Sometimes when filming on location, we met extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances, and sometimes we met ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Charles Alpert was something else entirely.

We were shooting in the dead of winter in a town that was, the year before, the EPA’s top offender at the same time that it had been recognized as the most economically distressed community in the U.S.

Welcome to Weirton, West Virginia, circa 1983.

We were shooting six days a week, which is probably just as well, since there wasn’t anything to do in Weirton on the weekends in a cold and bleak winter.

Most Sundays you could find half the crew wandering the clothing section of K-Mart in a daze, looking for new combinations of thermal underwear and outerwear that might make a few degrees’ difference the coming week.

But for me, Weirton will always be about renting furniture.

We had a set to build and furnish, and I was trying to stay true to one of my goals, which was to bring as much business to Weirton as our little art department could.

We were building our set in an abandoned high school gymnasium just over the border in Mingo Junction, Ohio, just on the other side of Steubenville, and I needed to furnish the set from top to bottom with furniture that was 30 to 40 years old, give or take.

It turns out that neither Weirton -- nor Steubenville nor Mingo Junction -- had a Good Will store or any kind of consignment shop.  We started to wonder how far we’d have to go to furnish the set.

Then Nora, one of our art department stalwarts, told me that she’d found something startling.  Up on the hill, in Weirton, was a used furniture store.  We’d missed it because the sign was never lit when we drove past.

She warned me that the owner was a little strange.  I was unconcerned; I felt good about my on-location diplomacy skills, and I had arrived at a stage in my life, at the ripe old age of 30, when I figured there was very little that could surprise me.  Of course, I was wrong.

Nora and I had an appointment with the proprietor of Alpert’s Hardware and Used Furniture for five o’clock.  We wandered in, and I was immediately taken by the abundance of old-school props on display -- we were in Retro Housewares Heaven.

A man I would come to know as Charles Alpert stood at the cashier’s counter with his finger up in the air, a gesture that we understood to mean that we should stay put right where we were, a couple of paces inside the front door.

He was peering toward the back of the store.  He finally turned back to us and spoke in a conspiratorial tone.

“Could you come back later?  I think I may have a customer.”

He resumed peering at the back of the store.  There was no one visible back there, and I was fairly certain it was just the three of us in the store.

Nora made a little grimace at me privately, as if to ask, “see what I mean?”  I asked Mr. Alpert to suggest a convenient time, and he offered 7pm.

We returned at the appointed hour and he was ready for us.

The lefthand side of his store was full of housewares, some of which were items I hadn’t seen since my childhood.  The righthand side was full to the ceiling with furniture.  Not arranged in little groupings, like in a furniture store, but stacked up high and arbitrarily, with an aisle down the middle.  It was dark on that side.

“I have here a brand new pen, a brand new pad of paper, a brand new flashlight, and a brand new pair of batteries” he said, offering us those very things.  “Perhaps you could go have a look and make a list of what you’re interested in.”

We took the brand new items from him and went about identifying the pieces of furniture, as best we could in the dark, and made a list.  We were done in about fifteen minutes, and showed him our list.  Mr. Alpert studied it for a moment, his brow furrowed.  He looked up and shook his head.

“I can’t sell these, they belong to a man from Dayton.”

Not to be deterred, I countered with “We could rent them.”

He looked at me, his eyes narrowing.  “How would that work, exactly?”

I decided to go basic.  “We would give you some money, borrow the furniture for a few weeks, bring it back to you, and you would keep the money.”

“Now that sounds tricky and complicated,” he responded.

“Well, we would also buy some stuff,” I offered, as I gestured toward a grim-looking set of flour, sugar and tea tins with a handwritten price tag on them.

He dove between me and the tins.  “I can’t sell these!” he nearly yelled.  He surrounded the wretched tins with both arms, as if trying to hide them from our predatory view.

“These are part of the charm and attractiveness of my store!  This is what draws my customers in!  I can’t sell these!”

I tried to look him right in the eyes, to see if I could catch a glimpse of his strategy, but he avoided my gaze.

“Okay.  Well, it was really nice to meet you,” I said.  “We’ll be in touch.”  

And we left.

We soon learned that it was common knowledge (except to us, the movie people, the out-of-town people) that Mr. Alpert wasn’t right in the head, and that you couldn’t actually buy anything in his store.  His brother had set him up with an enormous playpen, an imaginary store that he could open when he felt like it and close when he needed a nap, and occasionally, if he was feeling energetic, it was full of things he could dust.

