SCRABBLE TOURNAMENT – PART 3

While sister’s away, the cowgirls will play . . .

ORLANDO, FLA. – JULY 25, 2008 – From the moment Dakota Fanning and her family checked into the Royal Pacific Resort hotel Monday, the front desk has been besieged with phone calls asking the usual questions: When can I meet Dakota? What room is Dakota staying in? How can I get Dakota’s autograph? Are you accepting any job applications for temp positions through Tuesday?

When the Fannings appeared in the hotel lobby Friday morning on their way to register Dakota for the National Scrabble Tournament, which is taking place at the hotel, more than 200 of the actress’s fans were waiting for her.

Lowering her head and shielding her eyes, Dakota, 14, hurried off in the opposite direction with her father, Steve, leaving her mother, Joy, and 10-year-old sister, Elle, to deal with the crowd. Not surprisingly, Elle was instantly recognized.

Everybody loves Elle Fanning

“Oh, my God, it’s Elle Fanning!” a young girl screamed, and the pack of fans, mostly teen and pre-teen girls, surrounded Elle and Joy.

“You guys – I appreciate you coming down here and everything,” Joy said, “but Dakota’s very busy right now getting ready for the tournament.”

“That’s okay,” a fan said. “Can Elle sign autographs for us?” Another said, “We love Dakota and Elle!”

Joy looked at her watch and whispered something to Elle, who was standing quietly in a navy-blue sailor dress with a bright red cross-tie. Elle whispered something back and Joy said, “There are hundreds of you guys, so we have to shave that down a little. What I’m going to do is say a girl’s name, and all of you who have that name can come with me and Elle to a conference room, or wherever we can find some space, and we’ll visit while Dakota and her father take care of their business. The rest of you should go out of the hotel so you don’t upset the management. Okay?”

A girl yelled, “Choose my name!”

Joy said, “Okay, the name is . . . Sarah.”

A collective disgruntled sigh rose from the crowd. One girl stepped forward. She was very short and breathtakingly beautiful, with long, white-blonde hair and lovely blue eyes the color of the ocean. Her skin was perfectly tanned, and she had on black jeans and a pretty blue top with puffy sleeves.

“Are you the only Sarah in the bunch?” Joy said.

Sarah said, “The one and only.”

Before turning the crowd away, Elle spent twenty minutes signing notebooks, scraps of paper, arms, shirts and blank guest checks that somebody had swiped from the registration desk. When only Sarah was left, Joy and Elle started toward the elevator.

“Since there’s only one Sarah, we can just go up to Elle’s room,” Joy said.

“Where do you live?” Elle asked Sarah as they stepped into the elevator.

“Malibu.”

“Malibu?” Elle’s eyes got big. “And your name’s Sarah? Are you the same Sarah who posts all those stories about me and Dakota?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Sarah said.

“Man!” Elle said.

“You like the stories?”

“Oh, my God!” Elle said.

“Don’t say God that way,” Joy said.

“Oh, my gosh! I love the stories. You’re so awesome!”

“We really do like reading them,” Joy said. “It comforting to know that somebody else understands our craziness.”

“Thanks,” Sarah said. “Aside from the fact that WordPress sucks and everybody at Hannah’s Board thinks I hate you guys, it’s a great experience for me.”

“How old are you?” Elle said.

“Sixteen.”

“Man, you’re pretty smart for being just sixteen. You’re probably almost as smart as my sister.”

Sarah laughed. “I doubt that.”

“How tall are you?”

“Five feet,” Sarah said.

The bell clanged, the elevator doors opened and the three walked out into the hallway.

“And how much do you weigh?” Elle said. “You’re so thin.”

“Elle, knock it off,” Joy said. “Give her a chance to breathe.”

“It’s okay,” Sarah said. “I weigh eighty-five pounds.”

“Man!” Elle said. “I’m almost as big as you, and I’m only ten.”

Joy said, “Elle, please stop starting every sentence with ‘man.’ You sound like a hillbilly.”

“Well, heck fire, Ma, I was fixin’ to say wellllll doggies, but I figgerd y’all’d rather me say ‘man.’”

Elle and Sarah are going to get along real well

They went into Elle’s suite, which had been Elle and Dakota’s suite until Dakota decided she needed her own room. The beautiful maroon carpet was littered with clothes and hangers and books and makeup and hair accessories and food remnants – Hershey’s and Milky Way candy bars, Frito’s packages, empty Pepsi cans and wadded-up McDonald’s bags. Incredibly, in one corner sat a chainsaw that Elle had conned the maintenance men into letting her borrow, because she was fascinated by the little rubber nub you had to press to prime the engine.

