When I was at USC, I hated it. So I took a year off and got a job working at Disney Studios. It was pretty awesome, because I was at USC film school surrounded by a thousand full-of-themselves film geeks, (I admit being one of them) and a month later I was working with real professionals at a real movie studio on a real movie in real Hollywood. I was the first "production assistant" hired on to Disney's Beauty and the Beast. There were only 17 people on the whole crew. When the film finished production, the crew numbered well into the hundreds.

Don't believe me? Check it out near the bottom (way down there) of the credits under "Production Assistant". Hilarious. I always wonder what happened to those other folks on the list. No doubt they're all making millions now. I knew most of them at one time. I recognize their names in the credits of all the other animated films nowadays and I just laugh. What a bunch of dorks!

Most of the people I worked with were the most creative and artistic people I have ever met, and the whole experience was a profound and enlightening one for me. I was all of 20 years old. The youngest employee on the lot, I believe. I remember when the artists sent me out to get beer and cigars one day. I couldn't. I was 20! (They sent someone else.)

Anyway, my job was a lame one. Photocopy this, run that over there, hang up storyboards... things like that. But I was in story meetings with Hollywood giants like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Roy Disney! I was learning more than anyone at USC film school and making a pretty good salary to boot! With full benefits and free Disneyland tickets! And the film became a sensation. It eventually made hundreds of millions of dollars and was nominated for Best Picture. I went to the premiere. (I wore a tie!)

One day at work, a package came in from New York. It was a simple cassette tape. The famed musical-duo Howard Ashman and Alan Menken had just finished the first set of songs for the film. This was in the days before iTunes and the Internet and modern devices like that. I had to put the cassette in the stereo in my office and make fifty copies for the directors, producers, and animators. I was humming along after the second tape. It was February of 1990. I was the first kid in the world to have every song from Beauty and the Beast memorized.

I mention this now because eighteen years later my two-year-old daughter stood up in bed this morning and yelled down the hall: "I want to go to Disneyland!" Mrs. Ditchman rolled over and whispered in my ear, "She wants to go to Disneyland. You're going to have a full day."

Now the little one is listening to Disney music on a CD. She's singing "Be Our Guest" from Beauty and the Beast and guess what? I still know the lyrics.

AND NOW THE PUNCHLINE:

In the original cut of the film the song was sung to Beauty's father, Maurice. They later changed the story so that the song was sung to Belle. (It made more sense, story-wise.) As a result, the song lyrics changed.

But I still sing it to Maurice. I'm probably the only one in the world.


~

Last week:


I'd been walking past these buds for weeks now just waiting. WAITING! And now, finally, The Blooms! Years ago, after we moved onto this street, I got a few lilies at the Home Depot and had them around the house for Easter. Then they died and I couldn't bare to toss them into the garbage, so I just stuck them in the ground out front. Now, every year about this time, The Blooms!

I consider it something of a minor miracle, given that the soil under the Ditchman compound is an insoluble mixture of cement, clay, gravel, quikcrete, hardened lava, moon rock, naturally occurring metals... Who knows why some things grow in the stuff and others don't. I keep at it, though, with the petulant tenacity that humans are prone to. Our Father, who art in Heaven, shakes his head. When are they just gonna let it go? I'm still waiting on some of those seeds to pop up in the garden boxes. That was months ago.

Mrs. Ditchman is on the clock this week. Man, is she ever. One Home Show is tough enough, but two back to back and you get moments like this:

Mommy: Bye, bye. Okay, give Mommy a kiss.
Baby: And a hug.
Mommy: And a hug, too!
Baby: And a high five.
Mommy: And a high five. Okay, I have to go to work.
Baby: I don't like work.

That's funny, she doesn't say things like that when I go to work. Oh well. It'll swing around the other way by the end of the week. Why, just this morning Mrs. Ditchman went in to help her out of bed and the kid said: No. I want Daddy.

How nice, but Daddy was sleeping.

Not that it mattered. I'm not even sure where to start today. I've got a few hours to myself and a hundred unanswered emails, so there goes the morning. The heat wave we experienced these past few days has left a dry, burnt sheen on the Ditchman landscape, and I suppose I should tend to that before it combusts. I like these mid-April heat waves, though! Better than the June gloom that often comes early and leaves mid-July. We slept with all the windows open the other night and awoke yesterday with fresh air in the house, birds chirping outside. It was like we were camping!

We like to camp on the lake in the middle of summer when it's nice and scorching, with the water temp around 82 degrees. Air temp is in the 90s when the sun hits the horizon, and you are out of your tent to see the orange glow on the cliffs, and their reflection in the vast, still water. Yesterday I awoke to someone firing up a lawn mower with a WHIRRRRRR in the suburban distance, and in my dreamland I heard it as that first bass boat making its way across the glassy lake, heading for fertile fishing grounds at first light.


