Your love is like a tidal wave...

The future Bruins in front of Royce Hall

I'm shaking my leg, tapping my foot, checking my iphone 13,000 times a minute. I don't think I could keep my eyeballs focused on one thing even if I tried. Yesterday we took Nipper's niece to UCLA to check out the campus. She's 12. We like to plant that seed early around here. I said "just a second" so many times, I think Nipper almost chucked my phone out the window of the car. For the record, reading email, and checking facebook while at a stop light is technically not a moving violation in my universe. I'm from Venus. At one point I was trying to push Jack in his stroller up a hill with one hand, while checking our page views on youtube.

"Would you like a hand with that?" 

"What? No? Huh? Oh. Sorry."

Our muffintop double would like to remain anonymous. She's like the dancer from Flashdance.

The response to "My Muffintop" has been so unbelievably positive that I'm overwhelmed. My mother emailed me last night and said WHO are the 2% idiots who gave it a Die vote? Oh mom... I'll get their home addresses for you. My little dream of doing my Lady Gaga dance of shame on Ellen has been dashed upon the hard rocks of network schedules. She's wrapped for the summer. Not that she was going to invite us on or anything. But you know, a girl's got to have goals. 

Some very smart people have said some very nice things. Here's one of them from a MAN BLOGGER (there, I said it) our good friend Andy over at The Paperball. Merci Beaucoup to you and your wafflers. 

Lady Gaga Pokerface

I'm kind of blown away by the response to the video. So glad every is loving it! Keep sharing it! In the meantime, I thought some of you might want to see the video that inspired it. More later on how I heard about the views on Photocinenews premier jumping from 900 to 3000 in 20 minutes, (we had over 9000 views yesterday!) and how Jack and I found a ladybug graveyard at the beach.

Oh also, My Muffintop is up on Funny Or Die now! Check it out and give it a "funny" vote, or I will have to eat all the cheese in the house by myself today.

Lady Gaga returns!

Getting Gaga ready for her video shoot

I spent my Mother's Day with two of my most talented, beautiful, and amazingly generous friends, their kids, and spouses. We finished shooting the Lady Gaga parody video! I've been trying all night to figure out how to embed the song here for it's Mother's Day debut. But my brain is fried, and I've run out of minutes my body will allow me to be awake today. If any of you dearies out there in blog-topia know how to put a song of your own onto a blogger blog. Please share! In the meantime Happy Mother's Day to all you mamas out there who miss your hips when they were sleek, your breasts when they were high, and your time when it was your own. I know you wouldn't trade them back. Kiss your babies good night. I'm grateful to all the moms in my life.

Maybe Edison is ACDC

Oh Jack White, swoon...

So we are in the thick of finishing costumes, cutting out neon lightning bolts, rigging up low budget dolly tracks, and practicing our redonkulous dance moves. Sadie and I did a test run of our dance in heels on the brick patio in her backyard this morning. Her husband made pancakes, and we hooked up the ipod with Brett's version of the song to the speakers. I'm sure her neighbors were thrilled. Nothing like Lady Gaga at 8am. Here's what I have to say about our dancing: No one broke an ankle. 

Lucky lucky ducks that we are, it looks like it's going to rain all weekend. And since our Lady Gaga is going to be on the road with her band the next few weeks, it looks like we won't be able to shoot the exterior shots (dancing stuff) until the end of this month. SO we are going to have a few more weeks to practice the dance, and come up with new bizarre ways to pay homage to Lady Gaga, who Sadie and I admitted to each other this week we've come to love while doing this project. Her performance on Ellen alone was enough. She had me at the standing up on her piano bench singing solo. Adorable. I didn't know the first thing about her before we started. Not even sure how I heard the song for it to become enough a part of my subconscious that I would start writing my own lyrics to it one night in the kitchen. I was raised in a college town so my musical tastes were formed by New Order,  Siouxsie and the Banshees,  The Smiths, and The Misfits, (I turned into a martian, whoa oh oh...) and oh yeah, massive amounts of adolescent ennui. Bonjour Billie Holiday. Good Morning Heartache. Oh 1980's how I miss you so.

Maybe it was inevitable that I'd end up spending the first part of my 2010 glitter gluing Barbies, and supergluing them onto headbands, so that I could dress up like a pirate hooker in my bff's back yard and DANCE. Maybe my mother should have limited my musical experience to Wagner, and The New Kids on the Block. I could be married to a banker and wearing SLACKS on a Saturday. Speaking of my dear mother...

