Pizza Lines and Fame

Anyone out there remember Bonnie Raitt?  Foxy middle aged redhead, plays a mean guitar?  Ringing any bells?  And, yes, I totally have the hots for her.  How could you not?  That witch’s lock sends shivers down my spine (figured out if I’m just pulling your chain yet… betcha’ don’t know).

Anywho.  She put out this multi platinum album, “The Luck of the Draw.”  The title track is buried deep in the album, the 11^th to be exact, and that fucker hits me like a mighty freight train every damn time I listen to it.

You see it’s about this woman who is a bartender that writes screenplays “on the side.”  The song tells us that she feels that this work is beneath her.  In the first verse, “Three nights a week can keep a girl workin/Sometimes it’s good to lose your pride.”  And the chorus tells us we do these things to “write our fire in the sky.”  Excuse me… damn I need a tissue… this song… it does it to me.

But then the second chorus tells us that it’s all in the “Luck of the Draw”, to “forget those movies you saw” and that this is “the natural law” this, this, this fucking LUCK.  This roll of the dice.  This statistical nightmare of the impossibility of “making it” of writing my fire in the sky.

You know what?  Fuck that shit.  Yeah, fuck it all.  Shit on all that fuck.  Fucking shit.  That’s what luck is.  Fuck that.  Yeah.  Totally…

fuck

I weep at that song because it is so right on the damn money.  It’s all luck.  Who you know, what stupid Pizzaria you were standing in when the agent saw you (Natalie Portman, no joke), or which mall you were shopping in when the woman who is casting Terminator 2 sees you walking down the hall and asks you if you can ride a moped (Edward Furlong).

It’s all these stupid, impossible stories that start some of us into the business.  It’s all these stupid, impossible stories that keep some of us in the business.  It’s all these stupid, impossible stories that let us tell ourselves that “It’ll be different for me.  Just for me.  I’ll be 36 years old standing in line at the Bagel Shop, and the dudes from Matrix IVX will just happen to be buying the Lox that I was looking at and say ‘Hey, do you do any stunts?’  Yeah, sure that’s the way it’ll be, just for me.”

Actually, not all of us have this heart-wrentchingly obnoxious dream of being “discovered.”  Most of us want to work for it.  We want to work our asses off for it.  I made a pledge a long time ago to make my own fucking luck.  Don’t get me wrong, I love pizza and all, I’m even willing to stand in line for it, but damn it I am an artist and I will make my own FATE.  In fact:

THERE IS NO FATE BUT WHAT WE MAKE.

Okay, so that’s a line from Terminator 2… but damn it!  I cry at that movie too.  And that line has stayed with me since I first saw it…  I FEEL that line…  It moves me.

shit

Somedays, I’m more pathetic than others.

Now I’m going to go watch some shmaltzy movie about some person born under special stars but in a backwater town and with the talent to Make It…  If someone would only find him…ahem, I mean whoever it is in the movie.