~

Okay, I've got 25 minutes to type this. I just put Little Einsteins on downstairs and I can hear the Little Ditchman singing along merrily. It's Home Show Weekend! You know what that means: roles are reversed. Mommy comes home cranky, Daddy changes diapers, and the kid gets pizza and TV all weekend! (Just kidding.) Oh wait, there's the phone...

It was Mommy. Never fails. We all parade downstairs, goodbyes all around -kisses, hugs, high-fives. Do you have everything? Yes. What did she eat for breakfast? Not much. If so-and-so calls, say this. If she wants this you should do this. Okay? Okay. Mwuh. Mwuh.

One minute later: the phone rings. I was thinking maybe we should... and so forth.

There goes my 25 minutes. And then it's about five minutes per task before the Little Ditchman realizes she's not getting the adult's full attention, so she comes and pulls on you. I always get these wild dreams in my head about what I am going to accomplish on Home Show Weekend. The wild dreams are always just that, but the pulling on you is worth all the treasures of ancient Egypt. (Like in the "Golden Pyramids" episode of Little Einsteins! Did you catch that one?!)

The president is sending us all checks next week! Woo hoo! We'll see if mine comes or not, what with all those outstanding debts to the Dept. of Education. "Outstanding" as in, Look at those amounts! Outstanding! Speaking of sharks, there was a shark attack in Solana Beach this morning. Killed a guy, which is rare in these parts (actually, it's fairly rare everywhere.) Mrs. Ditchman is heading to Solana Beach right now. I told her not to go in the water.

Were you able to stay awake to see LOST last night? I missed the first five minutes and, wouldn't you know it? They opened with a shot of Kate in some state of undress on the beach. (My wife told me about it.) Another character was killed off, which I find hilarious. It's hilarious because the writers have full rule over this show. Years ago when Friends and Seinfeld were all the rage and the actors were getting something like a million dollars an episode, writers started getting shoved into the back room. So, to save bucks, the networks started making shows with non-stars in them, like LOST, and when the writers made stars out of these folks, they of course demanded more money. But the writers are also the producers, and they'd created a show where anyone could eat it at any time. So much for contracts!

I suppose it doesn't work anymore, given that it's been revealed who makes it to the end, more or less. Look forward to those guys demanding millions in the final season!

And I say give it to them. It's a good show and makes a ton of money. Let's see... what else? I just bought myself an extra 25 minutes with another LE episode. I've got so many errands to go out on, and we've got to square these things around snacks and naps, lest we fail to maximize the good moods and duration of naptime.

Can't think of anything. Too occupied with other things to do. See you at the Home Show!


~

Did everyone watch the Discovery Channel promo I posted yesterday? I just love it! YouTube doesn't have the magnificent power that HD does, but it's still fun, especially if you recognize all the characters from all the Discovery shows. Cracks me up. I can't stop watching it. And "the world is just awesome" has got to be the best slogan in a long while.

For that matter, did everyone watch the opening scene from Blue Velvet that I posted last week? I just love that, too! Remember what I was saying about life being awful one moment and then awfully funny the next? I think David Lynch captured it perfectly when that guy has a heart attack while watering his lawn, and then the dog leaps up on him to get a drink of water. Hilarious. Hard to see in the YouTube clip, but those last few shots are of insects, bugs, vermin writhing just below the surface of the perfectly manicured lawn. Figuratively speaking, that's the whole movie right there...

Anyway, TV is pulling itself back together. There's a new episode of LOST tonight and a new episode of House next week. And then Deadliest Catch is back on -this time in full HD! Deadliest Catch is pretty highly rated, and it's reflected in this new season as they obviously are putting a lot more money into it. Seems they even have a camera boat alongside the fishermen now, so we get full shots of the boats. Before it was just a boat trip as told from the point-of-view of being on the boat. There wasn't much scope to it. No worthwhile establishing shots. But now it's looking pretty good. I think they got some high-paid editors on there, too, because the promos for the show are pretty sweet and the intro is slick -best intro for a show out there. Hey, I like a good intro. They're often better than the whole show.

LOST has moved to ten tonight. Why? Because there's going to be more sex and more shots of Kate on the beach in her underwear? Maybe, (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) but it's probably because ABC knows you're going to be sitting around for an extra hour since you're hooked on the show, so here's a perfect opportunity for them to shove more boob-toob (literally) gruel down your throat. Ackh! Wake me when it starts! (Or, as my friend Mitch put it: "10:00pm? Who can drink that late?")

TV. Oy. I have seen more episodes of Little Einsteins than I want to lately. We only let the Little Ditchman get 45 minutes or so of TV a day (that's two episodes) and this morning she was up at 6:15 asking for it. Partway into the show she had that open-mouthed, drooling comatose TV look on her face and when I asked her a question, she didn't respond. I waved my hand in front of her face and she just slowly leaned over to look around it. Great. That's enough TV for a while.

