Nov. 19, 2016 "The man who would be Pi": Today I found this article by Mark Medley in the Globe and Mail. It was about the actor Rajiv Surendra from the movie Mean Girls. I remember him. My favorite part was after he performed at the talent show.
Kevin: Damn.
Janis: What?
Kevin: I wish you was out there shaking that thing.
One recent morning, Rajiv Surendra was waiting to meet the man who changed his life. He’d travelled from New York, where he lives, to Toronto, where he was born and raised, and was currently, and patiently, sitting in a quiet boardroom in a downtown office building.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” he said, although it wasn’t on account of nerves, necessarily, but an “overwhelming feeling of happiness and excitement.”
He’d been looking forward to this day for more than a decade and Surendra, dressed in tan khakis and a brown striped cardigan, spoke quickly, as if this would make the moment arrive that much sooner.
Voices were heard outside in the hall, followed by a knock at the door, and then the man whom Surendra described as his “guru,” the Canadian novelist Yann Martel, walked into the room.
“Nice to meet you,” said Surendra, and the men exchanged an awkward hug, like a couple set up on a blind date; Surendra had even brought Martel a present – a bar of goat’s milk soap he’d crafted himself.
To understand how the two men arrived at this moment, travel back 13 long years, to 2003. Surendra, then a struggling young actor, had just been cast as rapping mathlete Kevin Gnapoor in Mean Girls, the now-cult teen comedy. During a break from filming, a cameraman told Surendra, somewhat eerily, “You’re in the book I just finished.”
Later that day, Surendra bought a copy of Martel’s Life of Pi, a purchase that altered the course of his life and eventually led to Surendra’s own book, his memoir The Elephants in My Backyard, which arrives in bookstores next week.
It’s not uncommon to say a book changed your life. It’s also not uncommon, while reading a novel, to connect with one of the characters, to feel they are you.
But what Surendra experienced, flipping through Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, about a 16-year-old boy set adrift on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific, with only a Bengal tiger for company, was something more profound, almost transcendent. Surendra was Pi.
The parallels were numerous: Both Surendra and the narrator, Pi Patel, were Tamil; Pi eventually enrolls at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, which Surendra attended at the time; both teens were fixated on religion as children; Pi grows up in a zoo, while Surendra’s childhood home backed onto the Toronto Zoo. (“It was kind of creepy,” Surendra said.)
When he learned, a short time later, that the novel was being turned into a movie – M. Night Shyamalan was originally slated to direct – Surendra made it his mission to land the lead role:
“I was sure that there was no one else more perfect than me for this part.” The quixotic quest that followed, which lasted the better part of a decade and took him to India and back, is chronicled in his memoir.
Which brings us back to the meeting. Martel, who’d recently finished the book, was in Toronto for eye surgery and the International Festival of Authors, and Surendra, 30, who lives in Manhattan, had arranged to fly up and meet him. (They are both published by imprints of Penguin Random House Canada.) Now, there they were, sitting side by side. For Surendra, it was a chapter of his life that he could now close.
“This is kind of like life tying a little bow on the box,” he said.
Although this was the first time they met, it was not the first time they’d spoken; indeed, they had been in contact for years, mostly via e-mail. When Surendra first learned about the film adaptation, he sought out Martel.
“I can’t remember – did you call me?” Martel asked.
“Yeah, I called you. I went on Yahoo and found that you were doing a residency [in Saskatoon, where Martel now lives with his wife and four children]. I thought, I’m just going to call and see what happens.”
Martel, as it happened, was in his office that day. He answered the phone, and, far from hanging up, listened as this complete stranger explained all the similarities he shared with Martel’s fictional creation, and told him his plans to seek the role of Pi.
Graciously, Martel offered to e-mail Surendra a lengthy letter he’d sent Shyamalan, outlining his thoughts on the potential movie, in hopes it would help the young actor, marking the beginning of a correspondence which has lasted to the present day.
The majority of The Elephants in My Backyard details the lengths to which Surendra went to land the role of Pi. They ranged from the practical – he learned to swim; he interviewed people who’d survived long periods alone at sea – to the outlandish – Surendra dropped out of school, and moved to Pondicherry, the southeastern Indian city where Pi spends his childhood, even going so far as to enroll in Petit Seminaire, the school that Pi attends in the novel.
