liquid as if he thought he might find something swimming in it. "Drink it, Mr. Lee, lest I get up right now and find you a boyfriend."

Downtown wasn’t looking so beautiful to Jellwagger anymore. It was fucking cold, and he felt sick to his stomach. The torpor of pleasure draped over his brain by the first two glasses of Lagavulin had been mutated into a torpor of fatigue and nausea by his few sips of the third. Jesus Herman Christ, how was he supposed to finish that data stack from hell? The sooner he got started on it, the sooner it would be done. The question remained about how he was going to be fit to work tomorrow. Was it tomorrow already? Forget it. If he dwelled on more than one obstacle at a time, he’d barf all over these megalomaniacal fucks.

He stood up, saw the office towers flip over, and toppled forward onto the table, spilling the drinks belonging to Pat’s two other friends opposite. Everyone laughed their asses off. Not only these four assholes, whose laughs sounded about ten thousand times louder than when he was sober, but just about everyone up here.

Pat helped him up. "Let’s take you home, my man."

"I’ve gotta work." Jellwagger barely got the words out of his mouth. Strings of slobber hung from his lower lip. Sam T. Lee put down the light beer and Lagavulin and got up to help Pat carry Jellwagger to the elevator.

"I would advise you to go home, my man, but I respect your call. Anyway, I’ll give you a ring-a-ding-bop on your cell soon enough and we’ll talk about how you can help me. And at the same time I can help you."

"Give me a day or two to recover, Ming the Merciless."

"If you had to work tonight," Sam said, "and you work downtown, what were you doing all the way over in Beverly Hills?"

Just listen to that bastard. Stone sober and all, wasn’t he? Still able to pronounce every single word so crisply and perfectly. If Jellwagger had had the strength, he would’ve picked up Sam T. Lee like a bodybuilder would a javelin and hurl his perfectly coifed ass onto the next roof over. "Speaking of my cell, have I told you where I got mine?" He pulled it out and held it up next to his face with a dumb smile. "Because apparently I told Sam T. Lee about my sister even though I have no memory at all of doing so. So I’m just making sure I haven’t given you the backstory on this little rocket ship."

They reached the elevator. "I don’t think you have," Pat said. "Has he, Mr. Lee?"

"No. But tell me, Jellwagger," Sam said. "Do you remember, just before getting up and falling over, how you were saying you wanted to have children with your boss? Some Latina named Betsy?"

"Oh God, I said that?" Jellwagger looked at Pat and wanted to puke on him. "You see how Sam just calls me Jellwagger and not Mr. Jellwagger, Mr. Dinner? Take a cue from that. And take a cue from his hot hair."

"He addresses everyone with mister," Sam said.

"Just those I respect," Pat said.

Sam left them to it at the elevator. Jellwagger conked out on Pat’s shoulder during the ride down and didn’t come to until Pat was opening the limo door for him in front of the Sanwa Bank building. Jellwagger didn’t think he’d ever been so cold in his life. Pat was saying something to him, it sounded like a question. Instead of giving a shit, he lumbered into the building thinking about those same zombies he’d thought about on his way out earlier that evening. So this was what it felt like to be the walking dead.

When Jellwagger got back to his desk, he found Stu Dobkins sleeping on the floor next to his chair. Stu’s eyes snapped open. "Michael Johnson Jellwag!" He sat up. "Whatever you saw tonight, keep it to yourself. You read me?"

Jellwagger puked all over Stu’s fat Quasimodo face. And when I say he puked, I mean that our man puked like a champ. Forget the booze. Seeing it all gush out, you would’ve thought Jellwagger had drunk Niagara Falls. The slop spewed into Stu’s face and his glasses and his innumerable chins. Through the stomach acid Jellwagger could smell the Lagavulin. And the Spaten. And the sausages. And even that horrifically overpriced broth.

Stu leaped to his feet with amazing deftness considering his Everest-sized girth. "You alcoholic son of a motherfucker!"

"Leave my motherfucker out of this, Stu Dobkins! Unless you want me to tell all the world and the rich bastards who control it that you were taking a VIP tour of Grant’s asshole tonight. Or would it be considered yesterday now?"

Stu spit out the barf that had snuck into his mouth, then used his shirt and tie to wipe off his face. "Now you listen to me. If you say one word about mine and Grant’s fulfilling two fantasies with one bout of hot sex–sex so hot you’d be jealous if you knew just how hot it was because you’ll never reach that level of hotness in your own sex life–I will go to Betsy and tell her that instead of finishing your work, you went out and got hammered. And then came back drunk. Oh, and you don’t think she’ll believe me?" Stu whipped out his cell which, like the one Carla bought Jellwagger, had a built-in camera. He held it out at arm’s length, aimed it at himself, smiled, and pressed a button. Then he turned it around and showed Jellwagger the picture of the puked-on smiling Stu. "I’ve got evidence." He flipped his phone shut and stalked away. Just before rounding the corner to the bathrooms, he stopped and shook a finger at our hero. "It was all going so well. You’ve been here four years, and I never had to deal with you once. Yesterday–yes, it would be considered yesterday now–I deal with you for the first time, and I have the day from hell. Curse you, Michael Johnson Jellwag!" He stomped away.

Jellwagger sat down at his desk, his eyes hanging low and his arms feeling as insubstantial as Stu’s hair. He needed something strong in him and now. Coffee. Soda. Something to kick him in the ass or he’d never get this done. He wiped another string of spit from his lip and said, just before his chin hit his chest, "It’s Jellwagger. Drop the mister shit. Drop the Michael shit. It’s just Jellwagger."

To be continued...

At the Movies with Governor Tom, Holiday Edition: A Christmas Carol and The Shop Around the Corner

"I know! I know! Sausages!"

And so was the very first line of dialogue spoken on the screen by actress June Lockhart, in 1938's A Christmas Carol.

Last night I attended a very special Christmas double feature of two...ancient!...movie classics. First up was the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen as our pal Ebenezer. Following that was the 1940 classic The Shop Around the Corner. Ever see that? It's one of Jimmy Stewart's earlier stuff, when he was in his early thirties. This was six years before It's a Wonderful Life. Back in the fall of 1998, The Shop Around the Corner was remade into that Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan flick You've Got Mail. I hadn't seen either The Shop Around the Corner or this version of A Christmas Carol before, so the prospect of being introduced to them on the big screen was kinda cool. What made this event an extra special holiday treat was that, between films, there was a Q&A with actress June Lockhart.

