Author Archives: kathyweiss

Thick skin required: The Hollywood episode

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For a brief time in the 1990’s, I lived and worked in Los Angeles in film & television production. How I ended up there was a textbook example of someone running toward a new adventure after a bad breakup. At the time, I was 28 years old which is practically ancient in the minds of whoever I was going to try to convince to hire me. I spent many hours on the phone from Boston, cold calling anyone I’d ever met who might know anyone in the entertainment industry who could help me land an interview for some kind of job. It was the only way I could think of to prepare since my love of movies wasn’t going to be much of a help. By the time I finally headed west in my Honda Accord packed with only the bare essentials, I wasn’t yet focusing on how I’d survive when I got to Los Angeles. I was more excited about my pit stops at Graceland, the Grand Canyon and Vegas.

Nine days later, I arrived at a dear college friend’s house in the San Fernando Valley where I set up camp in her toddler’s room for 2 weeks. Luckily, the cold calling & networking paid off and within a week I had talked my way into a job with a successful writing/directing/producing duo who had a deal with Touchstone Pictures on the Walt Disney Studio lot in Burbank. Our offices overlooked the Team Disney building which was home to the top studio executives. Carved into the facade are giant figures of the Seven Dwarfs positioned like columns along the top of the building. No recognition of Snow White anywhere, but that was par for the course. Do a little digging into the man himself, Walt Disney, and you’ll find some not-so-flattering words about his thoughts on women and other groups.

After promising my new bosses that I’d be a quick study to learn the “Who’s Who” in the industry, I spent the next week memorizing a list of agents & their clients, studio heads, producers and the names of all of the gatekeeper assistants through whom one has to go in order to get their bosses on the phone line. I was now one of those gatekeepers. Fortunately, I worked for people who were in demand, so I could usually get the other bigwig on the phone. However, I was quickly initiated into this weird dynamic where no assistant wanted to get his boss on the phone first and make him wait for the other person’s boss to pick up. Forcing someone else to “Hold” was a total power play. It was both entertaining and completely ridiculous.

Luckily, and for whatever reason, I’ve never been starstruck by working with “movie stars”. That turned out to be a good thing because the bulk of my time that first year was working with Julia Roberts & Nick Nolte. Only one famous person ever made me nervous – Steve Martin. I wasn’t starstruck, but I did have an enormous crush on him. He was and still is a genius and a true Renaissance Man. We met when when I was working on location in Chicago, based out of a large suite at the Ritz Carlton. While Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte were there meeting with us one day, Steve Martin stopped by to visit my bosses with whom he was friends and had previously worked on a film. He was in town staging “Picasso at the Lapin Agile”, a play he had written. I was sitting in a chair on which his coat was draped and he’d left his glasses in the pocket of the coat. As he excused himself to reach around me for the glasses, we ended up in one of those cute dances where he goes left when I go left, and he goes right when I go right. That was the extent of our interaction until I was shown a note sent a day later from Steve to my bosses thanking them for the afternoon visit. In the note, he wrote, “P.S., who’s the girl?”. If this were a real Hollywood story, someone would have introduced us properly, we would have dated, and I would have become Mrs. Steve Martin. That did not happen. One of my bosses decided she had to put me in my “assistant” place and announced that “the note must have been him just making a joke about meeting Julia Roberts, a.k.a “the girl”. It was a rather unkind, power-play thing to do, but it’s a fine example of the necessity of having a thick skin in that business. Aside from that, and so many other comical examples of the nonsense that assistants had to put up with, I have so many other memories that are wonderful. Including memories of a little something called the Craft Service table. When I was working 18 hour days, being lauded for doing such a great job but still getting screamed at when someone else is having a bad day, the Craft Service table was my happy oasis. It’s really just a table, off in some dark corner adjacent to wherever the filming is taking place, and it’s stocked with every kind of delicious junk food and carbohydrate. On a rough day, nothing takes the edge off like a huge canister of really fresh Twizzlers.

More than anything else though, it was the great friends and co-workers I met during this time that made the whole experience unforgettable. One might think that it would be hard to make true, lifelong friends in such a cut-throat business where everyone is trying to “make it”, but that was not my experience. Nearly 30 years have passed since my short stint in film production (and television production, but that’s a whole other story) but I can still count at least a handful of meaningful friendships that have endured. Even though one of those friendships still isn’t Steve Martin.

