They’re filming on our street again. It happens all the time.
We live in a part of Brooklyn that looks and feels like Sesame Street, or the opening shot of The Cosby Show. My Kid won’t even bother to cross the street to check out a film shoot. In our part of the world, signs taped to lamp posts with arrows that point to “EXTRAS HOLDING” or “TO SET” are as ordinary as fliers about lost cats and dogs.
I remember when she was still in a stroller she was attracted to the tent over the craft services table set up a couple blocks from our apartment. She wanted to go towards it because she thought it was a party. It was a music video shoot.
Another time, Dan Zanes was filming in the park next to our regular playground while my daughter and her friends watched and at least one parent had to sign a release contract because his 3-year-old wouldn’t get out of the shot and the producers let him stay there listening on camera with the children who had been brought in by a casting agency.
At the Bleecker Street Playground in Greenwich Village, I watched with amusement as some photographers were setting up a shot of a Bugaboo. Toddlers kept coming over to play with the ball and sand bucket the stylists were artfully arranging around the wheels of the stroller.
When my daughter was a toddler and we were still new to New York, my husband and I got excited when we saw, on an episode of Blues Clues “our” vegetable store in Chelsea Market, the one where we shopped every week because it was in the same building as my husband’s office. Though it was her favorite show at the time, My Kid was unimpressed. In her experience, familiar places were on TV all the time. Now she goes to school with a girl whose baby coos were used as a character voice on Blues Clues. Yeah, so. Another PTA parent was the host of one of my daughter’s favorite cooking shows. Last year at a school event I overheard the son of this celebrity chef tell another kid his dad was embarrassing.
A couple of years ago, I took my daughter to Fort Greene Park one sunny day, so she could practice riding her bike without training wheels. We looked across the street and there was Lavar Burton repeatedly coming down the stairs of a brownstone with a wrench in his hand taking the training wheels off a bike. They were filming a segment for Reading Rainbow.
We live in New York City. The places my daughter goes and the things that she does are on TV and in movies all the time. She sees film crews about as often as her cousins in Montana see wild deer. When George Clooney and Brad Pitt were filming in Brooklyn Heights not that long ago, some of the moms hung around the school after drop-off, hoping for a star sighting, others grumbled about parking. But the kids didn’t take notice until the last day of shooting at that location when the guys from craft services delivered enough pink bakery boxes of cookies for all the teachers, staff and students in the entire elementary school.
Original post to NYC Moms Blog.