one of the perks that comes along with my career of choice is that i sometimes get to live (albeit temporarily) in little corners of the world that i otherwise would probably never even pass through. it’s also the primary reason i don’t have any pets.
there was the stint in the catskills. and a month or two in saint louis. and those (somewhat dreaded) summer months in the phoenix oven when i wished i was a camel. or dead.
and there was oxford, maryland.
[okay, i’ve already lied. i had actually spent a lot of time in and around oxford during my growing up years, so this was not actually a new-to-me location. the chesapeake bay was home to many sailing weekends and oxford was usually port base. that or annapolis. but i didn’t realize it was the same place when, many years later, i was called to go down and shoot a movie there. whatever. you get the point.]
i spent i think close to 4 months living there. and it was awesome. like summer camp for adults.
situated on the eastern shore of maryland, oxford is this rare gem of a place that defines the meaning of sitting-on-the-dock-of-the-bay . . . otis redding, eat your heart out . . . or maybe oxford was your inspiration and in that case, i’ll eat my heart out and you go on collecting those residuals. even though you haven’t been alive for 44 years. which is a bummer.
there are about a hundred reasons to like this little waterfront town and like it a lot. me and Small Pants (who was my assistant on the film and who i affectionately call Small Pants because her name quite literally translates into small.pants) always threaten to go down there (but never do) and relive the glory days that were “filmmaking 101” (because for a lot of us this was our first feature film experience and we hadn’t a friggin’ clue what we were doing, but somehow got away with it in large part because we were doe-eyed and knew exactly when to flirt with who in order to get around looking like idiots who were playing with fire. which we also did . . . literally. there is something wildly amusing about lighting a match and spraying a can of hair spray over the flame. instant blow torch. i can’t in good conscious recommend that you do this, but it provided hours of entertainment during the “hurry up and wait” portions of the day. and when we ran out of hair spray, we would climb a roof. any roof. until we discovered that the producers had zero problem firing people for climbing roofs in the middle of a shoot day. so we stopped doing that and went back to makeshift blow-torching . . . . . . there is a lot of down time on a film set, people. a.lot.of.down.time.)
over the months, we created this initiation ritual of sorts where anytime a new crew member got to town, we would take them to schooner’s and eat crabs in true maryland fashion. with bibs. and mallets. and 10-ounce budweisers.
[and then we realized we didn’t really need to wait for anyone to come to town, we could do this every day. and justify it.]
with summer on the horizon (i’m ignoring the fact that it snowed this morning), i think it’s time that i honor my vow of getting back to the shore. and i’m packing Small Pants and maybe some small pants. ha.
and i want to sit by the docks and wait for the watermen to bring in the crabs that i will later beat over the head in the kindest and most respectful postmortem way i know how.
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