The first time I met Matthew McConaughey I was a baby, and I don’t remember it. It might not have even happened, but it’s all I’ve got to tell today on account of the second time I met Matthew McConaughey hasn’t happened yet.
My mother told me she was holding me when we saw MM at the Mayflower in Jackson during the time he was here shooting A Time to Kill.
I doubt it ever really happened because the Mayflower sounds too convenient, and my mother was the person who taught me to suspect any story in which the details are either vague or contrived. Her story is both.
The Mayflower is the kind of place people go to with their out-of-state relatives to show them some local culture. It was in the movie The Help. It was in Ghosts of Mississippi that came out the same year as A Time to Kill. That’s the place everyone would have tried first hoping to catch a glimpse of MM.
Mother says she just went there for lunch with a cousin one day and happened into him. I don’t buy it. She would have been more believable if she’d told me she met him at the Waffle House at 1:00 am or at a Popeye’s or something.
She’s a vegetarian, so if she had said she met him at Popeye’s, and the only reason she went in there was because she had to go to the bathroom and just couldn’t hold out long enough to make it down the street to Taco Bell, that would have been totally plausible.
Also, my mother is the kind of person who might have been at the Waffle House in the middle of the night with a baby. If she wanted to lunch at the Mayflower with her cousin, she would have left me with my granddaddy for the day, especially since it must have been a Saturday considering she was in Jackson and not at work in Laurel, though even that detail has been left out of the story.
Plus, there’s the fact that every time I’ve asked what she ordered that day, she has said, “For God’s sake, I don’t know.”
Why would you not know what you ate the day you met the man who was walking around town in character as Jake Brigance?
And why no picture? Why no signature? I’ve asked that too, and Mother always says, “Now that would have just been tacky, wouldn’t it?”
Details don’t even pry well out of this story. My mother has put very little effort into making it up.
“What did he look like?” I would ask.
“You saw the movie,” she would say. “He looked like Matthew McConaughey.”
“Were you excited?”
My mother always copped a too-good-for-this ‘tude at this point. “I enjoyed meeting him, but why would I get excited? He’s just a person. People place too much emphasis on celebrity in this country.”
My mother once made me stand in line for thirty minutes to get a book signed by a poet that nobody had ever heard of before. I wet my pants while he was signing the book, and my mother pretended she didn’t notice until we got back to the car. In my defense, I was very young. In hers, I think the poet called her and asked her for a date the next week.
She probably still has the book. I do not have a picture of Matthew McConaughey holding me as a baby, but if my mother is not going to give me details, I might as well offer them to myself. If he met me, he must have picked me up. If celebrities are people, they probably can’t resist babies.
I saw on Facebook last week that MM was in town again for the making of a film about The Free State, and I knew my mother was the last person I was going to call. For one, I’m staying at her house right now on account of not really going places with my life. For seconds, she’s, well, who she is.
My mother doesn’t even know that we have HBO. It came as part of a promotion package that she never bothered to cancel. She’s watched bits and pieces of True Detective, but she didn’t know what she was watching or on what channel. If she figured out that it was a show that was coming on a premium channel that she was paying for, she would say she was going to cancel it and then forget to ever call the cable company, so it wouldn’t really matter, but I’d have to hear about it.
Who you gonna call, Marley Jones? Not Mother Jones. Not Ghost Busters. Not my best friend who gets bent out of shape over Free State stories because her family is even crazier than mine. Not my boyfriend who broke up with me on my 21st birthday being the prince of a man that he is. Not my senior thesis director who wouldn’t care and must be avoided on account of I’m not writing my thesis.
That’s why I started this blog. I should be writing my thesis, but I kind of want to stalk MM just a little bit. I’m way too lazy to do that in person, and if I did get a selfie with the man, it would all be ruined by my mother’s voice inside my head calling the whole selfie scene tacky.
Not to mention I have my own ick factors. The dude is pretty close to my dad’s age, so nobody can know I want to stalk him, and since my dad does good (and yes, I hear my mother’s voice telling me that’s well) to remember to send me a Christmas card with a $100 bill in it once a year, it wouldn’t even take an amateur psychiatrist to scratch out a diagnosis of daddy issues for me.