It's a tough call, really, when you've got a million things to do. You can get some of them done if the kid is sedated on the couch with Higglytown Heroes or something, but you can't bear the thought of her innocent little brain cells being shredded one after another, so you turn the set off and the screaming and wailing begins. I swear it's like confiscating and flushing the needles of a heroin addict. (Yikes!) So what's the answer? I don't know. Give up entirely and have more kids, I guess.

Truth is we'd all be better off if we stopped whatever it was we were doing and went and played outside with the kids. I always feel better afterwards, really. It's hard to do, somehow, but what's so hard about it? You're playing! And you think work is so important. NEWS FLASH: the kids don't think so. How else do you expect to stay young? The creams don't work.


~

Clicked on Lileks.com this morning only to find that the domain had expired. Expired! You'd think a blogger who gets a bazillion hits a day, the original blogger, who spends so much time photoshopping those snazzy home pages every Sunday, you'd think he, of all people, would remember to renew his domain name. Ah, well. I clicked over to Buzz.mn where he posts all day (does the guy have a life?) to see what was up. Looks like he was at the dentist this morning. See? Don't step away from the Internet, it may pull ahead without you, leaving you at the yellow light.

It's funny because I had just awoken from a dream and James Lileks, of all people, was in it. He had moved onto my street and lived a few houses down and was blogging all about it. My neighborhood suddenly became a thousand times more interesting by virtue of an entirely different blog, and I had suddenly become a minor character in the story of my own life. I responded by blogging furiously about the neighbor who won't shut up.

So how was your Earth Day?

--WARNING: POLITICALLY-CHARGED COMMENTS TO FOLLOW--

I celebrated by burning up 20 gallons of unleaded petrol all over San Diego county. At $4 a gallon, that's quite a party! Also, I took out my trash, dutifully separating the recyclables and yard trimmings. I drank a beer and the bottle will go back to being refilled, or reprocessed, or ground down into brown glass dust for some other brown glass item that will be filled with something else I will consume and excrete and flush into the mighty Pacific Ocean. Saw a bumper sticker while making the rounds at work:
EARTH FIRST! (WE'LL STRIP MINE THE REST LATER.)

I don't mean to sound too callous and insensitive. But, yes, I am a bit sarcastic about it. Latest research shows the Antarctic getting colder, so global warming enthusiasts are focusing on the other pole. And gas prices are skyrocketing because EVERYONE'S USING THE GAS! I know, it sounds silly, but remember all those people in India and China and Bangladesh riding bicycles? It's 2008. Now they're all driving cars.

So, oh well. Myself, I'm still a big proponent of bringing back DDT, which would save millions of lives worldwide if we encouraged third-world countries to use it responsibly instead of threatening to take away their foreign aid dollars if they use it at all. And turn our food into fuel? Aren't there starving people all around the world? Earth Day, indeed. It's such a bummer when Earth Day falls on a Tuesday. It gets so much more press when it falls on a news-free Saturday.

--END OF POLITICALLY-CHARGED COMMENTS--

The world is just awesome!




~

OKAY, my plate is full! Which is funny, because I thought it was full last week, and the week before that. But, no, now it's really full. Food running off the table full. The Ditchman Family has begun turning down invitations and is begging off prior commitments. There's just no more open space on the calendar to write them in.

Does anyone really use those calendars on their computer? I've got a great one but I just can't find the time to look at it. I've got a hundred other calendars around the house, but when it comes to the one on the computer, I remonstrate: No, please! Not one more thing to click! "But you could put all your calendars in one place." No, that would never work for me. Here at Casa Ditchman we've got the family birthday and anniversary calendar in the kitchen, the water delivery calendar on the fridge, the work schedule dry-erase calendar in the office, the two workout calendars to keep track of our exercise... Mrs. Ditchman has her appointment book. (Mine's in my head, which drives the boss crazy.) And then there's all of last year's calendars -and the year before- which we can't bring ourselves to throw away because they are like detailed journals of past doctor appointments and friends' parties we never want to forget. And still the days fly by, no slower, no faster.

I picture myself in extreme old age, napping in a room piled high with calendars. My own personal history in towering stacks, blocking the sunlight coming through the window. I suppose when I can't see the shadow of the blinds moving across the floor, that's when I'll cash in the ticket to the next life. Lord, I beseech thee: no calendars in Heaven.

No clocks, either. Drives people crazy that I don't wear a watch. I used to love watches when I was a kid. I remember the first digital watches to come out in the seventies. When they became affordable, I got a black Star Wars one with a red LED -it had a button you would push for the time to blink on. A few years after that I got one of the first calculator watches, which impressed all who met me (at age 10). Then, a couple years after that, I had a watch that told the temperature! Wow, that was sweet. I remember slyly cheating on a test in my eighth grade science class. The question was a math problem where I had to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. I just casually looked at my watch! If only the rest of school were so easy.

