Home work

For the drive up, all I had to listen to was my big binder full of old CDs—some skipped a beat or two, but for the most part they held up surprisingly well. (My iPod has recently gone the way expensive things left visible in cars go….)

And I actually found it nostalgic to listen to “Prolonging the Magic” by Cake and even enjoyed a little Dave Matthews—don’t tell anyone; the latter is less socially acceptable to admit.

It’s kind of amazing how well one’s brain retains the knowledge of lyrics to songs one hasn’t heard in years. I find that I can still quote whole songs that, until I heard them again, I had forgotten even existed.

I wish my brain would use some of that space for more important things.

I arrived home to Narrowsburg last Monday to start four weeks of editing on a feature film called “Martha Marcy May Marlene.” The film is being directed, produced, photographed, acted and crewed by good friends (who also all happen to be extremely talented), so it’s a pleasure to visit the set and I’m excited that we are all working together again.

It’s almost too good to be true that it’s also being shot locally in Livingston Manor, Roscoe and Tennanah Lake. So it’s an excellent opportunity for me to get out of the city for a month and spend some quality time at home.

So far, I’ve been spending about half my time on set, but as we shoot more and more footage I will start to spend almost all of my time in the editing room on the second floor of the Arts Alliance building on Main Street in Narrowsburg.

But for now the dailies trickle in slowly, making quite a journey from Livingston Manor to Narrowsburg by way of Technicolor in New York City for processing, transferring and color correction. And I have been enjoying the familiar faces and quiet nature of small town living. I find myself nostalgically making my way through the week. (Though by now I have figured out how to use my phone to play music in the car.)

Main Street has changed a lot since I’ve lived here. There are new places to eat and drink coffee and new stores to poke around in. Now I have something to do here, something I really like doing; where, as a teenage, there was once boredom, there is now calmness and concentration.

My girlfriend, Emily, came and visited for the weekend and we went on a cute high school date together to Carousel in Beach Lake and played mini-golf. It was a lot of fun. I was a little bummed that the batting cages were no longer open.

On the ride to a friend’s house for dinner on Saturday, Emily looked through my booklet of CDs and chuckled at many of them. She let me slide on the Dave Matthews though, admitting that she, also, enjoyed an album or two of when she was younger.

I smiled, actually a little glad that I still knew the words.

- Zac Stuart-Pontier