The actor stomps away from the shoot, handsome and ridiculous in his full-length white fox fur coat and glam-rock eyeshadow. They are shooting a dream sequence, and he's being asked to do something by the second-unit director that the director promised him he would never have to do. Apparently, nobody gave the second-unit director the memo. And where the hell is the director, why is Archie shooting this scene?
The crew take on a studied nonchalance, all turning to look somewhere else as their attention stays riveted upon the actor. The old hands have a way of looking in the opposite direction and knowing more about where the actor or director has gone for their tantrum than were they watching with binoculars.
Stomp, stomp, stomp goes the actor. What an arrogant prick, thinks a minor supporting actor watching the lead. Arrogant prick in a white fur coat. Of course he throws a tantrum in a white fur coat. Everyone's afraid the coat will be damaged, so they'll definitely pay attention.
The actor is veering perilously close to some equipment too costly to replace. The 1st AD has gone off in search of the director and the 2nd AD is fluttering mothlike in an arbitrary circle between the camera and the general vicinity of the lead actor. She is 20. She graduated early from a prestigious east-coast conservatory and knows all about Sondheim. She took a job with her uncle, the producer of this Sci-Fi Film Noir Indie Epic, for the summer. She told all her friends, "New York is not so great, I want to get some real experience under my belt, some hard work." So she took the very first flight she could get from Boston to Oakland, even switching to a flight to San Jose when she saw it was boarding as she waited for the connecting flight to Oakland, so that she would be back in comfortable, temperate Northern California ASAP, pronounced ay-sap, like yay-sap or gay-sap which was a joke some of her friends from the conservatory would make that she never understood. "I just want to get to work ASAP," she confided in her best friend Marjorie Frida-Kahlo Lockwood Lamont, knowing full well that Marjorie Frida-Kahlo Lockwood Lamont would tell everyone how passionate she was about gritty work, and never realizing that all of her friends saw through her purported desire for work to the very real fear of New York and possible failure that was too too daunting for this very young overachiever with decided fundamentalist Christian leanings.
The 1st AD knows precisely where the director is. The director is over behind some bushes -- azaleas? lobelia? oleander? -- sobbing uncontrollably as he tries to tell his mother about a dream he had last night. The director is plagued by dreams about the house his brother lives in with wife and two lovely children. There is something under that house, the director dreams every night, something dark coming for the children. He has tried to keep the dreams at bay with a variety of soporifics, but none have helped. His sleeeeeep has deeeeeeeepened, he is going off the deep end and will soon need depends because he's practically shitting himself. Not literally, but emotionally, and he just can't keep it together long enough to get through one phone call. The 1st AD knows all of this because it's the 1st AD's job to know all of this. He is an exceptional 1st AD. He knows where the director is, and that is why he is going to look for him. In the opposite direction.
The costumer is very worried about that coat. Well, actually, that coat can suck a bag of veinies as far as she is concerned -- she is more concerned about the vintage mink she traded as collateral for the white fox in case of damage. The mink is worth twenty times what the white fox is worth, a fact she is desperate to keep from the manager of the costume shop at A.F. College where she rented/traded/borrowed most of these costumes. Next thing she knows, someone figures out who the mink used to belong to and it's on E-Bay and she's screwed out of a hell of a lot of retirement. Or whatever. God knows, the way things are going, she'll be lucky if she doesn't have to go back to work at a library after Christmas. She's watching the actor and the 2nd AD as the 1st AD goes in the opposite direction, good boy, he knows where the director is, too, and he's letting him get it out, whatever it is. But the costumer watches the actor and she looks around for something to throw to distract him, should he begin to tear at more than his hair. That coat. Christ, what a waste of time. They could have used fake fur. Nobody ever sees below his neck, they could have used a stole. No, that would suck, it has to be the coat. Fucking ridiculous dream sequence. All we need know is a mime with a red balloon chasing a circus dog in a swastika-speckled party hat.
The cinematographer is very upset. The shot was perfect. The light is changing. This is not something we can fix in post. The 2nd AD is hot but useless, too bad her uncle is the producer, or the cinematographer would have to ask what the fuck she was doing dithering like this. The shot was fucking perfect. Where the fuck is the director? The second-unit guy is totally freaking the lead out.
The caterer is not the second-unit director. The 2nd AD thinks he is, because she was told that the second-unit director is Spanish, which to her means Mexican. So she found the first Mexican she could find on set and brought him over because Brick Fetterly had some questions. She walked past several actual Mexicans, including the director unseen behind the oleanders, who looks Irish but is Mexican and can explain why, but this guy with the long hair in a ponytail with a clipboard and dark skin and an accent looks like a Spanxican to her. He's actually from Panama, but he doesn't bother to explain this. He asked the actor what the actor wanted for lunch and the actor kind of fumed with only his nostrils and then turned and stomped away.
The makeup girl and the actor used to fuck. This was a while back, but she totally knows what he's into. It's kinky. She liked it. He stopped calling when he got some out-of-town projects and they haven't really had a chance to talk on set. If he wants sex, she's going to pretend to be seeing someone. She needs to be professional, now. She asks in advance if it's porn these days and has finally learned to turn work and other experiences down. For the most part.
The producer is about two blocks away, in a treehouse. He is watching all of this and whispering it into a mic attached to his iPod. He is writing a book. I am the producer. My niece is totally hot and we are not related by blood. She likes the jacuzzi. She is an overachiever. I am glad my wife and daughter are out of town for two weeks. My niece is an overachiever. I rented this treehouse from the preplexed family standing below on their lovely, idyllic suburban back lawn. This is the perfect vantage point from which I can watch all proceedings and record these notes for my memoirs. I call people via mobile if I need to. I will call my niece with some ridiculous task in a few moments, I will make sure she bends down to pick something up at the right angle. That makeup girl looks familiar.
The third actor in the shot, a supporting lead, watches all from a chair in the shade. He's here for two days. The producer tried to bar him from the production based on some jokes he'd made about hyenas. The director, writer and another producer totally overrode the producer's nay-saying. It turns out that this was good, that actor is good, and there he is, not freaking out. Where did he learn that? Where did he come from? Where will he go?