If you're my age or younger, it's likely you've never heard of June. While she was in some major motion pictures early on, soon enough her big thing became TV. Among her dizzying amount of credits is playing Ruth Martin (the mom) on the show Lassie back in the late fifties and early sixties. On the heels of that came Lost in Space, where she again played the mom, Maureen Robinson. After that came Petticoat Junction. And on top of all that, June's racked up a ton of TV guest star credits throughout her career, including recent stuff like Las Vegas, Cold Case, and Grey's Anatomy.

Her connection to last night's event was that the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol was her very first acting gig. She was all of 12, and her tiny role was that of Belinda Cratchit, one of the half dozen or so kids of Bob and Mrs. Cratchit. Bob, if you recall, is that poor guy who slaves away for Ebenezer Scrooge and whose several children include Tiny Tim. In the film Bob Cratchit's played by Gene Lockhart. Notice the same surname as June? Yes, you got it. Gene Lockhart was June's real-life dad. And Mrs. Cratchit was played by her real-life ma, Kathleen Lockhart.

Even if you've never read the original Charles Dickens story, surely you've seen one of the billions of movie versions that have been adapted from it. Released on December 16, 1938, and showing first only at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, this version of the tale is pretty straightforward. It starts with an establishing shot of London with a caption that says something like "A little more than a century ago..." So right off the bat you see that they're doing a faithful adaption. At only one hour and ten minutes, the story moves along pretty fast. First we're introduced to Ebenezer's nephew Fred (Barry MacKay) meeting Tiny Tim Cratchet for the first time on his way to his uncle's business. Then Fred arrives at Scrooge and Marley and gives a bottle of booze to the long-suffering Bob Cratchet. Before they can have too much fun, of course, Fred's good ol' Uncle Ebenezer shows up and spoils the party. And I tell ya, Reginald Owen was brilliant as that crusty old killjoy. I mean he was nasty. When these two solicitors show up to collect money for charity, they try to impress upon Ebenezer that if these paupers don't get money and a place to stay, they'll die a miserable death. And Ebenezer's like, "Your point being?"

Things go south from there in a hurry when Bob, on his way home and just trying to have some snowball fun with the other boys in the neighborhood, crafts the perfect snowball and unwittingly nails his boss square in that goofy top hat. Suffice it to say Scrooge sacks him on the spot. That doesn't spoil Bob's mood, though, even though he's got a wife and six kiddies to support, one of them requiring constant medical care. He stops by the food market and buys tons of stuff for dinner. When he gets home, he makes his kids try to guess the awesome feast that lurks under all that packaging. And this is where we get to our very own June Lockhart's acting debut and her one and only line of dialogue in the flick as she tries to guess what Dad brought home: "I know! I know! Sausages!"

I won't go too much into the rest of it. You know how it goes. Marley shows up and gives his old colleague a what for, the ghosts show up, and Reginald Owen does a terrific job showing us a guy doing a total one-eighty thanks to a healthy splash of spiritual cold water to his wrinkly face. As a side note, Lionel Barrymore, not Reginald Owen, was MGM's first choice to play Scrooge. Unfortunately, though, 1938 was the same year Lionel came down with arthritis so severe it confined him to a wheelchair. Still, he did get to play Mr. Potter, a Scrooge-type character, eight years later in It's a Wonderful Life.

Before I go on, I should point out that the Spirit of Christmas Past was played by Ann Rutherford. You know her? If you've seen any of those Andy Hardy movies with Mickey Rooney, then I know you've seen her. She played Polly Benedict in those. At the time of A Christmas Carol, Ann was all of 18 years old. Yes, 18, and her acting career had already been going at full steam since she was 15. She was only 17, for example, when the Hardy gig came along. And just weeks after finishing A Christmas Carol, she scored a role as one of the O'Hara brood in Gone with the Wind. Soon after that came Pride and Prejudice. Ann never lost a beat in her career until she retired in the mid 1970s, when she was in her mid fifties. And yes, she's still alive.

The Shop Around the Corner was adapted from a play called Parfumerie by a Hungarian writer named Miklos Laszlo. Like the play, the film is set in Budapest. And also like the play, and plays in general, the film tends to stay at one setting for long stretches. Here's the gist of the plot. Jimmy Stewart plays a chap called Kralik, Alfred Kralik, the longest-working employee at this Budapest gift shop called Matuschek's, which is owned and operated by a guy named, you guessed it, Hugo Matuschek. When the story starts, Alfred's already been engaged in a sort of pen pal relationship with an anonymous woman he met through a singles ad. They've exchanged four letters so far. Originally he'd been browsing through the paper looking to buy a used encyclopedia or something. He'd been growing weary of singles events and thought he'd try more scholarly pursuits. That's when he came across those singles ads with women saying they wanted to correspond with guys about various cultural things like books and what have you. So Alfred said sure and signed up.

On the day the movie starts, a woman shows up at Matuschek's desperate for a job. Her name's Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan), and her predicament at the time was all too common. Remember that this was 1940. Pretty much the whole world was still financially depressed. Alfred tells her they have no openings, but Klara demands to see the boss. She simply won't take no for an answer. She makes a sale that impresses Hugo Matuschek, and he hires her on the spot.

The film jumps forward a few months. Christmas is approaching. Alfred and Klara are feeling anything but the holiday spirit. They ram horns on pretty much a daily basis. Klara's good at what she does. Alfred doesn't admit it, but he feels threatened by her. He's been there a long time and figures he'll run the store when Hugo retires and doesn't want any whipper-snapper upsetting his plans and making him look bad. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, Alfred and Klara are each other's secret pen pal.

And they're secretly having a ball exchanging letters with someone they don't know. In fact, after months of it, they've finally agreed to meet in person. Unfortunately, that's the same day that Hugo Matuschek sacks Alfred on the spot for no reason. Down in the dumps and in no mood to go on a blind date, Alfred decides not to meet his pen pal, but he does show up at the cafe where they'd agreed to meet just so he can see what the mystery woman looks like. When he sees that it's Klara, he goes in and pretends that he was just stopping by, and of course they trade a few barbs simmering with sexual tension. You know they want each other, and that Alfred's secretly thrilled that Klara turned out to be his pen pal.