I've decided to use her in the video. She's spending the winter in Palm Springs, and I needed an older woman. Not an old woman, just someone older than me (fair enough). So she's game, and even willing to do a little bit of legwork for her costume. This morning, she was out shopping for a Ken Doll to glue onto HER headband (you see, there was NO chance of me turning out vanilla), and she sends me this text:

"Ken is honking huge.  Wouldn't you think there would be an Ellen D type looking Barbie that is normal size but could be ACDC.   Where the hell are the boy dolls?"

making rag dolls in the loony bin

Ok, so I have to admit that I've been letting the stress get to me. I need to get a grip. I'm not curing cancer over here. Nobody's life is at stake. I told Sadie that I feel like I'm shouting at myself  "I WANT THE TRUTH" and then myself is yelling back at me "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!" Dude, chill. 

Yesterday I was at the gym doing a guilt workout so that I could say that I had lost at least a half a pound for the biggest loser dealie (I did!). I was also trying to blow off some steam because when I woke up, I couldn't turn my head from side to side, after doing our first dance rehearsal, which made me feel old and craggy. Just about everything everyone says to me makes me want to unhinge my jaw and shout "I'm all full thanks, leave your card by the door". 

Today instead of buying a HDMI to mini HDMI cable, painting fiber board lightning bolts, and learning what it means to transcode, I went into the pink man cave and ironed. That's right. I said it. I IRONED. I got out some of my old sarongs that Nip and I bought at Simrane in Paris before Jack was born. I bought tons of them, but the pink ones I wore the most (obv) and they've gotten so worn, that they're pretty faded, and some have ripped. I ironed them, and then cut them into strips so that I can make a quilt. I thought I'd mix in some of Heather Ross Mendocino fabric too. Yeah, no, I don't know how to quilt, but why should that stop me? I don't know how to act, or shoot music videos, or write songs, or take pictures, or make cakes, or be a mom, or really do much of anything at all. But the idea of doing all those things keeps me interested. SO I ironed and I felt better. 

SO back to the day before at the gym. I was on the treadmill, and because I felt like I needed to maximize the use of my time, I decided to practice my Lady Gaga dance moves (at least the arm movements) on the treadmill. Yeah, that's right, I don't give a damn what kind of crazy I look like, I'm a MOM. SO I'm there, happily walking, watching the tutorial on my iphone propped up on the magazine rack on the treadmill. I've got my headphones on, I'm pop and locking, and as I bring my arms down in front of me, I get them caught up in the headphone wires. The earbuds jerk out of my ears, and the phone tumbles to the ground. The moving sidewalk underneath me, I fumble to grab the headphone, or phone, anything, and as I do, I KICK the phone. KICK it, like I was Pelé, and lucky me, the treadmill is located on the balcony overlooking the weight room, and over it goes. In slow motion I watch my 2nd iphone set sail, and as I'm on a treadmill, it takes me a second to smash the stop button, jump off, race to the banister, and see, is it dead?  There it is, on the ground. I look around, did anyone see that? On top of being the psycho loser doing bad dance moves on the treadmill, I am now the psycho loser asking some meathead to keep an eye on my phone, until I can come down and retrieve it. This guy, whose neck is at least as wide as my waist, grunts enough of an acknowledgment. I grab my bag, and run down the stairs, pick the phone off the floor. It's still playing the Lady Gaga tutorial, and besides having some serious gym rat cooties, it's fine. Hoorah! AND...scene. Please tip your waiter on the way out. 

please mind the delay, we're experiencing technical difficulties

Please listen to this as you read this post. It will help you get in the mood.

I know I haven't written all week. It's only Monday. I mean I haven't written since last week. Oh hell, I'm going back to bed. I have suddenly reached critical mass, the tipping point, whatever it is, I'm broken. Officially. I have successfully piled too much on my plate, and now I'm full, and I can't take another bite, but guess what, there are six more courses. The sad part of this statement is that I don't have a job. Not really. Not a job job, where you get up in the morning, and have to put on clothes that convince your coworkers that you are not a hobo or a schizophrenic. I do have to go to auditions, and from time to time, report to a set at some ungodly hour, but that's only like ten times a year. So how did I end up this Monday in February, deeply in need of a nap, vacation, bubble bath, lobotomy? I blame apple computers. We have four of them. FOUR OF THEM. Not including the iphones that we all have, including Jack. NO, I did not go buy my two year old an iphone. He has my old one that we loaded up with kids games, and movies, and he knows how to navigate youtube to find his favorite videos, because he was born in the future. 

