Growing in Greece: Giggling Drag Queens

January 27^th, 2011

Aghia Paraskevi

Athens, Greece

I was anticipating a super fun filming day and I was right! A lot more tiresome than I thought it would be, but definitely fun. We shot scenes 20, 4, and 42 today. For scene 20 I had already reserved the theater department’s black box theater from 9:30am-3:30pm so we were all set. Scene 20 consists of drag queens, two emo kids, and a metro cosmetic salesperson. Seeing Will and Mitch dressed up in women’s clothes, and McKenna, Jess, and Morgan giggling alongside them in a kickline was HILARIOUS!

It’s a good thing we had 6 hours to shoot this scene because there was a lot to go over. When we got there, Jamie, Kristy, and I met with Yannis, the man in charge of lights. It was a little difficult to communicate him since he spoke no English, but we soon discovered which knobs worked which lights, etcetera and then Katerina came and helped translate for awhile. She has been super helpful this entire time and even opened up the dressing rooms for us to use. We’re hoping to cast her in one of the scenes at the airport, but she has a very busy schedule. Also, some of the cues were especially hard to grasp for the drag queens, and the counts got a little messy for awhile, so that took longer than expected.

The emo teens scene is the one I ‘acted’ in, dressing up in all black (leather jacket, skirt, corset shirt, fingerless gloves) and black eyeliner galore. It was short and sweet but still a little fun to be an actress for awhile, plus it gave me a break from producer duties for that scene. Off we went to shoot scene 4, or the hipster and George in the bathroom scene. We had already gotten permission to use whatever we wanted on the Deree campus as long as we weren’t causing too much of a disturbance so we just pasted some gray duct tape over the boys restroom and started shooting. It was a little difficult for the videographer (Brendon today) to get the angles exactly the way he wanted since there are lots of mirrors, but he did a great job. Tavis continually squirting water up his nose was comical to watch, especially when we did like five takes of that scene! I even did audio for the last half of the scene today to give Jordan a break which was fun and I liked learning a new skill as well.

The last scene of the day was 42, or the Janitor rallying his troops, well, rallying his coworker Steve anyway. Last night Will, Arnold, Jordan, and I had scouted out the storage room and moved couches and desks around to create the Janitor’s secret “mancave” or his scheming room. It took a bit of interior design and some man muscles to create the scene just the way we wanted it, but it looks pretty awesome now! Will is very good at improvisation and has a lengthy monologue in this scene; I can actually see him being a professional actor and if he was it’d be cool to say that I’ve worked with him! All around fun, exhausting day; filming for over 9 hours really wears me out, but that just means we’re one step closer to finishing the film!

Lovin' Athens,

Susie