Whoa! The director is at the lead's side and they are conferring. The lead looks relaxed, like putty, like melting, like happy safe time. The director has this effect on people. He looks sane and normal, not like a man who dreams of ghosts trying to poison his brother's marriage. The 1st AD is miraculously returned and makes a slight gesture with his eyes which is picked up and transmitted to the crew so that now boom mics are readied and things are done and this and that happen and now we're shooting and the caterer is heading back to his truck with everyone's lunch order.
Everything is fine until the neighbors call the police and it's Napa and Napa cops are clearly working for the Third Reich. They ask the director if they can search his car, he tells them he doesn't own a car here, which is true, his car is in Chicago, the producer drives him everywhere, they don't believe him and they demand to see proof that he is a US Citizen.
The producer, in his haste to get out of the treehouse, breaks his ankle. He regains consciousness as the decorative gnomes begin to surround him. They are singing a song, and it's the same song the director heard in his dream last night; it makes the producer cry, because he knows that if the director could remember this song, he would be okay. It goes like this:
Would you have been so lonely
That you had to get in a boat
And sail away to the moonbeam ocean,
Far up in the sky?
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
Oliver in Idaho, Part IV: Rehearsal Continueth
October 15, 2006 3:20pm
The second rehearsal, Tuesday 10/3/06: I go into it with hope because the night before, when I got back to the house of my hosts, they wanted to talk about theatre with me and pick my brain for thoughts on how better to run the company. They are both on the Board of Trustees and don't really know much about the structure and administration of theatre. Apparently there have been some recent political shake-ups in the upper echelons of the Idaho Falls Youth Arts Centre. I get the feeling that there was a lot of Pleasanton Playhouse-esque casting of board members' children in leads and the usual political fallout therefrom. I have yet to glean precisely what afflicted the company, and I shall report faithfully as soon as I know.
So when they asked me what I thought of the company I told them honestly that rehearsals are extremely disorganized and if you're paying an actor to come from California, you should get your money's worth and use him at every available opportunity. I also rambled for two hours about the possibilities inherent in their position as the only company in town doing musicals. These are some very level-headed people and I may have made an impression regarding the future of this company and theatrical hierarchy. But my hopes that my words would have an immediate effect on how rehearsals are run were dashed on the rocks of Idaho Falls at this second rehearsal.
I'm introduced to more people. I sit at a folding cafeteria table and study my lines. I'm pointed out to everyone who comes in, generally: "Anyone who just arrived, this over here is Edward Hightower, he's our Fagin." Applause follows. It's embarrassing. I'm trying to concentrate on my lines, because the first scenes we're working do not include Fagin. Bill Sykes arrives. My Gaydar goes off like a big decorative Chinoise gong. I'm not sure why, but I get the feeling he's a closeted gay Mormon. Perhaps it's the wispy sideburns and the YMCA Fu Manchu moustache. Admittedly, his Fu Manchu is a very very butch Fu Manchu. Very very butch. And this is Idaho. And he's in a production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in another town. So I figure maybe my Gaydar was thrown off by Mountain Time.
We work the Fine Life Reprise, a quartet wherein Bill, Nancy, Fagin and Dodger bellow and harrangue one another about -- surprise! -- Oliver. That's what I think the song is about. Bill wants to kill Oliver and Nancy wants to prevent that but keep Bill. Fagin wants to preserve the status quo, which means just keeping Oliver there and alive and continuing the very lucrative thievery we all do so well. We work the song. Musically. But we don't stage it. We stage the scene going into it. There's a chance we staged the scene following Oom-Pah-Pah first. I'll check that later.
Perhaps I am unfairly prejudiced from having had the deep pleasure of doing this scene at PCPA with David Studwell as Fagin, Bryn Harris as Nancy and Jonathan Hoover as Dodger. I always enjoyed that scene. I spent the scene intimidating everyone and then trying to murder Oliver, and then switching my rage to Nancy when she got in my way: the red cape waving Bully Bill away from the innocent child. I feel that it was fun and effective.
Here in Idaho Falls, the scene goes like this:
Bill: Try and get away from me, would you?
(Bill takes two quasi-threatening steps toward Oliver. Oliver does not move. Nancy walks toward Fagin.)
Nancy: I won't stand by and see it done, Bill. You've goh' 'im 'ere, whah' more would you 'ave, is that the right line?
Director: Nancy, honey, say that line to Bill, not to Fagin.
Nancy: What? Oh, yes. (To Fagin:) You've goh' 'im 'ere, whah' more would you 'ave?
Director: No, to Bill. Say the line to Bill.
Nancy (calm and collected): I won't stand by and see it done, Bill. (She crosses slowly toward him.) You've goh' 'im 'ere, whah' more would you 'ave?
(Bill takes a step toward her, then turns away.)
SM: Edward, Fagin, I think you have a line.
Fagin: Oh! Shit. I mean shoot. Sorry! Sorry, everyone. Kids. Can we take it back a bit? I was elsewhere.
We take it back a bit and it gets worse. Long pauses between every line. Nancy and Bill stare at one another from fifteen feet away. Bill never tries to get to Oliver more than once, and then only a little. Nancy is apparently exploring silence. Which is great for any actor. Just not as a bookend to every line in a scene that could potentially have the audience at the very least mildly concerned for Oliver's safety. I'm trying to imbue the scene with some sense of urgency, trying to get in between them when they're ... not ... fighting. Which makes it pretty easy to get between them. Only it's completely unjustified. I'm thinking that maybe if I get in Bill's face, he'll react. He does. For a couple seconds.
The director? Loves it.
Everything else we do that night with Bill and Nancy is pretty much the same. Nancy keeps delivering lines directly to me. Keeps looking for ways to poke me in the chest, the shoulder, the side. I begin to suspect she's gauging my muscle tone. Should I suck in my gut more than I already am? Is that possible without sharting? Does it matter? Why is she poking me?
