LIVING A DREAM

Ask anyone of my kids what my idea of heaven on earth is and they will answer (probably in unison); a white sandy beach, warm aqua blue water, a hammock under palm trees, a good book, and an unending supply of cold fruity drinks (preferably brought to me at regular intervals by a hot 30 something guy with a mop of unruly curly black hair, a Spanish accent, and a look in his eye that clearly says ‘I don’t care if you are 49 and overweight; I want you”). Ok, that last bit they won’t say because no one knows I have thoughts like that, until now that is, but you get the idea – I have dreamed (aloud apparently)about this for a long time. Dreamed, wished, moaned, whined, – whatever.

This past year I FINALLY got to experience it (well - not the Spanish hottie part) and it was as close to heaven as I have ever been. Speaking of which, do you think there will be white sandy beaches in heaven? I sure hope so or eternity is going to seem endless if I can’t go to the beach.

It came about like this: I was sitting in a local café with another script supervisor, we were working on our respective shows scripts, both of us near exhaustion as a result of a long season on episodic TV. Sixteen hour days and then working all weekend on the upcoming episode had taken it’s toll. I happened to mention to her, as we were slaving over our laptops, that my show was going on hiatus for a week. She said hers was as well. Turned out it was the same week. We looked at each other and at the same time said ‘Want to go somewhere?’ Scripts forgotten, we began searching the internet for a good deal on a vacation - somewhere hot with a fabulous beach. And palm trees.

We ended up buying tickets to an all-inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen, the dream vacation that I always wanted. I was beyond excited. I started counting the days.

It was August. When we got off of the plane I thought the wave of heat I felt slam into my body was from the plane’s engines. Nope. That was the temperature outside. I had NO idea how hot Mexico was in August and, in the one and a half minutes it took to get from the airport exit to the waiting coach, I thought I might pass out from the heat . We did say we wanted somewhere hot. Climbing onto that bus, never had air conditioning felt so great. So delicious. So necessary.

On the drive to the resort I couldn’t stop looking out of the window. All the trees were short and thick, a jungle started where the roadside ended. The highway was surprisingly wide and modern, not sure what I was expecting – a dirt road? The cars and trucks whizzed by in various states of disrepair. I saw a truck loaded down with bricks and five men sitting on top of all of the bricks as it sped by. I shook my head. So crazy.

When we pulled off of the highway at the large stonework gate that marked our resort and started down the long, winding drive I could hardly contain my excitement. Taking in the luscious green gardens resplendent with flowers, palm trees, deep green lawns and – as we drew closer – a huge building that had no front wall, just open to the warm air, my excitement began to build. I could see that it was the main building and was two stories high with a red tile roof and honey colored marble floors. When we left the cool of the bus and walked inside I could hardly watch where I was going as I dragged my suitcase. There were Mayan-type carvings high up on the walls, deep cushioned rattan couches and chairs arranged in groups all around a large glass sculpture, and a long mahogany bar with cute bartenders busy keeping patrons lubricated in the far corner just before the entrance into a large dining room. Lush. Exotic. Luxurious. Fabulous.

We checked in and then headed through the main building and down the pathway to our room. We passed more beautiful gardens with a man made waterfall spilling over golden rocks. The grass on the lawns was thick and coarse and when I stood on it to test it out, my feet sank far down into the prickly leaves; definitely not for walking on. Identical square cottages were spread throughout the grounds, all painted a bright yellow-orange with red tiled roofs. We found our cottage close to the main building and climbed the tiled stairs to the second floor. Our room was large and cool and so …Mexican. There was even a tiny gecko on the wall near the air conditioner. We named him Hector and he made an appearance almost every day.

We changed into our swimwear, stuffed our valuables into the tiny safe in the closet and headed down the winding pathway to the pools and beach. The heat and humidity in the air was heavily perfumed with the blossoms on the bushes everywhere. I know my flowers but I had no idea what these were, they were so vibrant and exotic looking. The sensation of breathing in the dense scented air was like nothing I had ever experienced.

The pools were spread out at the end of the pathway, one for children on the left and the other for the grown ups to the right. There were white chaise loungers surrounding each pool and the grown up pool had a swim up bar with a thatched palm roof. Just beyond the pools was the whitest powder sand beach that anyone could ever dream up, the kind I had only seen while drooling over travel magazines. The water beyond was all shades of the most gorgeous blues and greens. I think this is what Enya called Carribean Blue. And this was the Carribean Sea.