There is no way to escape information in this house. I can't dodge an email, or a phone call, or a text message, or the huffington post, or etsy, or my bank account, or that pre-school that we're looking into, or that rug on anthropologie.com, or my blog, or other people's blogs, or taking pictures, or playing monopoly, or watching this really funny video that my husband's sister's mother in law's gynecologist posted, or FACEBOOK. All of these things are unavoidable because of the multitude of apple computers at hand in this house. And now it looks like we might be getting another one, because none of the FOUR that we have has a fast enough processor to handle the video files from my new camera. WHAT THE F*#K! When did this happen? Can Steve Jobs just install the chip in my head and get it over with? I want that new mac smell right in my very own body. 

I've been guest blogging on a site called photocinenews.com. You can read those posts here and here. I'm working on shooting a parody of a Lady Gaga music video. As in, I got this idea one night while standing in the kitchen, so I wrote some new lyrics to one of her songs, handed it over to Cleo's mommy, who I thought would record the lyrics over a karaoke version of the song. Nope, she and the uber talented sound engineer for their band remixed the whole thing so it sounds like oh I don't know, LADY GAGA is singing it. Sadie offered up her backyard for the shoot, and her dance skills. Uhm. Pressure on.

I've been making props, glitter gluing Barbie dolls, making macaroni face masks, figuring out costumes, making shot lists, thinking about getting SAG contracts, choreographing some dance moves (DUDES, this is not going to be pretty), and learning how to use the camera. I just threw that last one in last because if I can't use the camera, none of the rest of this will matter. It should be number one on the list. But I have some kind of genetic abnormality that causes me to wait until the last possible minute, when the pressure to perform is so intense my eyeballs are bugging out of their sockets. Then I sit down and cram. Not really the best way to learn, and I'm hoping I can steer Jack towards some better study skills. Do as I say, not as I do Buttercup.

I've been trying to get some of the home projects done. The bathroom painting I know, is a big joke. I think we are coming up on the half year anniversary of the whole paint pen fiasco. Maybe it'll never be finished. It's the potty of shame. It's also the only working toilet in this house. The upstairs toilet will only flush water. If you put so much as three sheets of toilet paper in it, it clogs. Our handyman Roberto came over to fix it, and $100 later, it doesn't flush any better, but it now sprays water on you when you flush it, which sort of makes it like a poor man's bidet.

The pink man cave/craft room/office has indeed brought a great deal of satisfaction in it's fledgling stages, but it's also caused all manner of strife and indecision. The rug I ordered from Overstock.com turned out to be revolting. As soon as I took it out the packaging, I knew it, but I was paralyzed by the thought of navigating returning a rug through the mail. Turns out it was easy as pie, so kudos to overstock.com for not making me want to take an entire bottle of xanax. And kudos to Brenda, our nanny, who this morning without hesitation told me the rug was ugly and she hated it. Thank you Brenda, I was trapped in a procrastination spiral that was sure to last until the last possible day before I could return the thing, followed by cursing and some pinot noir, a handful of m&ms and a xanax.

I mentioned I was doing Nipper's cousin's wife's biggest loser challenge. Thanks again to the damn interwebs and apple computer, I'm now engaged in a long distance shame game, whereby if I don't drop this last 5 pounds in the next 4 weeks, it's not just me I'm lying to about unbuttoning my pants while I drive. I was going to go to the gym this morning, but Roberto called me and said he could take out the window to remove the couch from Jack's room to put in the pink man cave. I waited around for him, and ate the leftovers from Hattie's birthday cake. Did I mention I spent 10 hours on Saturday licking frosting and batter off my fingers while making a Minnie Mouse cake for Sadie's daughter's 3rd birthday? Oink oink.

I wore big orange rubber gloves to mix the black food coloring into the fondant. Good thing too, because I had to throw them out when I was done. A million manicures wouldn't get that ink out of my cuticles.

This afternoon, at an audition I ran into another actor who's putting together a show of women doing 5-10 minutes as their mothers. I'm in. Wait, did I say I was in? Did I say I'd have my first draft in a few weeks. Around the same time we'll be shooting the Lady Gaga video? What is wrong with me? Has ANYONE read that ADHD article yet???

Jack moved from his crib into a big boy bed in his new room, which was our old office last week. He's fine. I'm devastated. I know it's cliched but I feel like I just brought him home from the hospital. I just heard his little cry for the first time, all sweet and raspy. I just gave him his first bath in the bathroom sink. Just said "I'm so happy to meet you, I'm your mommy". I moved the rest of his furniture out of what was "the nursery" today. I just stood there in this empty room, save his crib, and some baby toys that he's grown out of. Time is moving too quickly and I'm trying to savor all the little moments.