Mel's in town.

It's Friday, I didn't feel like packing lunch this morning, and I have been craving a burrito for a solid 24 hours. So Minh and I decided* to walk into downtown Northampton for lunch at my favorite burrito spot.

Coincidentally, Mel Gibson is in the area this week, filming Edge of Darkness. (They actually had an open casting call for extras in August, but since they were not seeking adorable half-Asian toddlers, we didn't attend.)

Say what you will about Mel and his movies, but I think it's pretty cool to have him filming right near home. The movie crew has set up camp at Atkins in Amherst (with lots of trailers inside of which I assume are real, live actors) and will also be filming next week in good old Sunderland, home of Frontier Pizza. And next Tuesday they are shutting down part of Main Street in Noho to film Mel exiting the courthouse and driving down the street. I may just have to get accidentally stuck in the craziness on my way to work that day, and need to pull over and watch the filming for a while.

And on the way to lunch today we saw a very fancy, dark-windowed bus drive by that most certainly contained Mel himself. Then we walked by a stalky man, lingering on a street corner, clad in all black with loads of camera equipment on his person and at his feet. Minh assured me that this man was paparazzi. There were also six more of these camera-clad folks ordering themselves burritos for lunch.

In addition, today must have been some sort of school holiday or half-day because the burrito place was overrun with middle-schoolers. They were everywhere--in line, at the counter, seated in booths. Some of them were pooling their money with friends to be able to split a burrito and a side of chips.

So what this all means is that, in a crowded downtown restaurant, Minh and I were the only ones over the age of 11 who didn't have cameras slung around our necks.







*Actually, I talked him into it. he's not a big fan of burritos. But he's a big fan of me, so he agreed.