Julia Roberts in the Garden

Sometimes I love being a journalist. Okay, make that most of the time. The pay may be lousy (at this point anyway), but the job is an entree to...well, basically anyplace that a person could want to go.

This job is just cool. For instance, you can call up people like Project Runway's Season 2 winner Chloe Dao and they'll actually call you back - that happened this week.

Anyway, while I'm in the business of name-dropping, I have to relay this anecdote:

For an upcoming Statesman story I visited several homes recently that have appeared in movies. The first was a big blue Travis Heights house that was featured in the kids' movie "How to Eat Fried Worms." Just Monday I went out to Pflugerville (about 30 minutes north of Austin) to visit the home that was Dolly Parton's brothel in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." Pflugerville used to be a tight-knit German community, and it was funny to hear the 74-year-old owner of the house talk about first getting the call back in the early '80s from the film's location scout.

"At first we were a little uncertain about doing it, because of the name - Whorehouse," she said. "But then we realized if they didn't make it here they'd make it somewhere else, so we wouldn't be stoppping it anyway."

I thought I was finished with the research for the story (and that I'd had a pretty good run of it already), but then my editor asked me to visit one more house to round things out. My contact at the Texas Film Commission told me about a movie being filmed right now in Bastrop (30 minutes south of Austin), and I managed to get permission from the production manager to visit the set.

The morning of (i.e. yesterday morning), I figured I better Google this film, "Fireflies in the Garden," so I would have some idea of what kind of questions to ask. I clicked on the IMDb link and up popped an all-star cast: Julia Roberts, William Dafoe, Emily Watson, Hayden Panettiere (one of the teen stars of "Heroes"), Shannon Lucio and a couple of other names I recognized.
I didn't figure I'd see any of these people, though, since the production manager had told me to come at noon - during lunch.

When I got there, though, there had been a schedule change and they actually were filming. As somebody gave me a tour of the house, we passed right by a pregnant Julia Roberts, who was sitting on a couch waiting for the next take. I didn't even look at her the first time, not wanting to be the dorky girl who stares at the celebs, but I did catch some good glimpses later. In fact, she walked by a few feet away from me as I was standing outside the house and she was going in. I saw her hold out her hand and say,"Oh, it's raining," in a surprised voice.

Later, as the location manager was finally able to take me upstairs, we walked in front of Julia as she sat on a bench facing the stairs. She definitely looked at me, probably thinking "Who the fuck is this girl who keeps taking surreptitious sidelong glances at me?" Or maybe she was just thinking, "I'm pregnant - where that's jar of pickles?" We'll never know.

Cocktails at Tiffany's

Since breakfast tends to occur a tad on the early side for mingling (see earlier Macy's breakfast post), the folks at Austin's new Tiffany & Co. hosted a cocktail reception last night to celebrate one month of business. It was about my seventh trip to the Domain, a funny thing since I've never been one to frequent luxury shopping centers - as the following anecdote illustrates.

Always on the lookout for my next Street Cam, I stopped a pretty woman in a green dress (Zac Posen, as it turned out), who was one of a handful in the room actually trying on the jewelry. She was already wearing all Tiffany for the occasion, I learned, from earrings to necklace to ring to brooch, and just looked smashing despite being a mother of two young kids.

As we talked about her favorite places to shop (Neiman's - collectors' section) and her favorite designer (Missoni), she complimented my dress and asked where it was from. For a second I was set to drop the name of some chic boutique, but I always lie terribly so I told her the truth - Forever 21. (I didn't tell her it cost $24). "What's that?" she asked, to my amusement. I told her it was kind of like an H&M, and she looked surprised."In Austin?" A few minutes later, as we were wrapping up, she complimented by necklace, which had a black braided cord and an oversize gold heart pennant. "Forever 21 again," I said, sotto voce. "You have to check it out."