Journal Notes
I stayed in Puerto Vallarta for five days during the 2004 Film Festival. My write ups of each day's experiences are linked below. Day One: Travel Day Two: Boobies & Trash Day Three: Walking in Paradise Day Four: The Life of (John C.) Reilly Day Five: Endings Read the Article

The next morning comes way too early—the first thing in Mexico that has this distinction—and I stumble down to the thatched roof hut for breakfast. We are supposed to show our appreciation to the Sheraton marketing director, Megan, who has arranged for our free stays. Several long tables are pushed together giving space for nearly 40 people to sit. When I get there at 9:00, the prescribed time, five other people are there. Natalie soon shows as do Peter and Darius. Kirk is sitting next to me, though I haven’t introduced myself to him yet. I eat my pineapple, say hello to Megan when she comes by—two kisses on the cheek—and am done soon after. “Are we supposed to do more than this?” I ask Natalie. Natalie shrugs. More people have arrived, but the tables are still far from even half full. By the time I leave, more people have arrived, but so many people have left that there aren’t ever more than 10-12 at the table at one time.

I’m tired and am working on less than four hours of sleep. I’m going back to my room. As usual, I can’t get to sleep when I want to. On the last day I will be in Puerto Vallarta, I will mistakenly be up at 7:45 AM and when I arrive back in my room at 2:00 AM, I realize that I am wide awake and spend more than an hour packing and watching DVDs before I can fall asleep. That famous quotation “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” runs through my mind over and over.

Instead, I watch The Family Guy and do nothing. At noon, I walk down to the pool, say good-bye to Peter and Darius and prepare for my impending lunch at Daiquiri Dick's, this small, little local, Mexican restaurant with the native-sounding name.

We take the Sheraton bus to Dick's and what looks to be a horse is standing next to the bus as we exit. The horse appears both old and decrepit. I ask Marco, the bus driver, “Is that a horse or a mule?”

“Mule,” Marco says instantly. He peers under the horse’s hind quarters, raises his eyebrows and says, “No, that’s actually a horse.” When I ask what the difference is, Marco takes his hand and makes a slicing motion with it. “For a mule, they” and he makes the cutting motion with his hand. “That’s it?” I question. He nods and peers back at the horse’s large genitals. “That is definitely a horse,” he smiles somewhat embarrassedly.

We enter into Daiquiri Dick's and I am surprised because it is nothing like Senor Frogs or any of the other really prominent tourist destinations in Puerto Vallarta. There are no cheap, flimsy T-shirts for sale and drunken college students don’t look like they’d be welcome. It makes me wonder why the place has such a drunken college student type of name.

Daiquiri Dick's is, in fact, an upscale dining establishment that is located on the first street east of the ocean; the dining room looks out onto the beach. Lisa with a ‘Y’ gives her speech about the restaurant and I realize that it too is a client of hers. It is a trend that will continue during my stay.

I am debating between ordering a Mexican dish and the tuna salad sandwich. I’m not particularly in the mood for Mexican, but, I figure, when in Puerto Vallarta, do as the Mexicans do. Lisa with a ‘Y’ pulls up a chair next to me at my position at the smaller of the two circular tables the wait staff at Daiquiri Dick's has positioned together. I explained my conondrum to her and ask which she would recommend. She tells me to order the Lobster Tacos. “They’re really awesome,” she says.

“Let me ask you this,” I begin, “Is there anything on the menu that you would advise me to avoid?”

She pauses for a brief second—long enough to appear to be thinking, but not long enough to actually form an opinion—and says, “No, everything is really, really, really good.” Three ‘reallys’. I know because I’m counting.

Besides the usual assortment of exciting events—interviewing Conrad Vernon and John C. Reilly, talking to Alison Dickey and Alfonso Cuaron and meeting a dead man in Gabriel Figeroa—there were two other distinct firsts that occurred while in I was in Puerto Vallarta.

While talking to Gabrielle, a sixty-something woman Reilly later deemed “the crazy lady”, she paged through my magazine and handed it back to me of her own accord stating as she did so, “I don’t want to carry this around with me.” She quickly lost whatever good graces she earned for that honest statement by then feeling the need to qualify her statement.

“One,” she said, “I don’t feel like carrying it around. And two, I don’t want to because I don’t know what it’s about.”

“It’s about film,” I say, answering her literal question.

“But how do I know that?” Gabrielle says, intuiting that she should somehow have been able to gleen that information from the cover… when there is a three inch box with the word “FILM” in 120 point capital letters.

The other and possibly most exciting first came on the last night of my stay in Puerto Vallarta when, seated at dinner, Lindsey from Forbes.com mentioned that she was from Michigan. It led to the following inevitable conversation

I started. “I went to school in Michigan,” I say.

“Really? Where did you go to school?”

“I went to school in Kalamazoo,” I tell her, bracing myself for the “Oh, you went to Western Michigan?” comment.

“You went to K-College?” Lindsey asks without a second’s hestitation.

The impact of the statement hits me. “Yes I did!” I exclaim excitedly. “You didn’t say Western!”

