Goin' Hollywood

Thought experiment:

In the professional statement I sent to the people at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, I included more than one reference to the regularity with which I update my blog. Yesterday, they named me as one of six finalists out of hundreds of applicants for the television scriptwriting category.*

*For those of you not following the drama on Facebook, this is the one of the most widely sought after internships in the country and arguably the most sought after internship in the entertainment industry. Having progressed to the finalist round, if I win, I will be placed in the writers’ room of a major TV show and given a $4000 stipend. We’re all very excited.

Presumably, they picked me as a finalist based on the strength of my professional statement and the five page writing sample I wrote, an original 30 Rock cold open. In order to stay in competition, I’ve got to write and submit the rest of the 30 Rock script before May 7th – this on top of being in England doing everything.

Fortunately, my classes over here are a joke, and I’ve gone hog-wild enough with tourism in the past few weeks to have earned a few days alone in my room, hard at work on my 30 Rock script. However, in order to win one of the two positions these other five people and I are competing for, I’ll need to go to the mattresses: Writing, rewriting, editing, and generally upping the funny.

Which means that blog updates until May 7th may be kind of dicey, which in turn invalidates the claims in my professional statement about being diligent about timely updates. But if they deemed me worthy of the job on the basis of those timely updates…

For about nine days, I’m going to need to abandon you guys. If it’s any consolation, it’s because I need to selfishly advance my own career.

If you want to sully your reputation as a writer by being a guest contributor, please do hit me up on Facebook. I’m going to do my very best to make sure there’s content here on every update day, even if that means asking Slagathor to contribute.

In the meantime, you can keep up with my Flux travel blog updates at blog.fluxstories.com, which just recently went online. There’s three older updates there, and as I’m required to update weekly there you can expect one more (it’s not because I like them better than you. Daddy loves both blogs equally.)

Thanks in advance for understanding – and if you don’t understand, piss off. This mess is about to get raw like sushi, so haters to the left.

Truman Capps thanks Jeff Matarrese for reminding him of that last line.

London, Indian Style

Pappadoms. This will be important in a moment.

Blood sausage, liver and onions, jellied eels. These are just a few of the disgusting foods for which England is traditionally known. In fact, England is essentially the only country I can think of that has an internationally bad reputation for food – and if a major facet of an entire nation’s culture can be unilaterally written off by the international community, you know that shit has to suck.

This was worrisome for me, because while I am a great lover of England, English culture, and girls with English accents, I am also a big food lover. Someone who loves food going to the country known for having the worst food is a lot like someone who loves not getting murdered by drug cartels going to Mexico. It just doesn’t make one helluva lot of sense.

One thing that people did tell me before I came here was that I could expect some of the finest Indian food in the world, thanks to England’s close and sometimes jingoistic relationship with India. This relationship permeates pretty much every level of English society.

In America, for example, should you walk into a fast food restaurant, you’re pretty likely to see a person with brown skin standing behind the counter. The same is the case here, but it’s a different flavor of minority. Indians work many of the service industry jobs in London – they drive the trains, they wait the tables, and they operate literally every single market in the country.* Seriously, fucking come over here and prove me wrong.

*I’ve also seen plenty of Indian people in business suits and ties, because everyone is equal in one big happy rainbow of employment.

This sort of immersion into Indian and Pakistani culture is new for me, since never outside of a speech and debate tournament have I been around this many South Asian people before. The other day, for example, I saw my first ever mosque. It wasn’t anything too special, but having never seen one in Oregon before I took a picture to show all my friends back home and piss off the rednecks.

Everybody walking by was looking at me like I was crazy, this guy standing in awe of a regular building with a spire and concrete half moon on top, because they see mosques everyday. I imagine an English person visiting America would be equally impressed by various mundane aspects of Mexican culture.

“Yes, Mum, it’s really amazing! I just had some traditional Mexican food today at a little place by the Interstate! I think it was called Taco Bell. Have you ever heard of a Crunchwrap Supreme? I think it’s Aztec!”

One of the good things about Indian food in London, I had been told, was that it was often far cheaper than the local western fare. This was what led me to an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane, one of London’s hotspots for authentic Indian food.

I picked a restaurant, got settled at a table, and ordered a lamb curry dish priced at 7.95. And the waiter nodded and said, “You want poppadoms with that?”

And I was all, “Fuck yes I want some pappadoms!”

