You know it's bad weather when...

...there is snow INSIDE your Amtrak train!

I'm not kidding. Took the train from DC to New Jersey this AM. At 7:30am. It was the only train running due to the weather further north. We desperately wanted to reschedule but the client asked us to keep the meeting. We were bummed because we could see that almost no trains were running and just KNEW that we'd no doubt get to Jersey, but would find it almost impossible to get back home at the end of the day. {foreshadowing....}

Anyway, to impress upon you the gravity of our desire to cancel the trip, need I say more than "the snow was blowing INSIDE the train"? Whenever those doors at the end of each car would open, you could look out and see about a one-foot high drift of snow inside the train. At each stop, the conductors would take a snow shovel and a broom and clear the exits so people could get on and off. You couldn't really travel to the club car--or any other car for that matter--unless you wanted to wade through shin-deep snow between cars.

So we kept the appointment but arrived an hour and a half late. And how did our meeting go, you ask? Well, we arrived to find that most of his staff had stayed home due to their 15 inches of snowfall, so our "crucial meeting" turned into a "chat" with our contact and, like, two employees who owned 4-wheel drives. Yes, friends, I got up at 5am to travel for 4 hours on a train to have a 2 hour meeting that turned out to not be a meeting at all. You have never seen me more charming and effervescent with a client:

"And the Oscar for Best Actress in a Bad Client Drama goes to E. For her role as a put-upon consultant who traversed far and wide for her clients, through rain and sleet and snow and dark of night. Only to wind up stuck in the Trenton train station for 4 and a half hours, and finally returning home from her 90 minute meeting just 14 hours after she left. Her performance of a happy, chatty, client-focused professional was the highlight of this tragi-comi-drami-noiry career-defining work."

My acceptance speech would be a send-up, an homage if you will, to all the lame speeches you will hear in March when the real thing happens:

"First of all, I want to thank the Academy for naming themselves “the Academy” so that I wouldn’t have to thank something so pedestrian-sounding as “the club” or as ominous-sounding as “the pentavirate.” “The Academy” has that erudite ring to it that all celebrities crave. So thank you for your foresight in not being The Filmsters or The Needy Thesps. I also want to give it all up to God for giving me this gift, as well as my lord and savior Jesus Christ who has given me the opportunity to act in movies that denigrate women, show off my rack, and promote violence in, and a cultural coarsening of, our society. I want to thank my mom, to whom I owe everything—especially my constant need for approval and validation from external and meaningless sources like The Academy and Entertainment Tonight. I want to thank all the lackeys around me who tell me I’m so hot when we all know, that if you saw me pass you on the street and I wasn’t famous, you most likely wouldn’t look twice. I want to thank the wardrobe departments for those bust-enhancing inserts in my costumes, the clinicians for the botox and the subtle nose bridge “adjustment,” the photographers for the airbrushing, and the august Rabbi Shmuley Schneersonmendelsohnman who introduced me to the wondrous powers of ‘Kabbalah For Celebrities: Ineffable Mystic Consciousness in Three Days or Less’. Oh! I’m running out of time! So let me just say thank you to all of my fans, my friends…and who am I forgetting…oh yeah—my agent, without whom, more than even G-d, nothing is possible. Thank you everybody! Free Tibet!”

Phew! Now I feel better! And after reading that little psychotic break, I’m sure you are as eager to have my business travel minimized as I am.