She looks at me with wide-eyed innocence and says, “I would never ask you if you went to Western.”

The moment gets better when Rebecca starts talking about A) how good a school Kalamazoo is and B) how she wanted to go there, but chose to instead attend school out of Michigan. It is so nice to not have to answer the question, “Wait, is Kalamazoo College a two year school?”

For the time being though, I am still mystified by Lisa with a ‘Y’s insistence that everything at Daiquiri Dick's is equally and uniformly perfect. If nothing else, she could have assured me that no matter which choice I made, it wouldn’t be a big deal because the restaurant doesn’t make a habit of giving its customers much food on their plates.

The portion sizes are so incredibly small that one appetizer doesn’t even include a full piece of asparagus--one piece is cut into thirds and two of the three are place onto a skewer. As a result, I take more pictures of food on plates.

Kirk is sitting next to me. I have heard that he works for Outside Magazine but don’t know many specifics about him. Frankly, I don’t learn his last name until my last full day in Puerto Vallarta. Kirk has a genuine charm and charisma that not many people have. He is smart, worldly, funny, handsome, a supremely gifted story-teller and quite refreshingly happy with his life. “I’m living the dream,” he says in my ear on a number of occasions. He pages through my magazine at the table actually reading articles as he goes. I mention to him my not so thinly veiled borrowing of Outside Magazine’s layout. He laughs when he notices it and, though he has nothing to do with the graphic design of the publication, says, “Theft is the highest compliment.”

Half way through the lunch, Gregory Walters arrives. I alternately call him Gregory and Greg depending on some random convergence of factors. It is the first time I have met Greg. “I like your haircut,” I tell him as he’s sitting down,

“And I yours,” he says, nodding towards my own bald palatte.

Over lunch, I made a joke that turned out to be quite a polarizing remark. Kirk, Greg and Natalie laughed at the comment, the other persons at the table looked at me and those who were laughing at my comment with questioning eyes. Naturally, I spent as much time as I could there after with Kirk, Greg and Natalie.

This remark came about when Lisa with a ‘Y’ was talking about her other clients. I asked if there were any locales that were easier to promote than others. “Oh sure,” Lisa with a ‘Y’ said. “Some places are easy but there are some places that it’s very hard to dispel the common myths about.”

And I said, “Like Pedophile Island.”

Kirk laughs and nearly chokes on what he was chewing. Natalie tries to keep from laughing, but fails and Greg laughs appreciatively. Lisa with a ‘Y’ is looking at me as though I’ve done something egregiously wrong. The table goes silent for a brief second before Lisa with a ‘Y’ collects her thoughts and moves passed my Pedophile Island comment.

After lunch ends, Lisa with a ‘Y’ and the other publicists are trying to coordinate travel plans. No matter what happens, the travel plans are always a mess.

Kirk and Greg have known each other for 20 years—they started out working together at a magazine in New York in the very same office. “Our careers began about a month apart,” Kirk points out.

Kirk specializes in Latin America, both writing about it and traveling through it for the last decade.

Greg lives in Mexico City, one of 450,000 Americans he says that call Mexico City home, speaks fluent Spanish and has also done an extreme amount of travel. I later learn that he is going to make a three-city tour through the country of Colombia later on in the year.

The two of them plan to wander off on their own. I ask Kirk and Greg if I can tag along with them. Am I ever glad I did. Instantly turning off the more touristy part of Puerto Vallarta, Kirk, Greg and I strike out.

Kirk and Greg point out several interesting things about the Puerto Vallarta apartments and say hello to the locals that we meet. Greg keeps talking about fourteen drinks that he and Kirk are going to have. We finally duck into the most Mexican bar Greg has seen in the city. While there are several gringos at two of the tables, this is no tourist spot. The floor is missing tiles and, I come to find out, the people seated at the tables can see most of what’s going on in the bathrooms without much difficulty. The men’s bathroom has no toilet paper, no sink, no toilet seat cover or seat, no lid to the toilet tank and no water in the tank. Judging from the smell, I was not the only person who considered peeing in a corner. Refraining from that act, I go into the sink and hope for the best.

When I get back to the table, Kirk is in the midst of telling Greg to be careful in Colombia. “Last time I was there,” Kirk says, “I got cursed by this really attractive Colombian woman.”

“What happened?” Greg asks.

It turns out that Kirk had met a girl at the Colombian airport on his way into the country, made out with her some, had a good time going to dinner with her and after dinner, she wanted him to come meet her parents. “Is this normal in Colombia?” I ask.

Kirk shakes his head. “This girl had plans.”

After seeing her a couple more times—“She was gorgeous!” he explains—Kirk’d had enough of the girl’s wackiness and went to another part of the country. Several days later, her flew into an airport in the northern part of the country and, lo and behold, the woman was waiting for him at the arrival’s gate. “There was no way she could have known I was going to be flying into that airport,” Kirk says, still mystified.

