Family, Redux.

 For some reason, this is what I imagine 
a crew Thanksgiving would be like...

A little less than a year ago, I wrote a holiday post about family. It wasn't about the Aunts, Uncles and cousins I see once or twice a year around this time, but it was about the make-shift families we find on set. We spend more time at work than we do in our own homes, so it's only natural that we'd form tight bonds with those in the trenches with us. The result is, of course, a sense a family.

And a family is what I found on that shoot a year ago. While my own family was miles and miles away, scattered in every direction the wind may blow, I found substitutes at work. Uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters... I felt like I had a complete set. And though they definitely don't take the place of the family I grew up with, they were just as good, if not better in some ways.

But where are they now? Like my real, flesh and blood related family, as time passes, they too have scattered in every direction the wind may blow. A few still linger around in the same pools of crew I'll sometimes hop in, and every once in a while, I'll run into one of them randomly on a shoot. And while we and tell each other about our lives since we wrapped all those months ago, I'll catch tid bits of the others in our familial group. "I heard Billy's working on something out in Michigan...." or "Andrea was working on some web stuff..." But for the most part, I have no idea where these people are now.

That doesn't mean I didn't consider them anything less than family when we were shooting. It just means that the show inevitably ended, and with that, we all had to find other shoots to work on. And, just like all the others before it, we will spend more time on those shoots than we do in our own homes, and keeping in touch with our previous "family" will fall to the wayside as we build new bonds on the current show.*

So is, the nature of the beast.

Related reading.


Ps. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!


*And sometimes, you find yourself in a transitional phase where you've lost the bonds with the previous crew, but haven't formed new connections yet either...