Later in rehearsal, they're working the moment when Bill slaps Nancy after Oom-Pah-Pah. Now, those of you who know the show will say, "Edward, surely you mean after My Name. That's Bill's song. It introduces this character and makes it completely clear to the audience that Bill is a purely bad man who kills for the pleasure of it. Without that song, Bill looks like an only slightly violent white trash milksop who couldn't possibly engender the misplaced passionate love of the faithful yet abused Nancy."
And you would be completely correct, my friends. They've cut his song. He walks in after Oom-Pah-Pah and sits down and someone in the back goes, "Bill Sykes." Everyone takes a couple steps away. Bill does nothing. So now he's just a social leper. Not the right sort for the Whitechapel Country Club, but at the same time clearly not a murderous, extremely abusive misogynist.
I've asked why the song was cut. The response: it just comes out of nowhere after Oom-Pah-Pah and it's a really ugly song and just not our favorite. It completely kills the mood.
"Yes," I say. "Just like Bill Sykes."
This has yet to have had any effect.
So now Bill walks in to the bar and we have the scene about getting Oliver back and he slaps Nancy and we all run out when he tells us to, with me lingering a moment to see Bill walk up and tenderly caress Nancy's face, then leave. Because he, "...just can't say he's sorry."
Initially, the slap was a peculiar move that looked more like he was trying to push her down into fellatio. Interesting. But I didn't think that this was what the scene was about. Nor did I think it was that kind of show. When they're working this not-slap later, I hear the director say something about how Bill's wrestling moves certainly pay off. Wrestling moves? 7.9 on the Gaydar Scale, folks. Perplexing: it's clear they're trying to make it look like a real slap. But it sucks. And it's -- get this -- direct physical contact with her neck/face/left ear. A great big dangerous no-no, for the obvious reason that actors can get carried away. Adrenaline fuels energy, people get caught up in the moment and you've got possibly permanent injuries which could lead to lawsuits or at the very least pricier insurance. I get it. You get it. IFYAC doesn't get it.
I find myself drawn forward from the back of the multipurpose room. Valeen, the director, looks at me. "Edward," she says. "You seem like a stage combat type of guy. Do you have any thoughts?"
"My main concern is one of safety. May I -- ?"
"Please do."
I step up and explain how this can be tidied to increase both safety and the realism of the slap. It's your basic backhand swing, back of his hand making contact with her open palm, big loud smack noise and she whirls, clutching her face. The technical term for the moment of contact is, the knap. I show them the knap. He sort of tries it. Doesn't like it. I show him again. He sort of tries it again. I realise suddenly that he does not like at all the fact that my actual theatrical training and experience with stage combat has eclipsed his silly wrestling moves. It's clear to me that he doesn't really want to do it. He says, "It doesn't feel natural."
"I know. But it looks great."
Valeen says, "Is there something else you'd like to try, Chris?"
So he hauls off with his right hand, open palm, in a move I like to call, The Mommie Dearest. He likes that much better.
9.8 on the International Gaydar Scale.
I back off and figure there may be time later to fix this. I'll talk to Nancy. I try to talk to her as we're all leaving, but he's still there. We chat about a few things, she finds moments to poke me. I briefly consider sucking in my gut again, then decide against it. I'm playing Fagin, for fucksake, I seriously doubt anyone here is going to make any sort of romantic overtures.
Silly, silly Edward.
The second rehearsal, Tuesday 10/3/06: I go into it with hope because the night before, when I got back to the house of my hosts, they wanted to talk about theatre with me and pick my brain for thoughts on how better to run the company. They are both on the Board of Trustees and don't really know much about the structure and administration of theatre. Apparently there have been some recent political shake-ups in the upper echelons of the Idaho Falls Youth Arts Centre. I get the feeling that there was a lot of Pleasanton Playhouse-esque casting of board members' children in leads and the usual political fallout therefrom. I have yet to glean precisely what afflicted the company, and I shall report faithfully as soon as I know.
So when they asked me what I thought of the company I told them honestly that rehearsals are extremely disorganized and if you're paying an actor to come from California, you should get your money's worth and use him at every available opportunity. I also rambled for two hours about the possibilities inherent in their position as the only company in town doing musicals. These are some very level-headed people and I may have made an impression regarding the future of this company and theatrical hierarchy. But my hopes that my words would have an immediate effect on how rehearsals are run were dashed on the rocks of Idaho Falls at this second rehearsal.
I'm introduced to more people. I sit at a folding cafeteria table and study my lines. I'm pointed out to everyone who comes in, generally: "Anyone who just arrived, this over here is Edward Hightower, he's our Fagin." Applause follows. It's embarrassing. I'm trying to concentrate on my lines, because the first scenes we're working do not include Fagin. Bill Sykes arrives. My Gaydar goes off like a big decorative Chinoise gong. I'm not sure why, but I get the feeling he's a closeted gay Mormon. Perhaps it's the wispy sideburns and the YMCA Fu Manchu moustache. Admittedly, his Fu Manchu is a very very butch Fu Manchu. Very very butch. And this is Idaho. And he's in a production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in another town. So I figure maybe my Gaydar was thrown off by Mountain Time.
We work the Fine Life Reprise, a quartet wherein Bill, Nancy, Fagin and Dodger bellow and harrangue one another about -- surprise! -- Oliver. That's what I think the song is about. Bill wants to kill Oliver and Nancy wants to prevent that but keep Bill. Fagin wants to preserve the status quo, which means just keeping Oliver there and alive and continuing the very lucrative thievery we all do so well. We work the song. Musically. But we don't stage it. We stage the scene going into it. There's a chance we staged the scene following Oom-Pah-Pah first. I'll check that later.
Perhaps I am unfairly prejudiced from having had the deep pleasure of doing this scene at PCPA with David Studwell as Fagin, Bryn Harris as Nancy and Jonathan Hoover as Dodger. I always enjoyed that scene. I spent the scene intimidating everyone and then trying to murder Oliver, and then switching my rage to Nancy when she got in my way: the red cape waving Bully Bill away from the innocent child. I feel that it was fun and effective.
Here in Idaho Falls, the scene goes like this:
Bill: Try and get away from me, would you?
(Bill takes two quasi-threatening steps toward Oliver. Oliver does not move. Nancy walks toward Fagin.)
