oh, balls.

So I came home today, and I found a chartreuse piece of paper taped to the front door of my building. Apparently, they're going to use the alleyway and my building in a Sony commercial. This is what the note said:

MJZ Productions
2201 Carmelina Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90024

July 26, 2005

Dear Residents of the Kearny & Vallejo Street Area, [funny, I was just thinking of changing my name to exactly that]

In coordination with the Film Commission, the San Francisco Police Department and the Mayor's Office, a local San Francisco film crew has been hired to film a national television commercial for SONY in your neighborhood on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005, between the hours of 5:00 am and 3:00 pm.

Okay, so they're filming another commercial around here. Nothing so unusual about that. I read on:

This commercial will have thousands of soft rubber balls cascading down the streets in your neighborhood. [No, really. I'm not making that up. It really said that.] We have a large group of personnel help to help wrangle all these balls when each take is concluded. A host of the balls will be caught in nets.

At this point, I looked around to make sure I wasn't being secretly filmed. This, I thought to myself, I have GOT to see. It was probably the strangest note I had ever seen taped to my front gate. I continued reading:

The overall concept of the commercial requires that we close the streets to the general public and to traffic so we may control the intersection during our shooting. However, WE WILL BE ALLOWING ANY RESIDENT TO DROVE THROUGH OUR SET TO GET TO THEIR RESPECTIVE GARAGE.

If you have any special concerns please feel free to contact us.

Thanking you in advance for your assistance.

Wait, MY assistance? If those muhfukkas think for one minute I'm gonna be running up and down the hills fetching a bunch of goddamn balls rolling around...well, maybe I'll help 'em out a little bit, but you'd better believe I'm gonna try to grab some of those balls.

'Cause I'm so good at it, ya know?

Get it? Ball grabbing?

Oh, whatever. This is gonna be strange. I already saw my building (including my bedroom and living room windows) one night in a Nissan Murano commercial, and of course, that Reese Witherspoon flick they filmed last November (that link is to my photoblog about that whole thing).

Great. Tomorrow, my neighborhood is going to be taken over by a bunch of balls.

Never a dull moment around here.