Lights! Camera! Winston?

Franklin, TN~ I received a very interesting phone call last Wednesday. The nature of the call is even more interesting when you consider where I was standing when I received it. I was, in no exagerrated terms, wearing a hard hat and holding a shovel...shoveling gravel and mud on a construction site in Arrington, Tennessee.

I had been working all day as a temp worker for a construction site that needed its street drain covers cleaned to prevent construction debris from going "into the river." (You might wonder why I was operating a shovel with a college degree: because I have no idea what I want to do with my life. That's why, and I might as well be in the fresh air while trying to figure this out.)

Picture this. I was dirty, tired, sore, hungry, and not the least bit excited about the last two hours of the day when my phone rang. It was my old college bud Matt "The Flash" Keim. Now, Matt ran off to Shreveport, LA several years ago and I hadn't heard much from him. But, as with all great stories, Matt was hard and work and found his way on to a Hollywood movie set...in Shreveport (something to do with tax breaks and Hurricane Katrina.)

In no uncertain terms, Matt said he had work for me to do on the set, something called a production assistant. Basically, the job is to do whatever the director and others tell you to do. Grunt work, I suppose, much like my shovel job but on the set of a Hollywood movie. Matt told me the pay was twice that of my ditch digging gig. I surveyed the work site and laughed. Only in the Whimsical World of Winston could there be such a contradiction: talking to someone on a movie set (who had to whisper because they were filming) while holding a shovel that I was getting paid nine dollars an hour to operate.

Life is insane.

Anyway, I had two options:
1. Be in Shreveport by 8 a.m. the next morning or
2. Wait around for the next opportunity, which Matt assured me would come.

So, now I am in a beautiful world of limbo, waiting, on all things, a call to drop what I'm doing and come work on a movie set. I'm not really sure how these things happen. This is reminiscent of course of my little trip to the CMA after party last fall. I have never been blessed with any amount of money. In fact, I am what most governments would classify as "impoverished." But boy do I have some stories! As for me and my silver screen possibilities rest assured I will keep the Whimsical World posts going, even if I find myself in Shreveport in a couple of months.

As if that's not enough, I also found out my good friend Andrew Lovell is also there now. That would mean three guys who appeared in each others college film projects would all be working together on an actual movie...how cool is that?!?!?

I remember growing up my dad would say the ringing phone was probably Hollywood calling him. Turns out that is not such an outrageous claim after all.

That's the story of my life...