And the waiter said, “And do you want naan bread with that?”

And I was all, “Fuck yes I want some naan bread! Do I look like the sort of guy who eats Indian food without naan bread?”

And the waiter said, “And do you want rice with that?”

And I was all, “Fuck yes I want some rice! You show me the asshole who tries to eat curry without rice, and I’ll show you a man whose life is hollow and empty!”

And he left, and twenty minutes later my food arrived. Lamb curry, rice, pappadoms, naan bread – a feast fit for a king, or, at the very least, a duke of some sort.

Imagine how great this would look if I'd thought to use my flash!

This good, probably.

And it was great – tender, flavorful lamb, crispy pappadoms, naan bread all fluffy as the dickens. As I ate, I thought, “Man, what a great deal – all this food for 7.95! Long live India! I’m going to give Slumdog Millionaire a critical reappraisal!”

So imagine my surprise when they brought the check and I found that I had paid close to 16 pounds ($24) for what I had thought was a 7.95 meal. Pappadoms? Not cheap. Naan bread? Also not cheap. White rice? 1.95. In America, I can get enough uncooked white rice to smother a baby elephant for that much in dollars, but here they charged me that for a single dish of it.

I learned two things:

1) If you want a good dinner, no matter what culture you’re in, you’ll have to pay big for it.

2) Saying ‘Yes’ to everything the waiters offer you might be a good idea from a multicultural perspective, but it will straight up murder your pocketbook.

Truman Capps can hear the British person visiting America saying, “Would you believe they charged me $2.00 for guacamole? $2.00! Thieves, these Americans!”

Jolly Old Election, 2010

Well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

England is a very civilized place, and nowhere is that more apparent than their election cycle.

Elections in the UK don’t happen on a set date every four years, like they do in America – rather, Parliament sees that everybody’s term limits are coming up and says, “Well, shit – I guess we should have an election then, shouldn’t we?” And then they announce the election date, which is generally about one month after the date of the announcement.

Yes, that’s right – the entire British election cycle runs for one month, or four weeks, or 28 days, which is enough time for England to be completely overrun by zombies or for Sandra Bullock to kick her drug abuse problem and learn a valuable lesson about friendship, depending on which section of the video store you’re in.

This was quite a surprise to me, as I’m still shell shocked by the Iron Man Triathlon of a campaign we had to go through to get our current president, which I’m pretty sure started shortly before the birth of Christ and continued, relentlessly, through the following two millennia as McCain, Clinton, and Obama duked it out amid constant sideshow scuffles between a small army of obscure third party candidates and VP hopeful faux pas. As terrible as it was, though, I didn’t see anything wrong with it, because that’s how American politics works! Once every four years, there’s a solid 18 months where Saturday Night Live briefly gains relevance, and then there’s a new (or the same) guy in the White House.

I’m still sort of skeptical that you can even have an election in one month. What about the trash talking? Don’t get me wrong: There’s a fair amount of that going on here, but there’s no way that it can be enough to have an election! In my eyes, trash talk is like lubricant – you need a whole lot of it if you’re going to have a good circle jerk.

See, and politics is the circle jerk.

Not that I’m an expert on circle jerks. It’s not like I’ve ever done it or anything, because that would be really weird, right? It’s not the sort of thing you’d mention publicly, where all of your friends and your parents can read about it, unless you were totally kidding. And I am. I only know what it is because Trevor Jones keeps asking me to do one with him.

Right, anyway.

One month! They do the whole election in one month! And with three major political parties, no less – Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrats, who, as far as I can tell, are basically three slightly different shades of liberal battling it out over economic policy and immigration, as opposed to hot button issues like gay marriage or individual involvement in Vietnam.

I feel like they’re cutting corners, almost – like maybe the democracy over here isn’t quite as good as our democracy. And of course that’s true, because America invented democracy; after all, no Philly Cheesesteak will be as good as the one you have in Philadelphia, am I right?

With a one month long election cycle, Britons don’t really come to enjoy the end result as much as we do in America. There’s none of the satisfaction or accomplishment. At the end of every election in the United States, I always think, “Well, I made it through another election without completely losing my shit after the candidates called each other Nazis for the 15th time – God bless America!” Elections here are quick and easy, yet in my experience, good things don’t come quickly or easily. Knowledge, wisdom, Writers - all built on a veritable mountain of blood, sweat, and tears.

