Kevin Connolly – Page 2 – IAMNOTASTALKER

December 3, 2009December 2, 2009

Priscilla’s Coffee Tea & Gifts

Many years ago, I was enrolled in an acting school in Burbank that was located just down the street from a little coffee shop named Priscilla’s Coffee Tea & Gifts. I logged quite a bit of time at the coffee house, as my classmates and I would often grab a coffee and hang out there before and after class. So, when the place popped up in an episode of Desperate Housewives a few weeks ago, I literally almost fell out of my chair! Since I hadn’t been to Priscilla’s in almost eight years – and because I’m always on the lookout for any excuse to visit a coffee house – I decided I just had to stalk the place. So, yesterday I headed out to Burbank – laptop in hand – to spend the morning blogging and drinking coffee at Priscilla’s. And, let me tell you, the place was absolutely JAM PACKED when I arrived. There literally wasn’t an empty seat in the entire house. I was shocked that the the place would be so crowded on a weekday morning, but that’s a definite testament to how good Priscilla’s coffee is. 🙂 Anyway, after ordering my iced latte, I retreated to a nearby corner and waited around for a table to open up. Well, I wasn’t standing there more than 45 seconds when an extremely kind gentleman walked up and offered to share his table with me!! How incredibly nice is that? I almost couldn’t believe it, as people in L.A. aren’t usually that overtly friendly. But, from what I noticed yesterday, that’s just par for the course at Priscilla’s – people there are just plain nice! 🙂 So, my new friend and I sat there for a while – me blogging away on my laptop, him studying his lines for an upcoming addition, both of us enjoying some extremely good coffee. 🙂

Surprisingly enough, when I used to hang out at Priscilla’s many years back, I wasn’t a coffee drinker. In fact, until yesterday morning, I had never actually tasted any of Priscilla’s coffee and I honestly didn’t have high hopes that the place would compare to my beloved Starbucks. So, you can imagine my surprise when I tasted my latte yesterday morning and discovered it was JUST as good as Starbucks, if not better! It was so tasty, in fact, that as soon as I finished my first cup, I got in line to order another! LOL And it was while I was waiting for my second drink that I asked the barista if it would be alright to snap a few photos of the store. I really wasn’t sure how she would respond, because as I’ve mentioned before, for whatever reason, many restaurants in L.A. don’t allow any sort of interior photography. Well, not only did she tell me it was OK to snap pictures, but she also asked if I wanted her to take a photograph of me in the shop!!!!! I mean could this place be any greater???? The above photo is the one she took, and the other barista on duty even agreed to pose with me for it! LOVE IT! 🙂

Priscilla’s Coffee Tea & Gifts has actually been in business since the early 1970s, at which time it was operated out of a former gas station. In 1993, due to a growing demand, the coffee house moved to a larger location on Riverside Drive in Burbank where it has remained ever since. Besides coffee, Priscilla’s also serves up teas, pastries, sandwiches, salads, and even gelato. It’s also a great place to browse as they have numerous gift items and greeting cards for sale. And the fact that the place has free wi-fi and plays 80s music (including Michael Jackson!!!) is pretty much just icing on the cake! 🙂 Priscilla’s is a SUPER cute little coffee shop and I honestly cannot recommend stalking it enough!!!! In fact, I’m thinking of becoming a regular there! 🙂

Priscilla’s first popped up in the episode of Desperate Housewives entitled “The Coffee Cup”, which aired on November 15th. Quite a few scenes from the episode took place at Priscilla’s, which stood in for “The Coffee Cup Bakery & Cafe” on the show. It first appeared in the scene in which Julie Mayer (aka Andrea Bowen) has a highly awkward encounter with her married boyfriend’s wife, Angie Bolen (aka Drea de Matteo), while waiting in line for coffee.

Later in the episode, Angie confronts her husband Nick (aka Jeffrey Nordling) at Priscilla’s, after she sees him flirting with a Coffee Cup barista named Emily Portsmith.

And, finally, at the very end of that episode, Priscilla’s shows up once again as the spot where Nick makes a phone call to the police to let them know he is thinking of turning himself in for an as-yet unnamed crime . . .

. . . and as the spot where barista Emily is strangled.

And, in the following episode, which was entitled “Would I Think of Suicide?”, Priscilla’s shows up yet again! It is featured in the episode’s opening scene, in which the manager of The Coffee Cup enters the store in the early morning hours only to discover Emily lying dead on the floor.