Nancy: I won't stand by and see it done, Bill. You've goh' 'im 'ere, whah' more would you 'ave, is that the right line?
Director: Nancy, honey, say that line to Bill, not to Fagin.
Nancy: What? Oh, yes. (To Fagin:) You've goh' 'im 'ere, whah' more would you 'ave?
Director: No, to Bill. Say the line to Bill.
Nancy (calm and collected): I won't stand by and see it done, Bill. (She crosses slowly toward him.) You've goh' 'im 'ere, whah' more would you 'ave?
(Bill takes a step toward her, then turns away.)
SM: Edward, Fagin, I think you have a line.
Fagin: Oh! Shit. I mean shoot. Sorry! Sorry, everyone. Kids. Can we take it back a bit? I was elsewhere.
We take it back a bit and it gets worse. Long pauses between every line. Nancy and Bill stare at one another from fifteen feet away. Bill never tries to get to Oliver more than once, and then only a little. Nancy is apparently exploring silence. Which is great for any actor. Just not as a bookend to every line in a scene that could potentially have the audience at the very least mildly concerned for Oliver's safety. I'm trying to imbue the scene with some sense of urgency, trying to get in between them when they're ... not ... fighting. Which makes it pretty easy to get between them. Only it's completely unjustified. I'm thinking that maybe if I get in Bill's face, he'll react. He does. For a couple seconds.
The director? Loves it.
Everything else we do that night with Bill and Nancy is pretty much the same. Nancy keeps delivering lines directly to me. Keeps looking for ways to poke me in the chest, the shoulder, the side. I begin to suspect she's gauging my muscle tone. Should I suck in my gut more than I already am? Is that possible without sharting? Does it matter? Why is she poking me?
Later in rehearsal, they're working the moment when Bill slaps Nancy after Oom-Pah-Pah. Now, those of you who know the show will say, "Edward, surely you mean after My Name. That's Bill's song. It introduces this character and makes it completely clear to the audience that Bill is a purely bad man who kills for the pleasure of it. Without that song, Bill looks like an only slightly violent white trash milksop who couldn't possibly engender the misplaced passionate love of the faithful yet abused Nancy."
And you would be completely correct, my friends. They've cut his song. He walks in after Oom-Pah-Pah and sits down and someone in the back goes, "Bill Sykes." Everyone takes a couple steps away. Bill does nothing. So now he's just a social leper. Not the right sort for the Whitechapel Country Club, but at the same time clearly not a murderous, extremely abusive misogynist.
I've asked why the song was cut. The response: it just comes out of nowhere after Oom-Pah-Pah and it's a really ugly song and just not our favorite. It completely kills the mood.
"Yes," I say. "Just like Bill Sykes."
This has yet to have had any effect.
So now Bill walks in to the bar and we have the scene about getting Oliver back and he slaps Nancy and we all run out when he tells us to, with me lingering a moment to see Bill walk up and tenderly caress Nancy's face, then leave. Because he, "...just can't say he's sorry."
Initially, the slap was a peculiar move that looked more like he was trying to push her down into fellatio. Interesting. But I didn't think that this was what the scene was about. Nor did I think it was that kind of show. When they're working this not-slap later, I hear the director say something about how Bill's wrestling moves certainly pay off. Wrestling moves? 7.9 on the Gaydar Scale, folks. Perplexing: it's clear they're trying to make it look like a real slap. But it sucks. And it's -- get this -- direct physical contact with her neck/face/left ear. A great big dangerous no-no, for the obvious reason that actors can get carried away. Adrenaline fuels energy, people get caught up in the moment and you've got possibly permanent injuries which could lead to lawsuits or at the very least pricier insurance. I get it. You get it. IFYAC doesn't get it.
I find myself drawn forward from the back of the multipurpose room. Valeen, the director, looks at me. "Edward," she says. "You seem like a stage combat type of guy. Do you have any thoughts?"
"My main concern is one of safety. May I -- ?"
"Please do."
I step up and explain how this can be tidied to increase both safety and the realism of the slap. It's your basic backhand swing, back of his hand making contact with her open palm, big loud smack noise and she whirls, clutching her face. The technical term for the moment of contact is, the knap. I show them the knap. He sort of tries it. Doesn't like it. I show him again. He sort of tries it again. I realise suddenly that he does not like at all the fact that my actual theatrical training and experience with stage combat has eclipsed his silly wrestling moves. It's clear to me that he doesn't really want to do it. He says, "It doesn't feel natural."
"I know. But it looks great."
Valeen says, "Is there something else you'd like to try, Chris?"
So he hauls off with his right hand, open palm, in a move I like to call, The Mommie Dearest. He likes that much better.
9.8 on the International Gaydar Scale.
I back off and figure there may be time later to fix this. I'll talk to Nancy. I try to talk to her as we're all leaving, but he's still there. We chat about a few things, she finds moments to poke me. I briefly consider sucking in my gut again, then decide against it. I'm playing Fagin, for fucksake, I seriously doubt anyone here is going to make any sort of romantic overtures.
Silly, silly Edward.
Oliver in Idaho, Part III: Rehearsal Beginneth
October 9, 2006
We begin, I think, with You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two. It's a little hazy. I could go back and look at the rehearsal schedule, which includes decoding the director's somewhat baffling scene breakdown, but I don't want to take the twenty minutes to do that when I could be writing and getting funny looks from the maintenance staff here in the lobby. Besides, I left my Rosetta Stone in California. So just imagine a play broken down into 32 bite-sized scenes so that we never rehearse a scene straight through as written, but rather bounce around the play like a rusty pinball trapped between sagging Tetons.
Which might explain why nobody knows their lines. I'm the only one with a script in my hand. The kids are all unfocused and confused: none of them know their music, none of them know their lines, none of them really seem to know that we're in a play. Oliver doesn't even seem to want to be there. Nancy paraphrases everything, drops operative words, adds commentary and, "Something like that," to everything she's doing. So for example if she's crossing down left she says, "And this is where I cross over here and I say ..." Someone has coached everyone on their dialects. They're all using the same dialect. It's not a dialect I've heard terribly often. For a sample, see Corky's dialect from the end of Waiting for Guffman. His Henry Higgins / Eliza Doolittle bit.
