We Don't Work or Live Here, We're a Film Crew

           

            There was a large film crew set up on Dunn Ave and also in the Capital Espresso on the Tuesday morning of August 2nd. I overheard one passerby say to another, “Oh, it’s a film crew! I thought all those people were working!”

On Tuesday my top priority was to prepare my grant application for my courses in September and to hopefully be able to hand it in before the Admissions and Awards office closed at 16:30.

            Nick Cushing was in town for an unplugged Frequency Zed show, but he came early to shoot some video around Toronto. He called me but I told him that I could only get together in the evening because of all the financial paperwork I had to prepare for my grant.

            I had to go online to the OCADU website so I could access and print up my payroll receipts from August 2015 to the present. Then I had to dig through my business drawer to gather up all of my social assistance cheque stubs for the same period. The main problem was that my internet connection was horrible from both my sources and I often had to switch to one when the other failed, which was often. Once that was done I photographed all my social assistance stubs in groups of three. By the time I had my Noah Meltz grant application filled out and had attached to it all of my financial information, it was too late to go downtown to hand it in.

            I went to pay for my August phone service, and then I called Nick to let him know I wasn’t going anywhere.

            I took a siesta for about an hour and fifteen minutes and then after I got up, Nick came by with two cans of Lowenbrau. We chatted for a while, and then Nick showed me how to bypass Windows 10’s annoying import application in order to get files from the bike cam to my computer. My video of the food bank line-up that had been seemingly trapped in the camera came through fine the way Nick showed me how to do it.

            Nick also had three videos that he’d shot last month of me singing and playing my song “Love In Remission”. I had not heard a new recording of myself playing one of my songs for almost fifteen years and so I never knew what that particular song sounded like. I was pleasantly surprised. I made a mistake in each video but we just have to mesh the best parts together to make one good video.

            I stood at my window as a young woman walking along the other side of Queen Street noticed me looking at her and began to play with her hair.

            That night I watched a couple of second season episodes of “I Love Lucy”. Every show since the announcement of her pregnancy found comedy in the situations that stem from a couple that are expecting a child. Both of the episodes I watched that night made fun of Lucy’s food cravings. The first began with Ricky arriving home after having looked all over town for a papaya milkshake. He found one and also brought Lucy the large dill pickle that she’d asked for and which she proceeds to dip into the milkshake and eat in a state of ecstasy. At the end of the other show, Ricky brought her a hot fudge sundae and a package of sardines, which she mixed together and ate with great pleasure.