Alexis and I have been in Colorado for the last few days with two friends. Everyone else has been skiing, but I’ve been hanging at the condo doing film stuff. I’m an awkward, clumsy person skier, and I was petrified of injuring myself so soon before we start filming. So, chilling in the condo.
Holy yikes, by the way. In two and a half weeks, we start filming. Wow.
So this past Thursday, we fly in to Denver and the four of us stop for Mexican food, and in the parking lot of the restaurant, my phone is accidentally knocked from my hand and the screen shatters. Fully shatters. Little pieces of glass still come off on my fingertips when I send a text. But the phone still works perfectly, which is a blessing. Driving away from Denver, we stop at a liquor store and I buy beer. An hour later, we get to the condo and I can’t find my wallet. Between the four of us and six Apple devices, we figure out what the liquor store was, and I call. They haven’t seen my wallet. Not even in the parking lot? Sorry ma’am. I go to the websites of my credit cards, poised to cancel, and sort of spontaneously decide to call the guy at the liquor store back. Sorry to bother you, I say. Can you take my name and number, just in case someone finds it? Sure, he says. But I don’t think your wallet is here.
Five minutes later, my shattered phone is literally in my hand and Capital One’s number is up on my computer, and my phone rings. The liquor store guy found my wallet, untouched, in a dark part of the parking lot. Blessing number two, salvaged from the blight of a near disaster. But, the liquor store hero says, we close in one hour. And the liquor store is one hour away.
So Alexis and I jump in the car and take off and maybe he goes a mile or two over the speed limit. Just about five miles from the liquor store, we get pulled over. My heart is in my throat, this is seriously the most surreal and perplexing evening I’ve had in ages. I tell the officer my stupid wallet story and he follows us to the liquor store and I get the wallet (HURRAY!) and we then sit in the car, waiting for the officer to come over and give us whatever ticket. He takes forever. Then he comes over, talks for a while, and ultimately just gives us a warning. Blessing number three. My relief is so unwieldy and vast that I exhale for an hour.
I like to see coincidences as verification that I’m on the right path, and near misses give me a similar tingle. They force me to pay attention to how lucky I am. And now, today, two-ish weeks from principal photography, I need to settle down, take a breath, and think about how wonderfully lucky I am to be two weeks away from making a movie I wrote, that I also get to act in. That’s outrageous. I get so caught up in what’s left to do and what we can’t afford. But like a wedding or a community theater play, it’ll all come together. Momentum and this team will see us through.
We’re about to make a fucking great movie.
-bodine