“Excuse the mess,” Joy said, “but Elle lives here.”

“Very funny, Mom,” Elle said, kicking junk out of the way so Sarah could get over to the living room area without falling and breaking her neck. “Mom, since it’s just Sarah, would it be okay if we kind of hung out by ourselves till Dakota and Dad are finished?”

Joy looked at Sarah. “Can you endure her for that long?”

“I sure can,” Sarah said. “I never thought I’d even meet Elle, much less have a chance to actually talk to her and hang out with her.”

“Joe and Hank are right out there in the hallway, if you need anything,” Joy said and left the room.

“Who’s Joe and Hank?” Sarah said and moved a Batman cape out of a cushioned armchair so she could sit in it.

“My bodyguards,” Elle said. “So, wow. You also post stories about Mary-Kate and Ashley, huh.”

“And Avril Lavigne.”

“That’s so cool. Dakota loves Avril Lavigne. Did you grow up in Malibu?”

“Yeah, and I love it there. The city depresses me sometimes.”

“Tell me about it,” Elle said and plopped down in a chair across from Sarah. “Brentwood’s not exactly the city, but it might as well be.”

“So are you excited about Dakota being in the Scrabble tournament?”

“It’s okay. I’m mainly excited about coming to Orlando and doing something different where I can spend a lot of money and nobody worries about it.”

“But you make all kinds of money,” Sarah said. “It must be so cool to make millions of dollars for every film you’re in.”

“Ha! I don’t even get an allowance. Dakota just started getting one after she turned fourteen, but I don’t get jack.”

Sarah laughed.

“I mean I don’t get nothing.”

Sarah laughed some more. “You’re sounding like a hillbilly again.”

Now Elle laughed. “Let’s play hillbillies! Let’s pretend we’re hillbillies!”

“How do we do that?”

Just a couple of redneck girls at heart

Elle ran to one of her seven suitcases and pulled out two straw hats, two pairs of overalls and four small cowboy boots. She tossed one hat, two boots and one of the overalls to Sarah. “You’re about my size, so all that should fit. Let’s pretend we’re hillbillies at a hoedown.”

“You gotta have music for a hoedown,” Sarah said.

“Oh, man, I got all kinds of music. I rented a bunch of CDs from the entertainment department downstairs, or whatever they call it. I already lost like six of them.”

Elle and Sarah threw on the overalls over their clothes and put on their hats and boots. Elle found a red permanent marker and drew freckles on both her and Sarah’s faces, much to Sarah’s delight. She dashed over to a basket of plastic flowers and withdrew two long plastic twigs, put one of them in her mouth and gave the other one to Sarah. Then she started shuffling through a stack of CDs until she found the one she wanted. She put the disc in the player, and a staccato guitar filled the room.

“‘Redneck Girl’ – I love this song!” Sarah said.

“Wow – I thought only people as old as my dad knew that song,” Elle said. “Let’s dance!”

The girls began line-dancing through the junk on the floor, laughing and yee-hawing and singing along with the song.

“Livin’ for Friday afternoon,” they sang. “She’s gonna show one old boy that we can move.”

The music was very loud, and it inspired Elle to further lose herself in the role. She tied one of her belts around one of her purses and started slinging it around her head like a lasso.

Sarah came up behind Elle, held her by the waist, and together they line-danced around the room as Elle kept slinging the lasso. Then the purse flew off the belt and crashed into a large punch bowl on the counter by the sink, shattering the bowl into a million pieces.

“Ooops,” Elle said then started singing again: “And I pray that someday I will find me a redneck girl!”

They danced some more, then Sarah said, “Let’s get on the stage.”

“We ain’t got no stage, Sarah-Lu,” Elle said in a pretty convincing southern accent.

“Sho ‘nuff do, too, Ellie Mae – lookie yonder.” Sarah pointed at the dining table.

“My mammy said I ain’t s’possed to get up on no furniture cause I was raised in a Georgia mud hole and don’t know no better.”

Sarah laughed. “Okay, we can just dance on the floor.”

“But my mammy ain’t here, so let’s do it!” Elle swept all the junk off the table and onto the floor then ran over and re-tied her purse to her belt.

“Redneck girl got her name on the back of her belt,” the girls sang as they climbed on chairs then up on the table. “She got a kiss on her lips for her man and no one else.”

The table was big, and the girls were small, so they were able to line-dance effectively around its perimeter.

