Backlot

I came home yesterday after work, in the miserable drizzling rain, the day after a deluge.

In a rush to get home and out of my wet clothes, to begin my long awaited Xmas holiday, I found myself frustrated, blocked on my own street by obnoxious orange cones. I have to take a very short detour to get home, but long enough to be irritated.

I see a herd of film trucks blocking the street about a hundred feet from my apartment. People are scurrying everywhere, unloading film equipment.

A little research yields up the answer. Seems they were filming part of that Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett movie in my neighborhood. They'd been camped uptown earlier, but for at least one day they moved up here. The movie is an adaptation of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, my research tells me. It guess it makes sense to film up here then after all, since my neighborhood is predominately from the teens and twenties.

Stangely enough, it's not the first time.
Last year, before
You-Know-What, in my pre-deluge neighborhood, Jude Law, Sean Penn et al. actually camped out for a few weeks near my old apartment. I never did see them however. I did see Sean Penn one day in the line to see a movie at Canal Place one lonely Sunday, but that's beside the point.

I didn't see Brad or Cate yesterday, not even sure they were there, but they might very well have been. I wouldn't doubt it.

Funny world in which we live, isn't it..where you can come home from work and find a celebrity in your neighborhood.
Maybe I'm crazy, but it doesn't seem right somehow.