We were told his brother was a lawyer for the Mafia over in Dayton.  We eventually concluded exhaustive negotiations with Charles' brother for renting some of that furniture for our set.  The amazing thing was how perfect the pieces were, in style and condition, in size and in color, for the story we were trying to tell.

It was also the most we’d paid for a furniture rental, ever.

But we learned something about brotherly love, and the lengths a person might go, to create a safe place for a sibling.

If you had the disposable income to do so, what would you build for a family member with special needs?

We live in the Age of the Geek.  

I bet there’s not a pundit alive today who would disagree with that statement.

But I would argue about its most pertinent meaning.

The word geek is derived from the old English geek (meaning fool) and likely the German word geck (also fool).  It is presumed to share some heritage with the Dutch and Afrikaans word gek (crazy).

But when I think of a fool who might be a little crazy, I’m not usually picturing that slightly under-socialized, glasses-wearing computer whiz who keeps comic books in clear plastic sleeves.  I think we might be able to blame John Hughes for appropriating the word geek so that he could add it to an insult list that included dweeb and nerd.

The first American meaning for the word geek comes from the carney trade back in the 1800s, and that’s the meaning I like to geek out on.

The carney boss had mouths to feed and equipment to haul as he moved his operation across state lines and into the meadows -- and, later, parking lots -- of rural America.  If ticket sales were sluggish, he had profitability problems right away.

So his first task, as they parked and started to set up in a new town, was to find the most popular tavern.  He had already gotten finding local talent down to a science.  Basically, he needed to find someone who was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, that was a given.  On top of that, low self-regard was good, a total absence of self-respect even better.  If he could find someone who also craved attention, he’d struck gold:  he’d found his geek.

In the vernacular of American carneys, the geek was the guy -- and every town had at least one -- who was willing (for fame and glory only, no pay) to stand before a crowd that had paid 25 cents apiece to watch, and bite the heads off live chickens.

So I would put it to you that we do, indeed, live in the Age of the Geek.  

We live in the age when fools will do anything if there are cameras rolling and it might offer a fleeting moment of fame.  The Age of the Geek has given us, among other things, reality TV shows like 'Who’s My Daddy?' 'Fear Factor' 'Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?' 'Bridalplasty' (I’m not making this up, I swear) 'The Littlest Groom' and 'Honey Boo-Boo.'

So the next time someone wants to engage you in a discussion about geek culture, do me a favor and ask, “Which one?”


We had to face it:  our kids were going to be driving at some point.

I've always had an uncomfortable feeling about cars that strive to make us forget what they are.  It's easy to start believing that a car is a living room, a wi-fi cafe, a La-Z-Boy, a snack bar, or a mobile office -- and forget that it is, to borrow Tom Wolfe's memorable phrase, a 'hurtling piece of machinery.'

How are young drivers supposed to pay attention to the actual driving part when the entire experience clamors with so many competing identities?  "Hit the cruise control!  Turn up the music!  Put a drink in the cupholder!  Tilt the seat back just a little more..."

In a culture in which the very act of being present, of living in the moment, seems positively revolutionary, how do we teach them to be present while piloting a hurtling piece of machinery?

Add to this problem the issue of coolness as perceived by high schoolers, and you've got yourself a humdinger.

And then what about the constant temptation to check on texts, SnapChats and the rest?

To the early owners of telephones, every call was a spectacular event.  But before long, everyone was investing in technology to help them avoid having to answer the damn thing, and even having to hear it ring.

We're still in the infancy of social media and texting, if you think about it.  My kids and their peers considerate it a serious offense if they don't respond right away.  They haven't yet felt the exquisite pleasure of practiced avoidance!

So this, then, is my terrible and flawed advice to parents of burgeoning teens:  

Find an old, 2-door, standard-transmission Jeep Wrangler.

