Carless in Los Angeles, The Wong Sans Wheels Chronicles #19: WWOD? (What Would Oprah Do?)

Without going into too much detail, as mentioning this is already jinxing (but a great carless story I had to write about), I had a meeting scheduled over at Oprah's new network today.

As you can imagine, I was jazzed and have been looking forward to this for months, if not my whole life. This would be such a logical transition from playing houses of 99 people to bringing my brilliance to the world. And I do mean.... THE WORLD.

Their offices are on Wilshire in Miracle Mile and it is two short bus rides over from my place in Silverlake. So, it wasn't really an issue.

My friend Simeon Den, a wonderful photographer, has offered for weeks to take pictures for my Carless in Los Angeles show (you know, the still unwritten show that all this carless martyrdom is supposed to manifest itself into?). He has an amazing studio set up in a converted garage with lots of natural light. After endless scheduling and rescheduling back and forth, we finally came to the conclusion that today was the only day we were both free to shoot.

Our shoot concept was this, me sitting at a bus stop with lots of little toy cars around me. A love story about me and a vehicle. I had borrowed dozens of little toy cars from friends (I'm on a kick to not buy anything) and piled them into a brown grocery bag along with some costume changes.

As I got ready to leave for the bus, I began to do mental tabulations:

1pm Simeon's, 5pm Oprah. Leave house at 12pm, bus for an hour to Hollywood, get settled, shoot for an hour, take half an hour to look at the pictures, 2pm, get ready to go to Oprah's, but factor in an hour and an extra hour in case of big emergency traffic, 4pm, sit somewhere outside the La Brea Tarpits and breathe in my best life, the Secret... or something like that that will make my face glow. Wait until 5pm when the meeting happens.

Wait.... WHERE WAS I GOING TO PUT ALL THIS CRAP I WAS TOTING?!

I was faced with a real carless in LA dilemma. Could I walk into a meeting with the Big O's people dragging in a big tote bag of costume changes and a brown grocery bag of toy cars?

Sure, I'm a quirky gal... but could I get away with "bag-ladying it" as my first impression at Oprah's? Then I had flashes of the time I told someone on the bus that I was the commencement speaker at UCLA and got the, "Whatever, you crazy bus lady" look. I've also been rocking the whole "3rd Grade Chic" look of late. Partly because it is a nice innocent irony against the backdrop of the bus. But walking into big corporate offices dressed like an eight year old dragging along bags of STUFF?

Dammit, I could use a big exhaust pumping metal locker on wheels right now!

I imagined being in this meeting with the most head of honchos, two giant bags on either side of me, to the front and back of me, an SNL-esque scenario of trying to find a home for the bags. Blocking my own face with them, climbing over them to be heard, having to create a perimeter around me to accommodate them. Shaking their hands with the bags tucked under my armpits. Then trying to explain....

"Oh no, I didn't bring these bags in to show you anything... I came off the bus... I don't have a car to put them in... no, it's not because I'm broke or anything.... I used to drive a car that ran on vegetable oil. I bought it from a junkie eco hipster ... then somehow got embroiled in a class action lawsuit between him and another eco hipster...well...that's a long story...I just came from a photo shoot... I just have a phobia about owning a car.... Not like those scary phobias that would prevent me from working for you... this is more an experiment..."

Was this carless experiment going to now ruin my career? I dragged Simeon into the situation. Help Simeon! Where the heck am I going to put all this crap?Simeon offered to let me keep my stuff in his studio. But, that would just mean, I'd also have to schlep back on the bus for it. And when would I catch him at home again? And two of the toy cars in those bags belong to my friend Tre and I had to return those to Tre soon and and and and....

Maybe they wouldn't even notice if I walked in saddled down by bags, maybe the bags would start the conversation , or maybe I could walk in, leave them with the receptionist...

Maybe it wasn't a big deal, and I was making it a big deal and the fact that I was making it a big deal would be bad energy and maybe this bad energy would make the meeting go bad.

I was already exhausted by 1:00pm thinking about this.

Well, as it seems all that panic was for naught because I got a call at 2:00pm that the meeting got moved to Friday. So now I have more two days to practice giving away chicken and cars.