Trial Cohabitation

A few months ago, Goat's neighbors received a knock at their door. Upon answering they met a Hollywood location scout who wanted to use their house for filming a movie. After much back and forth, agreeing on specifics with the assistance of lawyers, the neighbors (Todd and Liss) agreed to let a film crew take over their house for the month of July.

Odd side note: I went to high school with Todd and I find it kind of weird that he and his family live across the street from Goat. To further the oddness: Todd went to college with Goat. To add even more oddness: even after not seeing him for well over a decade, Todd recognized Goat from across the street on a snowy morning at 6:30am while a bundled Goat shoveled his driveway.

Those of you who aren't familiar with the inner workings of Hollywood film making might not know that they will do whatever they need to create their set. Todd and Liss' house has now had the back ripped off (so they could park a car in the dining room), the entire downstairs has been painted a yucky rosy mauve color and the pounding and drilling from the inside of the house went on for days.

Todd and Liss have two dogs, two cats and one 15 year old son, Eli and all of them had to move out of their house and take their stuff with them (except the microwave, that's in the movie). The stuff went into storage. The family wanted to avoid staying at an extended stay hotel with so many pets and a teenager who would be stranded in a far away part of town away from his friends for half of summer vacation. They found a great house to rent a few blocks away from their house, but the jerky landlord changed his mind about letting them rent the place for a month. He informed them of his wizened decision 5 days before they had to be out of their house to make room for the set crew. So Goat and I decided to let them rent his house for July and he would move into mine.

Thus began trial cohabitation for Goat and I.

In the 17 years I have lived out of my parent's house, I have had a roommate or roommates for collectively one year and 5 months of that time. I'm a woman that really appreciates her space. The nude sauntering, the 3am laundry, the postponing of housekeeping (after all, I'm the one who has to look at it)and the hogging of the bed and covers have suited me just fine over the 15+ years of no roommate living. So the idea of infringement had my back up a bit, made me worry that I would discover that I love Goat, but I just can't live with him. Or anyone. So I was a little edgy when he came to stay for a while.

A few days ago when he got home from work, he delivered a silly "Hi, Honey. I'm home." and I got teary. I was so happy to see him even though I couldn't sleep in the middle of the bed the night before because he was in it with me and I had to clean the dishes in the sink because we made and ate dinner together and I couldn't saunter naked because we were entertaining friends he had in town. So far, this cohabitation thing is pretty good.

The family of Liss and Todd are happy in their rental house, watching all the action going on in their real house from the porch. It's kind of surreal to have people who you recognize from movies standing in the middle of your street.

Liss and I are both former actors and the other day, while she was showing me what the film crew had done to the house, we got laughing. After all the years we spent trying to get regular acting work, suffering endless auditions and rejection with dreams of being on the big screen in our heads it's her fucking microwave that ends up in a movie.