sophie heawood

It is late December, the last few days before Christmas, and I’m staying at The Jane hotel in New York for four nights while we shoot the ending to a film that we worked on in LA over the summer. It’s called Wolfe With An E, directed by David Zuckerman, produced by Michael Hekmat, written by DZ and Mandy Kahn. It’s about the musician Henry Wolfe, but he’s a mysterious figure, whose appearances are fleeting, and somehow my lines are more plentiful. I play a British music journalist from The Times, sent to America to interview Henry. She’s called Sophie Heawood. Yup, the method acting is killing me.

So I spent today pretending to be myself going record shopping in the West Village. Pretending to be myself running into an old friend. Pretending to go to her Brooklyn loft and pretending to get excited about Haydn’s clock symphony and then pretending to get so worked up about classical music and the mathematics of time travel and interplanetary egg breakfasts that I nearly slipped into unconsciousness. (Still not quite sure about that bit, but it was in the script. I did ask but they just frowned and muttered something about “the future”, and then started calling me Soph, always a sign I should have kept my mouth shut.)

Gaby Hoffman, who’s been acting professionally since she was a small kid living at the Chelsea Hotel, played my longlost friend. You can tell her to say anything and it just springs out of her mouth like she invented the language. I thought I sounded quite natural until I saw how she inhabited it; how the words she said didn’t sit and linger on her for a second. She seemed to be made of earth. I could have watched her for days.

My own experience of acting is quite like my experience of broadsheet journalism. You try and try to make sentences sound good while a small voice inside your head won’t stop nagging at you “but is this how you ACTUALLY TALK?”

Except today, acting was way better than journalism ever could be, cos I got given my very own hair and make-up lady to keep beside me all day long, patting my face down, sexing up my eyelash dossier and rearranging my “bangs”. She was, no word of a lie, the most exciting thing that has ever happened to the front section of my head.

“An introduced species is a species living outside its native distributional range, which has arrived there by human activity, either deliberate or accidental. Famous examples include the introduction of starlings to North America by an Englishman called Eugene Schieffelin, a lover of the works of Shakespeare, who, it is rumoured, wanted to introduce all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays into the United States. He deliberately released eighty starlings into Central Park in New York City in 1890, and another forty in 1891.”

RUNYON CANYON

Four young women out for a gentle hike; one is a white nanny with a pushchair containing a brown baby. The other women coo over the child and ask, “So, is this her second baby?”
“Yeah,” says the nanny.
“So, what, did she like RETURN the other one?”
“Yeah.”

A young white guy, maybe about 25, has been monologuing at his female friend for so long that I start subtly transcribing him into my Blackberry (with my super fast typing thumbs.) Seriously, this whole passage is verbatim:

“So I read in Oprah magazine about this kid who grew up in this super super strict family, like born again Christians? And like, he was gay? And obviously his family were not gonna be okay with this AT ALL, and he finally came out to his dad who was, like, traumatised and told him never to tell his mom, but his dad dropped dead a year later so he finally told his mom he was gay and she put him through all this electro shock therapy and all of this awful stuff to try and cure him and she pushed him and pushed him and so finally he snapped and he, like, KILLED his mom, and so the whole of the rest of the family was like really against him, you know, cos he’d killed his mom I guess, and nobody would support him and finally his grandmother on his dad’s side came out in support of him and she defended him at the trial and so her husband divorced her at the age of 75 and now the kid is still in jail and his grandma has moved to be near him so she can visit him but she’s totally alone and the whole rest of the family won’t have anything to do with them and it just goes to show that, you know, you don’t think something like that is going to come between you, because you think your family will always be there for you, but you know you’d be SURPRISED, sometimes at the end of the day it’s weird but people really don’t pull together over this stuff.”

GREENBLATT’S DELI, SUNSET BOULEVARD:

Waitress: Anger doesn’t get Russian dressing
Customer: What does get Russian dressing?
Waitress: Joy

Customer: Luxembourg? That country that was so random that Hitler forgot to invade it?
Waitress: That’s pretty much what they put on all their t-shirts. Have you seen In Bruges?
Customer: Sounds foreign
Waitress: I don’t think it is foreign, I think it’s English
Customer: Where is Bruges?
Waitress: Somewhere in Europe
Customer: Luxembourg.

Customer: Cindy was pretty wild when she lived in New York. She was dating some guy who had a dungeon. But these days people stay in touch.

Many years ago I started having singing lessons from a wonderful kind-hearted woman. I was younger and shyer then, and was immediately attracted to her generous philosophy. She told me that everybody has a voice, everybody can sing, and if they don’t sing in tune, well, maybe they’re singing a different tune, and that’s fine. I had lessons for some time and she taught me well. Once I spent a whole weekend at her house watching her work with another student - a middle-aged man, recently divorced - to successfully turn him from tone deaf to singing in harmony.

Now that I live on the other side of the world from her, we haven’t seen each other in a long time, but we recently met up in America and went on a retreat together. At this retreat there was a creative writing teacher who was going round saying that everybody has a voice, everybody has a story to tell, and everybody can be a writer. Now that I’m a professional writer, I found myself turning my nose up at his idea, and muttering darkly to myself that everyone can’t be a writer, just as not everyone can be a pastry chef or a chemical engineer.

Later, I told my singing teacher that I had become a horrible old snob who didn’t believe that everybody could write. She said that she no longer believed that everybody could sing. “But I watched you get that man from tone deaf to singing in tune!” I reminded her. “Oh GOD, but that was SUCH hard work,” she groaned. “I’ve realised that everyone in the world can make a noise,” she continued, “but… it isn’t always pleasant to listen to.”

My dark cynical heart felt quite a lot better after that.

“It was just a thing you try, like wearing orange for a while”

And the back of his anorak was leaping up and down, and people were chucking money to him, and I asked, “Do you earn a living doing that?” He said, “Yes, this is my livelihood.”

Midge Ure’s house on the island of Monserrat had to be rebuilt after a termite infestation, after which it was promptly blown away by Hurricane Hugo. He restored it a second time but it was then destroyed by a volcano which had sleeping for 400 years. He bought his parents a thatched cottage in Devon, which caught fire. Twice.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN
What an appalling philosophy that sounds! To attempt to classify you, Mrs. Cheveley, would be an impertinence. But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.

MRS. CHEVELEY
Oh, I’m neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN
You prefer to be natural?

MRS. CHEVELEY
Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

A few years ago, Hillary Clinton stepped onto a podium before Yale’s graduation class to make a speech. “The most important thing I have to say,” she told her eager audience, “is that hair matters. Pay attention to your hair. Because everyone else will.”

(Here she is making the speech)

The nuclear physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say of unsolicited student theses: “It’s not even wrong”, as if to suggest that being wrong would at least mean it was in the approximate area of being right.