fire of love

My first memory of a volcano is from Honeymoon in Vegas, watching Sarah Jessica Parker’s impossibly tan, lithe, balletic frame strutting across Kauai in ‘90s body-con. The camera was on James Caan and SJP, but 8-year old me couldn’t take my bespectacled eyes away from the magmatic fire dripping down the edge of the screen, as Caan’s corrupt, Cheshire cat grin bedazzled the other corner.

I served James Caan’s brother once at a horribly-run restaurant I worked at in the valley, my first restaurant job in Los Angeles. I immediately knew it was James Caan’s brother because it looked exactly like James Caan, just, askew. James Caan, but broader, more birdlike.

He was at a table with a bunch of loud, drunk, friends in their 50s and 60s. While I doled out his table’s orders, he asked, in James Caan’s voice, what brought me to Los Angeles.

“Acting,” I replied proudly.

He guffawed. “You??” He eyed me up and down. I instinctively sucked in my not-size-2 (or even 4) stomach as his bird eyes flitted over it.