GAMES OF THE ONLY CHILD
So, here we are on the first day of Blog Every Day April! I am very excited by the number of people who are participating . . . so many people who are signing on to write (or film) something EVERY SINGLE DAY this month. For example! My friends Charlieissocool, Alex “Nerimon” Day, and John Green! And many of you I’ve just met! (I am keeping a LONG LIST. It even has a Twitter at @BEDA09!)
Because it’s so new, I’m also going to remind everyone that this blog will be published here AND at the new maureenjohnson.ning.com, where you can hang out with other people, and write your own blogs, and chat.
From me . . . what you’re going to get is more or less of a blow-by-blow account of how I spend an entire month. Let’s start NOW.
So yesterday, I was filming a video for the release of the Suite Scarlett paperback. The filming, I was told, was going to be in the Algonquin Hotel, because it is a famous, classic New York hotel, and one of the scenes from the book takes place there. Yes! The Algonquin, home of the famous Round Table—the center of New York literary life in the 1930s! So classy! And we’d been booked into a room simply referred to as “the library” on the second floor, right across from the Helen Hayes Room. More classy!
I was expecting to find one person wandering around up there with a single video camera. What I got was an entire crew of people, and lights, and those umbrella things that photographers use, and those reflective things, and two cameras, and headsets, and someone walking the hallway to make sure the filming could continue without disruption.
I was put in a chair. There was already a table of makeup ready for me—a roll of brushes as long as my arm. After that, I was miked up and put in a chair, and things were placed around me, and lights and sound were checked.
When I was said and done, the first thing I realized was that the entire setup looked amazingly like the set of Monsterpiece Theater.
Me.
Alistair Cookie, Monsterpiece Theater
“This is like Monsterpiece Theater,” I said. But everyone else was too busy taping things to me to pay any attention to this. I had a LOT of stuff taped to me. I felt like a refrigerator.
So we filmed a bunch of stuff. Me talking about the book. Me saying hi to people shopping for books. Me reading. It was a lot of me doing stuff. And between takes (there was even one of those clapper things), the makeup woman would come over and polish me. I just sat very still throughout the whole thing.
I was reminded, sitting there, of the many, many articles I’ve read where actors talk about what it’s like to be on a set—the many hours they spend sitting in a makeup chair so that they can step in front of a camera and do something for two minutes. Then they have to get touched up and stuck back in their trailers.
But this was just me, talking about stuff. But you see what I mean, hopefully. I RELATED to the pain of movie stars. Later on, when we had to do some other shots, I was wandering around with my microphone strapped to me and a pack on my back and two people with cameras. And I had all of this MAKEUP on. I could see people looking at me and wondering who I could possibly be.
“This must be what WEATHERPEOPLE feel like,” I thought to myself.
Anyway, one of the questions I had to answer—several times, on several takes—was if I knew I was always going to be a writer, even when I was Scarlett’s age (15). I didn’t have anything ready to say, so I just started talking. On each successive take, I would a). try to remember what I’d just said, b). try to make it slightly more coherent.
The answer is . . . yes. Yes I did. I’ve been writing forever, largely because I was always a bit of an Indoor Child. You know what I mean. Likes indoor recess. Takes books to the playground and sits on the monkeybars with them. Bleeds easily.
I was also an only child. Only children are forced to come up with ways of entertaining themselves. I thought back on some of the games I invented to entertain myself as a tiny mj. Here are just a few:
LOBSTER POOL
This is where you jump into a pool and swim out to the middle, then imagine that a truck of lobsters as been pulled up to the swallow end and . . . inexplicably . . . been offloaded. The pool is now full of lobsters on one end. Your job: get out of the pool as quickly as you can by feverishly paddling to the ladder. (I don’t really know how fast lobsters can move. In my imagination, it was REALLY FAST.)
Can also be played with crabs.
GROCERY STORE WARS
You and your friends have been kidnapped by a madman who forces you to live in a grocery store. Every once in a while, he comes down and chases you through the aisles. As you shop, figure out how you can defend yourself and build shelters out of the things you see.
You can try this in other stores, but I always found grocery stores work best. Other stores often have things that are actually useful in these situations. (See Dawn of the Dead—the zombie movie in which survivors live in a mall—for examples of this.) It’s much more challenging to figure out how to defend yourself with things like muffins, cream cheese, and plastic wrap.
Don’t ask yourself why anyone would kidnap children and make them live in a grocery store, as this will ruin the flow of the game.
COUNT CRAZY AUNT’S CHANGE
My Aunt Clara was out of her mind in many ways and disliked most living things except her very greasy and violent cockatoo (named “Too-Too”) that would occasionally escape from its cage and terrorize me. She had owned many of these horrible birds, and often told me a dramatic story about the one who died right before I was born. “I let him out, just one day,” she said. “Just one day . . . and first he flew into the curtains and got all confused, and he then flew right into the kitchen cabinets, over and over again, until he slid down and fell into the sink.” Even as a child, I realized the bird had committed suicide, but I never said this. Living with my aunt couldn’t have been fun. Her goal in life was to hold a koala. She failed, largely because she never went anywhere. So she just collected small stuffed koalas and pictures of koalas and smoked and made jello and hated people.
