Sidewalk Superheroes

Or Europe, anyway. Whichever.

So, as you have no doubt learned from Catwoman, we ran off to Europe for a bit. Mainly Paris — technically it’s research for a screenplay — with a quick jaunt to Berlin for Audrey Hepburn business. While it sounded like work it was all fun, I’ll be honest with you. My time in Paris was nothing but amazing memories — until I tried to leave, but that’s a different story. Anyway, I hobbled together a video diary of sorts, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. If you didn’t already know, I’ve started a vlog (hate that word) about fumbling through life when you lose your job in a recession and not being able to find another called Simple Twist of Fate. Actually, it’s just about my life after I lost my job, etc, because I feel a bit Holly Golightly as described by Paul Varjak right now: “She’s a girl who can’t help anyone, not even herself.” But maybe by sharing my experiences I can help other people in similar situations. If not, then it’s always good for a laugh, right? 🙂

So there’s that. You may start at the very beginning, which is just a dull sort of walkthrough on where my life was when I started this at the beginning of April, or just skip around my videos, or watch part One (of many) on the trip and see if you like it:

Still on the fence? I’ll give you some teasers: I climbed the Eiffel Tower, met JARVIS COCKER (and more), was a tourist attraction on the Seine, and was a total guy magnet. There’s more, but you’ll just have to see for yourself what else I could cram into two short weeks.

jeune fille

So . . . this trip changed my life. Of course! Isn’t that why we travel and wander foreign lands, to expand our minds and change our world view? Or, as Mark Twain put it: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” But after living there for two weeks, mastering the Metro on my own with très peu French and a pocket map of the city and having Jarvis, who’s lived in France for six years, ask me how to say things in French when I’d lived there a week, I think I know what I’m going to do next. Batgirl is going back to school! I’m going for a degree in French this time (at this point, struggling the rest of my life to school in psychology just seems a waste, as much as I loved it back in the day), so I can live in Paris with a job and a legal reason to stay, and so I can maybe teach Jarvis some decent French. Seriously, it’s bad. Watch Episode 4 Part 4 if you don’t believe me. Oh, and if you’re a fan of the man or Pulp please check out all my videos, I put up quite a lot of him. I had a good two days with him.

Jarvis & me

There’s some pictures up on my Flickr account as well, though they’re pretty much just the Jarvis ones since people were clamoring for them. I’m still going through all of my other pictures and fixing them up (it was almost constantly overcast, which means adjusting the light for nearly all the outdoor pictures), and there’s also probably 4 GB worth of pictures to sort through. I am a documenting machine! But I’ll drop a note when I am done posting all of the other pictures so you can see what I saw, and also when I post the last video of my trip. I’ve put off doing it because it’s just one more reminder that I’m not in Paris anymore. 🙁 I know it’s only temporary, but I still hate seeing good times end. It’s why I didn’t want to unpack for a week and why I was dragging my feet sorting through the pictures.

Okay, that’s all for now. Are we caught up now? 🙂

Oh, forgot something! When I got back we wrapped filming a bizarre short film (preview here), so I finally got a haircut. Yay! Nothing drastic, I just wanted a bit more style — and to look like Anna Karina.

new hair!

Hello! Miss us much? Well, I hope you’re all fans of Audrey Hepburn, because that’s our new gig. After making a depressing amount of money on the boulevard as superheroes, we thought “It couldn’t be any worse” as Holly Golightly, and much more comfortable… so we donned our dark sunglasses and hit the street. Alas, we made about $2 in tips, once more, BUT we had our back-up plan. We sat down and negotiated with Café Audrey and got a little part-time gig going around to local hotels with pocket-sized menus, in costume, and earning a little extra money. It’s not enough to retire on, but at least we’ll be making friends with the concierges, and be able to wear sunglasses in the summertime. Better than nothing.

How do I look?

When I get the mean reds...

And a little bit of video…

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, our second day on Hollywood Boulevard and the day of the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which would step off at the corner of Hollywood and Highland. We showed up a bit earlier, since the characters we had met the day before said that mornings are usually the best time for making money, and wandered around a bit. Still dressed as Holly and Eliza, we earned a lot of admiring looks and loads of people sniping pictures when we weren’t looking, but still no one seemed to want to really photograph with us. We were cool, but we weren’t that cool. Still, business was improving from the day before, and there was still a lot to look at and absorb.

We spent a lot of the day just walking up and down the block, from Highland to Orange and back again, trying to grab the attention (and hopefully business) of all of the tourists and extra locals hovering about. There was supposed to be a big block of entertainment right in front of the Chinese Theatre from noon until the parade started, but it ended up being a load of crap Disney kids bands gyrating obscenely and trying to make it big. It was appalling, honestly, and the music was terrible. I saw a few teenage girls walking around with posterboard and glitter signs for one of the bands and considered asking them if they’d been paid to wave them. I just couldn’t believe anyone would take that god-awful drivel passing as music seriously. It also pulled out a lot of kids, and kids don’t know who Audrey Hepburn is. We did get a few moms who loved our costumes and forced their kids to take pictures with us, which wasn’t too bad.

But with crowds come the crazies. While the day before had been mild, even for a weekend, the draw of thousands of extra people with money and the news vans filming all over the place, the weirdos began to show. There was a relatively harmless older fellow who played guitar while whistling on the sidewalk, and while he was nice, he only seemed to know two songs. No one seemed to care for what he was playing, though, and avoided him. He started following us around, which further pushed business away from us. To make matters worse, Dollhouse Guy appeared. Apparently he is pretty well-known on the Boulevard, and he really is called Dollhouse Guy. I noticed the miles too big green jacket with that title painted on the back (in what looked like white poster paint) and wondered why. He and the guitarist got along and Dollhouse would make up bawdy lyrics to the two songs the guitarist knew. After we’d finally shaken them both, we turned around to find Dollhouse Guy, with a large dollhouse on his head, gyrating on the ground next to the stage set up for all those crap Disney kids. Oh, so that’s how he got his name. (more…)

Once it was decided that we would try our hand at the character job, we now had to decide how we should dress. Since we met through a mutual love of Audrey Hepburn, and we had just dressed as her (in two different eras) for Halloween, my partner in crime and I decided to try that. We figured that if Elvis and Marilyn Monroe did alright, then surely Holly Golightly and Eliza Doolittle would do fairly well.

We showed up in the early afternoon, and as soon as we stepped off the elevator at H&H, a man asked for a picture with us. Taking it as a good sign, we posed with him and he tipped us. And we hadn’t even really started yet! So we sauntered down to the Boulevard and suddenly froze, overwhelmed. What did we do? How did this really work? There had been surprisingly little information about all this on the Internet, and we hadn’t thought to come up here in advance and talk to any characters. As we crept closer to the stars on the sidewalk, a guy dressed as Darth Vader in tights came up to us and pushed back his helmet.
“Are you two new here?” he asked. We nodded. “Okay, welcome to the Boulevard,” he said, and shook our hands, introducing himself. He very nicely went over the rules; what line in the sidewalk delineated public from private property, and how we were only supposed to pose and photograph on the public side, and how we must do something to show that we were “off” when crossing onto private property, either by removing a mask or some other piece of the costume so we wouldn’t be approached. Grateful, we thanked him, and he moved off to take a break.

Clinging to each other, we slowly crept up the Walk towards the Chinese Theatre. In front of the Kodak Theatre there was a Jack Sparrow loudly heckling the tourists, shouting, “I need your money!” As we walked past, he called out to us.
“Excuse me, ladies.” (more…)