How can you be sure you’re electing the right person without two years of debate, punditry, waffling, and sex scandals? If our election had only lasted one month, John Edwards could’ve been president for nearly a year before we found out what a festering piece of shit he was! You’ve got to keep your politicians under intense public scrutiny for as long as possible – the one who doesn’t crack is your president.

At least, that’s how we do it in my country.

Truman Capps was also interested to find out that the Pacifica Forum is a political party here, and it’s called the British National Party.

Boozing In England, Part 2 - The Oldening

I didn't take my camera with me (thankfully), but this is what Flickr says Champers looks like.

The term ‘pub crawl’ has never made much sense to me, because it (quite rightly) conjures in my mind the image of a bunch of people getting piss drunk and literally crawling from one pub to the next. And of course, binge drinking is sort of a mainstay of English culture and there’s not a thing wrong with that – it’s just that, in my experience, when you give something a name, the name is intended to dress the thing up and obscure its faults. A shitty house is a ‘fixer-upper’, a wad of paper to fill with snot is a ‘Kleenex’, and a writer who makes a mockery of grammatical conventions by stitching together unnecessarily long sentences with dashes, semicolons, commas, and parenthetical statements is either ‘Faulkneresque’ or ‘Almost as shitty a writer as that Truman Capps guy, whose sentences sometimes get so long you have to take notes just to keep track of what the hell he’s saying.’

Saying “I’m going on a pub crawl,” though, lays it all out on the table: “I am going to go to bars and get shitfaced to the point that I might have to crawl from one to the next. I do this of my own free will.”

I had never been on a pub crawl before coming to England, as back in Eugene I only really went to one bar with any regularity in spite of the shitty booze, cranky bartenders, and decided lack of appropriate taco supplies on Taco Tuesdays. When I drank at home (something I only did once I was over 21, Brothers and Sisters writers assistants and 44 Blue Productions internship selection staff), it was usually White Russians with the roommates and friends. We never really had any reason to go anywhere, so crawling never came into it (although getting up and down the stairs would get difficult after a while).

So when several girls from the semester program invited my roommate Tom and I to go on a pub crawl with them in nearby Eastcote, I thought, “Great! Yet another chance to do everything!”

The girls had four pubs lined up down Eastcote’s main strip, which is probably what Salem’s Lancaster Drive would look like if everything was more charming and English. When we reached the first pub, though, I realized that something was wrong.

Firstly, there was a ‘MEMBERS ONLY’ sign in the window.

Secondly, everyone inside was over the age of 40.

The girls, dissuaded by the members only sign, began to drift away from the open door, but the bar’s crusty proprietor burst out, all yellow-toothed smiles.

“Where’re y’goin’, now? Y’just got here!”

The girls all giggled diplomatically.

“Well, we saw it was a members only place.” I said, pointing to the sign. “And we’re not members.”

“Y’are now!” He said, beckoning toward the door. “C’mon in! Make yerselves at home!”

I would have found this charming and friendly were it not for the fact that his charm and friendliness was completely motivated by the fact that he wanted five girls thirty years his junior to be closer to him.

But we went in, and for our entire time in the pub I could sense eyes on the girls – both the hungry, “God, I wish I wasn’t going back to my 47 year old wife tonight” eyes of the men and the “Where the hell do those young bitches get off upstaging us?” eyes of the resident pride of cougars. The bartender yelled at us to get out of the way when a new pack of people came in, and a bunch of drunken bald guys at the bar made more and more desperate attempts to strike up a conversation as the night wore on.

The hostile vibe, and the fact that the bar closed at 11, forced us out within an hour, and we moved on to the next site on the crawl: Champers, which billed itself as an honest to God disco and wine bar. This was a bad sign. Strobe lights and music thumped from within. This was a worse sign. The thumping music was Lady Gaga’s ‘Caught in a Bad Romance.’ That was the worst sign of all time.

So the girls lead us in there and it quickly becomes apparent that we are the youngest people here by a good 20 years. The room is full of drunk, horny, middle aged British people bumping and grinding to songs that people my age bump and grind to.

As I stood in the doorway, regarding the scene with outright horror, the bouncer pulled me aside.

“We don’ normally allow trainers in ‘ere,” he said, pointing to the sneakers I was wearing. “But because you came in wiv a bunch of girls, we’ll make an exception.”

