I am constantly reminded why I love New York and how I could never live in Hollywood. I was riding the subway home last night, with my producer, from Penn Station after having trained back to NY from DC, where I had a grueling day of shooting pick up shots for Fair Game in the freezing cold. All I was thinking about was my sleep plan: how if I go straight home, walk in the door, go straight to my bed and go straight to sleep, I will, at best, get five hours of sleep. But I kind of want to eat dinner, so subtract thirty minutes; and then I can’t go straight to bed once I get home, I have to unwind, write this blog, so subtract forty five more minutes, etc.

When my producer gets off the subway, there’s a cop standing next to me and he points to the patch on the sleeve of my super heavy parka. My friends make fun of this parka (there’s a picture below) but when I zip up the hood, it’s like I’ve stepped inside to warm up. This cop says the patch looks like an EMS patch from Westchester, and that starts a conversation during which, in one stop of the express, I learn that this guy was in the Marines, he served in Panama, was in the troop that seized Noriega, that the military taught him to go without sleep, that he works as a state trooper during the day and as an auxiliary cop in NYC at night and on Wednesdays he does EMS in Westchester at night. He was in the World Trade Center in both times it was attacked, first in 1993 and was in the South Tower in 2001. The military taught him to improvise and make do, so he can sleep in a chair as well as the rest of us can sleep lying down. At that point, my stop comes and I get out. I just made a connection with a really interesting person from a very different walk of life. Gotta love NY.

Freezing My Ass Off While Shooting in DC

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