When you bump into a colleague carrying a heavy box and ask if they need help and then look inside. Am I a money launderer or is it prop money?...the plot thickens. 

Local 52 Swearing In

After a lot of very literally blood, sweat, and tears, and no joke the hardest test I’ve ever studied for (and I got a perfect score on my SAT verbal section and passed the legendary US State Dept Foreign Service Exam) we passed all the hurdles to gain entry into Local 52 of the IATSE union.

After the swearing in with my friend and prop master extraordinaire Lauren J. Brown.

We are so happy because we studied so hard together for this.

Now card carrying member of the union!

Parking Triumph

A big component of set decorating buying in NYC is driving a minivan (#minivanlife baby) around New York City’s five boroughs, crazy traffic, anything goes driving norms, and most importantly parking.

When I first started I did not really know how to parallel park. I’m happy to report one of the most concrete skills I’ve acquired in the set decorating career is solid parallel parking skills.

Also, talk to anyone who drives regularly in New York City, and they could take to you ages about their best parking triumphs like a highlight reel of sports teams best plays. A good parking spot can totally make your day!

So it is with great fanfare I present you one of my best parking jobs to date:

near Washington Square Park on one of the quiet nearby streets that always has good parking (I’m not going to tell you where!)

Cause I'm a Dork

It is my first day working as the Assistant Set Decorator on a 1920’s period film (which if you know me is literally living the dream), so I pulled out a 1920’s themed notebook to serve as my work notebook for this job.

I started set decorating work because I want to work on period interiors, and there is no place where you get to play with period decorative arts as if they are living and breathing spaces for real people like in sets for film and TV.

One of my most favorite decorative arts eras is the Art Deco era, so working on a 1920’s period film is as I said earlier, a dream come true! (film still isn’t released yet)

One of my proudest finds

For the opening scenes of the season for The Affair Season 3, we had a funeral scene. Our wonderful production designer Kelly McGehee wanted us to find these special vintage folding funeral chairs for the funeral home in a quantity necessary to fill a funeral home room. 

this was the reference photo of the chair we were looking for

Always loving a good scavenger hunt challenge I started with the usual suspects: calling around the prop houses in NYC, looking up listings on Chairish, Krrbed, Etsy, Ebay and even Craigslist. I could never find more than 6 matching chairs and they were never quite the perfect fit of chairs.  That was a good afternoon's work. 

The next day I looked up manufacturers of funeral home furniture. I called a few places who had folding chairs, but none of them that had the special flair and specific vintage look to evoke the chairs in the reference photo. But I asked them the names and models of older vintage funeral chairs they thought most similar to this chair. 

I found the name and manufacturer of the type of chair most similar to these, but of course they are no longer in production. I googled that like crazy for any sellers online who might still have stock on these but didn't turn anything up. 

So then I started calling around old school funeral homes in the NYC area to see if any of them still had chairs similar to this photo and if they would let me rent. That wasn't turning up anything either. 

Finally one afternoon (I had probably worked on this for a couple of days--while of course also working on other set dressing needs) I decided I was going to drive around to personally visit some old funeral homes and see what they might have in stock and see if I could convince anyone to let me rent. 

I looked around online, and it looked like Yonkers, NY right outside of NYC had a good collection of old school funeral homes right near each other. I visited one, and turned up nothing. Then I visited another, walked into a room and saw these:

you have no idea how happy I was one I saw these. 

I was ecstatic and texted Kelly and our decorator Jessica Petruccelli right away. YES! I had found them! And yes they wanted them! 

...now I just had to convince the funeral home owner to let me rent them, take them out of his funeral home, bring them to the funeral home we were shooting at, all for a reasonable price. Well, I used to work as a diplomat so I summoned all my diplomatic skills and negotiation classes and got my hustle on with the funeral home owner. 

In the end we made it work:

This is still one of my most satisfying hunts to date. 

Post-Election Decorating

My professional and non-professional life converged with a lot of thought on semi-rural suburban Pennsylvania these past two weeks.