And I smiled and gave him the thumbs up in a thankful way, but what I actually wanted to say was,

That’s pretty big talk coming from the guy working at a nightclub full of people who only came out because their kids are in college and NCIS is a rerun tonight. Maybe you didn’t get the memo, but nightclubs were invented for people our age! You see, I come from a place called America, and in America they would be paying a bunch of sexy twentysomethings to come party it up with people older than our parents, regardless of what the fuck kind of shoe we were wearing!

And so I went into the dark, oppressively hot room full of loud music, flashing lights, and dancing drunk people, which, to be honest, I would’ve outright hated even if the room wasn’t full of cockney baby boomers.

A catastrophically drunk, balding 43 year old in a douchebag buttondown black shirt quickly spotted us in the corner where we had formed a tight circle, the girls enthusiastically dancing and me bobbing my head and wanting to slit my throat. He moseyed up behind one of the girls and began grinding against her, which was all fun and games for the first four seconds, until she realized that somebody her Dad’s age was rubbing his dick against her ass.

She moved into the circle and motioned for me to fill the gap before Baldie could, and I did, like a straight up hero.

Then, he started to grind on me.

11:30 in a senior citizens’ nightclub in suburban London with some drunk systems administrator in a midlife crisis rubbing his junk all over me. Truman Capps, this is your life!

I wanted to stand on a chair and shout,

You should all be ashamed of yourselves! You’re doing the stuff that we’re supposed to be ashamed of! You guys had your time to do this kind of shit – it was called the 1980s! And you had it way better than we do now, because the music was better and it was socially acceptable to do cocaine! So go home! Be adults! It’s after 11:30, and if you’re anything like my parents, you probably wanted to go to bed two hours ago anyway!

In my quest to do everything, I was bound to do some things I didn’t like, because as we all know, I dislike probably 30% of things. You win this round, London.

Truman Capps has every intention of getting way drunk when he’s in his 50s, but he will follow his mother’s example and only do it with friends in private, and feel very ashamed about it in the morning.

Boozing in England

When I was nine years old, my family went to New Zealand for a few weeks. This was back before Lord of the Rings and Flight of the Conchords put New Zealand on the map as the central repository for [Subject] of the [Object] – at the time, it was just a tiny country known primarily for its export of sheep.

Yes, the sheep industry in New Zealand was so big that while the country boasted a human population of roughly three million, the sheep population was something like 50 million. This was pretty exciting for a suburban nine year old who hadn’t seen a lot of sheep before.

On our way from the airport to the hotel I excitedly snapped pictures of every sheep I saw. They were white, fluffy, and cute, and I had it in my head that they were so unique that I ought to record every one I saw on film in order to remember the experience better.

By my second day in New Zealand, I had seen so many sheep that I scarcely even noticed them any more, and to this day am decidedly unimpressed by the entire species.

I had a similar experience with pubs when I first came to London. In my initial travels around the city on my first day in town, I excitedly snapped a picture of every rustic, quintessentially English pub I saw, as they were totally new to me and I figured that they were entirely unique.

Now, just like sheep, I’ve become utterly desensitized to the presence of charming pubs on every corner. However, unlike sheep, I’m willing to go inside pubs and look for something to drink.

What I understand now is that my being impressed by the traditional, English appearance of pubs is about the same as an Englishman going to the United States and eagerly snapping pictures of an Applebee’s. “Cor blimey! They’ve got sports jerseys and old timey pictures of firemen hung on the walls! So quintessentially American! What a unique find!” As it turns out, all pubs have been following the same design standards (ornate mirrors, polished bars, thick carpet, ornamental taps) since pretty much forever. Just like you wouldn’t see an Applebee’s with a reserved, minimalist design, you won’t see a pub that doesn’t adhere to the same design standard every other pub has used for the past billion years.

And for the record, that’s a good thing.

Pubs are to England what The Force is to Star Wars - they’re everywhere, they hold the country together, and they’re awesome. In many ways, England is like a bigger, classier version of college, in that it’s a commonly accepted practice that everyone goes out and drinks pretty much every night. The pubs are where this happens. Everybody comes in, has a few beers, eats some food, and gets jolly with people from the community. It’s like Taco Tuesday, only it’s every night. And there’s usually no tacos, because nobody over here knows what the fuck Mexican food is.

