A Christmas Drag Show: "It's DeLovely!"

If you thought I was going to let Christmas go by without a treat, you're thinking CRAZY!

Here's the fictional story of me and a miraculous wooden bird, to the tune of Anita O'Day's "It's DeLovely." It's all true, I swear!



Production Notes:

It's silly to call these things "Mini Drag Shows," since they take far more work than a drag show ever does. I decided to conceive and film one in a single day, which meant rushing a lot and losing some footage. Fortunately the second unit stepped in (errr, that's me too) and we made our Christmas deadline with some make-up shots.

You'll be amazed to know that the bird is NOT animatronic, nor is it a green screen effect! Our special effects technician (moi, ici) rigged it up in the old-fashioned way. Try keeping a cat away from an effect like that. You can see an intrigued Zsa Zsa during the early part on the couch.

My version of iMovie is the most up-to-date one available for OS X.3, but it is still INCREDIBLY limited. You're allowed a single video track, so you can't lay down multiple takes and see how they compare. You can split a video clip once, but both segments must remain on the timeline if you want to keep using them, and the "dragging rules" become stranger the more clips you split apart. To cap it all off, once you have cropped a video clip, it is considered to be permanently edited; you can "restore it," but then ALL of your edits to the clip are gone.

Tedious, tedious, tedious. But free.

I'm happy with the way the quick cuts turned out but you can't imagine the work involved.

Now, About Anita

It's only now that I realize that Anita O'Day -- the only jazz singer I've ever really enjoyed -- died last year. I bought a copy of her autobiography two years ago and it arrived with a decidedly crooked signature; I suspect she was getting fragile even by that time.

So Anita, this one's for you. Thanks for your music.