Made it to Nashville

Like most people who do Balkans road trips, ours began in Nashville, Tennessee.  After a delay getting out of LAX due to crew availability, maintenance, and a runway closure, we arrived in Nashville just under two hours behind schedule. Our seats were in the last row, but as a wise American captain in the jumpseat once told me, "The worst seat on the plane still beats the best one in the terminal." As the recent news can remind you, getting a seat (and staying there) is half the battle. After getting our rental car and checking in to the hotel, we set off to the Nashville Film Festival to get our packets. We displayed our lanyards to let people know that we are totes important. Nicole's says "Screenplay Finalist." Mine just has my name, though it should say, "Loyal Assistant." Thanks to our elite status, we enjoyed a free happy hour sponsored by Goose Island Beer. Honestly I was expecting Bud Light, so this was an upgrade.

Then we got some dinner from a nearby food truck. We both had bbq sandwiches, served with tots, pickles, and as you can see in the picture. . . His grace. We ate rather hastily because we went to a showing of a movie called, The

Exception, starring Christopher Plummer. He plays the exiled Kaiser during the early stages of World War Two, not to be confused with The Sound of Music. Anyway, a Nazi is assigned to be his body guard, a British spy is operating in the area, and hijinks obviously ensue. But guess who's coming to dinner? It's Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler! Again, not to be confused with The Sound of Music.

After the film, we took a short break and then saw some film shorts. Nicole and I both agreed that most of them were missing something, like perhaps a coherent story. This was something that was a problem in film school since people wanted to make something "deep" and ended up not making any sense. "I wanted to leave the ending up to audience interpretation," can only get you so far. We walked in a little late, so we missed an Italian short film called The Penalty. One of the filmmakers was there to do a Q&A and at one point said, "The final image of the soccer ball was seen as too strong by my filmmaking partners and led to a lot of disagreement." Nicole and I looked at each other wondering how that soccer ball could ever possibly be such a strong ending. We will never know. After engaging in snarky commentary about the other shorts, we drove back to the hotel and called it a night.