In a subsequent scene, Julie Mayer and her friends discuss Emily’s death out in front of Pricilla’s.

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Besides being a filming location, Pricilla’s is also something of a celebrity hotspot, thanks to its proximity to the area studios. Just a few of the stars who have been spotted there recently include Jay Leno, Ben Affleck and Kevin Connolly. Randomly enough, while I was attending acting school in Burbank, I happened to see a television show on the E! Network (for the life of me I cannot remember what it was called!) that featured paparazzi videos of celebrities performing day to day activities. One of the videos featured an old clip of my girl Jen Aniston during the early days of Friends grabbing a cup of coffee at Priscilla’s. And, let me tell you, when I saw that video I just about had a heart attack over the fact that Jen had visited the very same coffee shop that I was hanging out in at the time!! 🙂 What can I say, the girl’s got good taste! 🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Pricilla’s Gourmet Coffee and Teas is located at 4150 Riverside Drive in Burbank. You can visit their website here.

February 9, 2009February 17, 2009

I Am Just So That Into It!

On Friday night, literally the second my boyfriend got off work, I dragged him right out to see new movie He’s Just Not That Into You. He said afterwards that if he had known it was a two-hour-and-nine-minute-long-movie, he never would have agreed to see it. LOL Needless to say, he just wasn’t that into the movie. But I, on the other hand, was! I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT! LOVE LOVE LOVED IT! I was practically skipping out of the theatre afterwards, with a huge grin on my face, thinking to myself that movies like HJNTIY are the reason I moved to Hollywood. Movies like that make me want to act. 🙂 I’m not aiming to be the next Meryl Streep and I have no desire to be the darling of the independent film circuit – I just want to make people laugh and walk out of that movie theatre with a big ol’ smile on their face. 🙂 That’s the kind of acting I want to do – and HJNTIY is EXACTLY the kind of movie I hope to someday be a part of. So, in case you didn’t get it the first few times – I LOVED THIS MOVIE! 🙂

So, yesterday, after I found one of the movie’s filming locations, I, of course, ran right out to stalk it. 🙂 Although the movie is set in the East Coast city of Baltimore, most of the filming took place – of course – in Los Angeles. Only two weeks of filming actually occured in Baltimore and only four of the HJNTIY actors (Bradley Cooper, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Connelly, and Kevin Connolly) made the trip out to the East Coast. The film’s writers, Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn, decided to set their story in Baltimore because they had never seen it done before. Most romantic comedies are set in either New York or Los Angeles and Marc and Abby were hoping to shake things up a bit. Since Marc had lived in Baltimore for ten years before moving to L.A. to pursue a screenwriting career, he knew the coastal city well and thought it was the perfect choice to set their story.

But since I couldn’t very well run right out to Baltimore to stalk HJNTIY, I decided to try to find some of the movie’s West Coast locations. I really wanted to stalk the coffee shop where Drew Barrymore met Kevin Connolly towards the end of the movie, but I struck out on that one. Instead, after a bit of Googling, I happened to find these paparazzi photos of Scarlett Johansson and Bradley Cooper filming a scene at a grocery store in Burbank. From there it was just a matter of finding the right grocery store. And sure enough, I did! 🙂

In real life the grocery store is called Handy Market and it is a very cute and very tiny little shop. According to one of the Handy Market checkers, back in October of 2007 the store was shut down for a full day and a half for the filming of the two short scenes that took place there. Scenes were filmed both inside the store – at the first check-out stand and in a few of the aisles – and outside on the market’s exterior West facing wall.

It’s not hard to see why producers chose to use Handy Market. According to this article about the filming of HJNTIY , director Ken Kwapis said “One of the things that I love about Baltimore is that the texture of the city can be summed-up in one word: brick. The brick textures of the interiors and the exteriors are, to me, so expressive, so distinctive. Being a resident of Baltimore, you may not realize it, but boy, it’s not easy to find a lot of brick in L.A.” LOL Handy’s all-brick exterior must have made it a shoe-in for being used in the movie.