So the girl put a curse on Kirk. After a string of bad luck, Kirk decided to fight fire with fire and went to see a Russian psychic. The psychic promptly told him he was cursed and gave him the phone number of two Russian women who could remove the curse. He went to the address on the business card he was given and found two old Russian women in a nearly empty apartment in Hollywood, sitting on a couch, watching a top of the line 52 inch TV. As advertised, they removed the curse and Kirk’s string of bad luck ended.

Our time in the bar hastened to a close when a wandering band of mariachis showed up and began playing ear shatteringly loud mariachi tunes.

Kirk needed a pair of pants—the one white pair that he had were held together by pins and hastily and poorly hand stitch knots—and the three of us struck out to look for pants and then, well, struck out.

That night was the night Shrek 2 was to be screened in the outside theater. Kirk and Greg had purchased a half bottle of tequila and were debating about splitting it and hanging out in their room rather than going to the screening.

We walked back to the hotel, a good three mile jaunt, my knee was stiffening up slightly having severely sprained it less than a week before, but it still didn’t hurt too badly, though the residual effects of the walk would cause it to be tender in the morning. Upon arriving at the hotel, I quickly showered and headed down to the lobby.

I had enjoyed the hell out of screening Shrek 2 the first time I saw it in Chicago and was looking forward to seeing it again. Minus Kirk and Greg, the press contingent piled into the bus and drove into town. New people had arrived in town that day. A couple of people from E! Entertainment, George arrived from San Francisco, two complete nutjobs, Gabrielle and Smith, arrived from a small magazine in New York and Debbie arrived from Stuff Magazine.

Minus Kirk and Greg, the night was quite female-centric. As we walked into the outdoor venue to see the movie, I had an interesting thought that, for some reason, had never occurred before: could the movie have possibly been dubbed into Spanish? I’m used to foreign movies having subtitles, but never considered the possibility that an English language movie could be dubbed into Spanish. Knowing how integral the voice talents of Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy were to , I guessed that the movie would have Spanish subtitles for the mainly Spanish speaking audiences.

“Gee, you know I don’t know,” Natalie said when I presented the idea to her. “I hadn’t thought of it much?”

The venue was packed and having stood in the back drinking for the hour prior to the start of the film, we hadn’t had the foresight to secure chairs. Extras were brought out to us and Debbie sat down in front of me, Natalie to my left.

A few seconds into the movie, it became readily apparent that Shrek 2 had been dubbed into Spanish and, worse yet, dubbed by actors who all sounded alike. Closing my eyes, I tried to distinguish between the dialogue spoken by Shrek and the dialogue spoken by Donkey and between Fiona and Fairy Godmother’s dialogue. I couldn’t do it; they all sounded the same. Natalie had gotten out of her seat ten minutes in, I was the next to go after 20 minutes. By the end of the film, all of the English speaking journalists were congregated in the small bar that was positioned just off the court yard.

I took off on my own for a walk and wandered through some of the darker streets of Puerto Vallarta, intent on seeing as much non-touristy fare as I could. Besides Kirk and Greg, I was alone in this respect, much to the surprise of the others.

Some days later, Debbie asked me, “Have you gone to the Chicago bar?”

I frowned and replied, “I can do that on the other 359 days of the year.”

“Really?” she questioned, “You didn’t even want to check it out?”

After the movie concluded, we all headed back to the bus, our next stop being the Shrek after-party.

Contrary to the official sounding title, the Shrek 2 after party was nothing more than drinks with the same journalists I’d been hanging out with all day. And the film’s director, Conrad Vernon. I talked to Vernon for a short while, downed a couple of drinks and my body collapsed. I was tired and my knee hurt and I still had to do some research: If I could believe what people were telling me, I was going to have four interviews on Friday. Alfonso Cuaron and Vernon’s interviews were to take place during the day. Diego Luna and John C. Reilly’s interviews were to take place after the screening of The Criminal that night. Though I had been supposed to do something with famed director Roger Corman, Corman had to leave Mexico unexpectedly on Thursday.

“Why?” I asked Rachel when she told me the news that Corman had left.

She smiled impishly and said, “I can’t tell you. We’re going to announce it tomorrow.”

Whether that announcement ever came or not is up in the air, I didn’t hear anything about it until I bumped into a local festival staffer at the Awards banquet on Saturday night who informed me that Corman had been looking at someone while walking down some stairs, missed a step and fell face first onto the pavement breaking his nose in the process.

“Oh man,” the staffer said, closing his eyes, “There was blood everywhere. It was all over. I thought he was going to die or something.” The man shrugs his shoulders and says, “But he just needed eight stitches on his nose.”

“Just?” I ask.

“You should have seen his nose, amigo,” the man grins.

“So there’s no truth that hookers had anything to do with Corman’s hasty retreat?” I ask, jokingly. The staffer looks surprised at first but then realizes that I’m joking and confirms that, no, hookers did not have anything to do with Corman’s absence.

With the Shrek 2 after party in full swing, I say my goodbyes—Kirk and Greg are still MIA—and head down to catch a cab back to the Sheraton. I do my research and go to bed. I barely make it through an episode of The Family Guy before I crash.