My favorite childhood book was “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.” It’s essentially about a family going to hunt a bear. But as with most children’s books, it’s an allegory for capitalistic greed and the Great Depression. This book in particular is glued to my memory because of one specific line. As the family is on their trek, they encounter thick mud, tall grass, rocky terrain. At every pass, the mom I think says “We can’t go over it, we can’t go around it, we have to go through it.”
I’m coming here, pen to page today, in defense of going through it. Sloshing through the mud to get to kill a bear I guess.
We start prepping for season 5 of Maisel in a few weeks. For those of you unfamiliar, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a fictional TV show about a young Jewish comedian in New York. I was hired to work there through some loophole in which they were impressed with my Halloween costume and I convinced them that my time bookkeeping on a food truck would qualify me to work in accounting for a major TV show. Over a year later, I’m still here, still using the left hemisphere of brain way more than anyone anticipated. I love being a small part of a big team. Small but mighty and very ambitious. And resilient. Like a cockroach.
There are approximately 30,000 people that work together to make a TV show happen. From camera crew, costumes, hair, cinematography, Sweetgreen lunches and donut food trucks. It’s sort of impossible to capture how hard people work to make watchable things, and I can’t go into great detail. The next time you watch a show or a movie, sit through the end of the credits. Find the best boys and the gaffers and the stunt people and the locations coordinators. I can only speak for my show but I will say there are no corners cut. Nobody goes over or around, only through.
I didn’t log on today to talk about TV. It’s all I’ve been thinking about during my hiatus between seasons, because basically all I’ve been doing in my free time is catching up on it. I’ve been in a liminal space. A break from work, a new apartment in a new neighborhood, a newly single gal about town. I want to talk about what it means to be between.
We work towards goals. We drive towards destinations and we cook recipes to get to the soup. And before you think I’m going to give you some “it’s not the destination it’s the journey” bullshit, I won’t. I’ll say that it’s also about the gas station. It’s about the red lights and the flat tires. Not just the journey, but the time where you’re not really moving at all. The mud.
Being between is a lot of sitting. You’re about to get your teeth cleaned but right now you’re just reading a 2017 issue of Architectural Digest and staring at the Nemo in the fish in the tank. In between buying groceries and eating dinner is the 9 times you put in your passcode to unlock your phone again and scroll back to the NYTimes cooking app with a sesame oil coated finger just to remind yourself, for the 9th time, if it’s Tablespoons or teaspoons of garlic powder. Going through it is not glamourous. Doing the “work” as they say is just that, it’s work. But it’s necessary. On a TV show, there’s a lot of sitting and waiting. Between takes, between scenes. There’s a lot of stagnant time setting up and taking down and just- waiting. It can be draining but it’s part of the whole deal so everyone does it. You do it as many times as you need until it’s right. Can’t go over it, can’t go around it.
I hate writing. It’s tedious to me. I do it because- (come back to this.)
There’s something to be said about going through it. Wading in the muck. If there’s nothing to do, doing nothing. For the biggest shit storms that come at us, even the biggest and shittiest, we have to go through them. And it’s not always a journey. This is not the Odyssey. There’s not always some all-encompassing lesson and a theme song. Sometimes there’s just mud. But according to our tour guide at the Dead Sea, mud has a lot of vital nutrients. It’s good for your skin. So get dirty.