You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
In part one, I told you how I got the role.
In part two, I told you what it was like to be on the set.
Part III, the aftermath, might be the coolest of them all.
What about Dallas III is what it’s been like after the shoot was over. It’s about how I felt and how other people reacted to it.
To complete this Star Wars like trilogy; where Tim McGraw is my Father and Gwynth Paltrow is my sister. (of course I’m joking), I was exhausted when I left the set. I was physically tired and emotionally spent. My throat was so dry camels were walking across it looking for place to fill up their hump. But I was also really excited, pulsing with a fire hose like adrenaline knowing that I had experienced something that very few humans on the planet have experienced. It’s not the walk on the moon kind of exclusivity, but it’s not the same as shopping at WalMart either.
As I drove home on this Saturday afternoon, I looked at myself in the rear view mirror. I laughed out loud noticing that I was wearing a blue pin stripe suit with a polka-dot tie. My dress shirt was starched and fresh. I was wearing a silk scarff and a black over coat. I had on ostrich cowboy boots and quite honestly I was feeling a little GQ bad-ass. I had so much moose in my hair, I looked like BullWinkle’s gay lover. Even though I toweled off, I still had a layer of pancake make up stuck to my cheeks. I felt like a harlet.
It is this vision of bizarre that I enter the indoor soccer arena on a frozen tundra kind of Saturday afternoon.
I was immediately greeted by other dads wearing t shirts and sweat shirts and flannel shirts. Nobody was wearing French Cuffs that i could see.
“Wow, you look great,” one of the dads said to me in a less than manly way.
“You want to buy me a drink?” I say with a smile.
“Where you been? Work?”
I weighed this question in my head for a moment. Should I lie and say yes. Work would grant me a pardon, a quit exit strategy to the arena bleachers where I could watch my 11 year old play soccer. Say work and the discussion is over. “Oh you poor bastard,” they would say. “Having to work on a Saturday, that sucks,” they would lament.
Or I could live in the moment and tell the other dads the coolest truth in the building.
Their eyes looked me up and down the way a Beagle eyes a milkbone.
Screw it, I thought. I’m all in.
“Truth told, I just came off the set acting with Tim McGraw and Gwynth Paltrow in that movie they are shooting in town,” I said with a card player’s grimace.
I watched as their collective jaws unhinged.
“what?”
I took them through a truncated version of “What about Dallas” parts one and two.
After a couple of slaps on the backs and some attaboys, I turn to watch the game.
“Hey AC,” one of the dad’s calls out.
“How does Gwynth Paltrow look?”
I smile back. “She’s an Flippin goddess, dude. She is pure movie star. The Earth orbits around her, and the stars float across her aura.”
I think this dad would have been ok with “she’s hot dude.”
He smiled awkwardly. “right.”
On the way home, Tony called me.
“Dude, I got your message. So you didn’t take my call because you were acting with Mrs. Paltrow. That is awesome.”
Yep, it was.
At home, the same kids who laughed at me for a month of dinners, who moaned every time I said “What about Dallas, still didn’t really care. Kids are kids. And when they’re teenagers they are worse.
It was a much different story at work the following Monday. all the girls in the pit knew what I was doing and they all wanted me to dish the dirt.
I told them I would give them the short version, but they shut me down like a bunch of ex wives and demanded the long version, both parts I and II.
Always the story teller I was happy to oblige.
For the next two days the girls addressed me as movie star. It was fun and if it was surreal for me, I think it was fun for my co-workers who seemed to be generally excited by my experience.
I have another co-worker who had a brief role in the same film a week earlier. He too acted with Mrs Paltrow and he too had a quick speaking line. We compared notes and they were the same, but also different.
My co-worker only had one line which he says they changed on him at the last moment. He says that through him off a bit. He says he didn’t have any added lines or impromptu questions. He said the cameras remained behind him for the entire shoot. Like myself, he says he did have a nice exchange with the one and only Tim McGraw who didn’t want to call him interviewer 2 so Mr. McGraw took it upon himself to call him Rich, a name only slightly better than interviewer number 2. My co-worker thought that was hilarious and I guess if Tim McGraw calls you Rich on the set, that is pretty cool.
It’s been 3 days now, and I think the lustre is finally off the pumpkin for me. But obviously you fans of Crazy are eating it up. The hits to my website the last two days have been double what they normally are.
I didn’t plan on writing a “What about Dallas III” but it was a one of a kind experience and I can only comment on crazy news stories so many days in a row, so there you go.
As they like to say on the DVD, this story is sort of the director’s cut, or the extended version if you will.
And that is Crazy.
And now that the movie is out, many of my co-workers have seen it. They are coming up to me and screaming; What about Dallas.
I shot the scene almost a year ago, now that I write this, so it makes me smile.
“Did I get a speaking part?” I ask.
Yes, they respond. You have a close up and we hear your voice.
All in all, that is cool.
I have not seen the movie. I don’t know if I will. Maybe I’ll just wait a few years and one Sunday afternoon I’ll stumble across it on TNT or VERSUS.
I’ll see my stupid face yelling; “Hey What about Dallas?”
That will be crazy!