Her birds were unlike my grandmother’s many parakeets, who were pleasant and chirpy, probably because my grandmother was a much more pleasant person. (Thought she did go through a strange period in which every bird she bought only had one foot. It wasn’t intentional. She’d get them home and they’d just start hopping strangely . . . and sure enough, one foot. Don’t buy your parakeets at Sears, that’s all I can say.)
Anyway, my Aunt Clara distrusted doctors and banks. So she refused to ever get medical exams, and she kept all of her money in old peanut butter jars in her closet. “So I can watch it grow,” she would say to me. She did like me, however. She liked kids, because “you can trust ‘em.” When she babysat me, she would often have me count her change while she listened to talk radio. I even kept records of my change counting on this pad of paper she kept on her kitchen table. For some reason, I thought this was fun. When I would go to other relative’s houses and I got bored, I would ask to count their change too. I would report this back to my aunt, who nodded sagely and said, “That’s my girl.”
I have no idea what this means.
These are just some of the stories I COULD have told in the video, but decided not to. They are, however, the kinds of stories you can look forward to hearing more of this month, as I become increasingly desperate to figure out what to blog about EVERY SINGLE DAY.
And anyway, if had been smart, I would have just recreated THIS video.
Because it’s so new, I’m also going to remind everyone that this blog will be published here AND at the new maureenjohnson.ning.com, where you can hang out with other people, and write your own blogs, and chat.
From me . . . what you’re going to get is more or less of a blow-by-blow account of how I spend an entire month. Let’s start NOW.
So yesterday, I was filming a video for the release of the Suite Scarlett paperback. The filming, I was told, was going to be in the Algonquin Hotel, because it is a famous, classic New York hotel, and one of the scenes from the book takes place there. Yes! The Algonquin, home of the famous Round Table—the center of New York literary life in the 1930s! So classy! And we’d been booked into a room simply referred to as “the library” on the second floor, right across from the Helen Hayes Room. More classy!
I was expecting to find one person wandering around up there with a single video camera. What I got was an entire crew of people, and lights, and those umbrella things that photographers use, and those reflective things, and two cameras, and headsets, and someone walking the hallway to make sure the filming could continue without disruption.
I was put in a chair. There was already a table of makeup ready for me—a roll of brushes as long as my arm. After that, I was miked up and put in a chair, and things were placed around me, and lights and sound were checked.
When I was said and done, the first thing I realized was that the entire setup looked amazingly like the set of Monsterpiece Theater.
“This is like Monsterpiece Theater,” I said. But everyone else was too busy taping things to me to pay any attention to this. I had a LOT of stuff taped to me. I felt like a refrigerator.
So we filmed a bunch of stuff. Me talking about the book. Me saying hi to people shopping for books. Me reading. It was a lot of me doing stuff. And between takes (there was even one of those clapper things), the makeup woman would come over and polish me. I just sat very still throughout the whole thing.
I was reminded, sitting there, of the many, many articles I’ve read where actors talk about what it’s like to be on a set—the many hours they spend sitting in a makeup chair so that they can step in front of a camera and do something for two minutes. Then they have to get touched up and stuck back in their trailers.
But this was just me, talking about stuff. But you see what I mean, hopefully. I RELATED to the pain of movie stars. Later on, when we had to do some other shots, I was wandering around with my microphone strapped to me and a pack on my back and two people with cameras. And I had all of this MAKEUP on. I could see people looking at me and wondering who I could possibly be.
“This must be what WEATHERPEOPLE feel like,” I thought to myself.
Anyway, one of the questions I had to answer—several times, on several takes—was if I knew I was always going to be a writer, even when I was Scarlett’s age (15). I didn’t have anything ready to say, so I just started talking. On each successive take, I would a). try to remember what I’d just said, b). try to make it slightly more coherent.
The answer is . . . yes. Yes I did. I’ve been writing forever, largely because I was always a bit of an Indoor Child. You know what I mean. Likes indoor recess. Takes books to the playground and sits on the monkeybars with them. Bleeds easily.
I was also an only child. Only children are forced to come up with ways of entertaining themselves. I thought back on some of the games I invented to entertain myself as a tiny mj. Here are just a few:
LOBSTER POOL
This is where you jump into a pool and swim out to the middle, then imagine that a truck of lobsters as been pulled up to the swallow end and . . . inexplicably . . . been offloaded. The pool is now full of lobsters on one end. Your job: get out of the pool as quickly as you can by feverishly paddling to the ladder. (I don’t really know how fast lobsters can move. In my imagination, it was REALLY FAST.)
Can also be played with crabs.
GROCERY STORE WARS
You and your friends have been kidnapped by a madman who forces you to live in a grocery store. Every once in a while, he comes down and chases you through the aisles. As you shop, figure out how you can defend yourself and build shelters out of the things you see.
You can try this in other stores, but I always found grocery stores work best. Other stores often have things that are actually useful in these situations. (See Dawn of the Dead—the zombie movie in which survivors live in a mall—for examples of this.) It’s much more challenging to figure out how to defend yourself with things like muffins, cream cheese, and plastic wrap.