Meanwhile back at the store, Hugo Matuschek tries to kill himself. He would've done so had one of his employees not shown up at the last second to grab the gun. You see, Hugo fired Alfred because he thought Alfred was having an affair with his wife. But then a P.I. informs Hugo that nah, it was someone else. So Hugo gets pissed at himself for firing Alfred, and he's kind of glum that his wife's cheating on him. Hence the suicide attempt.

Anyway, Alfred comes back to work. Hugo's spirits go back up as his store makes a ton of money in Christmas sales. And finally of course, Alfred reveals to Klara that he's her pen pal. That's the very last scene, and it's very well written. It's my favorite scene in the film, which says a lot considering there are a lot of great scenes with terrific and clever repartees flying every which way. If you haven't seen it, please do yourself a favor and chuck it onto the ol' Netflix queue. And just as a side note, You've Got Mail wasn't the first remake. In 1949, not even a decade later, it was remade into the Judy Garland vehicle In the Good Old Summertime.

I know The Shop Around the Corner has nothing to do with June Lockhart, but it's one of those Christmas movies that doesn't get shown on TV very much. I'd always wanted to see it but never got around to it. Seeing it on the big screen was a nice bit of gravy on top of what was already a cool holiday screening event.

As for the Q&A, it struck me right away how un-82 years old June Lockhart is. Seriously, she could easily pass for a gal in her fifties or so. I'm not just talking about her looks, but her whole being and bearing. She's so alive, very animated and spirited and always smiling or laughing. They did have a moderator up there to ask questions and stuff, but he became redundant in no time flat. June ran the show. In fact, it was kinda funny. After the Q&A, during the break before they started The Shop Around the Corner, I hopped on out to the concessions to get a refill on the 'corn. Nearby I could hear the moderator talking to someone. He was like, "This was the easiest Q&A I've ever done. I didn't have to do anything." He told his friend he'd done so much research on her career and came prepared with all these random trivia questions, but he never needed them.

Regarding A Christmas Carol, June said that at the time it didn't seem like a big deal at all. At her household, they would always put on their own little productions of A Christmas Carol with her parents and some of the actors they knew. For instance, the guy who ended up playing Marley in the film, Leo G. Caroll, always played Scrooge at their house parties. So when time came to make a film version, it was ho-hum, just going through the motions one more time. The entire film was shot, by the way, at the MGM backlot in L.A., so of course all that snow was fake.

Among other memories she had of the film was the huge crush she had on Barry MacKay, the dude who plays Scrooge's nephew Fred. Apparently he could sing quite the tune, and you can sort of tell that when you watch it, just by the whole way he delivers simple lines like, "Hey, how are ya?" or whatever. During the Spirit of Christmas Future segment, when Scrooge sees the Cratchit family mourning Tiny Tim, June said that prior to shooting that scene, director Edwin L. Marin played Schubert's "Ave Maria" over and over and over to make the actors unbelievably depressed. Whenever she watches that scene, she always wells up at the bit when her dad Gene pats the back of her little head while she's sitting on the floor and he's sitting in a chair telling everyone how he'd just run into Fred on the way home. She also got to meet the film's producer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was only 29 at the time. If you recognize his name, that's 'cause he went on to become fairly huge in the biz. He wrote and directed stuff like Guys and Dolls, All About Eve, and Cleopatra.

Before anyone could ask her, June explained that the reason she didn't get any screen credit was mainly because there was no union like the Screen Actors Guild at the time. Although she does only have that one line of dialogue, June is on the screen more than once, especially during the Tiny Tim mourning scene. She definitely would've gotten screen credit today. As June put it, these days even the person who serves coffee on the set will get their name in the end credits.

As for her parents Kathleen and Gene, you're not going to believe how they met. They were introduced to each other by Thomas Edison. Come on now, how many people can say the frickin' inventor of light played matchmaker to Mom and Dad?! You see, the thing is, Tom had this sort of caravan type deal that he'd travel with once in a while to promote all of his awesome inventions. Part of this caravan included actors and performers and various peeps who'd put on shows at every stop. Enter Gene Lockhart, an actor from Canada who became part of this caravan deal. Kathleen Arthur was an immigrant from England trying to establish an acting career on this side of the pond. After they each auditioned successfully for this one Edison caravan production, Tom brought them together and said, "Dudes. You'll be working together. Now get those lines down pat." Or something. Anyway, how cool is that?!

One little interesting tidbit about June's growing up that shows just how tiny a globe this really is, is that when she started high school soon after A Christmas Carol, the high school she went to was the Westlake School for Girls in Bel Air. That just happens to be the same high school my mom went to about 20 or so years later. The difference is that June actually lived there. She'd go on Sunday night and board at the school until Friday afternoon. Meanwhile her parents kept working, which meant June got to know all these awesome actors on the weekends. The way she told it, every time she came home for the weekend during her Westlake years, there'd always be get-togethers and social gatherings of one sort or another. Talk about making contacts to break into the biz! June was barely out of Westlake's doors when she landed supporting roles in stuff like Meet Me in St. Louis and Son of Lassie.

But again, soon enough June's big thing became TV. Lassie was a good steady gig that almost wasn't. Her role was originally played by Cloris Leachman, but Cloris dropped out after 20 episodes. June took it from there. On this night, though, the audience really wanted to hear about Lost in Space, which came right on the heels of Lassie, when June was in her early forties. This one guy in the audience, for example, asked June who the greater miser was: Ebenezer Scrooge or Lost in Space creator Irwin Allen. June laughed a healthy hearty laugh at that one. Irwin Allen, she said, was great at what he did. The slight little flaw in his character was that he was a raging weirdo. For example, Irwin decreed at one point that, going forward, June and Guy Williams (who played her husband) were no longer allowed to touch each other. That's right. Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, even though they were a couple 'n all, were not allowed so much as to hug. As June put it: "All we could do was look at each other longingly." She said that Irwin Allen was sensitive to all the kiddies who watched his show, and he didn't want any risque content. Like a married couple hugging.

