Tag Archives: movies

Welcome to film camp, everybody.

Posted in Career by
On the set of "The Curse of Mokato" at the Joey Travolta Film Camp

On the set of “The Curse of Mokato” at the Joey Travolta Film Camp

On July 15th, I started working with the Joey Travolta Film Camp as part of my job at Steeltown. Steeltown’s Youth and Media program had partnered with the director of the camp, Carolyn Hare, and for the past two years, staff and interns have had the opportunity to work at the camp and act as “aides” for the kids.

If you are unfamiliar with the Joey Travolta Film Camp, as I’m sure many of you are, it is a two-week summer camp for kids and young adults on the autism spectrum. Joey Travolta himself (brother of John Travolta) directs the camp and has held similar programs in other cities for the past eight years. This is the third time that Carolyn has brought Joey and his team to the Burgh.

You can read more about the camp in my article on Steeltown’s website.

But I want to tell you the real story. Not that the article on Steeltown’s site isn’t true. I know it is because I wrote it. But this is my story and the kids’ story. This is behind the scenes. This is the heart of the camp. Continue reading →

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities

Posted in Life's Adventures by

The_Fault_in_Our_Stars

After Pennsylvania’s $60 million in film tax credits were renewed earlier this month, the first movie that was set to film in Pittsburgh using those tax incentives was The Fault in Our Stars, based on John Green’s novel. I figured I’d better read this if movie studios think it’s great enough to create a major motion picture.

I’m a big fan of books. I read just about every day and I fall asleep with a book in my hand. I cling to characters like family and read every word of the acknowledgements when I don’t want it to end. When they make a movie out of a book, I believe the book is almost always better.

I finished it in less than a week. I couldn’t stop turning the pages–I laughed and I cried and I went through half a box of tissues. It was just as good as the news articles and the Facebook posts had claimed it to be. I like cynical characters for some reason—characters who see the truth and harsh reality of a situation rather than the silver lining. So I fell in love with Hazel from the first page. And I fell in love with Augustus because he looked for that silver lining and tried so hard to get Hazel to see it. Continue reading →

The Pursuit of Something Else

Posted in Life's Adventures by

Sometimes I compare things in my life with movies. I’m sure everyone does, but maybe I’m a romantic and you hear me saying it more often. You know the phrase, “-but that’s how it is in the movies!” or “it never happens like that in the movies.” And people respond “yes Meg, but those are just movies.” 

Well I found myself doing it again. You see, I have good days and bad days, as does everyone. On the bad days I wonder where my life is going and whether I’ll  ever get a real job and I think about my friends who live far away and can’t visit and the student loans I’ll have to start paying because my six-month grace period will be up….. And on the good days I remember that life is an adventure and I’m just living it- that everything will eventually work out and then when I’m old this will all be part of the awesome story I have to tell.

So the other day, I was having a good day. And for some reason I started thinking about the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it is based on a true story about a young man with a wife and child living in New York City. The man is a door-to-door salesman, but his hospital equipment isn’t selling well. They can’t make rent and his wife leaves him and their son. And this man just thinks that if he wore a suit and worked as a stock broker in a big city building that his life would be happy. So he takes this unpaid internship, while still trying to sell the hospital equipment and raise a son, and he goes through arguably the hardest part of his life and comes out the other side.

I own this movie, but I don’t think I’ve seen it in awhile. Which is why I was surprised that I was just driving along and it suddenly came to me. And I wondered, are we really in the pursuit of happiness? I don’t know if that phrase is quite accurate.

I find myself in a similar, but most certainly not exact, situation. I took an unpaid internship, in addition to the job that makes the money, and at the end of it, I hope a real job will be in closer reach. I’m working almost every day and I’m busy and stressed. But remember, I was having a good day. So I kept in mind that I don’t have a spouse that just left me, I’m not saddled with a kid, I don’t have rent to pay (right now), my internship isn’t a full time job taking up all my time, and I’m not homeless and sleeping in subways. And suddenly I felt much better about the situation.

My internship is two days a week, four hours a day. So far they haven’t had me doing anything super exciting, but there is the prospect of doing exciting things down the line. I really like what the organization is doing and the projects that I’m working on. It’s all very peace-hope-and-love stuff that you can’t help but get sucked into. The interviews that I’m transcribing right now do give me a little hope for humanity, if only there were more people with as much positivity and kindness as this woman. And I love the atmosphere of this non-profit/public television workplace, the people who say hello to me in the halls and the good vibes you get when people love their jobs.

I’m definitely in pursuit of something, but I don’t think it’s happiness. Hopefully there aren’t a lot of people in the world who are in search of happiness. I think that happiness can always be there, but often people are too tired or stressed to notice and accept it. And so they think they’re not happy. In the movie, Will Smith had happy moments, I think. His son was a huge source of happiness for him, when he noticed. The problem was that he broke his life down into a tiny little word used to sum up the whole time period (example: “This part of my life is called running.“) But life is so much more complicated than a single word and he limited himself by boxing it all in like that.

As for me, I think I’m happy. I think I have a lot going for me if I have a good day and take the time to remember it. I’m in pursuit of something else. The pursuit of a plan. Or stability. The pursuit of a long-term achievable goal. I wonder if we could spell that wrong and make it a sequel. I’m clearly in pursuit of something, but if I weren’t, my life would be boring. And I’m really looking forward to having a good story to tell.