Here's what we've discovered:

1. They're classic, and defy trendiness with some kind of eternal coolness.  Other kids will be jealous.
2. They don't look right without some dents and scrapes.  It makes your first couple of fender-benders considerably less traumatic if you only have to worry about the other car.
3. They seem like they were designed by the same people who made Erector Sets.  You can take them apart in good weather.  (See #1)
4. Everyone should know how to drive a standard transmission, because, well, you never know.  And guess what?  It requires two hands at all times.  The phone stops being an issue.
5. The visibility all around the vehicle is inconceivably good, unlike any other vehicle.  You can actually see what you were just about to hit.
6. You can't forget that you're piloting a hurtling piece of machinery.  The numbing of the senses that naturally occurs in a traditional cushy car doesn't have a chance when you have such a tactile experience of the road beneath you.  Everything your tires experience, you experience -- you can feel your speed; you can feel precisely how close you came to rolling the vehicle by taking that corner too fast.  You develop an intimacy with asphalt, as a partner in getting you where you need to go.

But really, it's an age-old question.

Should we make absolutely certain that our children never take a spill at the playground, or should we presume that tumbling off the jungle gym once or twice is critical to developing good coordination?  Some say that a father will traditionally tend to see value in those scuffs and scrapes, and that a mother will traditionally try to get through parenting without seeing any blood.

Of course, playgrounds are now made of recycled rubber particles and bark, so they don't bite like they used to.

But I figure my kids will be driving cushy cars soon enough; while in my care I think they should have an aggressively reality-based experience of driving to get them started.

We all need to feel the asphalt once or twice to get our bearings, don't we?

This post isn’t about knowing when to be the noisiest person who gets all the attention.  It's not about being a “squeaky wheel.”

It’s about a toy I borrowed when I was a little kid.

It was a plastic dashboard that rested in your lap, presumably while you were riding in a car that was being driven by a grownup.

It was bright yellow, and had a red steering wheel made of hard plastic, and in the center of the steering wheel was a red button, made of soft plastic, that squeaked when you pushed it:   the fifties version of a car horn on a toy.  No batteries needed.

Years later, I would find myself at a film event in New York City.  I had originally been asked to be part of a panel with some other production designers.  At the last minute, the organizer asked if I would moderate the panel instead.

He didn’t know that I’d just instituted a policy to say “yes” whenever I was asked to do something scary.  So I said “yes.”

Now that the day had arrived and I was there, shaking hands with the other production designers (all of whom were older and more experienced than I was), I was overcome with a bad case of nerves.  It didn't hit me until I saw how nervous the other production designers were.  Why were they so nervous?  They could just sit there passively and wait until someone asked them a question -- I was the one who had to facilitate the discussion.

There was no place to go, really, so I drifted away from them until I thought they were looking elsewhere, and I stood behind a large column.  Hiding, as they say, in plain sight.

And I closed my eyes and started to talk, under my breath.  I don’t think I would have called what I was doing "praying," at this point in my life.  I might have called it Consulting the Universe.  Of course, anyone in his or her right mind would have taken one look at me and thought, “That dude’s praying.”

Anyway, it came to me that this event was a transaction, an information transaction.  A bunch of people were showing up who had bought tickets because they wanted some information.  The people on the panel most likely possessed some or all of that information.  I just needed to facilitate that transaction, and the only thing that could get in the way of a successful transaction was me being nervous.  The other production designers were nervous enough for all of us, so my nervousness would just be gilding the lily, as they say.  Like bringing coals to Newcastle.

I returned from my hiding spot behind the column and was delighted to see that the production designers were still so nervous that they hadn’t noticed that I had stepped away from them only to hide behind a column less than thirty feet away.  So far so good.

The audience began to enter and fill the hall, and while making small talk with the other production designers, I noticed the strangest thing.  The audience members were surprisingly nervous.  Perhaps they were nervous that they’d signed up for the wrong event.  Or nervous that someone would find out that they knew a lot less about production design than they’d suggested at dinner last night.  Or nervous that they’d left the stove on at home.  All I knew was that I was significantly less nervous than the people in the audience.

The event was a success, and I was told I’d done a good job.  I actually couldn’t remember anything I’d done or said, but I could remember the topics that got covered, the fact that the other production designers seemed to relax and enjoy it, and that the audience seemed enthusiastic.

What I remembered most clearly, however, was the idea that my own nervousness came from a misunderstanding.  I had arrived thinking the event was about me and my lack of experience at moderating, and my Consultation with the Universe (or prayer) had revealed that it wasn’t about me at all, but simply about some information that needed to get transferred.