One episode in particular that she talked about was "The Great Vegetable Rebellion." Apparently many people in the audience remembered that one because no sooner was the episode title out of her mouth than everyone laughed. This was the second to last episode of season three, which turned out to be the last season of the show. June said the idea for this episode came about because the writers had run out of ideas. The gist of the plot is that the Robinson family lands on a planet where plants are just as smart as people. The family gets kidnapped by this giant carrot named Tybo, who threatens to turn them into trees. Dr. Smith, meanwhile, becomes a giant stalk of celery. At this point in the Q&A, June actually got up and acted out a scene in this episode where several of the characters were supposed to walk down a set of stairs. But apparently the producers of the show were too poor to film this scene with a set of stairs. So what the actors did, as June demonstrated for us, was walk off screen while bending their knees more and more, so that it looks like they're going down. And then eventually they had to do the same thing in reverse to simulate walking back up the stairs. She said the whole thing was so absurd--the giant talking vegetables, the simulated stair climb--that she and one other cast member couldn't help laughing their asses off between takes. Irwin Allen finally got so pissed that he decided to suspend June and her castmate from the show for two episodes. June said it didn't bother her so much because she still got paid for those two episodes. And as it turned out, Lost in Space only had one more episode anyway before it became lost to TV viewers.

Here's one more example of Irwin Allen's eccentricity that June talked about. Despite the fact that the writers were scraping the barrel for episode ideas, the ratings were good, and the network really wanted the show back for a fourth season. All they needed, right? Was for Irwin Allen to submit brief synopses for every episode idea he had for season four. He never submitted jack. With no explanation at all, he simply decided not to submit any episode ideas, and the network was forced to drop the show unceremoniously. But again, as "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" sort of hints at, the reason Irwin didn't submit any more ideas was because he was probably out of them.

As I mentioned way up above, June is still working, mainly with one-off guest spots on network TV. She did mention this one film she just finished shooting called Wesley. It's about John Wesley, the English Anglican minister and Christian theologian who helped kick-start the Methodist movement. He's also the namesake of Wesleyan College in Georgia. June plays his mom, Susanna Wesley. She was pretty blunt in saying it wasn't much more than a job. If it played on any screens outside those of Methodist church basements, she'd be surprised. Ohhhhh-kayyyyyyy.

Watching her parents on the big screen just before the Q&A got her all nostalgic, so she went back to talking about them. She's obviously proud of Kathleen and Gene. When someone asked if she was an only child, she said yes and that was just fine with her. She loved being the center of her parents' universe. One interesting piece of trivia about her dad Gene was that he wrote plays as well as acted in them. At age 28 Gene Lockhart wrote his first play, a musical called The Pierrot Players. Gene wrote the book and the lyrics and starred in it. Among the songs he wrote for it was none other than "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise." Have you heard that one? It's fairly popular because it's been covered by everyone and their cousin. I mean you've got music legends like Oscar Peterson, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Django Reinhardt who did their own versions of that. In 1949 Les Paul and Mary Ford did a cover of it, which went on to sell zillions of copies. So the next time you hear anyone covering "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise," you know what to say:

"I know! I know! Gene Lockhart!"

Temple at the Getty Center

I did it!

Finally, last night and at long last, I mustered up the courage to attend my first Temple University alumni event. Why is that a big deal, you ask? Pretty much for the same reason toughing out the Screenwriting Expo six weeks ago was a big deal. It meant journeying to a land swarming with strangers, small groups of whom knew small groups of others, adding up to a congregation of people who had other people to talk to while I hovered around the crowds of heads like a butterfly who can't make up his frickin' mind about where to land. When I originally got this invitation back in mid October, I hesitated. I'd gotten invitations to alumni events before but chickened out. The last one was in July, I think, when the Phillies came to town to play the Dodgers. This time I spent a week vacillating. And then finally, the same day the Screenwriting Expo started in fact, I shot Temple an e-mail saying basically, "Oh why not? Count me in!"

Are you familiar with Temple University? If you live in the northeast, it's very possible you are. If you follow college hoops, it's also possible, although the last few seasons have been kind of tough. I think the last time Temple made it to the NCAA tournament was 2003. And then a couple years after that, our long-time coach John Chaney started taking drastic measures like ordering one of his players to break the arm of some poor dude on the other team. After that it was like, "Um...John? Does the word 'retire' mean anything to you?" So he left, and now we've got this new coach from Penn named Fran Dunphy. It's only his second season and so too early to tell if he's making a difference. Temple's a fairly large public university in North Philadelphia. And I do mean large. When I went there from 1994 to 1998, it had something like 30,000 students. As of the start of the 2007-2008 academic year, the head count had topped 35,000. Bill Cosby went to Temple. That's right, kids. The Coz. When I was still living in South Jersey in the nineties, I used to see commercials of him getting me all jacked up over the Temple Challenge. "The Temple challenge: Go for it," the Coz said. That's not why I went there, though. Simply put, my dad teaches there, which means I went for free. You got that right. I didn't pay a single dime. Thanks, Dad!

Anyway, the alumni association started up this thing a year or two ago called Temple on the Road where they host alumni events in big cities across the country. But every time they sent out invites to me, I would just stare at the stupid things before recycling them. Not this time, though. I figured I had to face up to it at some point. Parallel with this increased activity in alumni outreach is, not surprisingly, their monster fundraising campaign. It officially started in July 2002, but they're just now getting really excited about it. It's called Access to Excellence, and the goal is basically to raise something like a billion dollars by the end of 2009, when Temple celebrates birthday number 125. It might sound like I'm exaggerating when I say a billion, but I'm pretty sure it's close to that number. It's a very, very high nine-digit number, let's put it that way. So far I haven't paid them a penny. Shame on me, right? Don't worry, I will. Next week.

It was really stupid of me to chicken out all this time about these events, though. Seriously. I have nothing against Temple at all. I had a great time there. Busy as all hell, of course, what with 16- and 17-credit semesters paired with a job at night. But still, I had lots of great professors and learned tons. My major was film and my minor was German, but it was the electives that turned out to be the most interesting. Like in my last semester I took this class on Roman history from about 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. It was awesome! I was really into it and even went out of my way at the end of it to ask the professor about further reading. I shit you not, I actually asked for further reading. Who does that?! I also took a racquetball class in their phys ed department. I don't think I have ever had so much fun in my life. I couldn't believe I got credit for playing racquetball for Christ's sake. Anyway, point is, it was a very fulfilling four years. So why hide from them?