The choreographer is showing me where I am and what I'm doing in the pickpocket number. The kids are pushing me down and stealing my stuff. One of the kids says, "You don't know I'm here."
I say, "Of course I do: this is my little pyramid scheme. I'm a master thief and pickpocket and you're my students. I've taught you everything you know." As I finish, I'm looking at the choreographer with that gleam we professionals reserve for other professionals when we all know we're on the same page. I'm smiling a little. She's looking at me. There's a placid complacency to her little smile. The dark circles under the eyes, belying the calm surface and hinting at spiritual exhaustion beneath. I know these signs.
She says, "Well, not exactly."
I can't help it. I say, "Ha! Really."
"We're thinking that these kids are getting the better of you. They're tricking Ol' Mister Fagin."
"I see."
The disorganized rehearsal was bad enough, my friends. I was willing to overlook it. Organization can be made to happen. But this was the moment, as I said 'I see,' when my guard went up completely. Shields were raised, the Polite Mask fell firmly into place and my heart sank below my stomach, down beneath my shoes into the deep soil of this high desert plain and I wanted to cry. I realized that I had driven 945 miles to work with a company not much more theatrically savvy than the one I had been teaching and directing at in Dublin, CA for most of 2004 - 2005.
I looked around. Everyone was talking. Even the director. She glanced over occasionally. I looked back at the choreographer. She said, "I mean, you can play it whatever way you want. They'll just play that they're tricking you."
I smile, polite and professional: "Of course."
We get through the number and it's a shambles. None of the kids know anything in the number except one girl and Dodger, who stop to tell other kids and me what to do at various points in the process. The choreographer does not seem to remember some of the number. She did not in fact know we were doing this tonight. She happened by when she dropped her son off. It wasn't on the schedule. I understand. I'm weighing my options. Guarding my expression. Placid. Trying to blend.
We run the scenes, starting with Oliver's arrival at Fagin's lair. Technically, this is known as the Thieves' Kitchen. It's all pretty traditional. There's a kid who's been given the line, "Password!" whenever someone is going to enter my lair. He never remembers it. There's a pause. It kills momentum. Wait, momentum? Silly Edward.
An assistant gets up to show me the blocking. "I was you," she says. She's got blocking written in a script. People sort of say their lines. I'm looking at her script, looking at the people, looking at my script. Polite and attentive. Valeen, the director, tells the assistant to sit down. I think she can see that an Edward left to his own devices in this situation will perhaps be the better Fagin than one chained to an assistant's scrawled blocking notes. I begin to love Valeen a little, in spite of the disorganization.
Oliver's resentful and noncommittal in everything he does. I say a line and he just sort of stares at me. When he doesn't react, I begin making up responses for him:
"Oh, sorry, Mr. Fagin, Widow Corney upped my meds and I'm just a little confused right now."
"Are you, my dear? Well that's nothing that a little re-casting couldn't help." And I smile at him.
He blinks, says, "Wait. What?"
Valeen says, "Nathan, honey, where's your script?"
"Over there."
"Well go get it, honey, you're holding things up."
Script in hand he's not much better. We go through the scenes, basically giving me the blocking. Could have saved time meeting with someone earlier today and copying it down.
We move on to the next morning when Oliver sees me counting my treasure. When it comes to the threatening with the sausage fork, I step right into directorial mode and show him how I'm going to grab his shirt and he should grab my wrists and hold on and do all the shaking himself. Basic stage combat.
He seems a little more awake. I have hope.
We do the scene and I grab him and he's dead weight. I stop. "You've got to do the shaking for me," I say. "Here, make it look like I'm shaking you to death." He wiggles. "Bigger," I say. He wiggles a little bigger.
Valeen says, "Nathan, come on, you've got to react."
I shake him again and he wiggles a little bigger. I take it from the moment I see him awake. I leap across the stage, grab him by the shirt and practically throw him into the air. Direct eye contact. Complete commitment from me. He's terrified. Deer-in-the-headlights. And suddenly there's something going on in the scene.
After I shout at him to wash, Valeen says, "Good. That was good. Nathan, those reactions were really nice."
His hands are in his pockets and his face is dull again. He's staring at the floor. I begin to wonder what goes on at home. He says, "Okay." Not sad. Just doesn't seem to care.
Originally, I wrote something here comparing the boy unfavorably to poo-poo. I have decided that my words were too harsh. He's a good kid. He may just be horribly miscast. He's certainly got his work cut out for him.
We begin, I think, with You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two. It's a little hazy. I could go back and look at the rehearsal schedule, which includes decoding the director's somewhat baffling scene breakdown, but I don't want to take the twenty minutes to do that when I could be writing and getting funny looks from the maintenance staff here in the lobby. Besides, I left my Rosetta Stone in California. So just imagine a play broken down into 32 bite-sized scenes so that we never rehearse a scene straight through as written, but rather bounce around the play like a rusty pinball trapped between sagging Tetons.
Which might explain why nobody knows their lines. I'm the only one with a script in my hand. The kids are all unfocused and confused: none of them know their music, none of them know their lines, none of them really seem to know that we're in a play. Oliver doesn't even seem to want to be there. Nancy paraphrases everything, drops operative words, adds commentary and, "Something like that," to everything she's doing. So for example if she's crossing down left she says, "And this is where I cross over here and I say ..." Someone has coached everyone on their dialects. They're all using the same dialect. It's not a dialect I've heard terribly often. For a sample, see Corky's dialect from the end of Waiting for Guffman. His Henry Higgins / Eliza Doolittle bit.
The choreographer is showing me where I am and what I'm doing in the pickpocket number. The kids are pushing me down and stealing my stuff. One of the kids says, "You don't know I'm here."
I say, "Of course I do: this is my little pyramid scheme. I'm a master thief and pickpocket and you're my students. I've taught you everything you know." As I finish, I'm looking at the choreographer with that gleam we professionals reserve for other professionals when we all know we're on the same page. I'm smiling a little. She's looking at me. There's a placid complacency to her little smile. The dark circles under the eyes, belying the calm surface and hinting at spiritual exhaustion beneath. I know these signs.
