Scout

Last month, I was minding my own business when my husband called.

“Are you home?” he asked, because I absolutely refuse to wear that ankle monitoring bracelet that he got me for Christmas. Why aren’t they called anklets, by the way? It would make people under house arrest feel a little bit better about their situation. And while we’re on the subject, doesn’t house arrest sound like a dream come true? Because most days, I really don’t want to leave the house, but have to for reasons like WORK and GROCERY SHOPPING and ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS. (Disclaimer: Calm down, I don’t really do the grocery shopping.)

But wouldn’t it be great to be able to call your place of employment and say “look, I’d love to come in this morning and help cover the early shift, but then I’d make you an accomplice to violating house arrest and I care too much about you to put you through that!”? I guarantee you’d get all sorts of awards and maybe even a promotion.

Back to me.

My husband asks me if I’m home and I say “who wants to know?” because that kind of a response doesn’t get any less endearing.

“Just tell me where you are,” he says which makes me nervous because as it so happens I am home, but what if I were at Saks, exercising my constitutional right to buy a lot of shit? I don’t need anyone undermining my freedoms and/or contacting the credit card company with some “temporary hold” nonsense.

Now that he had secured my whereabouts, he lowered the boom. A scout wanted to see our apartment.

Seeing as I wasn’t born yesterday, or even in the near past, and that I’m a dedicated Nightline watcher and therefore familiar with the murderous ways of husbands and wives, I had his number. As far as I was concerned, this was nothing but a plot to get a henchman into our apartment and have me killed. But on the other hand, I had a shitload of laundry to do over the weekend, so there were worse things than getting murdered as far as I was concerned.

Finally, with the formalities out of the way, a real-life scout appeared at my door. He was young, which to me means under a million, and friendly.

“Hi,” he said. “Mind if I look around?”

I didn’t mind, not at all. I was sitting at the kitchen table, and both kids, in their respective rooms, had friends over. There were a total of seven kids and for a moment I thought that I could offer to throw them all in, in case they were remaking Annie, or possibly Oliver Twist.

The Scout took some photos of the apartment and then asked me if we could talk.

“Of course,” I said, even though I was right in a middle of a Twitter rant about the evils of ending a sentence a preposition with.

“So in this movie Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton are a married couple-” he started.

“Stop right there,” I implored. “I think I know what this is all about. If you want me in the cast as their daughter-”

“No, we don’t,” he said.

“Fine. Granddaughter. Fortunately, I can act a lot younger than my age.”

“I’m a location scout,” for some reason he wanted to impress me with his resume.

“Alrighty. I’ll have my people contact you about my being cast as Diane Keaton’s granddaughter. Or possibly mother. I think you’ll be impressed with my range,” I opened my arms wide to give him a visual. “Go on.”

“They’re a married couple who are looking to move to a different NYC apartment after living on the Lower East Side for a long time.”

“Ah, yes,” I nodded. “The good old boy marries girl and lives on the Lower East Side and then decides to move story. Classic.”

“So this would be the apartment that they’d visit.”

“I see,” I saw. “I am very comfortable with that material. No nudity or anything Republican, correct? And what would you require of us?”

He explained that everything really depended on the lobby. If our lobby was chosen, then they’d shoot a scene (or something, I’m not in the business, so who the hell knows that they call those things) in our apartment. For that, they’d need a day of staging, a day of shooting, and a day of putting all our crap back.

“I want to mention that one of our electric knife blades is missing,” I mentioned. “It’s really crazy because they’re a pair, so how could one be missing? It’s been driving my husband crazy. Crazy, I tell you. I’m telling you this so that your people could keep an eye out for it, please. Both during the staging process and during the putting everything back. That would really help us out.”

He made a note. Probably so that he could be sure to remind everyone to be on the lookout.

He asked me a few questions, mostly about how I thought our neighbors would be if there were film crews in the hallways for a few days.

“There is nothing that my neighbors would love more,” I decided to lie as much as possible. “The couple across the hall has a newish baby, and I’m sure they’d welcome the diversion of many people walking around.”

He took some notes and thanked me for my time. I could sort of sense that he regretted his career of location scout and was going to see if he could transfer to talent scout immediately, although I’m not sure what kind of schooling you need for that.

A few weeks later he called me. Unfortunately, they decided to go with another building’s lobby, so they would not be using ours. Because our building lobby is a huge loser, in Hollywood terms. Don’t think I’m not upset about it. I’ve been giving the lobby the silent treatment ever since.

One year ago ...

• Why Not - 2012