But as the years went on, and the film was passed from director to director, like a book – Shyamalan to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Jeunet to Ang Lee – Surendra was eventually forced to accept the fact that, no matter how badly he worked for it, he might never have the chance to play Pi.
“It went from six months to six years. And at the end of four, five years, that’s when I started thinking, ‘What am I going to do if they do cast somebody else? Will I even be able to handle this? Will I fall apart?’ I didn’t know.
But I’d come so far that I figured I might as well keep going.”
It’s not giving away the ending to reveal that Surendra did not get the role – it went to an unknown Indian actor, Suraj Sharma – but this, in a way, makes the book that much more interesting.
“His story is the story of everyone trying to find out who they are, and how to get there,” Martel said. “It’s a story that exemplifies, in some ways, Pi’s story. He didn’t get the role, but, in a sense, he lived the story.”
These days, Surendra mainly works as an artist – he’s a potter and a painter, a professional calligrapher and has built a thriving business as a chalk artist (his work can be found all over Toronto). He still goes out for the occasional audition, from time to time, and has already made one thing clear to his agent.
“If they sell the film rights, the one condition is no one else is playing me.”
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Memoir by Rajiv Surendra traces actor’s...
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Today I found this article "She's all grown up" by Sadaf Ahsan:
Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood & Accidental Fame
By Mara Wilson
Penguin
272 pp; $22
For Mara Wilson, the question of “Where are you now?” is an almost daily one, because when people meet her, they don’t see the 29-year-old New York writer she’s grown into – but the daughter of Mrs. Doubtfire, Miracle on 34th Street’s Susan Walker and, most of all, Matilda Wormwood, the precocious six-year-old with secret powers and a love of big books.
In other words, they’re infatuated with a character Wilson played at the distant age of six, crafted by Roald Dahl and lovingly brought to the screen by Danny DeVito in 1996. In other words, they’re in love with someone she isn’t.
“There was a time when I definitely wanted to push it away, but you can’t,” Wilson tells me backstage at the Global TV studio in the middle of a whirlwind press tour for her first book, a memoir called, what else, Where Am I Now? “You have to accept it, because it will follow you through your life. You either choose to be proud of it or joke it off. And I fortunately was in a movie that means a lot to myself and so many people.”
But, as much as she’s proud of the role, she has a caveat. “The most troubled relationship I’ll ever have is with a fictional six-year-old girl,” she admits. “For a long time, it was like having an older sister who overshadows you. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s like coming to appreciate your big sister, all that she did for you, all that you learned from her. That is where I am now.”
In her refreshingly earnest autobiography, Wilson dedicates an entire chapter in the form of a letter addressed to Matilda directly, in which she lets out all her “resentments” as well as the things she’s thankful for because of Matilda, from being able to bring joy to fans’ lives to being the final work her mother saw before her death to cancer, mid-filming.
“I don’t remember much of 1996, and what I do remember is painful,” she writes to Matilda.
“My mother was gone, my world had changed, and I felt unmoored. The filming of Matilda felt like it had happened in another lifetime, or in a dream. Ironically, it was during this time, after I’d finished playing you, that I related to you most. You knew what it was like to feel alone."
Wilson suddenly went from feeling as if she were this prized character she had adored before she’d even been cast, to one she resented, as strangers would encounter her on the street and be disappointed with who they found in Matilda’s place – an actor, far from their imagination.
“I grew up and you didn’t,” Wilson writes. “I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be Mara, but everyone knew me as Matilda. You wouldn’t let me go. What if you were all there was to me?”
Even as she concludes the letter by accepting Matilda into her “family,” it’s the pages that come after that solidify Wilson as very much her own person, wizened and mature beyond her years – incredibly similar to Matilda and yet not, simply because she’s had the privilege of growing up.
By the end of the ’90s, Wilson had left her acting career behind, but not entirely by choice. Although she says she was disillusioned by it and longed for a more satisfying career – one that felt more fulfilling – and a real childhood, the industry fought back.
Wilson’s memoir details growing into her early teens, and how she began to take notice of it only when industry execs did (and had no problem pointing it out to her). The most striking and emotional anecdote tells of filming one of her last projects in 1999, at the age of 12, when she was pulled aside by the director for a “private conversation,” and then bluntly informed that there was “a difference in (her) body.”