A lot of people told me that I was going to have to start liking beer if I wanted to make it in England, because I would probably get beat up by soccer hooligans if they heard me ordering a bitch drink like a White Russian. And this is undoubtedly true, as I’ve met my fair share of Britons (my host father* among them) who are very quick to point out the things about America that are feminine or inferior, probably as some sort of belated resentment for having their asses handed to them in two separate wars a couple centuries ago.

*On our first night here, my housemate, Tom, mentioned over dinner that he was sad to be missing out on the end of the Portland Trailblazers’ season. My host father looked up. “That’s basketball, yeah?” He said. Tom nodded. “Hm.” My host father grunted. “It’s a women’s game, innit?”

Rather than start drinking beer, though, I’ve moved to cider, which is sort of like Diet Beer – fitting, as I am a Diet Coke man through and through. Also, cider has a higher alcohol content, high enough that our program director saw fit to warn us about it at orientation, lest we throw back several pints of cider without knowing what we were getting into.

There’s definitely something to be said for being able to walk into a pub, order a pint of cider and a reasonably priced meal, and then get a solid buzz on while watching a sporting event you don’t understand on TV between two teams you’ve never heard of* with a bunch of English strangers who, by virtue of being in a pub, are now your best friends.

*Which, admittedly, is the case for me with virtually every sport in the United States, as well.

These are people who don’t smile at you on the street or speak in the subway – it’s as though they save up the pleasantries until they’re in a dimly lit room full of booze and fried food, at which point they let loose.

Truman Capps enjoyed a pint of cider before a trip to the theater the other night, which made the play about Enron FAR more exciting.

Food in London

Fucking ploughmen.

When I told people I was going to London, they often cautioned me, “Get ready for some terrible food!” And I would scold them for being culturally insensitive, acknowledging that while England does have a well-earned reputation for bland, unpalatable food, this came mainly as an outgrowth of wartime rationing and London is now a vibrant culinary center thanks to the growing international popularity of fine dining.

Or, y’know, a shorter version of that.

I got all of that information from Wikipedia and guidebooks – and I knew, of course, that no guidebook would say, “English food is terrible - do not eat for the duration of your trip!,” nor would an encyclopedia article read, “CUISINE OF ENGLAND: Don’t.” I recognized that they were probably blowing a fair amount of smoke – clearly, to have earned this reputation for bad food, England had to have at least some really nasty food.

I did not, however, think I would come into contact with it so soon.

On Saturday, my housemate Tom and I went out to the British Museum to take a look at the Rosetta Stone and the various other ancient priceless trinkets they had on display. On the way from the Underground to the museum, we were hit by hunger, and decided to stop in at a restaurant a block away from the British Museum called Munchkin’s.

I would wager that our first warning was that the restaurant was a block away from a major tourist attraction on a street lined with currency exchanges and gift shops. The second warning came when we opened our menus and were informed that ‘MUNCHKIN’S ACCEPTS EUROS AND AMERICAN DOLLARS.”

It appeared that we had been caught in a tourist trap, and even as we sat there I could feel its acidic saliva slowly beginning to digest us. Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” blared from a PA system, ensuring that as I spent the rest of my day inspecting various landmarks in Greek statuary, the only thing I could think of would be the disco anthem of gay rights and women’s empowerment.

My first instinct was to jump up and leave in favor of somewhere completely authentic, run by a charming old English couple, but then I stopped, considering my ‘DO EVERYTHING’ credo. I had already eaten at several authentic restaurants. I had not, however, patronized a classic English tourist trap. If I fled, I would be leaving a thing undone, which would compromise my goal of doing everything. Besides, even if it was a completely terrible meal, it would only make my subsequent good meals all the better by providing a horrible experience to bounce back from.

So Tom and I each picked an exotic item on the menu, and not long after a waitress with a strong Eastern European accent and a seemingly scanty knowledge of English came to our table and informed us that she would now like take order please.

“I was wondering,” Tom said. “What’s the Ploughman’s Lunch?”

The waitress nodded. “Ploughman Lunch – O.K.!” She noted this on her pad and turned to me. “You?”

I pointed to my menu and asked, slowly, so as to avoid the miscommunication she’d had with Tom, “What is the bacon split potato?”

She nodded again. “O.K. – split potato. Beans?”

I figured she was asking if I wanted beans in addition to my bacon, and seeing as I’d already accidentally ordered an item I knew nothing about, I decided to take the plunge and said, “Yeah, sure.”