Don’t ask yourself why anyone would kidnap children and make them live in a grocery store, as this will ruin the flow of the game.
COUNT CRAZY AUNT’S CHANGE
My Aunt Clara was out of her mind in many ways and disliked most living things except her very greasy and violent cockatoo (named “Too-Too”) that would occasionally escape from its cage and terrorize me. She had owned many of these horrible birds, and often told me a dramatic story about the one who died right before I was born. “I let him out, just one day,” she said. “Just one day . . . and first he flew into the curtains and got all confused, and he then flew right into the kitchen cabinets, over and over again, until he slid down and fell into the sink.” Even as a child, I realized the bird had committed suicide, but I never said this. Living with my aunt couldn’t have been fun. Her goal in life was to hold a koala. She failed, largely because she never went anywhere. So she just collected small stuffed koalas and pictures of koalas and smoked and made jello and hated people.
Her birds were unlike my grandmother’s many parakeets, who were pleasant and chirpy, probably because my grandmother was a much more pleasant person. (Thought she did go through a strange period in which every bird she bought only had one foot. It wasn’t intentional. She’d get them home and they’d just start hopping strangely . . . and sure enough, one foot. Don’t buy your parakeets at Sears, that’s all I can say.)
Anyway, my Aunt Clara distrusted doctors and banks. So she refused to ever get medical exams, and she kept all of her money in old peanut butter jars in her closet. “So I can watch it grow,” she would say to me. She did like me, however. She liked kids, because “you can trust ‘em.” When she babysat me, she would often have me count her change while she listened to talk radio. I even kept records of my change counting on this pad of paper she kept on her kitchen table. For some reason, I thought this was fun. When I would go to other relative’s houses and I got bored, I would ask to count their change too. I would report this back to my aunt, who nodded sagely and said, “That’s my girl.”
I have no idea what this means.
These are just some of the stories I COULD have told in the video, but decided not to. They are, however, the kinds of stories you can look forward to hearing more of this month, as I become increasingly desperate to figure out what to blog about EVERY SINGLE DAY.
And anyway, if had been smart, I would have just recreated THIS video.
Views: 3
Comment
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Comment by Lucy on April 13, 2009 at 1:00pm -
haha i saw the two pictures and i thought that cookie monster was what you actually looked like on screen... for just a second. Then I came to my senses and read the accompanying text. Only now do I realise that it would have been better to follow your advice, and not search for the truth, but lie to myself about you, just because I like the lie better.
I'm one of 6, so I had plenty of playmates growing up, but that didn't stop me morphing into a complete reclusive nerd who can still recite the pokerap (partially) and argues with people in her head. (not in a weird way , though... more in a "I lost this conversation battle with you last time, and now i'm practicing my next conversation with you and preparing my comebacks so i can catch you seemingly off-guard next time we meet" kind of way. It doesn't really work though, so don't bother trying). So yeah. I guess in a way, even though I'm not, I still act like an only child.
That's enough from me. I will add this though. Monsterpiece theatre whilst not pivotal to my formative years is awesome to the point that that clip made me laugh. At 2:59am. Thanks MJ... or should i say... ALISTAIR COOKIE?!?!?
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Comment by Rebecca on April 8, 2009 at 1:25am -
Wow, I didn't remember Monsterpiece Theater being so funny. HEHEHEHEHEHEHE.
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Comment by dozzzier on April 4, 2009 at 9:33am
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I usually played The Floor Is Lava, which is a game not limited to only children, but is generally only played by children too poor to watch television.
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Comment by foolery on April 3, 2009 at 2:39pm
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re: "Can also be played with crabs."
But if you'd get rid of the crabs you'd be so much more comfortable during Lobster Pool.
Great game names!
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Comment by Ana Lorena on April 3, 2009 at 2:07pm -
I'd add to the Indoor Child the effort people try to talk to you when you're reading during recess, which I personally responded with small talk and turning to the other side and continue reading. It has improved for the last four, five years.
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Comment by SweetGirl (Nancy) on April 1, 2009 at 11:16pm
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I am an only child as well, well a grown up one of course but still a child at heart, and I too used to make up games and stories being forced to entertain myself.
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Comment by Danae on April 1, 2009 at 10:55pm -
hahah no way!! I had a version of lobster pool, but with whales (as i was scared of them)
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Comment by Rachel on April 1, 2009 at 7:39pm -
I like to count nickels. But nothing else. Whatever.
I played many many strange games to amuse myself most involving INTENSE DRAMA. (ie, I have just had a baby and we are on the run)
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Comment by Manar on April 1, 2009 at 5:57pm -
Hahahahahahaha, Maureen! Those games sure sound fun.
I have a brother whose only a year and a half older than me, so I do not have this issue.
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Comment by Diana on April 1, 2009 at 3:41pm -
I wasn't an only child, but I WAS the middle child, wedged between two boys. As such, I had either the option of playing wrestling games, or being on my own. Consequently, I spent most of my time reading. I don't know why, but I got into the habit of imagining that the world was made of clay so if I touched something too hard, I would ruin it.
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