Putting my toes into the soft white sand for the first time rates as one of the best experiences of my life. I think it falls somewhere between becoming a mother and eating turkey dinner at Christmas (which are not as far apart on my scale as one might expect). As I stood there in the blazing sun under a tall palm tree that was blowing gently in the warm breeze coming off of the ocean and wiggled my toes in that softest of sand, I wanted to cry. I actually had to fight back the tears. I never thought I would live to see the day. I thought this would always be just a dream. I know it probably sounds superficial but this moment had been one of my most treasured dreams, something I had imagined and lived over and over in my mind when I needed something wonderful to think of. And now here I was, actually living the dream.

It happened again the first time I walked into that azure blue sea and felt water as warm as a bath surround my body. I looked down and saw a school of pure white angelfish swimming in a circle around me and had to fight back tears. Was I really here after all these years of dreaming? Yes I absolutely was.

A dream fulfilled is a miracle.

THE DREADED FIVE-O

They say that you age gradually.  It’s a lie.  From my experience, you go to bed one night looking like you have looked for the past 20 years, then you wake up the next morning and there's a brown spot on your face you know wasn’t there yesterday.  A week later you wake up and there's a deep crease in your forehead between your eyebrows that, until now, you’d only seen on your Aunty Mary.  And, by-the-way, I'm pretty sure I know where that came from.  I can be sitting thinking about nothing much, or even something pleasant, and someone will walk in the room and ask 'What's the matter?'  and when I say that I don't know what they mean I am told I looked angry or upset, that I was frowning.  Well, I guess that's just my face in repose.

I always believed that age spots and wrinkles would appear first as sort of a ghostly image of what was to come.  That I would look in the mirror (the magnification side mind you) and if I looked hard enough I would see the faint hair-width of a crease that had started to form somewhere and I would know that I had about five years to go before it would become a full blown wrinkle.  That the age spots would first make themselves known as a slight discoloration of a few cells and I would think, ‘oh-oh, that will be an age spot in a couple of years’.  That way I could get used to the idea of it or maybe even nip it in the bud before it blossomed into it’s full blown glory.  But no.  I go to bed looking one way and when I stumble into the bathroom the next morning and peer in the mirror the shock of what is peering back knocks the last vestiges of sleep fuzz from my brain and a cold reality takes it’s place. I am aging.  And fast.

I am going to turn 50 this month.  Fifty.  Half a century.  I can’t wrap my head around it even though I have felt the weight of this birthday coming for the past 5 years.  And I have been dreading it.  The roots of this dread go back to something I discovered many years ago.

I used to buy Glamour Magazine every month back when I was 18 till I was about 27, at which time, with one child on my hip, another permanently wrapped around my right leg, and yet a third playing Lego on the kitchen table, I gave up on the notion of ever becoming Glamorous and quit buying it. Every issue had a page towards the back that featured an aging celebrity in 5 or 6 headshots, one for every decade of their lives from becoming famous to the present day.  What always struck me, and this was the case for all although the time they featured Cary Grant is the one that is burned into my memory, is that in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s they looked pretty much the same.  The hairstyles of the women changed but the faces hadn’t changed much at all.  Even in their 50’s they were still looking pretty good.  But O MY GOSH, the difference between the one in their 50’s and the one in their 60’s was nothing short of a complete shock.  It was like all the aging they should have been doing gradually over the decades hit all at once in that 10 year span.  The hair had greyed (or gone completely white in the case of Cary Grant), the face was a mass of liver spots and wrinkles, there were bags under the eyes and bags over the eyes….. it shocked me celebrity after celebrity, month after month.  And it burned an awareness into my very soul that beauty ends somewhere in your 50’s.

So now I face turning 50 with the absolute knowledge that I am about to live the last few years where I have of any chance of looking good.  That the gradual aging I thought I would do in the past two decades will hit all at once in this decade to come.  And what’s worse, I seem to have a bit of a head start.  I am overweight.  I have skin tags sprouting up everywhere like mushrooms in the wild.  I have been waging a battle with age spots on my face for a year now (thanks to endless sun tanning sessions in my foolish youth) with trips to the dermatologist where she blasts them with nitrogen.  Some wrinkles have shown up, especially on my neck and chest in the most puzzling of formations until I realized they are from sleeping on my side.  Now that is what I call the epitome of injustice.  I can understand getting wrinkles from doing something you can control, like frowning too much.  But from how I sleep?  That’s just cruel.