She left us to wonder just what the hell we’d gotten our gastrointestinal tracts into. I resolved then and there that while I would do my best to keep an open mind, if ‘split potato’ turned out to be a bladder of any sort, I would not eat it – multiculturalism be damned. You could fill a sheep’s bladder with meat loaf, hummus, and first edition singles of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’ and I still wouldn’t go near it. Animals’ bladders should only be used as storage for animal urine, or as soccer balls in instances of severe need. Never food.

When she returned with our food, we were relieved to find that neither item was bladder based, though both were unexpected and not necessarily what we were looking for. Tom discovered that a Ploughman’s Lunch is intended more as a platter to be shared by several people over beer, comprised of multiple cheeses, pickles, and onions. It is no more a meal than a microwaved chocolate pop tart and a glass of whiskey are a dessert at a Black Angus.

I found that a split potato is a baked potato, split open. I also found that when our waitress had said, “Beans?” she didn’t mean, “Do you want beans in addition to bacon?”, she meant, “Do you want me to slather your potato in beans and nothing else?” Hearing my positive answer, she had done just that, dumping a can of baked beans onto a baked potato.

I was about to go to a museum that showcased some of the finest artistic and cultural products the world had to offer, followed by a long ride on a crowded subway. It was not a day for flatulence.

“Excuse me,” I said, pointing to my plate. “I ordered this with bacon.”

Her Eastern European eyes flicked to my bean laden potato, then back up to me – icy and unblinking. She said nothing.

“See, uh…” I muttered, trying to fill the silence and provide her with whatever information she appeared to be seeking. “I wanted, uh, bacon, and not beans, so…”

She continued to stare, as though it was my fault that she had fucked up my request to have a potato covered in bacon.

“I just, uh… I want bacon, not the beans, so…”

“I understand you say, ‘beans.’” She said, finally.

“Well,” I said. “I ordered bacon.”

She picked up my plate with a glare. “I bring bacon.”

Not long after, she brought me a similar baked potato covered in bacon, which was about as good as a shitty baked potato covered in shitty bacon could be. However, I’m reasonably certain that she or one of the cooks spat in it, so I suppose that was a pretty authentic experience.

The moral of the story? Don’t go on a culinary, “What the hell did I order?” adventure when you’re in a country with a reputation for disgusting food.

Truman Capps finds it easier to do everything when bacon is involved.

Photo Essay: London, April 5 - 7

Get used to this sort of thing, folks - it's way easy to take a picture and way difficult to write a blog, and between jet lag and physical exhaustion from walking all over the place, most nights when I get home I don't know whether to scratch my watch or wind my butt. Thus, please enjoy:

These cars were part of a small children's carousel set up at the local shopping center in Harrow, the suburb where I'm living. In order to make the cars seem exciting and realistic, the manufacturers evidently decided to put the names of random American states all over them.

No matter where you go in London, the suburbs are uniformly rustic and charming like this. I would know - I've ridden past a few billion houses like these on the tube, and all of them look just like these, in that you expect them to be full of magical nannies and mischievous, singing children.

I think we've established that the only people who will get this besides me are my Dad and Jack Brazil. So yuk it up, guys.

I was feeling a bit out of sorts and alone on my walk to class on the first day, but then I saw this and felt right at home all over again. (Yes, I know most of my pictures from London so far have been of otherwise unremarkable signs and children's rides; the good stuff is coming.)

Woah! Double decker buses AND black taxis? Well this is basically the most characteristically London picture ever! If only there was a...

Boomtown.

Here in downtown London, there's one of these on pretty much every street. And after dark, it's like Taco Tuesday EVERY NIGHT.

Alleys in London are more than just places for restaurants to put Dumpsters and hobos to masturbate - here, they actually have shops and pubs in them.

See? Nobody in this picture is a hobo, and I was the only one masturbating.

Truman Capps took something like 300 pictures in two days - expect more on Facebook once he has the time to get to uploading everything.

Brothers, Sisters, and Housewives

When I was a freshman in high school, our English teacher went around the room asking each of us what we wanted to do. When he came to me, I told everyone that I wanted to get famous writing TV shows and movies. Frankie, a stocky jerk with an illustrious JV football career ahead of him, snorted and said, “Oh, yeah right, Truman!”

