4 19 11

Do you ever play that game where you shut your eyes and pretend you're yourself as a 9 year old, and then you open your eyes and pretend that you've time travelled to 2011 and you have to quickly deduce where you are and how old you are without alerting the people around you? It's fun. First you discretely touch your face, look at your hands, and study the expressions of the people around you to gauge how well you know them and who they think you are. Then you have to jump in and say something, and hope that you're speaking in a way that's appropriate to the situation and your age. Once it seems like you've suceeded, and your friends are convinced (or is that your husband? He seems to think you're close), you have to decide if you're gonna stay, and live this new, older life – or try to go back. I usually decide to stay, because going back just seems anti-social. I've actually been playing this game since I was nine; I used to do it in the back seat of the car on road trips, generally overplaying my disorientation and staring at my mom's face with a look of horror at how she'd aged until she got annoyed. I bring this up now because my screenings at the San Francisco International Film Festival this weekend will be a really good opportunity to play the game. When I was a kid in Berkeley we usually only drove over the bridge to SF to visit my relatives. So the first thing I'll notice is that we're not at Uncle Paul's house. And my parents are staring at me from the audience and they're Uncle Paul's age, which means he must be dead and I must be my mom's age. Woah. I'll be doing my entire Q+A from this perspective, wish me luck.

The Future plays on Saturday, April 23rd at 6pm at the Sundance Kabuki Theater, and Sunday, April 24th at 9:15pm at New People Theater.

follow this with this video