Teenage Vacation Week

Photos by Janicza Bravo. Featuring Anna Rose Hopkins and Mireya Lucio.

Lately I’ve been thinking back on the first film I ever produced, Teenage Vacation Week. I was also in it. In those days I thought I’d always act in everything I produced, but I realized it’s too much meshuga to futz with. You gotta wear so many hats: actor, producer, writer, blah blah blah. And with all those hats, the higher you climb, the heavier they get on your head, and the harder it is to get up those last few rungs on that ladder to success.

Teenage Vacation Week featured two young starlets who used to be on The Mighty Mouse Show. Maybe you’ve heard of them: Anna Rose Hopkins and Mireya Lucio. Of course you’ve heard of them! They’re huge! They wanted to do something on the edgier side to change their images. Something like the French have been doing lately. That’s why this movie was perfect for them.

Teen Vacation Week! Boy, was it great. I played Jim Francino: A low-down, dirty pimp who had a thing for naval outfits. He convinces these two teens who are on vacation for a week to do a bunch of low-down and dirty things. It was a hit. Made my career. Made Anna’s and Mireya’s. Harry Nilsson even wrote a huge hit song that won a bunch of Grammys. As I get into a stressful frame of mind these days I just think of that song, and all the mental garbage gets washed away like a Mexican hosing down my lawn.

I can just hear it now:

Teenage Vacation Week
It’s not for the weak 
If you’re a teen and you need a break
Take a Teen Vacation Week

Teenage Vacation Week
All this cocaine makes me tweak 
I tweak for a week 
I don’t even speak
That’s Teenage Vacation Week

Teee-een Vacations are sen-say-tions
As long as no one gets killed
I think you need some ed-u-cation
On how to sit back and chill

’Cause it’s Teenage Vacation Week. 
I get so tweaked 
So much I can’t speak
Drugs will be drugs and sex will be sex
And it’s all the best
Because it’s Teeeeen-ageeeee Va-cay-tionnnnn Weeeeeeeek

Beautiful, huh? Those memories clear a lot of the cobwebs. Those memories keep me going. Those memories are really all I’ve got.

This is the 12th chapter of Combover, Brett Gelman’s new novel about Hollywood, the beauty of the Jewish tradition, baldness, and murder. We will be serializing it through April.

Previously - Laugh Pig Laugh