My Dinner With... Kathleen Turner

Piper @ Lazy Eye Theater sent me a dinner invitation. Only trouble was it was blank and it required me to actually do the inviting. But before I do, let's consider for a moment the audacity of M. Piper. He sent it to me on January 8th. I know right? Yes, just as the BFCA winners were celebrating and the DGA nominees were being announced... smack dab in the feverish build up to the Oscar nominations it did arrive. January! The nerve.

My friends all know not to try to engage me in actual attention-requiring conversations from mid December through late February (yes, I'm that good to my loved ones). But with Oscar season over, my brain is my own again. I can now enter the kitchen rather than taking my meals intravenously at the computer.

So this is what a kitchen looks like.

1. Pick a single person past or present who works in the film industry who you'd like to have dinner with and tell us why you chose this person.
I'm inviting Kathleen Turner to dine with me.

"I'd love to, Nathaniel. I don't care if this whole room of reporters knows about our rendezvous!"

I'm not inviting Kathleen because she's my favorite "lost" actress from the 80s, though she is (she hasn't made a movie since 2000). This is not because I am Oscar obsessed and she was the first talent I ever considered "snubbed" in my earliest throes of awards curiosity, though she was (I was confused that they preferred three farm wives to her LAFCA winning work in Romancing The Stone & Crimes of Passion). This is not because her "Martha" in the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was one of the best performances I've ever seen and she (shockingly) made me forget all about Liz Taylor, though it was and she did.

No, it's a combination of all those things but mostly that I've just finished reading her bio Send Yourself Roses. I was disappointed to discover that it was only 261 pages long. I was hoping her oral profundities would last me through the rest of winter. I'm a slow reader but 261 pages of Kathleen is easy to binge on. Like her film career, this book was way too short.

With my invitation would come roses (no way should the great lady have to self-send) and a note that would hopefully quell her objections to meeting a crazed fan. It would utilise her own get up and go / face the music motto that she winds throughout the book's pages "...you just have to, don't you?"

2. Set the table for your dinner. What would you eat? Would it be in a home or at a restaurant? And what would you wear? Feel free to elaborate on the details.
Kathleen can wear whatever she likes. She's not into fashion. She's into comfort. Her feet bother her (rheumatoid arthritis + knee replacements. Ouch and sympathies) ...socks or flip flops are fine. I would actually hold the dinner in a rented van. No, no sillies --not like a Buffalo Bill type of situation. A van so that Ms. Turner and I could do service together for City Meals on Wheels in between bites. Kathleen is a good samaritan and I'd want to impress. It's been eons since I did something selflessly for someone else. Unless you count all this free promotion I do for celebrities like Kathleen Turner on this blog. Shush.

The trickiest thing about this dinner would be that I would have to have the table especially built so that it was just an inch or two too high. I want Kathleen, a large woman, to have to look up slightly to talk to me. This way, her patented head toss that delights me so would be sure to occur with great regularity as we scarfed our food. If the food was spicy enough maybe I could engineer some extra eye-flashing from her as well.

Kathleen believes in communal dishes. She says so in the book. So the first course would definitely be something we could get our hands into and share, like an African rice dish perhaps. I haven't worked out the entire menu but I'd theme the courses after her movies... can you eat alligator? Kathleen is not a recovering alcoholic as the tabs and her own vodka soaked public breakdowns had everyone believing. She is a self-moderating drinker but, all the same, no booze for this special night.

Kathleen's five best performances, give or take Crimes of Passion (which I
haven't seen in too long to judge) counter clockwise from top left: Body Heat (1981),
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), War of the Roses (1989), Romancing the Stone (1984)
and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (2004-2007)

3. List five thoughtful questions you would ask this person during dinner.
I would ask 50 --can one ever have enough Kathleen, but do they have to be "thoughtful"? This meme is so strict. Here's a sampling.

1. Why didn't you write about your Oscar loss for Peggy Sue Got Married in your book Send Yourself Roses? You wrote about a few unpleasantries and some straight up tragedies and the way I see it an Oscar loss (when you deserved to win) surely fits somewhere between those polls of ewww. And yet in 261 pages ...nothing. You're torturing me! I fear I remember the night better than you.
2. Your candor has always been a great and rare gift, especially for an A lister. But, if there's one part of the book that feels like you're holding back it's the section on Crimes of Passion (1984). You do dish some stories from the set but once it comes to your first screening, your husband's subsequent anger and assumption that he could control your creative choices, and your own surprise at the same... the book suddenly feels cagey. Can you retrieve the missing 10 pages please. 20? There's more stories there, surely. I wish you had slapped him around a bit. Who marries an actress known for her screen-scorching sexuality and then freaks out when she uses it in the service of a role?... a truly outré role in a deranged Ken Russell movie, but still.
3. You've smartly realized how much better stage roles are for actresses of your calibre and age... but you've also expressed a desire to return to the movies. What kind of roles would you like to play? I've seen you on stage and you're an even better actress than you were when you were a huge movie star. Hollywood is missing out.
4. Can I audit your class at NYU "Practical Acting: Shut Up and Do It!"? I'm not an actor or an NYU student but I love the title and I'm willing to bet that you're an insightful coach. It'd give me great blogging material. You believe in charity. Give. To me.
   
5. Speaking of... Will you star with me in a YouTube response video called "I'm F#@*ing Kathleen Turner"?
   ...........I've already written the song.

4. When all is said and done, select six bloggers to pass this Meme along to. Link back to Lazy Eye Theatre, so that people know the mastermind behind this Meme.
okay, get cooking people... Emma @ All About My Movies, 14 or Candy @ Circus Hour, Gabriel @ Modern Fabulousity, Jackie @ Spectator, JA of My New Plaid Pants and Dave @ Victim of the Time.