She says, "Well, not exactly."
I can't help it. I say, "Ha! Really."
"We're thinking that these kids are getting the better of you. They're tricking Ol' Mister Fagin."
"I see."
The disorganized rehearsal was bad enough, my friends. I was willing to overlook it. Organization can be made to happen. But this was the moment, as I said 'I see,' when my guard went up completely. Shields were raised, the Polite Mask fell firmly into place and my heart sank below my stomach, down beneath my shoes into the deep soil of this high desert plain and I wanted to cry. I realized that I had driven 945 miles to work with a company not much more theatrically savvy than the one I had been teaching and directing at in Dublin, CA for most of 2004 - 2005.
I looked around. Everyone was talking. Even the director. She glanced over occasionally. I looked back at the choreographer. She said, "I mean, you can play it whatever way you want. They'll just play that they're tricking you."
I smile, polite and professional: "Of course."
We get through the number and it's a shambles. None of the kids know anything in the number except one girl and Dodger, who stop to tell other kids and me what to do at various points in the process. The choreographer does not seem to remember some of the number. She did not in fact know we were doing this tonight. She happened by when she dropped her son off. It wasn't on the schedule. I understand. I'm weighing my options. Guarding my expression. Placid. Trying to blend.
We run the scenes, starting with Oliver's arrival at Fagin's lair. Technically, this is known as the Thieves' Kitchen. It's all pretty traditional. There's a kid who's been given the line, "Password!" whenever someone is going to enter my lair. He never remembers it. There's a pause. It kills momentum. Wait, momentum? Silly Edward.
An assistant gets up to show me the blocking. "I was you," she says. She's got blocking written in a script. People sort of say their lines. I'm looking at her script, looking at the people, looking at my script. Polite and attentive. Valeen, the director, tells the assistant to sit down. I think she can see that an Edward left to his own devices in this situation will perhaps be the better Fagin than one chained to an assistant's scrawled blocking notes. I begin to love Valeen a little, in spite of the disorganization.
Oliver's resentful and noncommittal in everything he does. I say a line and he just sort of stares at me. When he doesn't react, I begin making up responses for him:
"Oh, sorry, Mr. Fagin, Widow Corney upped my meds and I'm just a little confused right now."
"Are you, my dear? Well that's nothing that a little re-casting couldn't help." And I smile at him.
He blinks, says, "Wait. What?"
Valeen says, "Nathan, honey, where's your script?"
"Over there."
"Well go get it, honey, you're holding things up."
Script in hand he's not much better. We go through the scenes, basically giving me the blocking. Could have saved time meeting with someone earlier today and copying it down.
We move on to the next morning when Oliver sees me counting my treasure. When it comes to the threatening with the sausage fork, I step right into directorial mode and show him how I'm going to grab his shirt and he should grab my wrists and hold on and do all the shaking himself. Basic stage combat.
He seems a little more awake. I have hope.
We do the scene and I grab him and he's dead weight. I stop. "You've got to do the shaking for me," I say. "Here, make it look like I'm shaking you to death." He wiggles. "Bigger," I say. He wiggles a little bigger.
Valeen says, "Nathan, come on, you've got to react."
I shake him again and he wiggles a little bigger. I take it from the moment I see him awake. I leap across the stage, grab him by the shirt and practically throw him into the air. Direct eye contact. Complete commitment from me. He's terrified. Deer-in-the-headlights. And suddenly there's something going on in the scene.
After I shout at him to wash, Valeen says, "Good. That was good. Nathan, those reactions were really nice."
His hands are in his pockets and his face is dull again. He's staring at the floor. I begin to wonder what goes on at home. He says, "Okay." Not sad. Just doesn't seem to care.
Originally, I wrote something here comparing the boy unfavorably to poo-poo. I have decided that my words were too harsh. He's a good kid. He may just be horribly miscast. He's certainly got his work cut out for him.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Play the Ink
What do you do as an actor when you begin to think about your character's past, their origins, their family, their morning, their evening -- basically everything that happens before and after we see them on stage or on screen? If you have an imagination, if you have an inquisitive and active mind and if you are playing the part, isn't it ultimately up to you as the actor to devise a complete picture of whatever content you choose?
What do you do as a director when you think about a character's past, origins, family, everything that happens before and after we see them on screen or on stage? As the director, every last detail is in your control. Shouldn't you map every single thing out for the actor and tell them how to play it? Shouldn't you make them do the role the way you see it? Shouldn't you direct and guide them into the performance that you see as best fitting the role, the play, the production?
If the answer to the majority of these questions is "Yes!" -- as many actors or directors would tell you -- then we are at an immediate impasse: the answer cannot be yes to the actor's questions if the answer to the director's questions is also yes, because the director, in theory, ultimately decides. But if there is a disagreement and the director forces the actor to bend to directorial will, the actor may always have a shard of splintry grudge in her heart over being forced to play the role one way, when she feels deeply that it ought to go down a different path.
Similarly, a director knows when an actor is ignoring their direction. Well, a good director knows; a director who deals in direct (pun!) communication, clear choices and intelligent staging knows when an actor is pretending to forget because there has definitely been clear, calm discussion at some point during rehearsal about what, precisely, is going on in this play. So when the actor "forgets" repeatedly to use the double-take or to cross down left before the witty riposte, the director knows that the actor doesn't like what they were told to do. Hopefully, it is a situation in which the director can talk to the actor and they can work it out. If it is not, the director is better off giving the actor the benefit of the doubt and moving on to the next project with cloudless hindsight: actors' egos are strange, fragile things more slippery and potentially destructive than the Hayward fault.
Rehearsal is the place to work these details out. And the actor and director must approach the work with an equally open mind. Truly wonderful things can happen as a result of open collaboration, and it is exciting to see what magnificent works arise from bright minds applied to potent work in fertile artistic ground.
But.