Last night's event took place at the Getty Center. If you live in the L.A. area and you haven't been to the Getty, shame on you. Get over there, stat! If you don't live in L.A., next time you're in town, you have to go. It's a moral imperative that you make the trek in the little tram that winds its way up that gargantuan hill casting its shadow over the Brentwood section of West Los Angeles. That's where the Getty is. It's a massive complex of exhibition halls and research libraries and gardens sprawled across the top of this hill in Brentwood. On clear days you can stand at the outdoor cafe and catch postcard views stretching from downtown in the east all the way to the ocean. We're talking panorama, kids. And the buildings of the complex are stunning. In fact, the museum complex itself could be viewed as a work of art. The Getty Center is a relatively young museum. In fact, it's celebrating birthday number 10 right now. It opened on December 16, 1997. It wasn't the first museum with Jean Paul Getty's name on it, though. That distinction belongs to the Getty Villa out in Malibu. That opened back in '76, just months after Jean Paul kicked the bucket, which kind of sucks 'cause he'd been really passionate about seeing the Villa come to fruition. The Villa, while I'm digressing here, was originally called the Getty Museum because it was the only Getty museum of any kind. Then in January of 1998, a month after the Getty Center opened, it closed its doors for an eight-year overhaul. It reopened as the Getty Villa in January of 2006. I've been there a few times since it reopened. It's awesome. The stuff there is mainly focused on ancient worlds, specifically Rome, Greece, and Etruria. It's good stuff, so go there too when you come to L.A. In the words of Alan Coulter on The Late Show: "You'll be glad ya did!"

I wasn't kidding about that tram, by the way. That's how it works at the Getty Center. You park in a garage that goes underground a whole bunch of levels, then take an elevator back up to the surface and catch this tram that winds up the hillside like a big albino serpent or something. And it really takes its time too, just sort of gliding along, giving you plenty of time to take in the awesome views of West L.A., Hollywood and, way off yonder, downtown. And if you peer straight down, you get to see all those poor suckers sitting in gridlock on the 405 freeway. Ha ha ha!

The alumni event last night coincided with this terrific exhibition the Getty Center's got going right now. It's called Medieval Treasures from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum is apparently undergoing some major overhaul and has generously decided to share its Medieval stash with other museums. Actually, just two museums. First it went to Munich, Germany for a spell, and now it's at the Getty. After this, it's back to Cleveland. Before I delve into the exhibition, let me talk about the actual alumni event.

So it kicked off at 6:30 p.m. at the Getty restaurant which is on the west side of the front part of the complex. That meant things were looking up already. On weeknights the Getty usually shuts its doors at 6 p.m., so by starting the event at half-past, we Owls had that whole joint to ourselves! When I walked into the restaurant, I stopped at the welcoming table where they had a sticker with my name on it to slap on my shirt. It also included the school my field of study was in (SCT, which stands for School of Communications and Theater) and the year I commenced ('98). Also on the table was tons of free schwag, such as bumper stickers, fridge magnets, lapel pins, little desk flags, notepads and whatnot. And these really fancy silver and black pens. I hawked several of those suckers. Here's where it gets even better, though. Way toward the back corner of the restaurant they had...(wait for it)...a free bar! Suffice it to say that I wasn't in the place two seconds before I had an Amstel Light in hand. They had other beers too, like Sierra Nevada and Guinness. But I'm not big on the pale stuff, and I wasn't in the mood for something leaden like Guinness. Meanwhile, waiters were making the rounds with trays full of shrimp on sticks and butternut squash. I'm pretty sure that was my first time ever having butternut squash. Not bad 't'all.

So for like the next hour or so, I stood around the restaurant throwing down Amstels and slowly bulging up my pockets with the cherry and white school schwag. Easily half the attendees, if not more, were age 50 and up, and the vast majority of them came with their significant others. And they pretty much stayed at the side of their significant others. I made the rounds of that friggin' restaurant I don't know how many times, feeling braver with each passing Amstel, but for the life of me I couldn't find a way to strike up a conversation with anyone. I suppose I could have cut into some of the small groups of people sitting at the dining tables or standing at those taller, smaller round tables near the bar, but that's just too weird for me. I can't just cut in while a group of pals are catching up on old times and be like "Hiya, kids! What's cookin' with my fellow L.A.-based Owls?" Okay, I wouldn't say exactly that, but you see my point. That's not to say I didn't enjoy myself. Aside from the free booze, nibbles, and schwag, I got to see in person Ann Weaver Hart. She's been the President of Temple since mid 2006, so she's still sort of new. And she's the first female president Temple's ever had. I've been reading about her in the quarterly alumni mag since she came aboard, including a great cover story on her in the summer '06 issue. Plus she writes her own column in the front of each issue. So it was cool to see her in person at last. During the reception she was talking to an older couple who were very well dressed and looked very distinguished. I stood nearby and eavesdropped while pretending to people watch. Ol' Ann was basically talking to these cats about all the stuff happening on campus, like building projects and whatnot. Don't you know this couple were probably big donors.

At around 7:30 p.m. the waiters stopped serving us the squash and the shrimp and told us to adjourn to the Harold M. Williams auditorium on the east side of the front of the complex, on the other side of the tram stop. Like the restaurant, the auditorium was another building at the Getty Center where I'd never been. It's quite huge with plush seating arranged stadium style. Down at the front there's a stage with a giant screen and a podium to the left. When we walked in, the screen was displaying the Temple logo with the words Access to Excellence along the bottom. By this time I'd thrown down three or so Amstels, so instead of sitting to the side and/or toward the back, which I would've done under more sober circumstances, I sat all the way down in the center of the front row. The auditorium had far more seats than there were alumni and friends, so everyone sort of spread out. No one else, I might add, sat down in the front row.

Before President Hart took the podium, this very official-looking guy from Temple came up and gave a little preview of the evening's agenda, which included free dinner up in the entrance hall followed by the exhibit. Then this younger, more casually dressed guy came up. He's an alum who helps organize the L.A. events for On the Road. His whole thing was just giving us a preview of various alumni events coming up in 2008.