She was instructed to wear a bra, one that, to Wilson, was “meant more for binding my chest than supporting it.”
“Puberty had arrived, and I was the last to know,” she writes, later describing how with each audition, she’d either be “too grown up” for a part, or no longer “cute enough” for it.
“It’s all about keeping you young, hiding your body,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t fulfilling a beauty standard, but I’m okay with the way that I look. But I was anxious because of that and I was freezing up. I wasn’t too thrilled with Hollywood at the time anyway, but I did feel rejected.
A lot of people wanted to frame it as either ‘Mara Wilson was too ugly to be in Hollywood anymore’ or ‘Mara Wilson got depressed after her mother died and left Hollywood.’ But it was a mutual breakup.”
The breakup didn’t result in Wilson leaving acting entirely behind, however. She used the money she’d made in her relatively short-lived acting career to attend the noted Idyllwild Arts Academy and then New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she put on her own one-woman show and began to do regular stand-up comedy gigs around the city.
In 2013, she hit her first small (new) break with her play Sheeple at the New York International Fringe Festival, and soon began to develop a whole new name for herself online, exclusively for her writing.
Now, Wilson has bolstered her original fan following to a whole new one on a platform that a decade ago would have been her worst enemy, but is now her greatest weapon: Twitter.
With over 300,000 followers (“more than my hometown”) Wilson has a newfound public persona; smart, sassy and humorous. From making bold feminist and political statements to controversially coming out as bisexual, Twitter has served as Wilson’s megaphone – without the face of Matilda, but the voice of Mara. But it also means even less of a filter than what she had to become used to on the street.
“It’s already pretty cruel in the real world, but on Twitter, I get messages telling me I’m ugly every single day, and that I’m insufferable once a week,” she says, noting that it’s her close-knit family that has always kept her grounded, an oddity for child stars.
“You have to shrug and move on. The stuff I did get as a child was bad enough, but everyday? I can’t imagine it.”
Wilson sees Twitter as a way to promote voices of fellow actors, comedians and artists she respects, ones she considers “bigger” talents than herself, citing fellow NYU graduates Donald Glover and Rachel Bloom.
“I try to amplify their voices,” she says. “I have a captive audience and there are people I know who are much more talented and brilliant than I am, and will never get the audience I have because I have this built-in fanbase.”
“Tom Stoppard said actors are the opposite of people, because they’re not afraid to embarrass themselves in front of large groups of people, as that is where they feel safest.
As a middle child, I always wanted an audience.
Robin Williams (Wilson’s co-star in Mrs. Doubtfire, and the subject of an emotional tribute in her book) was like that. He was obviously more talented than I am, but he came alive when he had an audience. Far more performers are like that than you’d think.”
This, she says, is why she’ll never leave the creative world behind. But if there’s anything holding Wilson back, it’s her tendency to be self-deprecating – but in such a self-assured way, she almost doesn’t seem like it – regularly placing her peers on a scale above herself, in talent, looks and star power.
But if Where Am I Now? and its biting wit and charming self-awareness is anything to go by, she’s very easily running in the same league as the Lena Dunhams, Rachel Blooms and Ilana Glazers of the world. In fact, she even made an appearance in Glazer and co-creator Abbi Jacobson’s Broad City this past season.
It’s a sign of where things could go for the former child star and lifelong storyteller, who promises this book won’t be her last. And if her social media following is to be trusted, her ardent new fanbase will be right behind her. It’ll be Mara Wilson — and not Matilda Wormwood — who’ll get the last word this time.
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‘Where am I now?’: How Mara Wilson outgrew Matilda Wormwood, and found an a...
By Sadaf Ahsan
'I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be Mara, but everyone knew me as Matilda. You wouldn't let me go. What...
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This week's theme is about actor interviews and movies:
"Plan B for A-listers"/ "Scrappy Little Nobody"
Tracy's blog: "Plan B for A-listers"/ "Scrappy Little Nobody" (badcb.blogspot.com)
"Strange days on big screen"/ Ryan Reynolds: ‘Deadpool’ Gave Me A “Nervous Breakdown”
Tracy's blog: "Strange days on big screen"/ Ryan Reynolds: ‘Deadpool’ Gave Me A “Nervous Breakdown” (badcb.blogspot.com)
My week:
Apr. 6, 2021 "She thought she was passing a kidney stone. Then she had a baby in the toilet": Today I found this article by Asha C. Gilbert on Yahoo news:
Looking back, Melissa Surgecoff says there were plenty of signs she was pregnant, but she believed she was passing a kidney stone in the toilet, not her first child.
