THE PROMISE OF NEW YORK
What were you doing in 2005? Do you even remember? I'll tell you what I was doing. I was managing Christopher X. Brodeur's mayoral campaign. It was a true American adventure. We were dating at the time and we decided to do the campaign together. It was a lot of work and it ran us both literally ragged. I got very sick and lost about 20 pounds. (For those of you who know me and my beloved posterior, you remember how skinny and gross I looked.) It tested every fiber of what we were made of and what we were capable of and it was an amazing learning experience. I strongly recommend that every single person either run for political office or work on a political campaign. Maybe they should even have that be a required class in high school, or maybe an elective instead of gym or something.
During the campaign, our friend Cassie Hohn's boyfriend Raul Alvarez decided that he was going to make a documentary about Christopher. He followed us all over the place with his camera and he captured footage of us doing just...about...everything. At some point he decided to expand the documentary and make it be about a few of the fringe NYC mayoral candidates instead of just about Christopher.
I got to see the finished product for the first time this past Sunday night and I cried.
It was so wild to see a year chunk of my life captured on video and then shown back to me, set to neat music. It was hard to watch in some parts. For example, there's a scene where detectives come to our apartment to arrest Christopher (for a misdemeanor harassment charge relating to Observer Journalist Ben Smith) and I lose my temper after hours of being holed up in my apartment, late for work, threatened with my own arrest for "obstruction of justice", and waiting for Christopher to surrender. Through the film you can see the bags under my eyes and how tired, exhausted and depressed I look. (God, I look hot now!) Christopher is a really interesting person. He's brilliant, funny and a terrific thinker. But I wouldn't date him again for all the pee in Chinatown.
I'm in a lot of the documentary. There are also appearances by Bob Powers, Liam McEneaney, Mike Amato, Village Voice journalist Jarret Murphy, The four "main" democratic candidates of the 2005 election (Gifford Miller, C.Virginia Fields, Anthony Weiner and Freddy Ferrer) The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players and others. It's a good film. It's well-done and I recommend it. It's funny, sad, enthralling and educational. Christopher is really great in it, too, and I say that even as a person who doesn't particularly like him.
If you'd like to see it, you have a chance this Friday, June 6th in the NJ International Film Festival. Here are the details:
http://www.njfilmfest.com/
And the documentary website:
http://www.thepromiseofnewyork.com
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