Cranky Actress Blog

Cranky has had the most horrible month. Like the curse of the ten plagues on the Egyptians. Sick, sicker and sickest. It got to the point where I swear I had sunk so deep into the couch that I think there was actually a molecule exchange between my ass and the sofa. I missed three auditions. I had to email them that I was unable to come because of horrid flu. Never heard from them again and I don’t blame them because who wants to make contact with contagion? I won’t go into details because I think talk about illness is tre gauche and boring. I’ll just skip to the almost end when I looked at my husband and he had the worst case of conjunctivitis I have ever seen in my life. At that point, I was ready for the fucking locusts to come flying through the fucking window.

I have never seen anything like it. What the hell. Mass quantities of oozing mass were coming out of the eyeball. “Does it look bad?” asked my husband. “No, not really,” I said, it’s just pink eye, you’ll be OK,” said like a good spouse who doesn’t want her husband to freak out. What I thought was; “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD THAT IS HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE EEEEEEEW!”

Then a few days later I was walking down Varick Street. I was trying to walk and text at the same time. Cranky is the world’s worst texter. I have turned down the blackberry many times. I don’t want my emails following me around. So I have a little clamshell phone with a little teeny keypad. You know: abc def efg – tap tap – tap – tap tap tap – like Morse code for each letter. So I am trying to text and walk and unfortunately it was tap tap tap tap take one step, tap tap take another, tap tap tap another step, when a homeless man yells out; “ Hey honey! Why don’t you do like the kids do, they can text and drive at the same time!” Thank you. Thank you Mr. Homeless Man. How many insults can you fit into one sentence? But he was right. And like an urban Cassandra, he was hinting at more technological trouble to come. I went home that night and my hard drive crashed.

I spent a week humming the tune to the song by Tom Adair and Matt Dennis – “Everything Happens To Me”:

Black cats creep across my path
Until I’m almost mad
I must have roused the devils wrath
’cause all my luck is bad

I make a date for golf – and you can bet your life it rains.
I try to give a party – but the guy upstairs complains.
I guess I’ll go thru life just catching colds and missing trains….

EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO ME

I went to a tech place and bought a new one. Then Apple told me they would have given me one for free. Then I got everything up and running and I sent myself an email and there was a cathead icon on it. Then I checked on all the emails I had sent that day and they all had the cathead on them. I had sent the cathead to my best friend, a prospective employer and a casting agent. The cathead was ruining my life. I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. Every email looked like it was sent by a housewife from Suffolk County. One who smokes and wears sweatshirts with pictures of cats on them. Whose house is full of knick-knacks. And a crochet covers on all the tissue boxes. And a vinyl tablecloth. With cigarette burns. And I think there might be a moldy smell everywhere. The cathead is giving me an identity crisis.

At the height of the cathead plague my doorbell rings. “Who the hell is this?” I think. I think people should call first. I open the door and it is the Super’s daughter. She is nine. She is what J.D. Salinger would call “roller skate skinny”. When she returned from a family vacation in Mexico (my superintendent lives better than I do) she ran up to me with the smallest shell you’ve ever seen and put it in my hand and said, “I brought this back just for you.” She is a character.

So she is standing at my door and says, “I wanted to talk to you some more about the garden.” (A neighbor and I are collecting money to buy flowers to replenish the sad, pathetic little gardens in front of our building.)

I tell her to come in.

“So, I wanted to talk some more about the garden. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about the garden and maybe we should have some vegetables. Not all vegetables but just a part of it vegetables. And then we could set up a table on the sidewalk like they do on Halloween and we could give the vegetables away. And oh, um, my birthday is on Friday and by then I’ll have like a hundred and fifty dollars and that’s more money than I could ever spend in my life so I was thinking could I give you a hundred and fifty dollars towards flowers?”

I know right then that the plague is over. The world is good. A nine year old wants to donate all her money because she loves gardens. Spring is coming. My faith is renewed. Even the cathead can’t get me down.