Today, no watch. I don't like things hanging off me. I only wear clothes for warmth and I don't much like wearing shoes. I can't stand jewelry -though I have been caught wearing my puka shells on vacation (Hawaiian legend has it that the shells insure a peaceful and safe voyage on a long journey for sailors and their crews) and I've come to appreciate the thin band of platinum on my finger, because it reminds me of my beautiful wife, our terrific wedding, and the lifelong commitment I made that day. When I go for a run I start the stopwatch and just leave it somewhere. The thing slows me down.

It all slows me down, really, this constant looking to the time passing. I guess there are times when you want to move fast and times when you need some slowness, but I just want to be in the moment, whatever speed is called for, and yet not miss a beat of life. When I ran the Honolulu marathon I wore a timepiece for a new interval strategy of walking and running and walking and running -and it drove me crazy, this constant looking at the watch, this constant change of speed! I know that you tend to look at the watch less, the more you use it (I guess you just get the feel for it and find a rhythm) but I'm just trying to enjoy life, here. On a clock there is always something moving on display. And then there's the times that you just want to stop, at least once in a while. Or how about once a day?

But everything moves, when you think about it. Whether it's your beating heart, the wind in the yard, or my faithful housewife, or the spinning electrons in every atom or the heavenly bodies through space. Even in erosion and decay, nothing ever stops. The Catholic church argued against this for a while, but it was Galileo who remained unmoved in the debate. "It still moves," were his last words, if I recall.

I've heard it said that the slowest moving thing the human eye can detect is the sun moving across the sky. We've all seen the cool evening crawl: sitting on a beach at sunset and staring directly at the orange sun as that distant heavenly ornament, just this side of still, sank below the horizon. Can you think of anything you've seen that moves slower? Would you want to? Have you ever felt more at peace watching anything move faster?


~

California Avocados! Hand-picked by movie stars! Did I get enough of 'em? No, I actually didn't even sample a smidgen of the green, bolus-pitted fruit. Why not? Let's just say that I couldn't bring myself to reckon with the avocado ice cream and avocado cupcakes.

Well, Mrs. Ditchman is the smartest of the Ditchmans. (I believe I come in third, unless you count the cat.) The Avocado Festival came in full force, and my wife duly prepared for it by making a hearty dinner in the slow cooker. When we arrived home last night with brains turned to mush (nay, guacamole), we opened the front door to the warm, spiced, welcoming scent of homemade chili. Yes, chili is one of those Fair foods, but we were glad to come home to it all the same.

In the interest of hastening the family's bedtime, we put the two-year-old in the shower and couldn't get her out. She likes it! And who wouldn't? After a day hawking wares at an Avocado Festival, you really need a good strong shower to spray off the carnival grime that sticks to your psyche like bacon grease in an oven vent. (I had it in mind to pressure spray myself with the LANDA 2300!) How'd we do at the festival? Mmmm, not too bad I suppose. You never know with these things. They bring hope, though, that there is work to be done out there and people willing to pay you for it.

The family in the booth next to us was selling beach chairs. Nice, folding beach chairs that had an aluminum frame, ripstop fabric, and a little sunshade that popped out overhead when you sat in them. They folded into a backpack! All colors! How much? Low, low, price of $59.95! Not kidding: they sold a few hundred of them. You do the math.

The rest of the weekend was spent fielding all manner of email and phone calls from fine folks interested in helping out our friends, the Lindens. You may have been following the story over at the Dawg Run, which has been a touching series of late. Family Ditchman is heading up an operation to rally the troops and lend some order to the chaos of emotions that's been evident from the blog. The wave of interest in helping some friends, (and in many cases, strangers) is truly inspiring. Our blogspot is here, if you'd like to take a look, lend some assistance, or are just curious.

Studies show that people who help others tend to be happier. I, for one, believe it. Helping others takes your mind off your own needs for a while, gets smiles out of everyone, and just all around feels good. There's been an enthusiastic response to Annabelle's Circle, and this set of givers strikes me as a happy set of people, people who are pleasure to be around -which is no surprise given the Linden family's own friendly countenance. The enthusiasm is cheerful and lends hope, but there have been some real donations of time and money that are jaw-dropping in their selflessness. It is all inordinately profound, and yet perfectly normal and not unexpected. Most people like to help! It's a wonder and a joy and a blessed miracle of life to be in the company of such folk. I look forward to my donation of back pain -predicted soreness from the ditch-digging and hauling. (I also look forward to everyone else's!) It'll surely be a Memorial Day in 2008.

~