How do we know which approach to take, and when? What is to stop me, as Oliver Warbucks in Annie, from choosing to play my role as an ardent Nazi sympathizer and soulless war profiteer? My name, after all, is Warbucks. It is clear that I made my money in World War I, I am bound to have multiple contacts in Germany, it's in my best interest that the United States be at war with someone, the President of Germany appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on January 30 of the year in which the play takes place (1933), so this is all quite possible.
The specific math: I am 37, so I play Warbucks as 37. If it's 1933, then 37 years ago was 1896. So at age 23, it was 1919, the perfect timing for my having made my first million by age 23, as stated in the script. [Pure inference: Being such a business- and work-oriented fellow, I am probably a Capricorn. Many Capricorns -- or people with Capricorn Ascendants -- tend to feel unwanted, so getting into a business that everyone in the world wants (weaponry) is going to be very satisfying to me.] None of this prevents me from choosing to make Warbucks a Nazi sympathizer. There is the fact that I invite Judge Brandeis to my house on Christmas Eve to officially adopt Annie, but I could justify that by saying I'm rubbing a Christian holiday in the face of a prominent Jew. There's nothing disproving this in the script, and imagination can justify anything.
What if a director disagrees with this? How do they go about dissuading me from this viewpoint? What if the director thinks that I am instead the inheritor of a vast fortune from a dead uncle whose attorney had to search Hell's Kitchen for me in order to execute the Last Will and Testament? Again, there's nothing in the script to say that this is not the case, and imagination can justify anything.
Aren't both points of view equally valid?
Possibly.
Is there some kind of yardstick, either universal or specific, that one can use as actor or director to figure out the true path of any character?
Yes.
It's called the script.
Specifically, the ink. The script can spark all sorts of ideas, and any number of approaches can arise therefrom. However, in Playing Shakespeare, Janet Suzman advises us to, "Play the ink." This means play what's there, play what's written and what can be directly supported by other ink in the script.
In other words, what Oliver Warbucks had for breakfast this morning does not matter unless the scene is about what he had for breakfast this morning. And the scene should only be about this morning's breakfast if that somehow advances the plot. If there's no breakfast mentioned, it's not playable.
An actor who spends time playing unwritten deep upset at past events is wasting everyone's time and her own most of all: why spend a play focused on one tiny detail of a character's past when the character's current focus is the now and the immediate or long-term future? Yes, the past is part of the tapestry. But it's only playable if it's written. And while Warbucks never says he is NOT a Nazi sympathizer, he also never says that he is. And if the character never says it, and if there is nothing in the ink of the script that clearly, directly states it, then it is not true and cannot be played.
We play wants.
We use tactics to get what we want.
We play these tactics with life-or-death stakes.
Whether or not we get what we want defines the degree of our emotional reaction to the situation; in other words, Emotion Is The Sweat Of Action. Play like your life depends on it -- literally, you will die if you do not get what you want -- and when you win or lose you will feel what you should in that moment. It's natural, it's organic, it's economical.
An important caveat: where you were just before you walked in and where you were going when you entered the room are, of course incredibly important. They are part of your arc, part of your path. In a well-written play, this is clear. But these are things to know, not to play. Only action is playable. Just like in hide-and-go-seek, we run for base as though we will die if we are tagged. To run for base as though thinking about the scary clowns of youth or the rhododendron behind which we were just hiding is precisely the path to losing the game.
What do you do as a director when you think about a character's past, origins, family, everything that happens before and after we see them on screen or on stage? As the director, every last detail is in your control. Shouldn't you map every single thing out for the actor and tell them how to play it? Shouldn't you make them do the role the way you see it? Shouldn't you direct and guide them into the performance that you see as best fitting the role, the play, the production?
If the answer to the majority of these questions is "Yes!" -- as many actors or directors would tell you -- then we are at an immediate impasse: the answer cannot be yes to the actor's questions if the answer to the director's questions is also yes, because the director, in theory, ultimately decides. But if there is a disagreement and the director forces the actor to bend to directorial will, the actor may always have a shard of splintry grudge in her heart over being forced to play the role one way, when she feels deeply that it ought to go down a different path.
Similarly, a director knows when an actor is ignoring their direction. Well, a good director knows; a director who deals in direct (pun!) communication, clear choices and intelligent staging knows when an actor is pretending to forget because there has definitely been clear, calm discussion at some point during rehearsal about what, precisely, is going on in this play. So when the actor "forgets" repeatedly to use the double-take or to cross down left before the witty riposte, the director knows that the actor doesn't like what they were told to do. Hopefully, it is a situation in which the director can talk to the actor and they can work it out. If it is not, the director is better off giving the actor the benefit of the doubt and moving on to the next project with cloudless hindsight: actors' egos are strange, fragile things more slippery and potentially destructive than the Hayward fault.
Rehearsal is the place to work these details out. And the actor and director must approach the work with an equally open mind. Truly wonderful things can happen as a result of open collaboration, and it is exciting to see what magnificent works arise from bright minds applied to potent work in fertile artistic ground.
But.
How do we know which approach to take, and when? What is to stop me, as Oliver Warbucks in Annie, from choosing to play my role as an ardent Nazi sympathizer and soulless war profiteer? My name, after all, is Warbucks. It is clear that I made my money in World War I, I am bound to have multiple contacts in Germany, it's in my best interest that the United States be at war with someone, the President of Germany appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on January 30 of the year in which the play takes place (1933), so this is all quite possible.
The specific math: I am 37, so I play Warbucks as 37. If it's 1933, then 37 years ago was 1896. So at age 23, it was 1919, the perfect timing for my having made my first million by age 23, as stated in the script. [Pure inference: Being such a business- and work-oriented fellow, I am probably a Capricorn. Many Capricorns -- or people with Capricorn Ascendants -- tend to feel unwanted, so getting into a business that everyone in the world wants (weaponry) is going to be very satisfying to me.] None of this prevents me from choosing to make Warbucks a Nazi sympathizer. There is the fact that I invite Judge Brandeis to my house on Christmas Eve to officially adopt Annie, but I could justify that by saying I'm rubbing a Christian holiday in the face of a prominent Jew. There's nothing disproving this in the script, and imagination can justify anything.