And as I thought about my misunderstanding, I pictured sitting in the front seat of the Beast, our enormous family station wagon, with the plastic yellow dashboard in my lap.  As a kid I was thrilled when I turned the little steering wheel to the right and the car actually turned right, and grinned when I turned it to the left and we happened to turn left.  I loved it because it supported my treasured illusion that I was driving, the red plastic steering wheel clutched tightly in my little hands.

I found a toy dashboard at a yard sale some years ago, very much like the one I’d played with in my youth.  I bought it, and I keep it within glancing distance of my workstation.  I've done that ever since I found it, in quite a number of office setups.

I guess I'm happiest when I am reminded that the most control I will ever have in this life, no matter what I do, is pretty much the same as clutching a red plastic steering wheel that isn’t connected to anything at all.

But hey -- at least it has a squeaky button in the center, just in case I need it.

Screenwriters know that the person who will actually read their new script is not the studio executive who promised to read it, but rather an Underpaid Assistant.  

One of the awkward things about this arrangement is that the Underpaid Assistant will tend to be a highly intelligent Ivy League graduate who understands screenwriting backwards and forwards.  Most of them, had they chosen the dubious profession of screenwriting, would be very good at it.  

This is a source of some misunderstanding.  

They’re not Underpaid Assistants because they are screenwriter wannabes, they’re Underpaid Assistants simply because they have chosen a different path:  they want to be the person who hires screenwriters -- and tells them whether their last rewrite was good enough.

Screenwriters also know that having their script dropped into the canvas bag of the Underpaid Assistant -- a bag already heavy with weekend-destroying scripts -- is the beginning of what is most likely to be a doomed relationship.  

The Underpaid Assistant already dislikes the screenwriter for destroying his or her weekend, but there’s also that problem of the Underpaid Assistant being an inherently good writer.  If the Underpaid Assistant constantly thinks, while reading scripts, “I could write rings around this clown,” it's not necessarily delusional.

Savvy screenwriters understand that this is who they are writing for:  someone they will never meet, who already hates their guts without having read even the first line of the script.

They know that they are writing for only one person.

The Most Hostile Reader Imaginable.

When I began my digital filmmaking life, I realized early on that between the pitch to the client, the realities and limitations of the shoot, and my somewhat, shall we say, embryonic abilities as an editor, I would always be chasing objectivity.  This is the task of any creative person, but the particular blinders I wear suggest that it’s hardest in filmmaking.

So that's when I discovered the value of imaginary friends.

I knew that most of the corporate video work that I was seeing had some shared problems.  The videos seemed a little smug at best, self-congratulatory and delusional at worst.  I knew that loss of objectivity was part of the problem, and that I needed to get much better at regaining it on demand.

I was making a fundraising video for a mentoring program along the lines of Big Brothers Big Sisters, and while thinking about the objectivity problem I remembered the Underpaid Assistants, and the tremendous rigor that screenwriters, the ones who understand that all-important first reader, apply to their work.

And so I created my first imaginary friend:  The Most Hostile Viewer Imaginable.

In the case of the mentoring program's video, it was a person who believed strongly that bringing a non-family-member adult into a child’s life -- one who has no disciplinary duties whatsoever -- is fundamentally destructive to the delicate balance of parenting.  “Of course she gets along with her mentor!” my imaginary friend would say.  “All the mentor does is buy her things and take her places, and she never has to do the hard part, setting boundaries or establishing consequences in the child’s life!  Mentoring programs like this, even with the best of intentions, are destroying the fabric of society!”

I made sure that my imaginary friend sat in on each interview I conducted for the video.  Knowing that he was looking over my shoulder kept my questions sharper, my need for proof of the program’s validity more acute.  When editing, it completely altered the way I built my case for why the program deserved funding.

Over the years I’ve had to invent a lot of imaginary friends.  

And learning to write characters, the kind that make sense to readers, the kind that resonate with a recognizable psychology, turned out to be the perfect training for creating imaginary friends.  

The more credible their convictions (and they were almost always diametrically opposed to my own), the more valuable their impact was on my work.

So here’s to imaginary friends.  May they thrive and multiply.

And here’s to Underpaid Assistants.  I’m sorry for ruining your weekend.

There’s a post that went viral a while ago that reveals a wonderful confusion.  The author explains that vaccinating your children is okay because it wouldn’t be the worst thing if your child turned out to be artistic.

Her confusion of the words autistic and artistic has resonance for me.

