Home-made Mary Poppins Bag
The other day I was talking about making boxes with stuff I don’t use. Well, looking for boxes I found other boxes and of course I just had to open a couple of them. In one I found some really nice stationery that I had bought right before the email era invaded my life. I will take the stationery with me to Ecuador. Who knows, I might use it… Then, in a big envelope I found some burnt 100$ used in a gag(*) for some special effect scene in the movie Hostage. And I started laughing thinking at the story behind those fake bills.
But I quickly turned the laughter into a nostrilizing attack when I found another envelope with Dick Van Dyke’s autographed 8′x12′ photo. Hahaha… It was my first year at vet. school and I was at the faculty library, checking my mail online. My classmate was surfing too and at some point she goes with:
“hey, I found Dick Van Dyke’s address!”
“huh?… so?”
“Seems like a home address, hu!”
“What site are you looking at?” some sort of fan site with stars addresses. “ya know, I doubt any of these people would let their home address online…”
“We can send a postcard, to see if it’s a real address. It’s cheap…”
“Fine, but… Dick Van Dyke?! haha… okay, whatever…”
So… my English skills being way better than most of my Italian friends’, I came out with a very stupid text for the postcard. I remember I wrote something about how nice I’m sure Malibu can be, but Tuscany (my home-region) is definitely better. And I also wrote that the first time I saw him I didn’t really see him because my mother was pregnant of me and she was at the movies with my father watching Mary Poppins. How clever, huh? Anyway, about 7 or 8 months later I found an envelope in the mail, handwritten address, from a town in the Los Angeles area. Back then I didn’t know anyone living in California, so I was wondering who was sending what?! I cracked up when I opened the envelope.
Back to my boxes exploration…
I kept taking out stuff and found some old postcards, hahaha. You’ll say “What’s so funny in some postcards?” Well, there was a time, when I was let’s see, around 14 maybe?! Anyway… back then, I used to buy an Italian magazine about cinema. The name was Ciak. It was a bit like Premiere or Esquire. Years later, it wasn’t as interesting as before so I stopped buying it. But for a while I’ve been collecting the magazine postcards. In fact, in each issue, they had 8 postcards about 8 movies: movie poster on the front, synopsis, cast & crew, trivia on the back. Sometimes they would mix movies with other pictures of actors and actresses. So now I have here in front of me the cards of Il Principe di Homburg (Marco Bellocchio, ‘97), Absolute Power (Clint Eastwood, ‘97), Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, ‘96), a headshot of Val Kilmer taken from The Saint, one of Don Johnson taken from Hot Spot, two of Richard Gere (they don’t seem taken from any movie that I remember), a photo of Harrison Ford as a tired, dirty, sweating Indiana Jones on a hanging bridge (seems like a scene from The Temple of Doom) and a bubble saying “Can’t find you! Where the heck are you?” and finally, a photo of Kevin Costner taken from Field of Dreams. No comment.
For some reason all these postcards suddenly reminded me of some high-school years and friends I had back then, and how silly a teenager can be.
Seems like there’s only movie-related stuff in my attic, but you have no idea how many boxes are still there.
For today’s… I also found some letters, old and more recent, and a couple of objects that reminded me of my Oregon days, the freedom of being in the wilderness, its vastity (or vastness?!) and how many times in the past 7 months I have wished there were no computers, no cars, no cell phones (come to think of it, I left mine turned off in the past 2 days, woooops). Just me and the land. And other people too, of course, so that my hermit self doesn’t become too dominant.
Someday I’ll buy some land, someday.
* a gag is a bit like a test-scene before the real shooting of the scene
