keep it weird

Austin, dog deception, Mira Nair

I booked two commercials that shoot in Austin the same week, so I’m currently living a very different sort of life, here, though one quite close to the life I was living in December while filming the movie in Florida.

I took myself to a matinee of a Mira Nair movie I’d never seen (Mississippi Masala!) despite watching Monsoon Wedding no less than 700 times in high school and beyond. I decided to walk to the health food market afterwards, because I don’t have a car here and it feels positively luxurious to have the time to go for a 4 mile walk to the store. 58 minutes in, my feet were a double fireworks show of blisters so bad that I limped into the store, sweating (“Umm…I broke in my purple clogs?”). At the checkout counter, the woman swiped my hummus and oranges while staring at me, open-mouthed.

Finally, she said “Okay. Are you the host of a PBS show?”

“What?! Yes!” I exclaimed, wincing as she swiped my $3 organic Band-Aids.

She tutted over me, exclaimed how much she loved Islands Without Cars. “You keep doing what you’re doing, girl. We LOVE you. Oh my gosh. I love where you take me,” she waved her rubber gloved hands around. Only in a health-food co-op! lol.

I put my groceries into a Lyft and as the driver pulled away, he asked me if I’d ever heard the song “Kera” by an obscure Austin artist James Hyland. Jangly guitar riffs vibrated through his hybrid car’s speakers as he raced over speed-bumps, knocking my hummus and produce asunder.

“Loving you, bring a good man fear

That’s some day, you may not be here

Kera, Kera

I just wanna be near her.”

He grinned back at me in the rearview mirror while his car belted out my name, and when we parked, showed me pictures of his 4 year-old on his phone.

My costar in the first commercial told me he was going through a break-up and the hardest part was losing the dog he’d loved for the last 6 years. I told him he should get a new dog of his own immediately to help cheer him up, but he shook his head, resolute.

“No, I could never do that to her,” he drawled, the most Texan accent I’ve met yet, with 1.3 inch bangs to match. “She was my bist friend. I would never want her to think I just moved on, just got another dawg, just like that, and forgot awl about her. It’d break her liddle heart.” He then got a faraway look in his eyes, presumably imagining himself in his sterile new apartment, petting a brand-new dog, emotionally denouncing his last one.

“She wouldn’t…know…though?” I ventured.

“I know, but I would, and that makes me think she would. Anyway she might. She was crazy intuitive.”

He then revealed that the breed of dog he was losing in the break-up was a pug, which made it even funnier, to me.

“She even knew when I would win at Fornite. I wouldn’t even make excited sounds if I won, but she knew the sound the game made if I won, and she would jump on me to congratulate me, lickin’ my face all over,” he bemoaned, a nearly-visible lump forming in his throat.

Earlier, the 2nd A.D. had joked about him being credited as “Dumbass #1” in the spot.

“I would seriously love that,” the pug-lover grinned, slapping the table with his palm.

There is a bridge here where every night at sunset, 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats bats fly out from underneath to go…find bugs? I considered venturing to see this phenomenon, but a quick google image search of what a Mexican free-tailed bat looks like assured me that that is not, actually, how I want to be spending my time.

Trigger Warning vibes

I am, however, planning on going for a February swim in the massive natural springs pool they have here, even though its temperature only hovers around 70 degrees. It’s apparently home to the endangered Barton Springs salamander, whom I absolutely would not mind running into.