I had only been at Krissy’s house for 30 minutes when I had a extra large glass of chardonnay in my hand and she was asking me “wanna do something illegal?” This, ladies and gentleman, is why we venture west of the 285 every once in awhile!
Now that you are completely confused, let me tell you about my Friday afternoon. A few weeks ago, I came across a website looking for 2 smiling faces with 67 days of vacation available to live in Orlando and play tourist, then blog, tweet, and post videos about what incredible adventures are in store for the future tourist who will be enchanted and flock here en mass. Basically, my perfect job. I immediately facebooked the link to Anna, because she is my logical partner in crime for any such adventures (see stories about Vegas, The Great American Roadtrip, and numerous camping misadventures for proof), but seeing as she is “gainfully employed” at the moment, and we were pretty sure the city of Orlando wasn’t willing to hold off for 2 or 3 years until she had some free time, I moved to plan B…aka plan Better! (Sorry Anna, but I’m pretty sure Coweta County is the key to winning this one.)
Enter Krissy, my adorable ex-resident (who made dorm life a constant adventure) who recently found herself tangled up in a bit of a …tricky… work situation. (Wow, I have never linked back to so many of my own stories in one post….) Needless to say, she seemed to fit in the requirement of 67 available days–now all we have to do is film our entry video. The video sounded simple enough, you have 1 minute or less to show and tell why you would be the best duo to take on Orlando…while showcasing genuine smiles! (Thank goodness Danny and Marian invested so much in the required middle school orthodontia, my pearly whites were about to make their big debut!) But, this is where we ended up clueless in Coweta County, with juice boxes of wine and no idea what to film…until Krissy said those magical words: “wanna do something illegal?”
All of a sudden the ideas were flowing–we would do a tour of Coweta County, and discover the fun, pretty, and slightly odd that it had to offer. We wouldn’t be the boring people standing in their house telling you they are adventurous, we would show you (in 7 craftily edited video clips) exactly what we can bring to the table–it would be “60 Seconds of Smiles in Coweta County!” (I know, I know, 67 is the magic number here, but I wasn’t about to get disqualified by a technicality of running over by 7 seconds…) We started racking our brains, making a list of what we could do–dad has a trampoline, there’s a waterfall beyond that fence, someone mentioned a park once with really tall slides…and then Krissy jumped up, careful not to spill the wine, ran out to the shed…and reappeared with a pink bicycle-built-for-two! It was perfect–we had our opening scene, and then we could stick it in the car and take it along to all the sites, it would be our thing–like the Doublemint twins, only instead of looking alike in height, hair color, or anything really, we would be matched by our pale, freckled Irish skin…and our winning smiles of course!
We pumped air in the tires, dusted off the seats, and recruited Krissy’s mom to film this first segment for us…and then we fell. Krissy was apparently a tad too short to reach the pedals up front–not a problem, I’ll steer the bike! (We were safe, there were no curbs or gutters in sight, so the arm breaking incident of 1994 was unlikely to be repeated.) Take 2–I steered us into a ditch. Take 3–Krissy’s head rammed into my back while trying to pedal harder. Take 4–I figured I could edit something out of this one, but the bike was cut from any further sections of the video…I was not in the mood for a third broken arm!
The video clips were running along pretty smoothly…no one yelled at us when we jumped the fence, Krissy didn’t fall into the water when I kept telling her to “move back a little more” trying to frame up a shot, I did a flip on the trampoline without bouncing completely off the side, and after 10 minutes of bribery, we got the 3 year old to let us use the slides for one take! We were on a roll…and then we came across “Barbie Beach.” Apparently, this famous Coweta County “landmark” has been around for almost 15 years…and is regularly redecorated to reflect the season, holiday, or gay pride celebration (the rainbow flag flies year round alongside the American flag…) and this month, it was “Barbie’s on (nude) vacation.” Hoping to bring a little local Georgia color to our video, I started looking for the best place to set my camera so I could push the record button and run, when on of the owners of “Barbie Beach” came walking out to chat…with a Miller Lite in one hand, Virginia Slim in the other, there was no way to stop her torn NASCAR t-shirt from flapping open, and revealing to us both that it was “bra-free weekend” on this side of town. She offered to shoot the video for us, and seeing that as the quickest was to get our clip and run (you know, to gouge our eyes out…) I directed her on where to stand and the one button to press. After 3 takes and a rundown of the next few themes, where her 2 boys were going to be spending the weekend (note to self: AVOID), and how darn hot it was, we hopped back in my car and went to film our last few necessary seconds…in the safety of Krissy’s yard!
Today, the video has been submitted (and could end up on Orlando’s facebook fan page if they liked us enough!) but instead of posting it here for you all to critique, I’ve decided you’d be much more entertained by our “blooper reel”…so, for your Saturday night viewing pleasure, may I present the footage that Krissy thought I deleted!
