no joy in mudville

It's a complete mess. A fiasco.

There are all these huge trucks rumbling down tiny country roads, the production a gigantic bumbling monster unaware of it's own conspicuousness. It's been raining for days,
and the mud produced between the grip trucks, the stakebeds, the five-tons and all the trailers is prodigious, if not biblical.

Today at work, our first task was to go into an old lady's house and remove her furniture so that (Big Actor) and (Huge Director) could bring in their own rented furniture, not as a shooting set, but as a production office/ video village/ green room/ hiding place. The homeowner, named Mary, showed us photos of the house in the 1920's, her father having bought the house in 1907.

Almost immediately, one of the set dressers inadvertently tracked cat shit through her house. Mary has about eleven barn cats, and it was raining like hell, and before anyone realized what was happening, someone mentioned that the house suddenly had a peculiar odor. While I cracked a window and moistened some paper towels in an attempt to minimize the pungent mess, the porta potties arrived outside on a trailer.

As the driver backed into the very soft lawn, the tires sank into the deep green bog until it began to bleed brown. Brownish red really, as the dirt in these parts has a high red clay content.

Mary asked me if we had ever done this before, and I struggled to not look sheepish, but it didn't sound very convincing, even to me.