Cranky Actress Blog

Cranky took a mini vacation last week. A perfect recession vacation. A friend let me stay in her Fire Island house for free when she wasn’t using it. So I brought a girlfriend. We arrived in the middle of the week. It was off-season. It was a cloudy dark and blustery. There were no people. There were no bicycles ringing their bells. No barking dogs.   It was scary as shit. All the houses were dark. We were on a deserted island.

I know this is supposed to be great. But I live in Brooklyn, a block from the 24-hour Korean Deli. In an apartment building with neighbors all around (most of them friendly – except for the two crazies in the building.) It looked like the perfect setting for a Shining kind of situation. We got off the ferry and 1:15 in the afternoon and the only little store was closing. CLOSING? HELP!

We watched “David Letterman” and I was inspired by his nightly top ten list. So I wrote one of my own:

The top ten things that show I’m an ACTRESS when on vacation on a deserted island:

1. The minute my friend and I get off the boat we start our vacation by doing a tough session of “Buns Yoga.”
2. We are ravenous after so share 5 crackers.
3. I’m supposed to relax but I check email 18 times a day.
4. The only other human on the island is the strange man who runs the grocery store and still I apply eyeliner.
5. First thought when spotting a deer on the lawn – “Why don’t my eyelashes look like that?”
6. I try to figure out how to swim without getting any sun on my complexion
7. For dinner we are starving and have to walk 2 miles to the only open restaurant on the island and still we split an entrée.
8. When the tough looking longshoremen types at the bar in the restaurant check me out my friend is nervous – I am relieved – if I can’t get attention on a deserted island it might be the end of my acting career.
9. Appalled to realize that being in a beach house means you, your clothes and your hair will smell like mildew the entire time- not attractive.
10. Spent 26 minutes scanning the channels of unfamiliar satellite TV to find “Project Runway” instead of playing the requisite board games.