Pop That Bottle Now, Not Later
This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I bought a fancy bottle of Champagne to open the day that I sold my first script. How triumphant the moment would be, I imagined: Me, shaking hands with a bunch of suit-clad execs in some backlot office; me, rushing home to call my agent; me, grasping that bottle, chilled and ready for pouring, and, finally, me, shuddering at that revelatory pop! as I opened it, letting its foam and fizz land where they would because, screw it, I could pay someone else to clean the kitchen now—I had made it.
Like so many Hollywood tales, however, this one also contained a few plot holes: For one, to call that bottle “fancy” was a stretch—it probably retailed for about $30. And actually, it wasn’t Champagne, technically, just “French sparkling wine.” But what is storytelling if not embellishment? What is Tinseltown if not a towering shrine to duct tape and showmanship? I peeked at my eager bottle every time I opened my fridge, and a little part of me, the hopeful part of me, thought, Any day now.
“Any day now” is the siren song of Los Angeles. So many of us here—actors, writers, directors with day jobs—whisper it to ourselves like a mantra. “Any day now,” every time I punch my steering wheel to turn on my shitty car, “any day now” every time I remove another cricket from my shitty studio apartment. The secret about “any day now” that has been so cleverly concealed is that it actually takes years—if it happens at all.
I’ve been in L.A. for almost three years, and while I have still not sold a script, I’ve accomplished other things. I won a big writing contest. I signed with a great management team. I finished draft after draft of pilots and features and short films, writing them on weekends and evenings to leave space for my primary job (as a professional writer for a newspaper). Twenty-two-year-old me, serving Reubens at a deli in Ohio, would explode from excitement if she knew that this was her future. And present-day me can acknowledge how much effort each of those milestones demanded, knowing that each one also brought me one step closer to my ultimate goal. But I didn’t pop the bottle for any of those occasions. In fact, I didn’t celebrate those accomplishments at all. Would Captain Ahab drink Champagne (or even “Champagne”) for catching some smaller whale? Don’t be daft. It was Moby Dick or naught at all.
Of course, Captain Ahab is not the hero of that tale. And I wasn’t treating myself as the hero of mine. And so I learned the hard way: Sparkling wines don’t improve with time. Or, the upscale vintages do, but the cheapies, the ones like what I had, those ones get worse. They go flat. They turn sour. They last a matter of years, if that.
It was a writer friend of mine who told me this, and she would know, because she hasn’t sold a script yet either, and so she’s earning money as the beverage manager at a bar. She winced when I told her how long I’d kept my bottle: “Well … it’s probably OK still, if you stored it the right way.” I didn’t even know there was a “right way” to store it. Apparently, not in the fridge.
I decided to drink the wine the next weekend with her, my un-shot messenger, on a last-minute trip to Santa Barbara. There was no real occasion—just two old friends escaping the city—and we sipped it from a cheap motel on the water before heading out to dinner. The wine didn’t make a sound when I opened it because it had already lost its fizz. We clinked plastic cups and I kept my toast simple: “To celebrating the little things!”
