>In Which I Become an Actress, Meet a Ghost, Sing Like Mariah, and Almost Go to Jail, All in One Day.

>I’m back from San Francisco, where I got to host a few episodes of BlogHer’s Backtalk. It was a lot of fun, but the best part was taking my direction from the director, a modern day Cecil B. DeMille whose craggy good looks and aviator shades made me feel more like a young ingénue preparing for her close-up than a mom standing in someone’s kitchen.

“All right, dear, in this shot, we’re talking about the Recession,” he said, glancing down at his notes as I prepared for my first shot.

“You’re feeling… down,” he said, gesturing wildly. ” You’re having a conversation with… with… your sister. You want to know… how she is.” He furrowed his eyebrows in concern and stared off into the distance.

“How are you handling this recession?” he asked plaintively, delivering my lines like a Gloria Swanson with stubble. “How are you handling this recession?”

“Okay,” I said, turning to the camera and imagining its lens was the sister I never had. She’d have my hair but not my eyes, I decided. She’d be funny, but not too funny, clever, but her writing would suck, pretty, but definitely plainer than me.

“Action!” the maestro proclaimed.

“How are you handling this recession?” I asked, with all the sincerity of Susan Lucci in a soap opera deathbed scene.

“Wonderful,” the director said briskly. “We’ve got it. Now!” he proclaimed, shuffling through his papers. “In this next segment, you’re happy! Bring out the…. Italian in you!”

“Oh, umm,” I said, anxious over his mistake. “I have no Italian in me.”

“Well… pretend you do!” he said.

“All right,” I said, thinking quickly.

“Action!”

“We want-ah to-ah hear yourrrrrr Backtalk-ah!” I said with all the expressiveness I could muster.

Somehow, we got through the day.

I don’t know how or why, but shooting takes like, hours, with very little down time. By the end, I was sosoverytired, yet I couldn’t resist when Glennia, Maria Niles, Deb Roby, and VDog offered to meet Erin and me for dinner near our hotel.

Most of what was said at the restaurant that night, I can’t repeat here because from what I understand, what happens in Burlingame, California stays in Burlingame, California, on pain of death. However, a few very tiny mojitos and martinis had been consumed, and it was decided we would all go to a Karaoke place a half-block down the street. As we made our way down the sidewalk, a man approached us from a dark nightclub.

He informed us that he was the doorman for a new country and western nightclub and gestured to the dilapidated building behind him. Understandably, we were skeptical. Someone informed the man that we had made plans that night to go elsewhere.

“My name is Jomo,” the man announced. “And I never forget a name or a face.” He earnestly shook each of our hands and looked us in the eye. “If you come back, I will remember you.”

Befuddled, we said our goodbyes and continued on toward the Karaoke place.

Only it didn’t exist.

So we used one of the many iPhones in the group to figure out the location of another Karaoke house, a couple of miles up the road in Millbrae. We walked back past the “country and western nightclub.” Jomo had mysteriously disappeared. We looked inside the windows as we passed. The place was empty. Abandoned. The sign said, “Closed.”

“That’s creepy,” I announced. “I bet they were trying to lure us in there to give us Rufees. If we had agreed, we’d probably be sex slaves now, tied up and on our way to North Dakota in the back of some beat-up van.” We all shuddered and Erin and I walked to Glennia’s car for the drive to Millbrae.

“Or maybe Jomo was a ghost,” I mused. “Maybe if we go back tomorrow, we’ll find a burned out shell of a building where that nightclub once stood. Maybe we’ll ask someone if they know Jomo and they’ll say, ‘Jomo?! He was the doorman of a country western club on this street- that burned down 50 years ago!'” We all were silent as we drove.

“The ghost of Jomo,” Glennia said quietly from behind the wheel. We giggled. A minute or two passed.

“Tales from the Jomo,” she said. We all burst out laughing.

“The Grim Jomo!” I said menacingly. We laughed harder.

“The Twilight Jomo!” I gasped. By that time, we were crying with laughter and I was gasping for breath.

Okay. I’ll just say what you’re thinking. You had to be there.

However, the Jomo haunting was a perfect prelude to Millbrae Karaoke House, which looked disturbingly like a place where a lot more than Karaoke went on, if you get my drift. We paid $30 and were ushered into a small room with a cow print-covered sofa, a disco light, and a Karaoke TV and controller. Most of the songs were in Korean, but we did manage to find a few we recognized.

In a paroxysm of poor judgment, I started things off with a solo of “Vision of Love” from atop the coffee table. I realized about halfway through that I wasn’t as good of a singer as my two lemongrass mojitos had led me to believe, but I decided to make the most of it and gave the ending everything I possibly could. Erin claimed she could hear me from the bathroom on the other side of the building. My larnyx is still paying me back for it today.

My favorite part of the evening was when I got to sing,”More Than Words,” with VDog. Seriously, if you want to really bond with a complete stranger*, sing “More than Words” with that stranger at Millbrae Karaoke House. You are pretty much obligated to be BFFs after that. Or at least Fs. We’ll see.

After an hour of Karaoke, it was time for Glennia to take Erin and I back to our hotel. But the evening couldn’t be complete without being pulled over by the police, who had the nerve to claim that Glennia hadn’t turned on her headlights. To make matters worse, she said about the worst thing you can say to a cop when you’re pulled over.

“Good evening, Officer,” she began. “We were just out singing Karaoke.” Um, hello. DUI check, anyone?!

Glennia realized her mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth. “And dinner! We had some dinner!” she babbled. But it was too late. The Karaoke die had been cast. I waited in mute horror for the cops to draw their guns and pull us all shrieking from Glennia’s SUV.

“Well, you ladies have a good evening,” the officer said. A reprieve! We’d been given a reprieve!

This time.

And that’s my tale of becoming a California actress, meeting a ghost named Jomo, channeling Extreme, and evading the pokey, all in one action packed day.

We now return to your regularly scheduled posts about diaper changing.

*VDog claims we met in the bathroom at BlogHer, but that’s how, like, every e-mail ever written to me begins, so I am not so sure.