Don’t Tell Me What I Can’t Do: The Playboy episode

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I haven’t written a blog post in a very long time. When my daughter was little, she used to ask me to tell her a story from my life, and I recall having difficulty remembering anything specific from my childhood & teen years. It’s all just a blur of Brady Bunch, bad haircuts and cheerleading.

If I’m going to start writing anything now, I may as well begin with whatever unusual stories I can somewhat recall… which brings me to the Playboy episode.

In late 1990, Playboy magazine booked a suite at the Westin Copley Hotel in Boston to scout for the April 1991 issue titled, “Women of the Women’s Colleges”. At the time, I was working at Boston Magazine nearby and we’d all heard that protesters had gathered in front of the hotel. The protesters were angry that women who had attended a women’s college would consider posing in Playboy. They felt that any one woman’s individual choice to pose would be seen as representative of the collective of all women who had ever attended a women’s college. I attended a women’s college and I disagreed. So instead of spending my lunch hour eating, I found myself sitting in a suite at the Westin surrounded by prospective Playboy models, the Playboy staff and a handful of producers from ABC-TV’s Boston affiliate.

I never had aspirations to pose in Playboy nor did I think Playboy would extend the invitation. I just felt like exercising my right to cross through the protest line. When I sat down with the Playboy team, they asked all of the expected questions as they tried to get to know me. When I mentioned that I had a different perspective than the women protesting, one of the tv producers zeroed in and asked me to appear the following morning on the Good Day show which aired in Boston every weekday. She explained that I’d be on-air in a split screen with a crowd at a women’s college campus and they’d be yelling at me via remote feed. That’s not exactly how she sold it, but I knew that’s how it would go.

Early the next morning, I showed up at the t.v. studio and was seated next to a young woman who had already posed for the magazine. Sitting across from us was Eileen Prose, the doyenne of Boston morning television. Our host was not very good at putting on an impartial face which became obvious when she gave me a bewildered look and asked “Are you posing because of the money?”. I clarified that Playboy had not even asked me to be in the issue, and then I spent the rest of the hour fighting for air time to respond to some of the mass generalizations coming from the crowd. I didn’t successfully deliver every point I wanted to make, but for being in the hot seat on live t.v., I did ok.

In the end, it was a memorable experience. A nice bonus occurred about a week after the appearance when I was approached while waiting for my lunch order at Copley Place. It was a young woman who had been part of the group that was debating with me on t.v. Surprisingly, she told me that whatever I had said changed her opinion. Even more surprisingly, Playboy called and asked me to be in the issue and to fly to Chicago to be a guest on the syndicated Phil Donahue the following week. I declined both. I was pretty sure that the Donahue segment would be a nationally-televised badgering. I watched the episode when it aired and that’s pretty much what it was. I didn’t care about being in the magazine either. Being featured in a future back issue of Playboy is as permanent as posting photos on social media today. It would have been a unique souvenir to have when I’m 80 years old though. I did hold onto a few other minor keepsakes: a VHS tape recording of the Good Day show (transferred to the Cloud before it disintegrated) and the Playboy photographer’s business card. I think I also still have a blank copy of that Playboy questionnaire form which gets printed in the magazine where the featured models answer questions about their favorite things .

Recently, my 19 year old daughter asked to see the Good Day interview. It was very weird rewatching and listening to my 26-year-old self, with my huge head of hair and massive shoulder pads, while sitting next to my grown daughter. She saw past the salacious Playboy part of it and was proud of me for defending myself against a surprising number of fairly judgmental voices . Pretty ironic, considering that the place where I learned how to articulate my point of view and present it respectfully was at Mount Holyoke, the women’s college from which I graduated.

The Patron Saint of Parking Spaces

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(Originally posted in 2009 on my old blog site)
Legend has it that my Grandpa Jack scored a really good parking space at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.  To put this in perspective, the New York World’s Fair occupied nearly a square mile and welcomed about 51 million visitors.  So getting a good parking space was quite a feat.  However that day,  Jack had a feeling he could find an even better spot, a a bold thought that was bordering on lunacy.  But he found one.  And when I heard that story years ago, I dubbed my Grandpa Jack the Patron Saint of Parking Spaces.

