My name is Penny and I live in Lennoxville, Quebec, Canada, (although my address due to regional changes states North Hatley, this point will be useful later on). Johnny has been my inspiration for years as I have a bit of social anxiety and by seeing and learning about Johnny and his strength to believe in himself and make his decisions in life based on his beliefs has given me the strength to overcome some of my problems faced everyday in my work as well as in my social life. I have seen every movie he has made that is available in Canada, (missing – The Brave, Lost in La Mancha, The Source???), I have got them all in my collection and love the variety of his work. Now, do you believe in fate? For me, (and this sounds a bit physco), but Johhny kind of felt like a missing piece to my puzzle and every one of my friends, family, husband too, know of my deep admiration for Johnny. I was going to try to make this story short but I have been known to go on and on, you know those messages that say, after the beep, leave a short message, well I am there worst nightmare. A year ago I changed jobs after 7 years with a company, I am in customer service/sales, and my largest customers closed there doors (GM), and I went home. I had been traveling an hour to work west of my home town. Two months after I was off, I was offered this great job in a small town 20 minutes from my town but the opposite way where I by pass the intersection for the town of North Hatley. This job is great, the people are great and my red faced, scared to death of everyone seemed to open up a bit to these people and when I was asked to do a presentation at a seminar I freaked but then looked at a clipping of Johnny from a local paper posted on my bulletin board by a co-worker who had found an article of Johnny in a French paper and had pinned it to my board knowing he was my idol, and gained the strength to go on and believe in myself. (It went pretty well by the way). In the month of April I think, the newspaper released an article that Johnny Depp was coming to the Montreal and to North Hatley to film ‘Secret Window’, we never ever get big stars out our way and for it to turn out to be my missing puzzle piece, Johnny was just crazy. I must have got around eight e-mails and phone calls that day from people trying to be the first ones to surprise me with this news. From then on I just thought wow, what if I could see this guy? I have way too much respect for him to approach him (and then with my anxiety problem), but I would just love to see him and be in his presence.
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since i didn’t know what time the premiere was supposed to start i wasn’t really sure when to go so i decided to go up the the theater at around 3:30 in the afternoon. i looked around trying to find axl, who said he was going to try to go, or cassady from the zone board. she was the only one who i knew for sure was going. she had said she was taking her small son with her so i looked for someone with a child, but couldn’t find one. my only other option was to go up to everybody there and ask if they were axl or cassady. i decided against that since i didn’t want the security guards, who outnumbered everybody else at the time, to think i was strange. i asked a few of them where to stand and was told to stand behind a barricade between the entrance for the red carpet trekkers and the main theater entrance. there were some photographers behind me. i don’t know why they were in that particular spot and lost track of them later on. but i think they were the lower level photogs, the paparazzi, if you will. i had become friendly with the closest guard and chatted with him frequently. i told him i was there representing the grandmothers for johnny crowd, which made him laugh. i don’t have any grandchildren myself but some of my friends from this board and the zone board who had encouraged me to go do have grandchildren and i’m certainly old enough so i made myself their rep. the guard got a big kick out of that and told people all afternoon that i was the “grandmothers for johnny” leader. one woman who stopped to ask him what was going on actually looked at me and said “are you johnny depp’s grandmother?” i got a big laugh out of that, because even though i’m biologically old enough to be his mother, if i started very early, there’s no way i’m old enough to be his grandmother. it helped pass the time, though. and i kept asking the guard if i was in the right place and he kept telling me i was.
i had been there for a long time. i don’t know how long really, but was beginning to get tired when all of a sudden a man came from around the side of the theater with several women and girls and a couple of men. he got some of the guards to help him and they dragged out another barricade and put it and all those people in front of me. i was very upset. i asked the guard i’d been friendly with what was happening. who were those people? he said they were supposed to be press people. i knew that couldn’t be completely true unless some of them were there representing their school newspapers. i was told that it didn’t matter how long i had been there i still had to stay behind the second barricade.
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