the 941

Saturday night’s Reel Experience at the Lake Club, planned mostly as an outdoor event, was driven indoors by a sudden downpour. One result of this squeeze was that I found myself pinned between two circular tables and a smiling woman whom everyone was photographing.

“We’re surrounded by sycophants,” I said to a friend. “Who is this woman?”

“I think she’s from Mad about You,” she said, squinting.

“No, that’s not it. But she’s from something.” I studied the thinly sliced flank steak on my fork. “Something where she had an accent, like a New York accent.”

“I don’t know.”

We sought the wisdom of karaoke dynamo and SFF Director of Programming Tom Hall. “Her name’s Nora Dunn,” he said. “She used to be on Saturday Night Live, but she’s been in a lot of features and stuff since then. She’s in Certifiably Jonathan, the film that showed this afternoon. Did you see it?”

“Oh yeaaah,” I said. “She was Wayne’s mom in the Wayne’s World sketch. Cool!”

I was determined to talk with her. For about twenty minutes I did this funky stutter-step dance as I approached her but then realized I had nothing to say, or decided I was too nervous, or was cut off by a more surefooted socialite.

Finally, my time came. I shook her hand, then half-cringed in anticipation of a bodyguard’s tackle. When none came, we got to talking. I had trouble forming words, so the gracious Ms. Dunn took over.

First, she demonstrated a new theorem: Sarasota is only snobbish if you’re not coming straight from Los Angeles.

“It’s sophisticated and elegant without being pretentious at all,” she said of our little village, in which she was enjoying her first extended stay.

She told me, as she’s been telling everybody, that our film festival is much better than Cannes or Sundance, which has lost its passion for independent film.

“When you go to Sundance, it’s a nightmare,” she said. “It’s been invaded by movie stars.”

In the same vein, she enjoyed the premier of Certifiably Jonathan because “the audience was there to enjoy the movie, not to judge it.”

That’s all. I suppose I should add that I was writing Nora Dunn’s quotes on the back of my valet ticket, and at this point I ran out of space. This may seem a shameful move, but I only resorted to it after the one-minute voice recorder on my cell phone timed out.

Send your donations to 1383 5^th Street, and I swear I’ll purchase a tape recorder for the next installment of “In awkward conversation.”

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