 
Many decades later, long after my Grandpa had passed away, I took a trip to Disney World with my husband and some friends.  As we pulled into the massively crowded parking lot at Downtown Disney, I said “C’mon Grandpa Jack, help us out” and lo and behold, a car pulled out in the front row.  We could not have gotten any closer to the entrance if we tried.  The couple who was with us has since adopted Grandpa Jack and has been politely asking him for parking spaces in the greater NY area ever since.
 
Jack’s own daughter, (my wonderful and wise Aunt) finally decided to give it a try a few years ago. The Tall Ships were due to sail down the Hudson River and everyone in NY was trying to park close enough to walk over to the Henry Hudson Parkway for a glimpse.   So my Aunt said aloud, “Ok Dad, I need a parking space” and just then, a car toots its horn at her.  She sticks her head out the window and the guy in the car said “Do you need a space?  I’m pulling out in a minute.  Go around the block and I’ll wait for you.”. So she did.  And she got the perfect parking spot thanks to her Dad, Grandpa Jack, Patron Saint of Parking Spaces.
 
Just last week, I went out for some drinks with the girls.  We went to a place on the water where there are very few parking spaces.  My friends said we’d never get a space.  I told them to just wait a second, as I pulled the car over in the packed lot.  Not 5 seconds later, two ladies hopped in their VW Beetle right in front of me and pulled away.  Later that evening, we decided to head over to one last spot for a little nightcap.  This place is in a historic downtown area with tiny one-way streets and virtually no on-street parking except for a few meters.  There waiting for me right in front of the restaurant door, was a nice, empty parking space, big enough for me to glide my truck right into.  Coincidence? Um, no.  Grandpa Jack just being one step ahead of me.
 
  I don’t know what folks do up in heaven, but there’s a good chance that my  Grandpa Jack is getting annoyed that so many people are now disturbing his regular poker game with God or whatever he’s doing.  Maybe I shouldn’t even be writing about this.  I like to think that I’m a generous person and willing to share whatever I have. Except when it comes to parking spaces.

Aw, Spanx!

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We all have those “million dollar ideas” from time to time.  Most of us never pursue them, so we never find out if they really were million dollar ideas… until someone else patents “YOUR” idea. And makes billions. That’s right, Billions.

Why hello Sarah Blakely, inventor of Spanx in 1998.  Except…. except…

It’s even hard to write about this.

Back in the dark ages of 1982 when I was 18 years old, I invented the exact same version of what is now famously known as Spanx. Yessir… a full 16 years before Sarah Blakely’s Spanx hit the market.  Young Sarah was 11 years old when I was cutting the feet off of a pair of pantyhose and wearing my “invention” under white jeans so that I could erase panty lines yet still have bare feet in a pair of flip flops.

What’s worse, it’s not as if I didn’t have encouragement to start a business.  My father, a business owner in his own right, frequently took me and some other lazy-ass friend of mine out for a “breakfast meeting”.  He’d encourage us to come up with an idea, start a business, etc…

Did I hear him? Sure.  Did I take his advice to heart?  Nope.  Do I regret it?  Ummm… yes. A billion time$ yes.

Sarah Blakely’s story is identical to mine except for the fact that she was not a lazy-ass. She spent only $5,000 plus some research and legwork to get someone to manufacture her product.  Then she dragged the buyers from Neiman Marcus and other high end retailers into their department store dressing rooms to demonstrate why her Spanx were worthy. And she made the sale every single time.

So. Sarah Blakely is a billionaire and I give her all the credit in the world.

And because humor is the best medicine for regret (and other maladies), every time I come up with a new million dollar idea that I soon realize has already been patented, I employ my best comical grimace and shout, “Aw, SPANX!”.   Makes my daughter laugh every time.  I can’t help but laugh along with her, but inside I’m shedding a billion little tear$.

Challenged

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I think I’m a pretty smart person.  Just prior to entering junior high school, I was given an IQ test and scored surprisingly high.   Jump ahead several decades and we arrive at today, where I find myself with a rapidly growing list of things that I find challenging.