I saw my interview for an internship on the TV show Brothers and Sisters as the first step on the long road to the awards show acceptance speech where I go up to the microphone, hold up my award, and say, “Blow it out your ass, Frankie.”

The magazines outside my interview at ABC had advertisements for Learjets and listings of what were the best over the counter painkillers and sleepaids in various South Asian countries. Right away I knew that I was in the big leagues – the magazines in the waiting room at my dentist’s office in Southwest Portland are full of ads for cheap mulch and knockoff erectile dysfunction pills.

In order to document this moment, I pulled out my phone to take a picture of the Learjet ad, but had to self consciously tuck it away a moment later when I heard someone coming down the hall. I would hate for my first impression with the writers at Brothers and Sisters to be that of the small town yokel so thrilled to be in LA that he’s photographing the magazines.

The interview went really well. The people interviewing me were arguably the four most beautiful individuals I’ve ever seen, like four Pygmalion-style Greek statues come to life, yet at the same time blessed with a sort of worldly knowledge that I could only hope to one day attain. On an unrelated note, they mentioned during the interview that they read my blog.

When they asked why I wanted to fetch coffee for TV writers, I explained that at this point in my life my only other option is to fetch coffee for journalists, which doesn’t sound nearly as fun.

After the interview my cousin Gene, who has been kind enough to let me invade his home during my time in LA, drove* us up to the Universal backlot to visit his incredibly nice friend Amanda, who works in the costume department at Desperate Housewives. She rolled up in a golf cart and gave us an impromptu backstage tour as we made our way to the set.

*Gene has a farm truck that is roughly 8000 years old and has no shocks whatsoever, which gives every pothole and speedbump a jolt similar to massive turbulence in an airplane. This would ordinarily be kind of scary, but the truck feels really heavy and solidly put together, as though it’s made out of Kevlar and melted down Terminators.

Golf carts might be one of the most dangerous modes of transportation, but nobody at Universal seems to know or care. Sure, they only go about 15 miles per hour, but they’re doorless vehicles with no seatbelts or shocks, so all it takes is one bump on a steep incline to send you tumbling out and down a hill into the shark tank from Jaws.

Cruising the Universal backlot was particularly fun because we got to see the Universal Studios tour groups go through in their big carts, seeing all the same cheesy attractions while we trotted off to a legitimate TV shoot. Once, while waiting behind one of these trucks, a bunch of overweight tourists near the back of the tram started excitedly taking pictures of our golf cart because it had “DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES” emblazoned across the front. I am now no doubt plastered all over some Midwestern Desperate Housewives aficionado’s Facebook page – “Is that Kyle McLachlan in the golf cart? Man, his complexion looks really bad in person!”

In the scene they were shooting, Eva Longoria confronts her husband while wearing some skimpy nightgown. However, they were shooting the scene inside the house and we were outside watching monitors, and all of the cameras were pointed at the husband for his reactions as they’d already shot Eva, so all I could see on the monitors was some middle aged guy making aroused faces and talking about how sexy his wife looked, which my Dad does basically all the time anyway.

However, as soon as the scene was finished, everybody poured out of the house, Eva Longoria among them, wearing an open robe over the absolutely tiny costume gown. She flounced down the stairs of the house and across the lawn to where all the crew, Gene, Amanda, and myself among them, had gathered by the monitors. She waved at Amanda, who she clearly knew from the costuming process.

“Hey, Eva,” Amanda said. “Have you met my friend Truman?”

Eva Longoria, #14 on FHM’s 2008 list of the sexiest women, shook her head and turned to face me. I scrambled out of the canvas chair I was sitting in, breaking the footrest in the process.

She had a Blackberry in one hand and her script in the other, but she extended the index finger of her Blackberry hand, which I gently shook. (I later realized how great it would be if she said, ‘pull my finger’).

“Hi.” She said.

This is your chance! I thought to myself. She doesn’t know you’re in the marching band! She doesn’t know that you have a Battlestar Galactica poster in your room! Make Eva Longoria think you’re cool!

And the best I could do was, “Hello, Ms. Longoria.”

“Eva.” She corrected me, before jogging off to a white van that took her back up the hill to her trailer. I got the distinct impression that she had forgotten me even before she met me.

So, first name basis with Eva Longoria. Blow it out your ass, Frankie!

Truman Capps also saw Ms. Piggy and Chris Rock that day, but that update is going to have to come later.