From my book, JUSTIFY THIS, in the chapter about GOSNELL:
"We were filming the movie in Oklahoma, and there was one role that we still had not cast. I just had not seen anyone that struck me as right for the role.
On a Sunday after the second week of shooting, I went to a Waffle House (my favorite restaurant chain by the way) in Oklahoma City. The place was very busy, and the manager was going around apologizing to everybody for their meals being late.
I kept looking at her. There was something about her. She was very attractive, and she had a tattoo on her neck. There was a certain toughness about her, and she way she carried herself was so poised and competent. There was a strength and a wisdom to her that I thought would really read on camera.
I felt moved to go and talk to her. I waited until she had a free moment, and I said, “Look, I know this sounds like a crazy pickup line, but…um, have you ever done any acting?”
Obviously having never been asked that question, she predictably responded, “Um, no.”
I said, “Look, I know this might sound like a cliche pick-up line, but…I really am a director from Hollywood and I really am shooting a movie here in town, and there’s a part in it that you would be right for. Would you mind if I got the script and let you read it with me to see if it’s something you want to do?”
“Um, okay.”
I drove home and got the script and went back to the Waffle House and sat down with her in a booth to read the script together. I explained that the character only had three or four lines, but they were very important to the story. I said, “I think you could do this. Would you be willing?”
She was understandably skeptical of this guy who suddenly showed up at her job claiming to be a Hollywood director and offering her a role in a movie. “I don’t know. How much would it pay?” she asked.
I said, “Well, it’ll probably be at least two or three days of work—and it’ll pay about eight hundred and thirty dollars a day.”
She said, “Okay.”
Probably a little better than Waffle House.
The first day she came to work, she practically brought her entire family with her to make sure I wasn’t some sort of crazy serial killer. We shot with her a couple of days, and she did very well. She was a natural. I kept telling her, “Tessya, don’t try to be interesting. You’re interesting enough. Just tell the truth. Let the words do the work for you.” And she was terrific.
On the third day, one of the producers, Ann, came over to me and said, “You’re not going to believe this.”
I replied, “Oh no. What now?” I was sure someone had quit, or some location had fallen out, or some other low-budget-movie disaster had occurred.
She said, “The thing that happened to her character in the movie happened to her in real life.”
I said, “What are you talking about?”
“Tessya, in her real life, went to have an abortion, and when they let her listen to the heartbeat of the baby, she decided not to go through with the abortion. She had her baby, just like her character in the movie.”
I was floored. I felt the hand of God was at play here. I believe God led me to that Waffle House to find her. That something inside me, telling me, when I first saw her, “She can do it! She can do it!”—was Him.
She is now the proud mother of three boys, including her firstborn, whose heartbeat changed her life.
@sagesteele@WaffleHouse
A new milestone for humankind: The crew of Artemis II are now the farthest any human has ever travelled, reaching a maximum distance of 252,752 miles from Earth.
This surpasses the previous record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 by about 4,102 miles.
Elon Musk: "We’ve got to be excited about the future. We’ve got to do things that make us want to live
It cannot always be about problems every day
Do you want to wake up every morning and everything’s just a problem?
What inspires you?
What makes you excited about the future?
There’s got to be some things like that"
It is worth dwelling on the restoration of order to the parts of L.A. that erupted in violence last month because this was not how any of this was supposed to end. | @NoahCRothman
https://t.co/mFLVdpLlum
Only 66 years from first flight to landing on the Moon in 1969.
Here we are, 76 years later cannot yet return to the Moon. We should have been on Mars by now.