And then President Hart came to the podium. She thanked us all for coming out and spoke for about 15 minutes or so. She pointed out that this was by far the largest alumni turnout for L.A. And it could very easily be bigger next time, what with the more than three thousand Temple alums living in the L.A. area. The highlight of her talk was a little video that was basically a series of snippets with current and former students talking about what they loved about Temple. It also showed all the current building projects underway on the main campus and how Temple student enrollment is going up, etc. In other words, the future for Temple's looking darned bright. The whole point of the video, of course, was to get everyone in the audience all motivated to give money to the Access to Excellence campaign. And I have to say, it worked on me. Plus, Ann Weaver Hart seems like a genuinely nice woman, not a slick car saleswoman type at all, just very professional and smiley and sweet. So I'll give her money. No really, I will. Next week.

And then finally up stepped Amy Powell to the podium. Good ol' Aim is a Harvard-educated art historian who only just joined Temple's art school faculty in 2006. Being at the Getty was kind of like a mini alumni event for her because before Temple, she did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute. Aim gave us a half-hour lecture about the Medieval Treasures exhibit and used a slide show to show some of the artifacts we'd be seeing later that night. The exhibit was far too huge and comprehensive to do full justice to in thirty minutes, but Aim highlighted stuff we should be sure to look for. Thank God she did, too. As you'll see in a minute, there ended up being a bit of a time crunch.

But first, supper time! After Aim's lecture, we all got up and walked over to the entrance hall. During regular hours, the entrance hall is where the information desk is located. And then off to the side you've got the gift shop and lounge area, restrooms 'n whatnot. On this night, the entire central part of the hall was set up for a huge dinner buffet with long rectangular tables with tons of food, big round tables nearby with tons of desserts, and then of course a sea of little square dining tables all over the place. Even though I'd been sitting in the front row, I somehow got up the steps to the top and out of the auditorium and over to the entrance hall before anyone else. Part of that reason may have been my starvation. It was now somewhere between eight-thirty and nine o'clock at night, well beyond when I usually eat dinner. Let me tell you, though, it was worth the wait. Want to see what they had? Not much. Just heaps of tri-tip pepper-crusted steak that was melt-in-your-mouth tender. Oh, and thick juicy salmon. Side dishes included steamed carrots, a kind of salad with Italian dressing, and polenta. Like the butternut squash during the reception, the polenta was a first for me. You ever try it? It looks a lot like cornmeal mush, grits or what have you. Only it's the Italian version so there's raisins and stuff in it. Not bad 't'all. The dessert tables didn't have much, only stuff like pecan melt-aways and these little baby lemon tartlets and hunks of dark chocolate bark with cherries inside. I wasn't sitting alone long before a fiftysomething couple joined me. The guy was a Temple alum, but he'd gone to Temple so long ago that it was when Temple still had a high school in addition to the college. So he was a graduate of Temple High School, not the university we all know and love today. I told him I had no idea Temple had ever had a high school. He said he figured if people just looked at him, it would be self-evident. The wife had no connection to Temple at all. In fact, she was a West L.A. native. Her alma mater was UCLA. After I told her I got my masters at cross-town rival USC, she smiled and didn't speak to me for the rest of the night.

There was only one rub to the magnificent feast: We had no time to eat it. I mean okay, we did, but not that much. I was still letting the steak melt in my mouth when a woman came around to all the tables and said the exhibition hall would be closing in a half-hour or something. Knowing how massive this exhibition was, I wasted no time in wolfing down everything, scarfing some of the desserts, and hurrying out into the center of the complex where a wide flight of steps leads up to the Exhibitions Pavilion. The Getty actually has five pavilions for exhibitions, the other four being North, South, East, and West. Those four have mostly permanent installations, but the Exhibitions Pavilion is always set aside for major visiting stuff like Medieval Treasures.

Okay. Now for the exhibition. Medieval Treasures covered a huge time period, from around the year 200 all the way to 1500. To make things more organized, the exhibition was split up into four general time periods: Early Christian and Byzantine (200 to 800), Early Medieval (800 to 1200), High Gothic (1150 to 1300), and Late Medieval (1300 to 1500). The "High" in High Gothic, by the way, just means the stuff in that part of the exhibition was made in northern Europe ("high" up in Europe), places like Holland, Flanders (present-day Belgium), northern France and what have you.

One of the definite highlights of the Early Christian and Byzantine stuff was a quartet of little marble sculptures from the late 200s that dramatize scenes from the Old Testament book of the prophet Jonah. He's the guy who was swallowed by that giant sea monster and spent three days in the monster's tummy praying and whatnot. And then on the third day, the giant sea monster puked Jonah back out onto the beach or something. The story is thought to foreshadow the whole story of Jesus dying and coming back to life. But the really big deal about these little marble bad boys is that they're very rare examples of marble artwork from that time period with Christian subject matter. Other stuff from this part of the exhibition included a tapestry icon that featured Jesus as the divine ruler, an ivory plaque that featured the Virgin Mary with little baby Jesus on her lap, and this gorgeous gold octagonal pendant with a gold coin mounted in the center featuring the profile of Emperor Constantine holding a globe and raising his right hand in salutation.

My favorite piece from the Early Medieval section was this portable altar from the German state of Saxony. The story goes that back in the year 1030, Count Liudolf I of Saxony and his woman Gertrude founded a church and then donated a whole bunch of relics and liturgical objects to the church treasury. Countess Gertrude was the one who commissioned the portable altar specifically for the new church. The Early Medieval works also included a copper water vessel shaped like a lion, also from Saxony. You also had this heavily gilded and richly colored page taken from a Gospel book in a German abbey. And then there was a gilded copper and enamel pendant that featured Jesus and his mom. That piece was made in a region called Bosan, which is part of present-day Belgium.

