399

On sets, we often call each other by departments. More Hollywood folks know me as Donna Costumes than by my surname. (And, have you met my husband, George Sound?)

Sometimes we shout out Union numbers instead. Local 80 is the grips, for example. And 399 is the Teamsters, aka Transpo.

When I first started thinking about writing this blog, I was working on a show called, Without A Trace. As we were standing around waiting for them to finish lighting the set, I asked the folks near me about their worst days in Hollywood and got two great stories from the transpo guys.

Story #1 was about some poor schmo who was nearly the last person wrapping up at the location and decided that he couldn't make the drive all the way back to his house in Canyon Country without a pit stop. So, he went in to use one of the restrooms in the honey wagon. Except the honey wagon driver didn't know he was in there and locked it up and started driving.

So poor Mr. Schmo had to ride all the way to the next location. May not sound so terrible, except when you consider that the 'contents' have a bad habit of 'shifting.' So I imagine the smell was nearly as bad as the worry that he might end up spending the whole night inside the toilet.

Story #2 was about a teamster who'd been wrapping up an actor's trailer at the end of the night and was fighting a bad headache. He saw a bottle of aspirin and thought that the actor wouldn't mind if he took two.

Only it wasn't aspirin. It was LSD and the guy ended up in the emergency room seeing imaginary snakes.