Surgecoff, 38, said she had no idea she was pregnant when she began to experience cramping the morning of March 8 in the North Shore of Boston. Due to having a history of irregular menstrual cycles, Surgecoff thought her period was coming after missing it for five months.
"It wasn't super alarming or a red flag, but I told myself this wasn't normal," Surgecoff told USA TODAY.
As the day progressed, Surgecoff said her cramps grew increasingly worse to the point where she called her mother to see if she could take her to the doctor. With each passing cramp she would get into the fetal position to attempt to alleviate the pain.
Although they were in shock, the couple is happy their son, Liam, was healthy.
"Looking back at it now there were clear-cut signs I was pregnant," Surgecoff said. "I had swollen feet, weight gain, heartburn, and if I put all the signs together I would have known."
"This is our first and probably last child," Campbell said.
She thought she was passing a kidney stone. Then she had a baby in the toilet. (yahoo.com)
My opinion: Does anyone remember this reality show called I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant?
I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant (TV Series 2008– ) - IMDb
I never watched the show. Years ago I was watching 20/20 and they profiled a woman who didn't she was pregnant and had the baby in the bathtub. They mentioned this show.
Apr. 12, 2021 Friend's phone call: I called my friend Sherry on the weekend and offered her a free discman. I had gave her my sister's old discman back in 2007. S had gotten an iPod. Sherry still has the discman and didn't want another.
Donations: This conversation lead to this:
If you have electronics that do work, donate to Goodwill.
If you have electronics that don't work, recycle to Staples.
Donate clothes to the women's shelter or Youth Empowerment Services: This was like back in 2016 and I donated 200 women's magazines (Marie Claire that my sister gave me) to Value Village. I then found some clothes that my sister gave me and I never wore them. My friend Jessica told me I should donate clothes to the women's shelter. I donated it to the Youth shelter.
WINhouse - Empowering domestic abuse victims
YESS – Youth Empowerment and Support Services
Lego Replay: You can donate old Lego blocks to them so charities that work with children can play with them.
Replay - About us - LEGO.com CA
Fundraising: Sherry told me about how she runs fundraisers and how it's hard to do that during COVID.
Would you want to go door-to-door selling chocolates and cookies?
This must be the law of attraction or coincidence, but the next day, someone rang our doorbell and was selling chocolate. Last year, I remembered a man came by selling wafers with a coupon book for $20. I think they came by before in 2019.
Apr. 14, 2021 "Embracing compassion with special bracelet": Today I found this article by Rita Montis in the Edmonton Journal:
Wear a bracelet, and spread a little kindness. That’s what Vancouver real estate advisor Karim Virani and his daughter, Alyssa decided to do recently, when the two launched the Human-Kind bracelet in their neighbhourhood, with 100% of the profits from each bracelet sold going directly towards feeding a household in need in British Columbia’s North Shore area.
The two worked in partnership with the North Shore Family Services, Harvest Project and The Lookout Shelter and, within three short months, the sale of the bracelet has provided more than 1,000 meals for those in need. The take-out meals are provided by Vancouver’s Earl’s Kitchen & Bar and are delivered through North Shore Family Services.
“The COVID-19 pandemic created a different reality for many in our community,” said Karim Virani, founder of Virani Real Estate Advisors in a recent media release. “Too many families found themselves being pushed to the edge of their financial means and beyond. Seeing this, we couldn’t stand idly by. We founded Human-Kind, a movement that encourages and celebrates the power of spreading kindness in our community by supporting those struggling with food insecurity.”
Human-Kind Bracelet (human-kind.com)
https://financialpost.com/life/fashion-beauty/embracing-compassion-with-special-bracelet
Apr. 12, 2021 "Doug Ford's critics call him out for 'inappropriate' vaccine joke":
After receiving his first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford jokingly pretended to pass out. People took to social media to express their frustration, citing the seriousness of the escalating pandemic in Ontario, especially as the province remains in a stay-at-home lockdown.
This is:
A. Offensive
B. Funny
C. Both
D. Neither
My opinion: This is just a joke. I would say neither. I didn't find this funny or offensive.
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