Touch You Last

“Barry,” my cousin Mike said, “I think it’s time.” It was clear that my brother didn’t feel the same way, but he only shrugged, which Mike took as agreement. “Dave,” he said, giving the words as much gravity as he could muster, “Go get the dictionary.” I was nine years old, and a tag-along. I’d walked in on my brother telling a story about how—during school that morning—a girl he knew got her period in the middle of French class. And I laughed like the dickens. And then they called me on it. After I’d lugged the dictionary down from the spare room, Mike told me to look up the word period and read out the definition. “The end of a cycle, a series of events, or a single action?” “Keep going,” he said. “The full pause with which a sentence closes?” “Not that.” “An interval of geologic—“ “Gimme that!” He yanked the book towards him, read down the page, and pointed me towards the definition he’d found. Menstruation: the monthly discharge of blood from the uterus of nonpregnant women from pu...

From the top Previous II. My first film role was in a movie called ‘The Valiant.’ It was described to me as a period piece, but it was really an action movie with muskets. It was about an American man who seeks out justice after English loyalists murder his wife. I, of course, played the wife. She really had no personality, she was just sweet enough that she had to die. I had a total of fifteen minutes of screen time. It wasn’t a good movie, a far cry from anything I’d been a part of before, but it had a fairly large budget, which meant, “Big distribution, big exposure,” according to Norman . I was cast alongside a man named Jude Rollins, who was supposedly an up and comer. The Valiant was supposed to be his breakthrough role, taking him from national to worldwide recognition. We met for the first time in a costuming session. “Hey there, Smallframe. You must be my wife,” were the first words he ever spoke to me. “My name ...

Have you ever been kicked out of a movie theatre, either for sneaking in underage or as a result of. . . other reasons. Alanis, I'm looking at you.

It’s difficult to see a current movie and not already know too much about it. I love trailers, but more often then not, they render the set up of any movie almost meaningless. Mr. & Mrs. Smith —a great movie that I enjoyed a lot, but we all knew going in that the Mr. and Mrs. were assassins for hire, and it gave the first half an hour a real get-on-with-it feel. This is why I enjoy these Wednesday movies, because I only know most of them by reputation and what I think I know is typically wrong. There were only two things I knew about Out of Africa before I watched it: it had won Best Picture, and it was longest movie in all of movie history. Turns out I was wrong on the second thing. I think my parents—to whom a ninety-five minutes feature is “some long, b’y”—might have seen this when I was young and I’d witnessed the fall out. At two hours and forty minutes, no one would define it as short and breezy, but it’s no Das Boot , if you know what I’m saying. So here’s what I didn’t kn...

Do you remember the first time you had exposure to the Internet? What banal thing did you do with it?

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce the newest members of clan MacDonald-McLean. First, Gunter. We'd had our eye on this guy for about two weeks, but the hours of the Anrprior Humane Society coincided pretty much exactly to our own work hours. He was a handsome guy, described as talkative and affectionate, and frankly, we just liked the name. He's the alpha male, or so he'd like to have you believe, but he's run off and hid like a pansy at least six times in the last two days. Oh, and he grumbles like a person. If he's pissed, you'll know it. But he's all talk. For the most part, he's a good guy. And he's also fond of giving headbutts of love. Next is Morris, who I like to call Moe, and Sarah likes to call Snowpants. (And when we're feeling particularly witty: Moepants Snowpants.) We weren't looking for a young guy, or a long haired cat, but this guy seduced me with a look after about ten seconds. (When I first met Sarah, it t...

When I was twenty-four years old I dreaded my thirtieth birthday, but for different reasons than I do now. I was still in University then, finishing up the last year of a creative writing degree. At the onset, those of us in the program (with some exceptions) started out certain we’d all be little wonder boys and girls by the time we’d finished. We’d form a crew; we’d write and be written about. This of course never happened. Near the end of fourth year we were all certainly better writers, but none of us were superstars. We weren’t even published. But it was okay, I rationalized; I was still young. While my original plan—to have amassed a portfolio of writing so enormous that something would have to get published—failed entirely, my new plan would simply be to publish a novel by the time I was thirty. It was six years away. Actually, I think the full plan was to churn out three books by then, because then one would surely get picked up. If I couldn’t publish a book by the time I was ...