DOUBLE DATE

A short film with the intrepid Richard Edson

A rich woman, the friend of a friend, saw me in a frayed jean skirt that I had made. 

“You made it?  Can you make me one?” She asked. 

“I don’t know how to get hold of another pair of my ex-husband’s pants,” I told her. 

“What do you want for it?” 

It really bothered her that I wasn’t interested in selling it  — that it wasn’t buyable. 

So she said, “I’ll just have it made.”  She whipped out her phone and took a picture of it, before I could comment. 

It was a dirty little transaction that felt like a minor copyright rape. 

She photographed it as if to say, “Wanna bet I can’t buy it?”  

And I was thinking… is spending power is your metric for everything? 

It was so capitalist.  She had no respect for the design, the labor — she stole it at the speed of thought, without thinking of my time investment or my work or my design.  Ownership trumped everything.  

I didn’t heel-kick her like I should have — I didn’t really care, but it goosed the latent Marxist in me. 

I also understood that I didn’t have the stomach for capitalism.  Part of me admired her.  I was also partly jealous, and nauseated.

In any case, it reminded me that in the eighties, social cache used to be about creativity, and now it’s pretty much exclusively about theft. 

In the mid-nineties, I met one of my heroes of the eighties:  Richard Edson, one of the stars of the early Jim Jarmusch movie “Stranger Than Paradise.”   I was in New York when I was 18 and I saw him hanging around glamorously at a legendary East Village bar — Madame Rosa’s or King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut.  I couldn’t stop staring at him, looking beautifully broken nosed in his fedora.  He raised his glass to me and it was my perfect New York vacation moment. (Richard also played, among numerous other movie roles, the criminal valet parker in “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off.”) 

I was working with the Actor’s Gang in LA at the time: Tim Robbins’ theater company, which spawned such stars as Jack Black and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D.   I was performing at a benefit at the Actor’s Gang which involved my wearing a white bikini and playing Edie Sedgwick at the Andy Warhol factory.  For some idiotic reason, I thought that salt would play better to the audience to create mounds of cocaine on all the surfaces of the set (I should have used baking soda! What was I thinking?).  It didn’t take long for our improvised skit to devolve into an absolute mess in which the other actors and I were spraying champagne and throwing handfuls of salt at each other’s faces — mostly into each other’s eyes. 

So it was in this state — teary-eyed and practically naked, when I actually met Richard Edson, who told me he was casting for a short film he intended to direct, which was shooting in New York, and I was perfect for the part of a sleazy girl from Dover, Delaware. 

Kevin, the boyfriend I was living with, had informed me a few weeks before that he was not renewing our vows.  We had a “Quebecois Wedding” deal going on, where we agreed to be married for 6 month blocks.  We survived two of these, but now he was letting me go.  Richard’s movie, I decided, was a perfect excuse to move to New York.    I told Richard he only needed to buy me a one-way ticket.  I packed what things I had, and landed in New York in the middle of a massive blizzard. 

The short movie starred four people — me, Richard, a weird kid named Nemo who had an influential listening audience for his local radio show, who had also had a bit part in a Julian Schnabel film, and a Japanese actress who was married to a famous American director, who really didn’t speak English very well at all. 

We commenced shooting in the dead of winter in Richard’s overheated East Village railroad apartment, with a small but dedicated team of filmmakers, including Chosei Funahara, who had been a member of the Plasmatics. 

At one point, Richard and I had to shoot a sex scene.   I was completely neurotic about it, and demanded that my nipples be taped over.  Chosei spent over an hour drawing an enormous dragon tattoo on my back in Sharpie.  Everyone oohed and ahhed over it.  Then I put my kimono on to await filming.  When I dropped the kimono, everyone gasped - I had been sweating in the radiator heat of the apartment, and the thing had smudged sideways, so he had to re-do it almost entirely. 

Richard and I had been having a kind of low-flame, subcutaneous flirtation going on, and we were both a bit apprehensive about the sex scene.  Richard was worried about how he’d respond, and I didn’t know how I would either.   We had already filmed a major kiss, which seemed to stultify him because I went after it with such open-mouthed gusto.  My character was a hardy New York slut, and that was the reason his character was in the scene. 

So, being intrepid thespians, we got in bed and started filming. 

(Part two below)

We started making out furiously.  He was wearing leather pants. I was wearing lurid underwear that Richard had picked out and bought for me, under a kimono.  

What simultaneously dawned on the both of us once we were in the sack was that there was zero sexual energy between us, with the cameras rolling.  We both started giggling and trying to figure out the most absurd ways of simulating sex — shooting creases in the arm to look like an ass and what have you. I was sucking on his pants.

The point of this entire exercise, this whole film, which Richard titled “Double Date,” was not monetary.   It was Richard flexing his director skills.  I was just enjoying acting for a change.  It was one of those projects that people do because they feel compelled to make it happen, as opposed to some holiday cash-grab like the miserable new “Wonka.” 

Richard never promoted the film. He had his doubts about it, but I still like it.  

Artwork: “The Consolations of Technology,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson, 2020