))((

The back and forth: It’s a theme in the heavily Portland-referencing Me and You and Everyone We Know, and it’s also the chorus of a song by Kay Kay, from Portland, with Larry Blackmon from Cameo on cameo, as I recall. My head kept singing it while I watched the movie. Completely unrelated aside.
So I saw it tonight finally, on wide-wale corduroy seats in the screening room in the basement of a fancy hotel. Stuck my soda in the soda cozy in the seat in front of me. Sat my seat back and there it was.
There is nothing but generosity in Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, (which you must see in NYC on June 16, 17, and 19 and NuARt in LA and Century Theatre in Chicago on June 24, 25, 26). It struck flint and impulse in my heart, like you and me and everyone we know have to get “carpe diem” tattooed on the insides of our eyelids because yesterday and tomorrow don’t exist. WE ARE ALL BRIGHT SPECKS OF LIGHT! You know, that kind of thing… I’m pretty sure I went three octaves higher, and felt a little bit like I had remembered I’d lost something but it was the exact right time to find it. I wanted to expand, because I am living and breathing and flawed and blindingly awesome and stoopid-real, and no film I’ve seen has presented such a vision of hope and aliveness that is as beautiful and unromanticized, but still romantic cause it’s so human. Every millisecond of it is magic and OH! And so hopeful and heart-full, so unique in its loving of humanity when the hate/hell/dethfuck is codified and cool-ified and written into constitutions, I just wanted to grab everyone around me and kiss… and I did. Because the film is not about wishing, but doing.
I won’t elaborate because I don’t want to spoil it for you because I want you to SEE THIS FILM NOW. Take your babies and your boyfriends and your Tia Andrea and Jean Gray, your (my) alcoholic neighbor from upstairs. There is nothing to stop you from being alive, other than self-immolation and/or the fake feeling that you don’t deserve it… the wearing of too-tight shoes, a hand aflame to mark a moment, a bird in a picture frame in a tree. Macaroni.
If you are the anonymous person who texted me at 6 am saying: “HACKEY SACK IS BACK, YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST, BOOYAH,” who are you? Please email julianneshepherd@yahoo.com.