Somewhere in Sweden, furniture designers are laughing their asses off…

I am not an unintelligent woman. I have built sets for every show I have done in the past 15 years. I change my own tires. But I just spent four hours putting together a bed from Ikea. My roommate’s dog found it all very amusing but I didn’t.

First rule of thumb – never try to build something from Ikea with your 70+ parents. I love my parents dearly and they have financially supported both my directing career and my current mid-life crisis. But sometimes I want to know who these people are and what they did with my parents. My mother apparently needs to be told something 48 times before she hears and/or understands it. My father, God love him, thinks Big Lots is the answer to all furnishing questions. Tiffany was very tolerant of the invasion of the parents.

After we decided that the screws they put in the box did not match the diagram and were about four screws short, I chased my parents back to Lakewood and set out in search of the elusive screws.

At Ikea earlier, I had seen a wall with little boxes that said “Missing a part? Take one!” I thought, yippee! This will be easy. Ikea must be Swedish for “where did all these people come from” as I attempted to navigate the store on a Saturday. I know, I should know better. I finally got to the parts drawers to find – shock and surprise – they’re all empty. Fight my way back through the crowd, through the Burbank Media Center parking lot and off to two different hardware stores before finding something approximating the Ikea screw (appropriate term).

Go back to the new place, tackle the bed. As I’m reading the directions, it appears that you have to assemble the whole bed while lying underneath it. All the screws go in from the bottom up. As I lay on the floor, cussing out the Sweds, trying to figure out how to get the drill underneath so I can use it instead of my aching hands, I had a sudden epiphany about myself. I’m too literal. Just because the diagram shows the bed being built from the bottom doesn’t mean you have to build the bed lying on your back. DOH! Stand the stupid thing on its side would work much easier.

As I said, I’m a smart woman. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was dealing with my adorable but frustrating parents. Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am. But I finally got the stupid thing put together without calling Chairman for help (as I almost did several times). It’s not bad and it actually held my weight for the first night spent in my new place.

Moral of the story? When frustrated by life, put it on its side and throw away the directions!