After hearing stories of bullying and humiliation that were apparently everyday occurances at my older brother’s summer camp, I quietly expressed to my parents that I was not sure that sleep-away summer camp was my thing.  I didn’t really expect them to respect my concerns; I thought my mentioning this was the equivalent of a death row inmate alerting the warden, on his final walk, that he was pretty sure he was innocent.

To my surprise, they enrolled me instead at Fiedel’s, an arts-oriented day camp that ran for a number of summers on some sprawling real estate surprisingly close by.  It was operated by Roz and Ivan Fiedel, who remain iconic figures in my gallery of treasured childhood experiences.  Ivan was a wild-haired, cigar-chomping pianist/composer/improviser, and Roz was a fiercely emotional black-leotard-wearing modern dancer.  They were classic beatniks, cultural disrupters by nature, and considered chaos and lunacy a better choice than order and tradition any day of the week.

Their embrace of all forms of self-expression as inherently good made their day camp a haven for misfits.  It also became known as a surprisingly safe place to send your kid with developmental disabilities.  This last detail was the source of some confusion for me.

In between the giddy epiphanies and moments of high-octane silliness, a creeping dread began to gather momentum in my impressionable brain.

From time to time I would turn, grinning from ear to ear, to the child sitting next to me, looking for a moment of recognition, a non-verbal isn’t-this-place-crazy? moment, and sometimes see the impenetrable look of a kid who was completely checked out.

It took me a while to notice that the front license plates on the small buses that picked us up and took us home all had an uplifting slogan about helping kids with developmental disabilities.  

And it struck me, in a single devastating blow one day, that if I had a mental disability, I would most certainly lack the capacity to know that I had a mental disability.  This realization felt like it cleared up a lot of mysteries for me.

Eventually I gathered up the courage to ask my father about this concern of mine, insisting beforehand that he make a solemn promise not to laugh.  

He didn’t keep his promise.

Years later, I was working as a freelance designer in New York City -- in the Analog Days, when you had to enlarge and reduce everything with photostats, when cutting and pasting actually involved blades and glue.  To survive in this field, you needed relationships with photostat services, and the ones I used had developmentally disabled messengers running their packages to and from clients like me.

One deadline was so tight I realized I had to walk the package to the photostat house myself, and wait for the resized artwork.  It wasn’t until I was in the elevator, waiting for the door to close, that I realized all at once that I hadn’t slept in 48 hours, my hair was dirty and standing up in all the wrong places, I was still wearing the ill-fitting clothes that had become my uniform for working with rubber cement and wax, and that, in this particular context, my retro eyeglass frames had lost every bit of their hipster irony.

When I was joined in the elevator by one of their messengers, I immediately saw that it was true:  I had accidentally appropriated a whole set of fashion cues.  I began to silently agonize over my oversight as the door closed.

I could feel the messenger look me over me from head to toe.  I stared at the elevator floor indicator, trying to look like a busy artist, the kind who’s got a tight deadline.

The elevator finally started its creeping ascent.  I couldn’t believe how slow we were moving.  We were almost to the floor that the photostat lab was on.

Then he spoke to me.

“You know, if you want to play softball on Saturday, you have to sign up in Miss Helen’s office.”

My childhood summers at Fiedel’s, the license-plate slogan, the checked-out kids, it all came rushing back, clouding my vision now, as the doors opened.  I glanced over my shoulder at the messenger, blurting out -- much too loudly -- “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

I made a bee-line for the customer counter, making a point to steer clear of the messengers’ pick-up area.

As I discussed enlargement percentages and premium rush charges with the photostat technician, I had trouble focusing and I was a basket case by the time I arrived home with my re-sized artwork.  Even my deadline would not prevent me from showering and changing my clothes.

For years I hoped I might encounter that messenger again, and have some kind of healing interaction that could somehow make up for my elevator outburst.  It never happened.

But I think it’s not such a bad thing, growing up with artism.

The way I see it, artism offered me honorary membership in a club I’d be honored to join, any day of the week.

Especially Saturday (as long as I sign up in Miss Helen's office first).

When I worked on movies while living in New York City, I found cooking for myself nearly impossible.

I had been struggling for years with the dreary grocery store task known as Shopping For One.  Now I was finding that my daily schedule was longer than almost anyone else’s on shooting days.