I get paid to spend a lot of time thinking about and putting myself in the shoes of fictional TV or film characters and contemplating their context and surroundings and what that would look like.

As a set decorator it is my job to think about the minute details of what that physical setting would look like: what kind of artwork would be hanging on the wall? They don’t seem like people who would frame their artwork. Are these the kind of throw pillows that make sense for the character? Do these curtains tell you more about the character’s background or are they a confusing message to the rest of the story? They definitely seem like people who would have a purely functional non-decorative standing torch lamp.

Lately I have been working on a set for a fictional working class woman in small-town Pennsylvania. We were decorating her place of work (a neglected and a bit depressed small town beauty salon) and her home the week of the election.

This mental travel to Pennsylvania for work also aligned with our whole country’s focus on important, battleground, “tipping-point”, swing-state Pennsylvania. The same place I felt was so important to our recent election that I also spent the weekend prior canvassing for get out the vote in Bucks County, PA.

Besides the gratifying experience of being an active citizen in support of our democracy and supporting a candidate I believed in, I was also really enjoying the experience walking up to so many real homes and observing all the details of how people put their personalities into the place they lived.

Instinctively my eyes tuned to the decorative details of people’s homes (being a keen observer of someone’s interaction with their living space is a key component to set decorating a set to look real, believable, and authentic). I noticed that regardless of what candidate’s signs people had in their yards, most everyone in this neighborhood had fall-themed wreaths hung on their front door.  

A great majority of homes had cute, well-thought out halloween decorations like pumpkin shaped outdoor lights and many had fall-cheer related items decorating their lawn like a country crafty looking scarecrow. There was evidence of how exasperating it must be to be an important voter in an important county: handwritten signs explaining why they did not want anyone knocking on their door with any sort of political message.  One sign said “Seriously unless you are selling thin mints, leave us alone.”

It was a bit eerie that the attention I paid to how these important voters in Pennsylvania decorated their front lawn while canvassing was then also professionally relevant, the same week as the election, to decorating our fictional character’s front lawn also set in Pennsylvania.

Often times instead of building a set from scratch on a soundstage, we will just redecorate a real person’s home for the set. The home our production found to stand in for this character’s home in Pennsylvania was in suburban New York close to the border of New Jersey on the west side of the Hudson River.  

Two days after election day I found myself in the suburban upstate New York strip-malls buying the same sort of decorations I observed in Bucks County, PA to transform the front lawn of the home we were using in New York into one that would be a believe-able working class/lower-middle class home in Pennsylvania.

I'm at a Christmas Tree store in a strip-mall and it occurs to me this store (one where you can buy stuffed turkeys that say “no tweeting while we eat” and has 12 different styles of fall-cheer wreaths) is like the homeland of that fabled demographic of college educated white women who handed the election to Trump. I bet the women who lived in the houses where we knocked doors to Get Out the Vote in Bucks County, PA bought their decorations somewhere like here.

I start feeling wary of each other shopper I pass. I'm so self-conscious of myself and apparent non-whiteness. I'm wondering if each person who passes me is thinking "Damn immigrants. Go back to your country" and the sort of xenophobic hateful rejoinders no person born in America should ever have to worry about hearing.

But here I am worrying about it and I don't like the new paranoia that is part of my stream of consciousness now.

In the checkout line the white lady in front of me is sizing me up and down and taking a good look at my overflowing shopping cart. I'm wondering what she's thinking and I brace myself for one of the ignorant and rude encounters I read so many of my fellow people of color have had to endure since this election cycle started and especially ramped up after election day.

She then asks me if I have a 20% off coupon and if I want to use hers. I'm startled at how benign this is and I politely tell her it is ok, this is all for work. And she makes a little joke and I am overcompensatingly kind to her because I feel guilty for being so suspicious.

I remember that 96% of all personal experiences I've had with Americans is with people who are decent, kind, simple, friendly, and warm. I want to believe the best in people as a dear friend used to always tell me.

I don't like being suspicious of everyone around me and always on guard. I want to revert to my previous baseline of greeting each human encounter (ok most not all) with open curiosity and a search for something common to share a smile or laugh about.