One of the artifacts I kept going back to in the High Gothic section was this gilded silver table fountain from Paris that was made in the early 1300s or so. Besides the fact that it just looked really neat, it was also clever in a technical sense. Someone obviously poured a ton of time and effort into this thing. The way it worked when it was actually being used was that water would be pumped up a central pipe and then cascade down stepped terraces, turning wheels that rang little bells. Apparently the main point of it was to entertain guests. I just hope whoever made the thing was well paid. Another work here that caught my eye was a trio of alabaster figurines from Burgundy. They're part of a grand total of 41 such figurines that stand around the base of Philip the Bold's tomb. Phil was the Duke of Burgundy back in the late 1300s. Another piece from the High Gothic was a work that Phil himself commissioned as a wedding gift to his son and daughter-in-law. It's an ornate gold panel that depicts the Annunciation. Other works here included a missal from France that was richly illustrated on gilded pages. A missal, by the way, is a book that contains all the instructions and texts for the celebration of Mass. And finally, I can't talk about the High Gothic stuff without mentioning this neat little ivory mirror case from France that shows a man and a woman on the front playing chess. Apparently the scene was inspired by a popular epic poem of the 1300s that narrates the adventures of Huon of Bordeaux. Huon, right? He's charged with playing chess against the daughter of a Saracen admiral whose castle he entered in disguise. If he wins, Huon gains the woman's favor as well as some cash. If he loses, he gets his head lopped off.

And with that we reach the fourth and final section of Medieval Treasures, the Late Medieval period. These works included more Christian-themed stuff, like an illustrated Book of Hours from Flanders, an Italian altarpiece with little oil illustrations of Jesus, his ma, Mary Magdalene, and various saints on a gilded panel background, and an alabaster figure of Saint Jerome from Germany which shows him removing a thorn from a lion's paw. Among the non-religious stuff was this huge oil painting from the 1400s by a German guy named Lucas Cranach the Elder. It shows a hunting scene near a castle called Hartenfels in eastern Germany. My favorite part of this time period, though, had to be the various suits of armor and weaponry. They had this one sword, right? It was called a long sword, and that name could not have been more apt. The thing was easily six or so feet long, including the hilt, which accounted for maybe a quarter of that length. They also had a halberd, which I'm not sure I'd ever seen in my life outside a movie. The suits of mail and armor included this one sort of half-armor from Italy made of gilded steel. It's called half-armor because it only protects your noggin and your upper body. This is the kind of armor people would wear during foot tournaments, which were basically like practice combat sessions with your fellow troops conducted with a barrier separating you from your opponent, hence there being no need for lower body protection.

I actually didn't have to rush through the exhibition quite as quickly as I'd feared. The Getty people were such good sports that they kept the joint open until past ten o'clock. I actually had time to scarf a few more desserts before calling it a night. I may not have made any acquaintances the way I did at the Screenwriting Expo two months ago, but I still had a blast. I'd been wanting to see this exhibition anyway, number one. And number two, President Hart and friends really spoiled us rotten with all the food and booze. I've never had so much fun at the Getty in my life.

At the Movies with Governor Tom: Persepolis

'Tis the season, apparently, for incredibly unique French films with fresh, original voices. I mean really. Last night, exactly one month after seeing The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I caught a sneak preview of this new animated French flick called Persepolis. Ye must catch this sucker post haste. It's terrific. And don't let the fact that it's in black and white animation scare you away. Soon enough you'll get so immersed in the story you won't be able to imagine it in any other format.

Here's the scoop on Persepolis. Back in 2003 or 2004, this Iranian-born French gal in her thirties named Marjane Satrapi (pronounced mar-ZHAN SAHT-rapee) published a pair of memoirs about her coming of age in Iran, and a bit in Vienna, during the eighties and early nineties. But these weren't your garden variety memoirs, mind you. They were graphic memoirs. In other words, she wrote them in the format of a comic book, with drawing panels and dialogue balloons and what have you. And in black and white.

The first tome was entitled Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. This basically covers 1978 or so until Marji, as her family and friends call her, goes off to a French high school in Vienna in the mid eighties. So basically it starts when she's eight, and when the Shah of Iran is about to go bye-bye thanks to a little thing called the Islamic Revolution. Her parents are very politically active and, like a lot of Iranians, are all for the Shah's overthrow. Adding to her family's interesting dynamic is that Marji's directly descended from the last emperor of Iran. Anyway, if you know anything about the government that replaced the Shah's, it's a classic example of "Be careful what you wish for." If anything, things just got worse after the Revolution. Further, Iran no sooner came under a new regime than it was thrust into a brutal war with it's next-door neighbor Iraq, a war which consumed tons of lives and most of the 1980s. Anyway, we see all this through little Marji's eyes. She's a monster Bruce Lee fan and soon falls under the spell of Iron Maiden. That is, after she gets the Bee Gees bug out of her system. Plus, she positively idolizes her Uncle Anouche, an unabashed Communist who lived in the Soviet Union for a spell. He regales our young Marji with tales of his adventures, which include various stints in jail. As you can probably guess, Anouche is really pulling for the Shah's undoing because he thinks it will mean a more socialist-type government for Iran under which equality will reign. He couldn't have been more wrong.

The second memoir is called Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. This pretty much picks up where the first left off. Marji's now at a French high school in Vienna. As you can imagine, it's that proverbial duck out of water story. Just as she was getting used to wearing a veil back in Tehran, she's now in a society where the veil makes her as self-conscious as all get-out. Still, don't think she's docile or anything. In the West we tend to have this stereotype of the conservative veil-clad Muslim female as very timid and submissive, to the point of avoiding eye contact even. Well, you can forget about that with Marji. Just like her liberal activist parents, Marji is the last person who's afraid to speak her mind. You gonna give her shit? Be prepared to take it back ten-fold. This explains why she has such a tough time finding a place to live in the Austrian capital. First she starts out bunking with some Catholic nuns. That goes over just about as smoothly as a lead balloon on a planet with gravity ten times that of Earth's. When the nuns give her shit about Muslims being lesser people or something, Marji tells them how she's always thought nuns were former whores. Really, I was dying. What a firecracker, right? Part of the finding-a-place-to-stay adventure includes a stint of homelessness. Eventually she finds a room for rent in the house of this middle-aged single woman who's a lunatic or something. Anyway, now Marji's becoming interested in guys and promptly gets deflowered by some chap who wanted to make sure he was gay. After sleeping with Marji, he tells her, in the words of Ellen DeGeneres, "Yep! I'm gay!" Meanwhile at school, she falls in with a clique of punks that includes this one mohawked guy who's a nihilist. This is just when Kurt Waldheim, who was an officer in the German army during WWII, becomes President of Austria. The peeps in Marji's new punk clique are bemoaning this guy's becoming their leader, but compared with what Marji's seen back in Iran, it seems small potatoes. Anyway, she falls in and out of love some more and eventually gets back to Tehran, where she has to readjust herself to a very conservative society. It's slow going, particularly because Marji hasn't lost one iota of her take-no-shit attitude. At one point, right? She's running to catch a bus that's about to leave. A couple of cops nearby tell her to slow down because her butt is making obscene movements or something. No, really. That's their reason for wanting her to miss the frickin' bus. How does Marji respond in kind? "Well then don't look at my ass!"

