My friend Dayna has been bugging me for months about her friend Tom Cassidy. He's a poet from Minnesota who comes out a few times a year. Despite the fact that my poetry skills are fairly sub-par, she insisted we'd get along like a house on fire.
Cassidy is in town this week, staying with his friends the Cooks, so Dayna put Mr. Cook and me together via email, but only after telling Mr. Cook that I was an artist of great skill, which is, again,less than accurate. But it was too late; Mr. Cook had been hornswoggled, so he invited me to a party he threw last night.
It was a fun evening. As it turns out, Cassidy is a damn talented man. He has this whole absurdist prankster thing going on. I, in turn, was able to bluff an aura of artistic legitimacy by showing him a copy of The Monocle and Jimmy Specs and knowing who Alexandro Jodorowskyis.
As Dayna puts it, the Cooks are "collectors." They collect diverse and interesting people, then throw them together. The whole affair reminded me of a 1920s Paris literary salon, like in A Moveable Feast. A bunch of creative people stood around, ate good food, drank and said clever things for a while, then Tom read some poetry.
I tend to be a bit of a collector myself and I have long dreamed of turning my home into a salon like this. Unfortunately, the people I collect may be creative, but they're also a bunch of drunks and there's not a single poet in the lot. Our get-togethers tend to lack a certain finesse that one associates with a literary salon. But we occasionally get loaded and play Guitar Hero, which is almost as fun.
The only hiccup of the evening came when I met the Cook's daughter, Rachel. She seemed familiar, but it still took a minute to do the math. Rachel + Cook = Rachel Leigh Cook.
I kept cool as we chatted, but then it occurred to me that our lives have intersected many, many times. My coolness waned as I told her about how her manager had expressed interest in one of my scripts, how I had been at a video shoot she'd starred in, how I'd stood next to her at Shane Black's halloween party once for, like, twenty minutes, etc.
After a while, her eyes glazed over. Of course, she had no knowledge of our many encounters. In my enthusiasm, I'd crossed a line; We were no longer two people chatting. We were a celebrity listening to a pleb admiringly waffle on. Realizing this, I made a joke to recover from my faux pas.
More correctly, I made a joke that turned my faux pas into a bigger faux pas by saying, "Jeez, listen to me. I'm, like, a total stalker."
Never tell an actress that you are stalking her, even in jest.
Anyway, my conversation with the Cooks' son went much smoother. He's into comic books and video games, so we had tons in common. He also kind of looks like Tom Cruise, but I managed to keep that to myself.
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Comments
Nice to see you back and this was really fun.
I don't know who she is but really think her name is pretty.
I had to re-friend you again bacause of some hicup in the system.
Rated for stalking in jest.