McAuto!

I was working at the chicken farm and forgot my lunch. Paint was drying on the sets so I got in the car and crossed the A2 Highway to McDonalds. It was 12:30 in the afternoon but I thought they might be closed. 1pm is the usual opening time for McDonalds in Spain. If you eat a burger before 2pm you're a culinary freak. I got brave and decided to try the "McAuto" drive-through. This could be dangerous... I was the only car and customer around and it was my first Spanish drive-through.

I slowly drove past two special windows with their metal shutters closed, one open side-door with guys yelling at each other in Spanish presumably about the proper location for the heaps of paper cups. I paused at the last-chance third window and stuck my head out to order two regular hamburguesas sin queso - just two regular old dinky hamburgers at a Euro apiece. The guy taking my order was African and through a series of hand gestures and frowny faces we figured out what I was trying to order. We were both patient and acheived our goal.

As they cooked the hamburgers I wondered if he told me to pull into the "zone of waiting" advertised by the white stripes on the asphalt ahead of me. As I was trying to remember key phrases of our conversation that I might have missed about the "zone" ahead of me, my McDonald's friend suddenly appeared with the sack of hamburgers carefully folded four times at the top. Before he handed them to me he asked me a question and held the sack closer to his chest. Uh oh. We made some more gestures and both hesitated a bit, gazing mysteriously into each other's squinty faces... Then he said to me very loudly, very slowly "Normal?" I said "Que?" (what!?) squinting into his booth area. He repeated "hamburguesas norMAL?!?" I said "uh...Si!" He smiled and handed me the bag and I pulled ahead into the empty parking lot. Yeah... norMAL would be good - no abnorMAL for me today thanks...

Romans from Remar

This past week was why I am in Spain. We shot a parable of Jesus in the Remar TV facilities. A handful of missionaries, all of our video/audio equipment, and the strong-hearted outcasts at Remar conspired to create a weapon of mass instruction that will be broadcast in many languages in many lands, including all of North Africa, The Gulf States, Turkey, and Mongolia of all places.



Remar is like a Teen Challenge facility but bigger and messier. Their huge facility out near the town of Daganzo serves as a halfway house for the addicted, dispossesed, ignored and outcast people who happen to find themselves in Spain. Think Good Will dropped onto a dusty rock quarry. It is a dystopian, post-modern Christian sanctuary - a refuge for old criminals and reformed gamblers, young girls involved in destructive life-styles etc... Not all are Spaniards.



There are many Croats, Portuguese, Morrocans and just about every color and stripe among them. They put there hearts into playing soldiers, servants and senators because it would help spread the Gospel. We now have an excellent working relationship with the reclusive Pentecostals of Remar.



Hardly anyone spoke the same language on the shoot. We used hand-signals, adjusted each other's costumes, took turns yelling "Silencio" when we needed quiet on the set, and even laughed at each other's funny faces between scenes. It was a long, hard day. Film crews earn their money. Remar took no pay, just the rights to broadcast the Parables series over their Christian TV channel that reaches all across Spain.



The IMM crew ran into problems with head-room during camera shots because my chicken farm-made palace sets where just a bit short due to transportation requirements (We used an old white VW diesel van) but most of us were short so we did not have to use "force perspective" like LOTR.



The Remar studio is big and well-used. Residents there who have chosen to turn their lives in another direction run a 24-hour a day broadcast operation, by contrast, the TBN studio we considered renting two hours away is clean and pristine. Not much work goes on at the TBN studio. They require a $1,000 a day "offering" to use it.



Roamer applied make-up and even played an extra in the shoot. She is the Parables director's favorite Producer's Assistant, kind of like the Managing Editor of a newspaper. I had a chance to put on all the sandals of the Roman soldier extras when not otherwise occupied. Roman sandals are leathery spaghetti like things that are difficult to lace-up, especially on big Portuguese guys wearing little red tunics. But after the week was over, everyone was worn-out but we had all crossed many language barriers for the Kingdom!



This week its back to the Chicken Farm for me. I have to repaint the entire Herodian set to look like a Roman political Forum for the next shoot scheduled for the middle of May. I'm tired - but this time it's a "good" tired. It's what I'm here for.

What. Who. Where

"What is he seeing as he sits and stares so long at a time?
What is he thinking when he wakes up in the middle of the night and sits on the side of the bed hour after hour just whispering to himself?
Who is he seeing when he says 'boys and girls are all in the room'?
Could it be that his mind is going back to when our children were small and needed Mama and Daddy so badly?
Who does he mean when he stands and waits so long for the other Mildred to come?
Is he maybe remembering when she was young and they were doing so much together... so busy raising their seven children... and he was working six nights a week to provide while this younger Mildred was keeping the home?
Where is home?
When he walks the floor all evening begging someone to please take him home...
no this isn't home.
Maybe he's remembering his childhood home... working on the farm with his Dad and Mama and brothers and sisters.
I've often wondered as these Earthly ties so slowly turn him loose.
Maybe the mind somehow realizes this isn't long my home.
Somewhere out there, there must be a place where this mixed-up mind will again be at peace.
But oh God I won't ask why. I know you are still in control and I thank you for our 65 years together..."

- my grandma Mildred wrote this in a letter to me last week. It's about my grandpa who is suffering badly from the effects of dementia. The above picture is from a WW II history book. My grandpa was a mule-skinner with the Texas National Guard and was sent to Burma to fight in the jungle. Many did not come back.

Industrial Light and Magic Chicken Farm

I've been away from the digital world for the past week. We are producing a new series about the parables of Jesus. Our facilities in the next town over are small, so any construction of sets has to be done at the "Nave" (nah-vay). Oddly enough, every storage area in Spain is called a nave. This particular space we use is located on a huge chicken farm that fell out of use long ago.



The place is a huge compound of buildings that can only be reached by passing through the green gate with the holy saint of agriculture on one of the tiled posts. The saint is wearing a brown robe and has a bald spot on top of his head and looks very sad that many chickens died here. Or maybe he is mournfully happy that many Spaniards ate their fill of poultry.



Immediatly on the left is the home of the compound's caretaker. Sometimes he shouts happy things at me when I drive by. I don't understand everything he says. As well as the tiny dog that you can see in the dirt, he has alot of animals, including sheep with big bells that wander around the whole place. Sheep like to stare.



After driving about half a kilometer around the plowed fields and many whitewashed structures you pass the guard dog nearest our building. He is always tied-up. I think he gets off the leash at night and has the run of the place with the other 15 dogs. I make kissy sounds at him when I drive by and I don't think he believes that Volkswagens should be able to make kissy sounds so he dismisses me.



This is the front of our nave. The green door is the only door and it is nearly impossible to open the bolts because they are made of rusty iron and have been repainted too many times. I always bust a knuckle trying to lean and pull on the thing while turning the iron ring that serves as a handle. The floor of the nave is tiled and there are many vents in back. We think this was a chicken-processing area.



This is my work space when I'm constructing sets "old style" with hammers and paint. I've had to paint pillars and columns to look heavy, wall "flats" to look worthy of a palace and wooden boxes to give the illusion of marble slabs. These slabs are the base-pieces for the throne that one of Herod's next-of-kin uses to give orders to his servants. This Parables of Jesus program deserves more than a chicken-farm and me with a bucket of paint. The first series is already being broadcast in at least 11 countries and beamed into Muslim areas via satellite. However, I am very greateful for the quiet times I've had at the chicken farm this week. Imagining and creating marbled patterns, resting a short bit while the first coats of paint dry, eating room-temperature spaghetti out of my plastic dish and listening to the birds exclaim that the green door is open!