Dreams

Martin McDonagh, Eavon Boland, and Seamus Heaney are out. The dream is much as it was before in Naples, Florida, driving through star-studded beaches and rich homes: that Steven Spielberg, seeing our car, would beckon us into his home that looks like Jurassic Park, and that we would have a cup of tea; we wouldn't even have to talk about movies, just get to a point where we could meet each other's gaze from across the room and do the somewhat-acknowledging-but-not-being-too-ostentatious chin raise that you see 50 Cent and all the cool rappers do, all to say: "Hey Steve... Whazzup?" To which he says, "Nothin', dawg, I'm straight chillin' like a well-earned glass of lemonade... on a hot day." This is how Steven Spielberg speaks in my mind.

And now Pedro Almódovar has also slipped my grasp. Not that I would recognize Spain's most well-renowned filmmaker by sight, but I'd love to see the man and exclaim, "I loved Hable con Ella as a piece of art even if it totally weirded me out! Do you have space for a Production Assistant who is really enthusiastic and wants to learn Spanish?"

We're in London in two days, and I don't think we'll see Gordon Brown either. Neither Ryan or I have much luck catching heads of state, especially me, because for all of my entreaties in DC, Obama never did come to my Starbucks, and Michelle, in a need for classy burgers that I can understand, visited the Five Guys at the end of my block and, probably sated with deliciousness from that place, did not need any coffee. Yet apparently Pervez Musharraf did come in with all of his aides an hour or so after I got off work, so maybe Tony Blair, W., or Mikhail Gorbachev will take our spot at the fireworks after we've been there, done that.

Woody Allen is preparing a new film in London, though (probably along the lines of Vicky Christina Barcelona), so there is hope. Maybe he'll even wind up in South Lincolnshire and need directions and I can hop out and direct the man whose zeitgeist films have traversed continents, from Manhattan and the feelings of an American generation in the '70s to Match Point and the European present. But the more I muse about this, and the massive James L. Brooks films of life that film in our neighborhoods in DC and don't hire us because they have handpicked staff from New York and California, the more that I remember that life, in its simplest essence, is that of flowers and babies, pied beauty and new life; and this life is everyday renewing... by God it is renewing.