Confession #4: Fact: I Really Do Love Coconuts.
I had a job a couple of years ago where I was cracking coconuts. It was for packaging, so the creative that I was instructed to follow had a nice portion of coconut cracked in a particular way so I needed to match the creative as close to exact as possible.
This meant I needed to be a coconut cracking master, which up until this job, I was not. So after much research, I figured out that I needed a machete.
Now growing up, both my parents keep one in the trunk of their cars. My father was a green beret, so he’s always prepared for everything... my mom on the other hand keeps one not for anything nefarious, but because she likes to find plants on the side of the road and collect them (you never know when you might find asparagus in the ditches, but the ditch-digging asparagus foragers on the Eastern Shore of Maryland can be rather territorial, so a machete means you mean business).
But back to my coconut job... I went out to find my own machete. I ended up finding one, but with one issue: It didn’t fit into any of my bags... I was going to have to carry this bad boy strapped to my back.
My shoot was in Baltimore, and like any city it has good and bad parts. This just so happened to be shortly after the riots, so everyone was on edge... and there I was all of 5 feet 2 inches strutting the streets with my machete strapped to my back, like I was ready for the apocalypse.
That day no one stood near me in the crosswalks, the usual street hagglers weren’t in the begging mood, and I had no fear walking alone in the parking garage at the end of the day.
Although people’s distance could have been from the strange look I was giving off…
Me, eyes darting around rapidly like...
I know you see that I have this, do you see the thing strapped to my back, I know you see it, look at. Loooook attt itttt!