Not to mention MM is playing Newt Knight who is a hot button topic in this town. You never know when you might want to quit school and get a job at Starbucks or something and have to deal with the fact that your new boss is the son of somebody who writes articles in the local paper about how Newt Knight was a traitor and nobody should go see the movie.
You just never know.
So no selfies with MM, mainly because I’m unlikely to run into him while spending all of my time skulking around alone in my mother’s family room, but because of all of those other things too.
So of course my name is not really Marley Jones. I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now.
Jones I picked out for the county I grew up in and the movie about The Free State that MM is filming right now, and I picked Marley for Marlena on Days of Our Lives. I used to watch that show with my mother, and she would hate for anybody to know she watched it. She likes people to think she’s too high-minded. She reads books and acts like she never turns the TV on. But we watched Days of Our Lives together. Sometimes we both stayed home from school to watch it.
My mother sometimes sent me to school when I had a fever claiming everything was fine and sometimes kept me home when I didn’t claiming she thought I might be coming down with something. In reality, she was just having an emotional crash day and wanted some company. We had a cat and a dog, but I guess a kid worked better.
I remember one time when we stayed home from school, and she tried to make tuna sandwiches, but after she dumped the tuna in the bowl, she noticed we didn’t have any mayonnaise, so she put ranch dressing in, and then she noticed that we didn’t have any bread, so we ate tuna and ranch dressing and pickles on the couch in front of Days of Our Lives.
The next day was Saturday, and we went to the public library where my mother graded papers all day to make up for lost time while I went to story time and colored and played in the kids corner by myself after all of the other kids went home. I fell asleep with my head on the table next to my mother.
After, we went to see Shrek.
It was a good day. My mother was pretty centered that day, and Shrek was hilarious. It wasn’t a good year because it was 2001, but it was a good day.
That was also the year Matthew McConaughey was in The Wedding Planner. We didn’t see it until it came out on DVD.
We also watched Bridget Jones later on DVD. It came out in 2001 too, and my mother loved/hated it, so I do know the name I picked out for myself sounds a little too much like BJ’s Diary, but I like the name Marley. I think I’ll name my next puppy Marley. And what other name would I use on a blog about The Free State, but Jones?
What you gonna do, Marley Jones?
I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna talk to myself right here on the good ole www for a little while. I’m gonna shake up the stories my mother made up a little and dissect the stories my granddaddy made up a little and add a little making up of my own.
I probably should try to set the scene a little if I’m telling stories, though. I see I’ve committed my mother’s sin of being vague about what I had for lunch today. It was half a pimento cheese sandwich from Newk’s in Hattiesburg that I didn’t eat yesterday and just pulled out of the refrigerator because I was too preoccupied to make a new sandwich, even though we do have both mayonnaise and bread on hand at the moment.
Besides, everybody knows Newk’s makes good pimento cheese. If you told me you saw Matthew McConaughey in Newk’s, I’d believe you as long as you were specific as to which location and what time and what you ordered and why you don’t have a groupie shot to show for it.
This girl I went to high school with told me that she saw MM last week at this truck stop looking place in Laurel that I’d never even heard of before even though I’ve lived in Jones County all of my life. I didn’t want to believe her, but I kind of had to. Her mother posted a picture on Facebook.
My mother has gone off Facebook for the time being to cleanse her chakras or something, so she wouldn’t post a picture of me with Matthew McConaughey right now even if she had one.
Well, I’m tired even though I haven’t told much about MM yet, and my mother has been suspiciously quiet for hours now. I should probably check to see if she remembered to eat today.
I hope you will come back again to read my blog another day. This is where I will write about The Free State of Marley Jones, about Matthew McConaughey, and Newt Knight, and Jones County. It’s my fan blog, and if you don’t like fan blogs, you probably haven’t bothered to read this far.
I hope you have a great day, and if you get to take a picture with MM, don’t even tell me about it. I’m beyond jealous already.
Matthew McConaughey is the only celebrity I’ve ever met, unless you count that time Bill Clinton came to Jones County, but I only saw him from across the room, so MM is really the only one, and I still don’t know if that happened inside or outside of my mother’s head. She’s usually more creative than that when she makes things up.