Then I get to the car to load all my stuff in and I pass a car two spots over covered in Trump/Pence stickers and it looks like a monument of hate staring back at me. I'm reminded there are so many concrete, real, and now proven reasons to really temper my optimistic baseline and hold on to that wariness. I try to negotiate this internally as I drive back to the home we are decorating.

Usually when a set decorating crew invades a home to begin the chaotic process of redecorating a space, the homeowners flee or hole-up in a room far away so our interaction with the homeowners is quite limited.

These homeowners, however, were unusually friendly, thoughtful, sweet, and present. The woman of the home put our work snacks (“crafty” in film parlance) into bowls just to make it more presentable and welcoming. We usually just eat the crackers and chips out of the bag. It was the coziest, warmest, reception from the homeowner while working inside a home I’ve had in awhile.

Who were these kind and good people? Well I was inside their home so I could use some clues to reverse engineer a little understanding of who they were.  There is a picture of Jesus hanging prominently in the front hall with a handwritten bible verse taped to it.  So maybe their kind generosity comes from their religious beliefs. They have made some bold choices with painting many different walls of their small home different colors. A cheerful streak? A creative streak? All the decorations and furniture look a little bit dated so they aren’t too focused on keeping up with the Jonses or they couldn’t afford to maybe.

I then realize this nice woman asking me if I want to move some of her backyard decorations to the front yard or feature her potted mums with a welcome sign in the front is also in that demographic: white suburban probably college educated woman. Did she vote for Trump and hate too?

Standing in the kitchen I notice the wall calendar hanging up with a “I Voted” sticker in the box for November 8. Well at least they did vote and did not sit this election out. Ok good so I can respect them as a citizens who value their duty to the republic. But then who did they support? The box on November 9 has the number nine circled and written next to it, it says “Our Good God rules the world.”

That could either be a triumphant phrase to celebrate the victory of the candidate they voted for or a word of solace as they mourned the loss of the candidate they supported. I search other parts of the month of November on their calendar to try and ascertain. On November 4 they went to a Mexican restaurant, so they couldn’t think Mexicans are rapists that we need to build a wall for right? Well, taco bowls.

This sort of panicked reckoning if I am in safe surroundings or not everytime I encounter an unfamiliar white college-educated suburban woman is exhausting.

I want to believe that these nice, God-fearing people would be allies who would be against presidential candidates who stir up hate directed at less powerful members of society.  I want to believe that not all white people are ignorant to how vulnerable and unaccepted many people of color like myself feel post-election day.  I just want to enjoy the company of someone who would plate crackers and chips for strangers just from the kindness of her heart and not have to worry about anything else.

But the way the votes panned out on election day reminds me my days of wishful thinking are over.

Abbi's Wallpaper on HBO's "Divorce"

I was watching the premiere of the new HBO show “Divorce” starring Sarah Jessica Parker, and when we were in her character’s bedroom, I recognized the wallpaper as a familiar friend…

Frances’ bedroom in “Divorce.”

…it is the same wallpaper used in Abbi’s apartment on Broad City!

Abbi’s living room wall in “Broad City.”

I recognized it instantly because I had to reorder Abbi’s apartment wallpaper while working on Broad City so spent some quality time with the design and seller, Secondhand Rose (which by the way is totally sold out of this design now).

I know those are sort of weird images of Abbi, but the best scenes featuring this wall of wallpaper in her set are from her infamous naked dance number to “Edge of Glory” when she realizes she has the whole apartment to herself in Season 2, Episode 2 “Mochalatta Chills”:

yes only decorators watch shows and notice wallpaper which reminds them of other wallpaper.

Trim Mania

Was dressing a set in beautiful Victorian Flatbush and needed a large quantity of ribbon fast. So I searched what was around and was delivered to this gem box of a ribbon and trim store. 

Stumbling upon little old school businesses with an ambiance of cheerful mania like Trim Fabric (they have coupon codes named "SuperMega") is one of the true joys of set decorating work for me.