How to Look Like You Belong Here

This photo was taken moments before my producing partner Emily and I entered the Final Celebration Mixer for Short Film Producers and Directors at the Cleveland International Film Festival. The festival was held on the seventh floor of the Ritz Carlton and when Emily and I saw this very fancy reception area we decided to strategize about How To Look Like We Belonged.


We decided to Look Like None of This Was Any Big Deal.

We decided that that was the way to look like you belonged. So we decided to practice before we went in. PLEASE don't tell anyone about this next part that I'm going to tell you. It's a little embarrassing and totally blows our very sincere attempt to look like None Of This Is Any Big Deal To Us.

In order to set up this picture we tried to very nonchalantly balance my iphone on top of my messenger bag which is actually a super cheap diaper bag that I got at IKEA because Messenger Bags are seriously expensive but everyone knows that IKEA gives you such an appearance of good Nordic European taste that even their diaper bags look great.

The thing is: Diaper bags are mushy. And phones don't sit nonchalantly on them as if they were tripods. So we ended up using a coffee table book, Emily's bag, and a very fancy throw pillow in order to build a very McGuyver'd psuedo-tripod, and dashing back and forth between the timer setting on the phone and our nonchalant repose.

And awkwardly, of course, there was a group of people chatting on the couches next to us trying to pretend like they couldn't see the fiasco of our backstage endeavors, because they also were trying to pull off the None of This Is Any Big Deal To Us Either.

They were actually managing it a little more effortlessly.

But wow, we really did manage to pull it off too for the photo, didn't we!?!? (Oops. Sorry about those exclamation points. We definitely don't care whether or not you think that we look like we don't care. Because none of this is any big deal.)