The items on this list are deceptively simple.  But shouldn’t a really smart person be able to figure this stuff out?  It makes me wonder if that IQ test was all a sham. Or maybe the authorities that administered it should have also administered a more useful “Life Skills” test that would send up a red flag indicating the need for remedial learning so that Kathy could function more effectively in middle age.

An abbreviated list of skills that have recently challenged me include (but are not limited to) the following:

1.              Cleaning the dried batter wedged inside the waffle maker

2.            Figuring out which *!?#* smoke detector is beeping in my house

4.              Removing mascara. Completely. All of it.

5.             Folding a king sized fitted sheet.

7.             5th grade math word problems

While I’m at it, I should start a sub-list of things that qualify more as “frustratingly unattainable”, such as:

a.            Finding a good radio station

b.            Performing a spontaneous cartwheel over the age of 45

c.            Navigating traffic at school pick up

And last but certainly not least —

d.            Watching a television show with my child while successfully dodging all commercials that will either scare the crap out of her (just prior to bedtime usually) or those that require an on-the-fly and age-appropriate explanation of erectile dysfunction.  Even with my cat-like reflexes and lightening fast DVR remote, I continue to lose in the television commercial wars.

I  will be victorious over every one of these challenges. Eventually. I will not, however, be taking another IQ test. I’ll just stick with the number they gave me back in 6th grade I think.

Gratitude

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(Originally posted January 29, 2010 — events mentioned in this post happened 3 years ago)

I’m one of those people who stops what I’m doing at least once a day with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for one thing or another.  Sometimes I recognize it silently in my head, other times I actually say “Thank You” out loud to no one in particular.  Yes, I am that lady in the passing car that looks like she’s talking to herself.

Last weekend, I had a bit of luck at the casino, so I thanked my friendly slot machine and walked away knowing that lightening probably wouldn’t strike twice.  I was grateful for my little windfall.

Most days as I drive around this beautiful little town that I live in, I say thank you out loud because I still can’t believe that I ended up here.  This is a house that’s been in my family for about 50 years.  I’d fantasized as a kid about living here some day, but never actually thought I’d be able to. Even though virtually every inch of this house was renovated and feels brand new, it’ll always be my grandmother’s house to me.  The view from the kitchen sink window is the same one I’ve looked at since I was a kid washing dishes after a holiday meal.  As I sit here at my desk, I’m sitting in my grandmother’s former bedroom. And there isn’t a morning that I don’t wake up and say “Thank You” before my feet ever hit the floor.  Over the years, gratitude has become a daily thing for me.

The other night, my parents were in a taxicab in San Francisco on their way to a fabulous restaurant when some lady on a cell phone  in a huge SUV ran a stop sign and broadsided them.  My parents are OK, but they were REALLY lucky and I am incredibly grateful.  The EMTs hustled them off in an ambulance to San Francisco County Hospital. They were processed through the trauma center with the local gun shot victims and I’m pretty sure that my mother was the only one in the ER wearing a St. John knit suit.  Knowing her, she probably tried to borrow someone’s cell phone as they wheeled her in so she could call the restaurant to cancel their dinner reservation.   My Dad has bumps and bruises and luckily, that’s all.  My Mom had 2 vertebrae that got thrown out of joint. The amazing doctors were able to work a little magic using about 12 millimeters of titanium and somehow she’s going to walk away with zero neurological damage. From what they tell us, this is very rare.  Turns out that my mother has an exceptionally impressive spinal canal and for that I am very, very grateful.   Some people are born with superhuman mathematical abilities. My mother was born with tremendous knitting skills and apparently a world-class spine.  She just never knew it until now.

If you added up my daily gratitude, multiply it by a million and then add Infinity, that’s how grateful I feel this week.

