A shout-out to the homeland

On St. Patrick's Day people always ask me, "Are you Irish?"

What a silly question. Look at me. Of course I'm Irish. I'm blond and blue-eyed, I cuss like a sailor, I drink like a fish and I punch things for fun!

It's like the Irish stereotype is the only one we've all agreed is completely okay. And Jamaicans. They don't seem to mind their stereotype either.

But just like most Americans aren't just one thing, (I'm also Scottish and English and Welsh, so please have a little respect for my vast ethnic diversity.) characters shouldn't be all one thing either.

I forget who said it so it was probably Bill Martell, but you should try to make sure every character has an opposite trait from what you'd expect.

In the short that Partner and I wrote we have a crazy cokehead running around threatening everybody. Then he spots a bag of carrots in the fridge and is like, "Ooh! Carrots!" which makes for great comedy because nobody can be intimidating while eating carrots. Everybody else in the room isn't quite sure what to make of him at that point.

But speaking of the Irish, last night I watched a documentary on HBO produced by the Contact who's looking at my short and may want to put his hands on it. He managed to get a U2 song into the independently produced film, which was beautifully done, by the way. That's not easy. Man, I hope he likes my revisions.

This band is actually from Virginia but every song they play sounds like a modernized Irish jig: Carbon Leaf. They're really good.

Now I'm going to go get some dinner before the wild Irish party, oddly enough thrown by Lead Actor who will play carrot-eating cokehead, who is, of course, Irish.