“A coyote’s howling out on the prairie,” they sang. “First comes love, then comes marriage.”

Elle howled “Ooh-la-la!” at the idea of love before marriage and slung the purse-lasso around her head. The pins holding the leaf in the table broke, the table began to buckle, Elle let go of her lasso, sending both purse and belt crashing through a closed window, and the table gave way with a loud crack. Both girls slammed together and fell, tumbling onto a pair of open suitcases. The table lay in two pieces.

Dakota and Steve walked in the door.

“Elle Fanning!” Dakota shrieked.

Elle looked up from the ground, from under Sarah, because Sarah had fallen on her. “Y’all ain’t s’possed to be back this early!” she said.

“What the heck are you doing?” Steve said. “And who’s that? And what happened to the table? And why is that music so loud?”

Elle said, “Dancing and being redneck girls, Sarah who does the website about me and Dakota, because we broke it dancing on it, and because we like loud music.”

Dakota went over and turned off the stereo. “Are you really the Sarah from DakotaFanningNews? My mom said you were up here enduring Elle.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said, getting off Elle and standing up. “It’s really nice to meet you.”

“And what happened to the window?” Steve said. “I hope you weren’t dancing on that.”

“No, the crows were,” Elle said, getting up herself.

“Don’t be smart. Where’s your mother? She just swung by the registration room and took off.”

“I think she went on a cattle drive.”

“Yeah, and I need to be going on my own cattle drive,” Sarah said and started getting out of her overalls and boots. “My mom’s basically a socialite, and we’re down here visiting some of her socialite friends, but I wanted to see if I could meet you guys, so I had her drop me off here.”

“Because you knew where we were and what we were doing,” Dakota said.

“I know everything,” Sarah said.

“I bet you don’t know a seven-letter word that means an irrigation canal.”

“Acequia,” Sarah said.

“Oh, my God, you do know everything. Can you stay with me till the tournament’s over? I’ll get you your own suite. I’ll make them put a computer in it, if you need one.”

Sarah couldn’t stay, but she wished Dakota luck in the tournament and gave both girls a big hug, then Elle and Dakota both signed 8-by-10 photographs for her. After Sarah left, Dakota told Steve that she and Elle needed to be alone, so Steve went off to locate his wife.

Dakota is a little worried about Elle these days

“You’re getting destructive, the older you get,” Dakota said.

“Me? You’re the one that demolished the bathroom door the other night.”

In a serious tone, Dakota said, “Is everything all right? Are you doing okay since we’ve been here?”

“Yeah, I’m having fun. I wish you were with me at all the different places they’re taking me, but I’m okay. Have you and Axl been practicing the rhythm method?”

“Breathing method, dummy.”

“Right, breathing method.”

“Yeah, he taught me all kinds of ways to breathe. You’d think there’s only one way to do it, but there are probably millions.”

Elle opened the refrigerator and got a Milky Way. “You want one? I got three left.”

“No, we had chocolate cake down there.”

“You had chocolate cake? Man!”

Dakota giggled at Elle in her cowgirl getup. “You look like a total hillbilly with that hat and those boots – and the freckles.”

“Shucks,” Elle said.

Dakota began cleaning up the fragments of the punch bowl. “Did you and Sarah have a fun time?

“Man, did we! She’s a really cool girl, even though she’s sixteen and could have an attitude but doesn’t. How did registration go? I can’t believe you got chocolate cake an hour after breakfast.”

“Registration was great. I’m so pumped!”

“Me, too. I’m way pumped.”

Dakota dumped the former punch bowl into the wastebasket and considered trying to clean up the rest of the room, but the mere thought of it exhausted her, so she decided to get out of it instead.

“Why don’t you use your pump to straighten out this place before Mom gets back from the cattle drive and throws you in the pokey for being a slob?” Dakota said.

Elle said, “Why don’t you just focus on all your study books and learning new seven-letter words and let me do my own thing?”

“I will, and I just came up with the perfect seven-letter word for you.”

“Which is what?”

“F-I-L-T-H-I-E,” Dakota said and walked out of the room.

(Editor’s note: Okay, I know it was a vain move putting myself in the story, but you gotta be a little vain every once in awhile. Plus I was in Orlando and really wanted to meet Elle, so it worked out great. And the photo of the blonde girl – that’s the actress Sara Paxton, who I used to look exactly like when she and I were 11 and 12 years old. She’s older than me, and she’s older than 16 in this pic, but we still look a lot alike.)

READ PART 4!

BONUS! Read an interview with Sarah about the Scrabble stories