We're off to see the Wizard.

Week three is over. I can't tell you how thankful every American on this movie is that week three is over. We spent the week shooting in the Mojave desert. Yes the desert in July...where things die from lack of water and the heat. Even more ironic is the town that we were shooting in was called El Mirage, which is even MORE ironic in itself as there wasn't a town there at all...

So we're out in the middle of the desert with no civilization, in a town that doesn't exist, and in the middle of July...can't get any better than that now can it? Now out in El Mirage is an airplane junkyard, kind of a place where commuter and military airplanes go rest peacefully after they finish their life of flying high in the skies. It's a pretty cool place that goes on for acres and acres of nothing but airplanes and junk. One would think that by us all travelling hours out into the desert that this would be a pretty big/climatic scene we were about to shoot, something that would have Indian audience members sitting on the edges of their seats gripping their curry fries tightly with one hand and covering their oppressed wives eyes with the other...oh the excitement when I found out that the scene we were shooting was...

Rather than give away the big climatic scene of the movie let's focus more on life last week know as hell. Yes, we all say that hell is probably hot, hotter than a witches titty, which I've yet to ever really understand. Are witches titties hot? Anyways, it was hot. How hot you might ask? Try 105 degrees at 8 a.m. reaching 125 degrees at 2p.m.. Now you folks in Texas might be saying that ain't that hot and I'm going to tell you to go suck an egg. When a truck is parked on the side of the road and one of it's tires suddenly explodes for no reason and the explanation given by a local is, "yep when your tires start to explode from the heat it's gonna be a hot one today", you know your in trouble.

True story by the way. Happened Wednesday.

Now we've established that the heat sucked. So we as the smart Americans that we are came prepared for the worst. We had our coolers of Gatorade and water. We should have been sponsored by Hawaiian tropic for the amount of sunscreen we had with us. But what we hadn't plan for is nature. Now when you're in the middle of the desert and there's nothing around you for miles and miles insects, particularly bees, have a sixth sense about finding you. Mental note for you all-Gatorade has sugar in it and bees like sugar. So what's wrong with a lonely little bee that just wants to collect some sugar to take back to her little children? Well there's nothing wrong with that but this little bee bitch got on her cell phone and called every fucking bee in her phone book! I'm talking HUNDREDS of bees taking over everything.

Que the flight of the bumblebee music.

Now imagine watching life before your eyes to the tune of the flight of the bumblebee. Would be pretty funny huh ? Now imagine watching life before your eyes to the tune of flight of the bumblebee while watching people run around being chased by hundreds of bees. Better huh? For example--the naive little craft services girl who thought it a nice gesture to cut up a watermelon to serve to the crew as they sweat their butts of in the desert. Nice fresh pieces of juicy watermelon on a cute little tray that she carried around serving people with. Her only problem is that the tray is so full of watermelon she has to use both hands, which doesn't allow her any ability to protect herself from the bees who are attracted to the nice, sweet, juicy watermelon. Think of someone having turrets syndrome but also having a seizure at the same time, all the while trying not to spill her tray of watermelon. But it wasn't just her...it was everybody. It was like were were shooting a movie titled "Attack of the Killer Bees". I'm telling you--you haven't lived until you've watched an Indian guy try to tell a bee to leave him alone. It's like a five minute conversation and QUITE amusing!

Now animals, including insects, have sort of a sixth sense in that they know when something is about to happen. You know the stories about when the horses start to run around and whine that somethings about to happen. Well now looking back I realize that when all the bees just sort of disappeared one day...we were in for something. See we were really thankful when we saw clouds forming on the horizon because that meant that we could have a potential break from the sun. What one doesn't think about is that usually when clouds form in the desert it doesn't mean shade, it means your fucked!

So the clouds roll in and we are all enjoying how it's now only like 110 degrees. What took us all a minute to realize is that we are in the middle of the desert surrounded by nothing but metal airplanes and metal attracts lighting. And then it began to thunder. That's when people started to run. It was like Godzilla was coming. Everybody pointed into the distance, yelled and then ran. About a mile from us is a dust storm blowing that looked like nothing but a wall of sand. Then it starts to rain. Then the winds begin to pick up. This is called a Monsoon...it goes from zero to you're screwed in .5 seconds.

I swear at one point I saw Aunt Em run out onto her front porch and yell for Dorothy!
Everybody took shelter as the winds picked up to crazy speeds, there was so much dust in the air it hurt to breathe. The road became a river in less than five minutes. We thought we were off to see the wizard.

But there in the middle of the monsoon we saw the naive craft service girl, drenched in rain and covered in mud, run by with a huge smile on her face yelling, "the bees are gone! The bees are gone!"...

...and that made everybody happy.

We are currently gearing up by putting flowers in our hair as we leave Thursday for a week in San Francisco to start the dance portion of the movie. Pray for us...