Among other things, her return stint in Tehran sees her falling for yet another guy, whom she's convinced is the One. So at 21, she gets married. Unfortunately, the One turns out to be the Total Loser. When Marji becomes inconsolable after the divorce, her grandma tells her that the first marriage is really practice for the next one. That grandma, by the way, was one of my favorite characters in the film. Talk about hilariously blunt. She is obviously the one from whom Marji inherits her zero-bullshit tolerance. Anyway, Persepolis 2 ends in the early nineties, when Marji's in her early twenties and decides, with the support of her parents, to pursue a new life in Paris. She still lives in Paris today.

The film is adapted from both memoirs and still only manages to be 90 minutes. It's book-ended by color-animated scenes at the Paris airport where Marji sits and smokes a cigarette and reminisces on her life up to that point. I'm not really hip on the who's who in French movie acting, but I did recognize a couple names. Marji's ma is voiced by Catherine Deneuve. Dad is voiced by Simon Abkarian. That name may not sound familiar offhand, but if you saw Casino Royale, you know who he is. Remember Alex Dimitrios, that minor bad guy early on whom Daniel Craig was spying on in the Bahamas? And then kills at that body exhibit in Miami? That's Simon Abkarian. During the movie's second half, when Marji is a teenager and young adult, she's voiced by Catherine Deneuve's real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni. Chiara's dad, by the way, was Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, who was in Federico Fellini flicks like La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2.

After the screening, there was a Q&A with Marji herself, who co-wrote the script and co-directed the film with her best pal Vincent Paronnaud. Vince was there too, all clad in black with black-rimmed glasses and facial hair and looking very much like a youthful Leon Trotsky. Also there was Chiara Mastroianni, very slim and model-like. Like Vince and Marji, she was wearing all black. All three French people were wearing black, and the two Americans in the Q&A--the moderator and Vince's translator--were wearing stuff that wasn't black. The moderator was a movie critic from LA Weekly whose name slips my mind but looked just like that actor Greg Germann from Ally McBeal.

When the Greg Germann lookalike asked her how the whole movie project got off the ground, Marji explained that she'd gotten a ton of offers from various studios and production companies to adapt her memoir into something live action. She resisted because she was scared the movie version would be something like Not Without My Daughter, the 1991 film with Sally Field that was itself based on a memoir set in the eighties and featured Alfred Molina as a tyrannical Iranian guy. Anyway, simultaneous with these offers, her pal Vince Paronnaud was getting the movie bug. He wanted to go into the movie biz and was looking for something, anything, to produce. At first Marji just wanted to join him for the ride. She didn't care what movie they made so long as they could do it together. Apparently they're that tight. Then it occurred to them that maybe they could take on Persepolis themselves. They wrote the screenplay together and directed it together. When writing the script and animating the film, they tried not to be so slavish to the drawing panels from the two memoirs. Vince said he read them once or twice and then set them aside and never looked at them during the production. For her part, Marji decided soon into the production that trying to be too faithful to the memoirs just wasn't practical, as the film of course would end up far too long. I remember her specifically saying that if you try to cram "five books into a movie, it's always a disaster. It's always better to be frustrated at having to leave things out than to include all five books in a movie."

Chiara talked about how she approached her role as the teenage/young adult Marji. She basically had to read the lines by herself in a studio. To help her out, the real Marji was there with the script and read any and all lines from all the scenes that Chiara was in, just so Chiara had someone to react to. Chiara said that Marji wasn't such a bad actor herself, but Marji played that down. "Of course that's not true," she said. As for making her voice sound different in the teenager part of the movie versus the young adult part, Chiara said she didn't even bother trying to alter the pitch of her voice to make herself sound younger because it sounded too obviously phony. So for the teen scenes, she just talked faster. That's basically all she did, and let me tell you, it worked. While watching the movie, I thought the young adult dialogue was being read by the real Marji. It never occurred to me that Chiara would've handled both. She was otherwise very quiet during the Q&A, looking glamorous and keeping to herself. Sitting in the front row, I could easily see the facial resemblance to her mom.

Someone toward the back of the audience asked Marji about her relationship to her parents today. She said there was no drama there. They're still in touch regularly, and they even visit now and again. I don't remember if she said she ever visited them in Tehran, but I don't think so. Whenever she does see them, they make the trip to Paris. As for her grandma, she passed away in the early nineties, very soon after Marji relocated to Paris.

One of Marji's loyal readers from the audience said she really liked Embroideries and wondered if Marji had any plans to make a movie out of that one. Embroideries is a graphic memoir Marji published in 2006. It basically features Marji's mom, grandma, aunts, and their gal pals all sitting around and drinking tea and talking about their adventures with men, real dishy female stuff, all while Marji waits on them. So most of it is told in flashbacks depicting whatever drama whichever gal at the time is relating. As for making it into a movie, Marji couldn't even think about it. Maybe, maybe not, but one thing at a time. Persepolis came out in European theaters earlier this year, and it was just now coming out in American theaters, and between all that she had to do a ton of traveling to promote the thing. The way she put it was that her soul was poor. That's exactly what she said. "My soul is poor from all the traveling and promotion." Whenever this was done and behind her, she had to kick back, smoke a cigarette, and make her soul rich again before she could think about her next movie or writing project.

Marji's got other comic book stuff if you're interested. In addition to Persepolis, Persepolis 2, and Embroideries, she wrote this other graphic memoir called Chicken with Plums, about the last eight days in the life of her great uncle Nasser Ali Khan. And she wrote a kid's book called Monsters are Afraid of the Moon. It's about this little girl named Marie who gets fed up with all the monsters that invade her room at night when it's dark. So she gets a pair of scissors, cuts the moon out of the night sky, and hangs it above her bed. Sure enough, the moonlight discourages the monsters from bugging her at night. But depriving the night sky of its moon has opened up a whole new can of nightcrawlers...