Small World

No more tears (enough is enough)!

When I’m in love, I get a bit scattered. In last week’s column, describing my experience on the Seattle location of Jennifer Lopez‘s latest visceral lip-liner drama Enough, I misidentified one of the young “background artists” thanks to my embarrassing preoccupation with Jennifer’s leading man, Dan Futterman. Cute co-star of the Tyne Daly TV series Judging Amy, and winner of last year’s SIFF Best Actor award for his mercurial turn in Urbania, Futterman had walked by me on the set, casually feigning ignorance about the fact that he makes me tingly.

My voice mail light was winking at me by the afternoon after publication. Hell hath no fury like a background artist scorned: “Hey, Steve, this is Ryan. I met you on the set of Enough—I was one of the background artists—and you featured my friend Ali in the story, but you called me Dan and said ‘Dan and Ali’ instead of ‘Ryan and Ali,’ and we were just wondering if we could possibly have you call us back. We know it was a misprint, we just wanted to see why that would’ve happened, if there’s any way we can get some kind of update or just like a sentence thing—my real name, you know—because, like, a lot of people read that and know the truth and everything, so if you could call us back today, it’s really important. Also we were able to get a real picture of Jennifer Lopez as she was leaving in her gray Expedition with her bodyguards. And she had changed her whole appearance and everything—she was filming a video later or something like that—but anyways, just call us back.” One last quick breath. “Thankyoubye.”

Five minutes later, while I was away from my desk asking our copy chief, Bethany, how best to handle the correction (a conversation we both understood to be masking the subtextual implication “haaaaaaahaaaaaaaahaaaaa”), I got another urgent message: “Hey Steve, this is Ryan calling again. I hope that you can just call and talk to me, and then maybe everything will be cool and everything, and just if you could possibly just even have a sentence in next week’s issue just saying ‘Ryan and Ali’ instead of ‘Dan,’ that would be just really cool.”

Let the healing begin. The person identified only as “Dan” should, in fact, have been the person identified only as “Ryan.” The Futterman known only as Dan should, in fact, call me immediately.

swiecking@seattleweekly.com