I know I am going to look back in a decade when I face turning 60 and kick myself for not taking steps to give myself a good head start, like losing weight and using expensive face cream night and day.  Today I did something I used to watch my mother do.  I placed my forefingers on my cheekbones and my thumbs on my jaw and gently pushed the skin towards my hairline. It took 20 years off.  So I guess there has been some drag and sag up to now but, trust me, it's nothing compared to that which is to come.

There just might be a facelift in my future.  For sure there is Botox ahead; to erase that crease between my eyebrows and freeze my forehead into a bland look of disinterest.  No more shall they ask 'what's the matter', but rather - 'are you listening to a word I am saying?'  To which I will reply, 'Sure I am.  I am just not getting any wrinkles over it!' 

NETWORK BLUES

I am so frustrated with impersonal decision makers.

Last year I worked on two TV series; Blood Ties and jPod. From an insider's perspective, they were really fun shows to work on. The cast and crew were really great people, the producers were accessible and friendly, and the scripts were intelligently written. Both series generated individual loyal fan bases. And those fans were up in arms when their shows were cancelled after just one season.

Blood Ties was a show about Vicky, a private detective; Henry Fitzroy, a 400 year old vampire; and Mike, a cop. They worked together to solve crimes that involved a supernatural element. Lifetime refused to renew Blood Ties for a second season despite the outcry from fans who, before Blood Ties, had all but given up on the network to produce shows they deemed watch-able. They mobilized to lobby the network to rethink their decision using the internet and fan sites to spread the word. They flooded the Lifetime website with postings, they sent emails to any executive they could find an address for, they signed on-line petitions, and any online poll that included Blood Ties was voted on by the fans to ensure it had a great result. All to no avail. The big guns at the network were impervious to the fans pleadings and so the show died a premature death.

But the obstinate suits at Lifetime and their callous non-response to their fans pleadings pales in comparison to the outright idiocy of CBC.

For those of you who haven't heard, jPod is based on the book of the same name by Douglas Coupland who is one of Canada's foremost authors. It takes place in a computer gaming company called Neotronic Arts and centers around five of it's misfit programmers. The show had a great cast including Alan Thicke, Sherry Miller, Colin Campbell, as well as the five main and relatively unknown actors. It was on CBC on Tuesday night, 9:00. After the third episode aired, CBC decided to change the time slot to Friday night, 9:00. HUH? The target demographic for this audience is 18 - 35 year olds. Now I am no network executive yet I can figure out that pretty much NOBODY in that age bracket is going to be home on a Friday night watching TV. In fact, pretty much nobody but your 80 year old aunty is at home watching the telly on a Friday night. That is why that time slot is usually referred to as the 'death slot'. So why did they do it? My theory is that someone at CBC had a personal vendetta. Maybe Doug snubbed them at a party. Maybe Larry lost it on an exec. Who knows? What goes on in the mind of the sequestered elite and the resulting decisions are an enigma tied up in a riddle wrapped up in a conundrum (or however that saying goes).

All I know is this: CBC hasn't a clue what people want to watch. I have three kids in the demographic jPod was geared towards. Until jPod, the only time they tuned in to CBC was to watch the Canucks. My 27 year old son loves jPod and proclaimed it the best show CBC has ever aired, so good that he couldn't believe it was a CBC production. Since the time slot change he downloads it via bit-torrent. My 23 year old daughter works at an online, interactive gaming company. She doesn't have cable so she can't watch it when it airs, but she has many co-workers who watch (albeit now they program their PVR's) and she watches the show on tapes one of her friends makes for her. She loves it. My 25 year old daughter in England has them on her computer from a bit-torrent site. She and her boyfriend love it.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people on line who have started petitions and facebook groups in support of jPod. And yet CBC is not moved. Like Lifetime, it seems they don't care what their viewers think or want. They will go ahead and do whatever they want and viewers be damned. CBC is funded by the Canadian government, so they can afford to be stubborn moron's, I guess. They will continue to survive via the benevolence of a government who is happy to throw our money around. But Lifetime stands to lose a lot by ignoring their viewers. Biting the hand that feeds you only works if you are Henry Fitzroy.