Note:  Just a reminder, these are events that happened 3 years ago for those of you who know me and my family.  I’m re-posting this Post because Gratitude is something about which we all need a little reminder now & then…

Common Sense

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Someone recently asked me if I’d ever want a “do-over” of my teens or 20’s.   I said yes, but only if I could do it knowing what I know today.  There are things in life that now seem pretty obvious. Common sense.   Something I apparently lacked in my formative years. I’m not dumb enough to share with the world any of the rather unflattering (and perhaps illegal) folly of my youth.  But I’d be happy to share a few more harmless examples:
Fried Mozzarella
Deep fried mozzarella is not a suitable lunch entrée.  So when your college dining hall offers you a platter of fried mozzarella patties, do not hold out your plate and say “yes, please”.  It is very possible that the weekly ingestion of this big, fried wad of cheese will contribute to the gaining of the freshman 15.  In my own defense, it is also possible that I was blinded by the health benefits of the lycopene in the marinara sauce.  Not that I knew what lycopene was in college.
Chicken pox
Whatever you do, don’t scratch. Whatever you do, don’t scratch. You’ll get scars!  Scars!  I scratched.  Hence the large crater-like scar in the middle of my forehead.  To make myself feel better, I like to think of it as my Third Eye and that’s why I’m such an Enlightened individual.
Baby Oil
Baby oil is not a suitable way to achieve a golden tan for the prom.  Crispy skin is only acceptable on Peking Duck.
Hair dye
Letting someone apply Eggplant colored henna to your hair may not achieve a natural looking result. This can be confirmed when you step into the sunshine and your mother tells you that your entire head is now dark purple. You know, like an EGGPLANT.
Tattoos
As much as you think you are always going to want that tattoo because it, like, totally represents who you are and it’s, like, so meaningful… it’s not. At some point in the distant future, your child will announce that she wants to open a lemonade stand to raise money to pay for the laser treatment that will make Mommy’s tattoo go away.  The silver lining is that it is now the world’s most effective tool for insuring that the daughter will never get a tattoo.
I could ramble on and on about my former lack of common sense, but I won’t.  As Shakespeare once said, “Brevity is the soul of wit”.  Then again, Dorothy Parker once said “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”, so I’m not sure whom to believe.

No Toys for this Tot

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(Originally posted Dec. 2009)
It’s the holiday shopping season.  Toy catalogs arrive in the mail by the dozens, but I just toss them in the trash.  My 7-year-old daughter doesn’t play with toys anymore.  I don’t know why.  In the past year, she hardly glanced at a board game.  Occasionally I’d see some Barbie dolls strewn around the house but I’m pretty sure they were just feeling unloved and trying to escape.  I’m happy that my daughter has found creative, homemade ways to entertain herself.  I just wish I’d known last year that all I really needed was:
1.  A king-sized bed sheet and chip clips — Or in my daughter’s world, the building materials one needs to construct a decent fort.
2. A big box — The bigger the better. Preferably the kind you can climb into and use as a clubhouse. Which is another name for…. a fort.
3.  A huge dry erase board and markers — It’s mostly used to play school.  We don’t want to GO to school.  We just want to PLAY school.
4. Kitchen utensils and ingredients — This is what we call potions or concoctions. The other week I bought my daughter some seasonal Pumpkin Spice mix and she practically jumped for joy.  We have an entire kitchen cabinet solely dedicated to concoctions.  There may be a few bottles of wine in there too, but those are Mommy’s.
So this holiday season, I’m going to wise up. Under the tree, there will be no Barbie toys that take 2 adults and industrial strength pliers to remove from the box.  There will be no stuffed animals (i.e., dust collectors).  There will be no cute dresses or other clothing.  The days when my daughter will wear what I’ve chosen for her have come and gone.
So, what will be under the tree this year? Maybe something small. After all, it’s the little things that often make us truly happy. I’m talking about iTunes gift cards.  But I’ll put them in a REALLY big box.

Random Acts of Kathy

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Just moved to my new home at WordPress and I think I’m going to like it here!

Much of what I write mirrors a viewpoint summarized in a quote by Dr. Arnold Beisser in which he said, “The tragic or the humorous is a matter of perspective.”   Or to quote Monty Python,   “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life”.  Because you know what?  No matter what it is, it could always be worse. That’s pretty much how I try to live my life and it’s what you’ll find here – Random Acts (and musings) of mine wherein I will aspire to find the bright side of things. Or at least, something worth a good chuckle.

Because I wasn’t able to bring my old blog content over to WordPress, I’m going to repost a few of those old entries.  If you choose to read along, I hope you enjoy them.  If not, no worries.  By getting my random thoughts on the page, hopefully they’ll make more room in my brain for other important matters.  Such as remembering where I put my phone.