This Afternoon In Drama

Wickham On My Mind

The debate over the silver-grays is over.  The Wickham Gray's up on the walls.  I'm real busy writing a spec television pilot set in a town called "Wickham."  I'm pregnant with a baby I'm naming Wickham.  She's going to be the most beautifully named girl in her class.  No I'm not.

Ignore the valance things.  They were there from before and they're coming down.  

The before:

On Paint And Panthers

It's been HGTV around the mannnnsion.  (On a related note, while watching HGTV a couple months ago, I saw an episode of House Hunters in which a Cal State Northridge graduate was looking to buy, his major priority being selecting a home that would provide the best acoustics for his a cappella group because he was moving members into the house with him.  If you've read this blog or my second book before, then you know I have a nearly moral issue with college a cappella groups, so I won't get started down that road again.  Suffice to say, I squirmed through the episode as the guy and his a cappella friends proceeded to sing their way through the three homes shown to them while their real estate agent stood awkwardly by and looked as if he were considering getting into selling human organs instead.  Then, squirmed as the a cappella guy bought the most hideous home because of its gigantic hideous singing space, and inexplicably moved himself into the garage.  You can see the episode in parts here if you have the stomach for watching a lot of harmonized do-do-do's in dated, crumbling valley ranch homes.)

We picked our silvery gray after giving up on the silver-silver because painters kept telling me that no matter how well applied, it would look as if our walls were crying.  So I said, "Well, we can't go with Revere Pewter or Ozark Shadows because we're too attached to our favorites, so let's find some neutral ground" because I am a very diplomatic and reasonable person.  So...introducing: Wickham Gray, which perhaps references Wickham & Co., locomotive manufacturer (we're both really fond of trains), or the small market town in England, and who isn't charmed by one of those small market towns, except maybe the villagers who've spent their entire lives selling vegetables there?  Wickham Gray also has the prestige of being one of the colors, it turns out, that Jerry O'Connell picked when Oprah's magazine volunteered to make over his bachelor pad because it was grossing out Rebecca.

Walls decided, we were onto a new beginning for the bed.  I'm the first to admit that I have difficulty with the concept of togetherness and sharing and cohabitation, but I believe my understanding took a major leap forward when I found a way to answer this question: how do you know you're with the right person?  The answer is that you're both in support of buying the faux panther fur duvet.

In the store, the salespeople seemed to find it funny that we were asking for the duvet, but I know if they were to get under one, they wouldn't be so giggly.  The first day we brought it home, we sank into a nap so profound that when we awoke, it took all the strength and fortitude we could scrap together to crawl out from beneath the thing to cook hot dogs.  It was like all the fantasy books I used to read as a kid in which the characters would find a way into an alternate world, and then, upon returning to their old one, find it that much more disorienting, that much more painfully unreal. 

The faux panther fur is less like a panther and more like some industrious beddingmaker scalped fifty teddy bears and stitched their pelts together, and it is an afternoonly and nightly delight.  At first Brent considered going for the panther fur shams as well, but I was like, "No, that's ridiculous," and so I added the Ralph Lauren houndstooth pillow covers to contribute that much more class to what's an already very classy sleeping situation.  Even Christmas can't handle how great it all works together and smiles in her sleep.

And if it even begins to cross your mind that the duvet is not made of a classy material, you'll find yourself having to answer the nagging question: then why would Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie dress their most precious natural born child in it?

And why would she look so fucking cool?