So, for all of you out there who weren’t like me and didn’t catch HJNTIY on opening night, drop what you’re doing and go see it now! I guarantee you so will be that into it! 🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Burbank’s Handy Market is located at 2514 W. Magnolia Boulevard in – you guessed it! – Burbank. The Home Depot store located at 16800 Roscoe Boulevard in Van Nuys was also used in He’s Just Not That Into You, although I most likely won’t stalk that location. 🙂 My boyfriend would probably be really excited if I did, though. LOL

February 4, 2009June 16, 2011

The He’s Just Not That Into You Movie Premiere

I am currently waiting on pins and needles for the movie He’s Just Not That Into You to hit theatres this upcoming Friday. The New Line Cinema film has all the makings of a hit – it stars my girl Jen and is based on an episode of fave television show Sex and the City. Come on – what more could a girl ask for?? 🙂 The “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little” episode of Sex and the City that featured that now infamous line “He’s just not that into you!” is one of my all-time-favorite episodes. And I absolutely loved the book by SATC creative consultant Greg Behrendt and SATC executive story editor Liz Tuccillo that came out of that episode. I find it absolutely mind boggling that Greg and Liz took one line – one line – from a hit television show and not only turned it into a best-selling self-help book, but also a major motion picture starring numerous A-List celebs. How inspiring! Who knows, maybe one day a hit movie will be created out of a line from one of my blog posts! Hey, a girl can dream, can’t she? 🙂

According to fave book Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell , the idea behind the line “He’s just not that into you!” came about one morning while a group of SATC writers were sitting around their offices getting ready to start their day. One of the writers was asking for advice about a man she was dating who had been sending her “mixed signals”. Someone happened to ask Greg Behrendt, the only straight male in the room, for his perspective on the matter. And that is when Greg uttered the now ubiquitous line: “He’s just not that into you.” The SATC writers were absolutely intrigued by this line of reasoning and an idea was born. And the rest, as they say, is history! So yesterday when some friends and I stumbled onto the world premiere of He’s Just Not That Into You while grabbing a coffee before our acting class I just about keeled over with excitement! 🙂

The premiere was being held at Mann’s Chinese Theatre – the movie house where almost all Hollywood premieres are held – and the red carpet had been set up right in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. To watch the event fans had to stand on the opposite side of the street behind some steel barriers where the view, unfortunately, was not the best. As you can see in the above photograph, several large screens were placed every few feet along the length of the red carpet for the actors to pose in front of. Much to my dismay, the screens also majorly blocked our view of all the hoopla. LOL

For some incredibly odd reason I have never watched a premiere before – I know, unbelievable, huh? – so I was extremely excited that my first red carpet event would be starring my girl Jen. 🙂 My friends and I parked ourselves just across the street from the red carpet and it wasn’t long before the celebs started arriving. 🙂 The first star we spotted was Ginnifer Goodwin (pictured above), who I absolutely LOVED in fave movie Win A Date With Tad Hamilton. The bright lights on the red carpet made it really hard for me to take photographs, though, so unfortunately the pics didn’t come out very well.

Next up was Drew Barrymore who is absolutely adorable in person. 🙂 She kept turning around to wave to the crowd and would pop her head in between the red carpet screens to smile at us. She was super, super cute in person and seemed very friendly! And it was right around that time – are you sitting down for this – that my camera died! I am not kidding! I managed to snap some pics of Drew using my camera phone, but of course they didn’t turn out very well. Let that be a lesson to me – ALWAYS have my camera charged! LOL After my camera died one of my friends said it was a sign that we should leave the premiere and head to our acting class – which we were already almost a half an hour late for. LOL While talking about the fact that we were so late for class the girl standing next to us said that she, too, was missing a class to watch the premiere. LOL So like the dutiful student that I am, I left the premiere and headed to class – WITHOUT seeing Jen! 🙁 Yes, you read that right. Now that’s dedication if I’ve ever seen it! LOL

For those of you who have never been, I HIGHLY recommend stalking a red carpet premiere. It was SO MUCH FUN! Even though we had to stand pretty far away, I still felt like we were right in the middle of everything that was happening. Besides Drew and Ginnifer, we also got to see Justin Long and Kevin Connolly. 🙂 You can see some high quality red carpet pics on this website where it looks like quite a few celebs – including Jennifer Aniston – walked across the street to sign autographs after making their way through the press line. So bummed I missed it! 🙁

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Mann’s Chinese Theatre is located at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard smack dab in the middle of Hollywood. You can visit the Mann’s Chinese website to find out about upcoming premieres being held at the famous theatre. The premiere for the new Friday the 13th movie will be taking place there next Monday, February 9th, at 7pm, with the celeb arrivals most likely starting at 6pm.