A production designer needs to be first on set, to make sure that the shooting crew has everything it will need to point a camera at.  Most of the day is actually spent looking after tomorrow’s work, and the next day, and next week, but you need to time your day perfectly so that you can meet everyone at dailies, and then hang out for the discussion after dailies.  In reality, this meant a 4:30am breakfast and an 11:30pm dinner for me, most days.  Are there any more depressing times of the day to be staring at an un-dated, half-full container of pasta salad in your refrigerator?

This is where the Greeks come in.

When I lived in Manhattan, there were a lot of hard-won cliches involving business ownership and certain nationalities, and one of them had to do with diners and Greek immigrants.  After sampling my neighborhood eateries, I felt that one of the two different Greek-owned diners was able to maintain a consistent quality in both breakfast-making and hamburger-making.  Pricing was all over the map, but that’s a different story.  For omelettes and cheeseburgers, these guys were it.  

And they were open 24 hours, so there was that.

At the time, there seemed to be a palpable sense of pride in the Greek diner cliche, and it had to do with maintaining a certain standoffishness, a clever way to be friendly without actually smiling, to remember the food a customer usually orders without appearing to care.  Now that I’m older, it seems the height of sanity -- to resist pretending to be better friends than we are.  At the time it seemed relatively surly to me, but I chose to give them my twice-daily business whenever I was in production, which was a lot.

I moved to Los Angeles eventually, and somehow seven years passed before I was in New York with some time to kill, wondering what my old neighborhood looked like.

“Wondering what my old neighborhood looked like” is misleading.  I wanted to know if the Greeks were still there.  I suppose there is something to seeing certain faces at mealtime, for years on end, that creates an odd simulation of family.  In the animal kingdom I think it’s called imprinting.  

So, there, I’ve said it.  I was searching for my Greek family.  The ones whose names I didn’t even know.

There was Gruff Owner.  There was Underappreciated Younger Brother.  And there was Exuberant Cousin, who broke the rule about being standoffish and was kept in the kitchen, out of sight of most customers.  He craved customer interaction, and spoke no English.  Sometimes they let him wait tables in the middle of the night, and he was incredibly friendly.  He could not remember more than a few syllables of English at a time, so placing an order with him was like something out of a Bunuel film.

So there I was, seven years in L.A. now, returning to my neighborhood a little bit like an immigrant -- wide-eyed, a little bit lost, and full of hope.

The first thing that struck me was that the travel agency next door to my little Greek diner was gone, and it had been subsumed by the diner.  They were a success story!

I entered and immediately saw Gruff Owner, his hair now all white, but there was no flicker of recognition.  He thrust his chin at a table, and I sat down, humiliated.

What was I expecting?  This is New York!  Sometimes my naivete is astounding, I thought.  On a busy corner like this, their cumulative customer count must be close to a million at this point.  Did I really expect a hug?  A rousing “Opa!”  Diet Cokes on the house?

I ordered a cheeseburger, and it was just as I remembered it:  tender, not overcooked, generous with tomatoes and lettuce, the smear of Thousand Island dressing a nostalgic touch.  

Comfort food.  And yet my soul would not be comforted.

Thirty minutes later I stood at the register, not thirty inches from Gruff Owner, my surrogate mother/father for so many years, and tried to remember what casual indifference looks like, so that I might, outwardly, appear less vulnerable than I felt.  He handed me my change.

As I turned my body slightly, counting out the embarrassingly generous tip I was going to put on the table, he said, still staring at the register, “Why you not come here for seven years.”

I stared at him.  “I moved to California,” I said, an idiotic grin spreading across my face.

“Oh, California,” he said, nodding, and -- was that a smile?

I was at a loss for words, no idea what to say next.  

“It’s bigger,” I blurted out, gesturing to the side of the restaurant where the travel agency used to be.

He was still nodding.  “California…” he murmured, with something that looked like approval.

And then I understood.

For seven years, my surrogate mother/father thought I’d been eating at his competitor’s diner, two blocks to the east and south.  The blank look that I’d received when I walked in wasn’t blank at all, it was a special look reserved for the disloyal, the traitor, the ungrateful scum of the earth.  I’d missed it.

I said, “Efcharisto,” trying to put as much feeling into it as possible.  It didn’t really work, it kind of sounded like I'd sneezed.  I wanted to be better at navigating my surrogate Greek family dynamics.

He nodded at me.  “Good to see you,” he replied, absolutely killing it.