REVELIO!

Hello my fellow magic conjurers,

On Friday, May 16th, I turned 41!

• The crew sang "Happy Birthday" to me at the morning Health and Safety briefing. For days, my stomach would do a little flip thinking about this happening. Somehow, I survived the attention. In case you want to picture what happened:

  • When everyone started singing, I instinctually sang along but when I realized what I was doing, I mumbled, "why are you singing," and then immediately stopped and plastered a smile on my face.**

  • I swayed side to side with my hands behind my back because I wasn't sure what to do with my body. (In this instance, swaying side to side should not to be confused with rocking back and forth.)

  • The 1st AD and then Travis gave me a hug in front of everyone. Travis said quietly, "human contact..!" when he hugged me.

  • **At least, I hope I was smiling. You know when you black out for a bit and don't actually remember what your face was doing...

• The Production Dept. gave me a giant cake that weighed approximately 20 pounds. One of the Producer's Assistants helped me pass out the cake for the remainder of the day. He sounded like a newsie, yelling at everyone that walked by to get them to buy his last paper. "Cake! Cake! Hey! There's cake here! You want cake?!" We were mostly successful but there was quite a lot left.

  • For those flavor fiends out there: It was a white cake with raspberry & cream filling.

    
    

On Saturday, I went to the Warner Bros. Studio Tour: The Making of Harry Potter.

• My time slot started between 1:30-2:00pm but I needed to get back to my apartment by 4:30pm to prep for a WILDWOOD Edit session at 5:00pm. Unfortunately, I had to rush through the exhibit in 1.5 hours -- not nearly enough time. (I had booked my time slot before we were slated to work.)

• The exhibit layout was well planned and executed, covering a lot of ground in the Harry Potter universe. If time was not a constraint, I would have meandered through the space and filled out the Activity Passport: Triwizard Tournament tasks -- which is, essentially, a check list of hidden things to find along the tour. Totally my kind of thing!

• The best part was seeing the Hogwarts Castle miniature.

• The biggest misstep was that there were no photo opportunities for individuals. Even having a staff member standing by to offer to snap a photo would have been nice.

• If you were wondering, I'm a Hufflepuff. Badger, badger.

  
  

On Sunday, I played Yahtzee with my family over Zoom.

• We had fun! Not as fun as spending time with them in person and rolling dice with my hands, but I was grateful to spend time with my favorite people on my birthday weekend.

Last year, I celebrated my 40th birthday in a hot air balloon ride at sunset. Floating through the sky was gentle and beautiful. 10 out of 10, I would do it again! The only thing that they don't tell you is that you have to help roll and tie up that heeeeavy balloon at the end of the trip. We landed in tall, wet grass, so it was even more difficult. Next time, I'll wear boots instead of light pink tennis shoes.

• Landing: The hot hair balloon doesn't have a designated place to land but the company does have permission to land on several people's properties. As is customary, they brought a bottle of wine and gifted it to the homeowner when we landed as a thank you.

  • The tradition of bringing champagne or wine was born in the 18th century from one of the first hot air balloon rides in France that crashed onto someone's farmland. The people in the fields, having never heard of a hot air balloon before, didn't understand what they were looking at -- they thought they were seeing some kind of monster or alien -- so they got their shotguns out. The ballooners had to explain who they were ("we're human, don't shoot!") and what they were doing. They later brought wine to apologize and thank them for landing on their farm. Those balloons can do some damage when they drag across the ground!

All Harry Potter photos and videos have been uploaded to my photos page, but here are several more:

Till next time,

Your WereMack in London