brykmantra.com

I just found this out last week: You might catch a glimpse of me in a new movie that’s coming out soon.

Maybe.

You may remember that almost a year ago, I wrote about being in the audience for what was supposedly the pilot episode of a talk show — but it was obvious to me and others there that it was all a big setup for some kind of joke.

At the time I wrote that I suspected that the actor playing the gay Austrian model (who was trying to adopt a black American baby) might have been Jamie Kennedy or Mike McDonald (from MadTV).

It turns out I was aiming too low.

I’m learning now that I was actually seeing Sacha Baron Cohen, best known for his characters of Borat and Ali G.

The sad part is that I had known since the Borat movie came out that Cohen’s next movie project was going to be about a gay Austrian model named Bruno.

But during the taping I just failed to put make the connection — I think that I blocked out the possibility that such a big movie project would actually travel to Dallas and intersect with my life.

But it did, and now there’s a small chance that my image (along with the images of 40 other people) might flicker across a movie screen near you.

I say a small chance because, as I mentioned last year, they weren’t happy with that taping session and did the whole thing again that night. And, judging by previews and advance screening reviews, the audience was “predominantly black”, and the audience I was in was only about 25% African American. (The producers were probably trying to evoke a stronger reaction, so in the second taping they most likely focused on the fact that the baby was black.)

Anyway, I actually hope I’m on the cutting room floor on this one, since I have the feeling that anyone in the audience at the time will be edited to look like a Maury Povich reject.

But I’m getting a kick out of the fact that I got to see Borat, almost up close, even if I didn’t find out for a full year.

I got some sad news yesterday: My mom’s next-door neighbor — a guy from my graduating class — was found dead in his house, apparently from a heart attack.

It was very sudden. He had had friends over earlier in the evening, and they had left thinking he was fine.

Just shows you can never tell.

This also marks the first death in our graduating class, which left high school 36 years ago this month. Other people in the class have passed on, but none of them actually *graduated* with us. Of course, there were only 44 people in our graduating class, but still, that’s a long time to have everybody still alive, especially since three of us have had cancer.

I was starting to think that OHS Class of ‘73 was invincible, but apparently I was wrong.

Now I’m bummed.

Like most people, I find Mother’s Day to be a source of annual consternation: My mom doesn’t need anything, but I can’t let that stop me from getting her something. On top of that, she doesn’t want us spending anything on her since I was out of work so long.

This year, though, I’ve found a nice solution: I’ve discovered that Staples does 24″ by 36″ black and white poster prints for only $2.99!

And as luck would have it, I scanned a lot of my mom’s old family pictures — most of them in black and white, conveniently enough — so it occurred to me to put together a collage of some of those photos and print it out at a mind-boggling two feet by three feet, and the results are seen here.

Also, she recently sent me her favorite picture of my dad, in his Army uniform from WWII, so I scanned it in, fixed all the cracks, creases and holes, and made a huge poster of that one as well.

I think she just might enjoy this more than something she could put on her shelf to gather dust.