The Day I Met The Family Show About Family

When I was writing for magazines, I would stop to watch television shows and movies being shot whenever I saw production trucks. It wasn’t that I was a fan; it was a business thing. Since I never knew who I might be interviewing from one day to the next, I looked upon these moments as research for future articles.

The best way to get to know people is by not letting them know that you are getting to know them. Let me explain. When I was assigned to do an interview, I pretty much knew everything about that person before I got there. Most of the time, I knew what they were going to say Before I asked the questions. My job was to get them to say more.

So, when I saw production trucks about a quarter mile from my apartment, I approached the crew. Being that I was on crutches, a crew member almost immediately got me a chair. After that happened, no one bothered me. The cast rarely knows Everyone on the crew. Some crew members change from day-to-day. It was the perfect place to observe the cast. More importantly, it was a way to talk with the crew during their off moments about what it was like to work with the cast. If you want to know what a celebrity is like as a person, ask the people who have to work with that person on a day-to-day basis. Some production companies are more open and friendly than others. On this particular day, I got lucky.

The show was a hit family show about a family. They were on location to shoot the exterior scenes of the family home. What you saw on television was only a small part of the entire location. It was actually at the end of a private cul-de-sac and the house was right next to a stable. You never saw the stable. Across the street from the house was nothing but trees, shrubs, and grass. There were no other houses, but television gave the illusion that this was just an average middle-class Street. Actually, the house belonged to a retired dentist who was renting out the television home facade for $500 a day. When there are a lot of exterior scenes to shoot in the same area, production companies will shoot all the scenes within a few days. Those scenes are then diced and spiced into the show during post-production. This turned out to be a bonus for me as it was only day one of a multi-day shoot.

The ages of the cast ranged from 7 or 8 to the late-forties. As I’ve said, I was only there to observe. But then, something happened that destroyed my anonymity. One of the crew members was a young guy about my age. He was a stand-in, literally a body standing in for cast members when they’re on a break. This allows the lighting technicians to set up lights and shades for when the cast returns to do the next scene. These jobs usually go to family and friends of the cast. Paul, as it turned out, was related to one of the cast members. He had grown up in New York, and that was only one of the things we had in common. We quickly became, what would turn out to be, lifelong friends.

Because of this impromptu friendship, after the exterior shooting ended, I was invited back to the soundstage. It was a more intimate setting, and I began to lose my status as just an observer. Over time, I found myself being “adopted” by this television family. They would include me in group conversations that would sometimes verge on being group confessionals. During one of those moments, I half-jokingly reminded them that I wrote for magazines. One of the cast members turned to me and said, “We know that. If we didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t be here.”

Aside from Paul, I found myself growing closer to one of the cast members. She came from a show business family. Her mother was a casting agent for child actors. Her brother had been one of the stars of another family show about families a few decades earlier. She was smart, beautiful, and a little bit of what I like to call good crazy.

Because it was a large cast, unless that particular episode focused on her, it was a few days on set and a few days off. We started spending her days off together. She lived in Santa Monica pretty close to the beach. Believe it or not, she could get me to do things I would have never consider doing. One time in particular, I found myself sitting on the back of a motor scooter, crutches across my lap, while we went in search of sushi bars and sake.

It was a Crazy but deeply satisfying period of my life. I had recently completed four years of experimental orthopedic surgeries. During that time, my life had become a repeating cycle of surgery, recuperation, and literally learning how to walk again from Step One. I had repeated the cycle seven times. I had also put my career and my social life on hold. It was an all-consuming event in my life. It had to be because it was all or nothing. I will be talking about this time of my life in later podcasts. 

Needless to say, I needed to spend time with someone who just wanted to be with me. I was too naïve to understand that she did as well. She had been married twice before she met me. They were brief. The first was for two years. The second only lasted about a year. Her celebrity didn’t intimidate me. Her previous marriages did. At the time, I didn’t understand why she had rushed into marriages and why they had failed. I now realize that she was looking for something real and secure. I think her ex-husbands had wanted to live in the glow of fame and fortune. Aside from being 2020, hindsight always has a way of coming too late.

There came a time when she wanted more than just a causal relationship. I was trying to get my career back on track. At the time, that was the most important thing to me . Looking back, I may have missed what was really important. I remember discussing it with Paul. He knew us both and imparted His own brand of wisdom when I told him that our relationship had ended. Bud, he said, you’re an idiot. He was right.

We drifted apart and I eventually moved to Vegas, but I never really forgot her. I heard she tried marriage a third time, but it only lasted a few months. I like to think that it would have been different for us. I took a job with a PR firm and remember the moment I was researching a client when I came across a newspaper article that she had died, suddenly, Six months earlier. I picked up the phone and called Paul. I asked him why he had never told me. There was a pause before he said, I didn’t know how. I understood because I knew he understood.

I think what really separates us humans from the thousands of other species on this planet is not the roads we travel or the ways in which we travel them. I think what separates us is the roads we chose not to travel and, More importantly, the regret we feel for not taking those journeys.