What if a director disagrees with this? How do they go about dissuading me from this viewpoint? What if the director thinks that I am instead the inheritor of a vast fortune from a dead uncle whose attorney had to search Hell's Kitchen for me in order to execute the Last Will and Testament? Again, there's nothing in the script to say that this is not the case, and imagination can justify anything.
Aren't both points of view equally valid?
Possibly.
Is there some kind of yardstick, either universal or specific, that one can use as actor or director to figure out the true path of any character?
Yes.
It's called the script.
Specifically, the ink. The script can spark all sorts of ideas, and any number of approaches can arise therefrom. However, in Playing Shakespeare, Janet Suzman advises us to, "Play the ink." This means play what's there, play what's written and what can be directly supported by other ink in the script.
In other words, what Oliver Warbucks had for breakfast this morning does not matter unless the scene is about what he had for breakfast this morning. And the scene should only be about this morning's breakfast if that somehow advances the plot. If there's no breakfast mentioned, it's not playable.
An actor who spends time playing unwritten deep upset at past events is wasting everyone's time and her own most of all: why spend a play focused on one tiny detail of a character's past when the character's current focus is the now and the immediate or long-term future? Yes, the past is part of the tapestry. But it's only playable if it's written. And while Warbucks never says he is NOT a Nazi sympathizer, he also never says that he is. And if the character never says it, and if there is nothing in the ink of the script that clearly, directly states it, then it is not true and cannot be played.
We play wants.
We use tactics to get what we want.
We play these tactics with life-or-death stakes.
Whether or not we get what we want defines the degree of our emotional reaction to the situation; in other words, Emotion Is The Sweat Of Action. Play like your life depends on it -- literally, you will die if you do not get what you want -- and when you win or lose you will feel what you should in that moment. It's natural, it's organic, it's economical.
An important caveat: where you were just before you walked in and where you were going when you entered the room are, of course incredibly important. They are part of your arc, part of your path. In a well-written play, this is clear. But these are things to know, not to play. Only action is playable. Just like in hide-and-go-seek, we run for base as though we will die if we are tagged. To run for base as though thinking about the scary clowns of youth or the rhododendron behind which we were just hiding is precisely the path to losing the game.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Week One: Part Two, OLIVER! in Idaho
Oct 9, 2006
As of 6:15 on Monday, 2 October, I haven't had any responses to my e-mails, not even a note of, "Gosh, Edward, so sorry we didn't get back to you." (In fact, since rehearsal has begun nobody has mentioned those e-mails at all.) More perplexing is that rehearsal is ostensibly beginning in 45 minutes and I have no idea where we're rehearsing.
I'd spent the day exploring Idaho Falls a little more, looking in at the local Chamber of Commerce and learning that there's an entire mountain full of Opals here in Idaho. The lady behind the counter was taken aback when I asked if she know of any good coffeehouses. She stumblepaused and said, " ... Coffeehouses? Well, yes, I'm sure ... here, let's see ..." Producing a local eateries pamphlet, she showed me the list of potential coffee places and reads the the names, pointing syllable by syllable. "Vil-la Cof-fee-house ... Jack Mor-mon's Steam-y Brews-N'-Smokes ... Hot Wa-ter Strained Through Gran-ny Pan-ties ..." I took the pamphlet and went in search of Villa Coffeehouse.
After a day spent drinking coffee and studying my lines I was ready to jump in to rehearsals. I like to arrive at least a half hour early, if not more. And by 6:17 I had accepted the fact that they were not going to contact me with any information about rehearsal. I was the pretty-pretty-princess, expecting special treatment and such. So I called the SM and said, "Hi there, Ginger, this is Edward Hightower."
"Oh. Are you in town?"
"Yes."
"... Great! So what can I help you with?"
"Well, I'd love to come to rehearsal tonight."
"Do you need a ride? Because I'm still at work and I have to go to the store before I go to rehearsal, but I could have someone come pick you up maybe. Actually, I'm just leaving work now. Do you need a ride?"
"No, I'd just like to know where rehearsal is."
"Oh! Do you have a driver, are you taking a taxi?"
"No, I have a car."
"You drove here?"
"Yes."
"Wow."
"I like the desert."
"I'll bet."
"So rehearsal is ..."
"Oh! It's at Jefferson Montessori in Ammon."
This was the moment when I thought my senses or cell service had departed me. "I'm sorry, where?"
"Jefferson Montessori. Where are you?"
"I'm in the parking lot of the Red Lion Hotel."
"Where is that?"
The Red Lion Hotel, at about six storeys, is the tallest secular building in Idaho Falls. It's right next to the river. Pretty visible. I wanted to ask if she lived around here, but things were strange enough. "It's near the river, downtown, off Broadway."
"Okay ... um ... I'm not good with directions. You're going to take Broadway to Yellowstone ... do you know where that is?"
"Yes."
"Okay, you're going to take Yellowstone North, so you'll be turning left. I think. Left, right, yeah, it's left. So you're going to pass Les Schwab and a barbecue place on the left and then you're going under an overpass and you take the first right and that's First Street. No, I'm sorry, the second right is First Street. And you're going to take First all the way down, couple miles, you're gonna cross a little bridge but right before that you'll know you're going the right direction when you pass an Arctic Circle on your left and a gas station on your right. The school's across from a Baptist church, it's on the right and there's another school next to it that has a billboard."
"I'll pass an Arctic Circle?"
"Yes."
"Aren't those all melting?"
" ... What?"
"Nothing. What's the name of the school again?"
"Jefferson Montessori."
"Jefferson?"
"Yes."
"Okay, well, I'll see you there."
"Okay, well, I have to go to the store and get some stuff, so I'll be there soon. And just call me if you get lost and I'll rope you in."
"Too late, Ginger."
"What? Why?"
"Nothing, I'll see you there."
So I follow her directions and there's no Jefferson Montessori. Everything else is exactly as she reported. But the name of the school is Snake River Montessori. I pull into the lot and I'm sitting there and it's raining. I call her just as a PT Cruiser is pulling into the lot. I think, 'I'll bet that's her.'
"Hey Ginger, it's Edward. Just wanted to check the name of the school ..."
"Jefferson Montessori. Where are you?"
"I'm at Snake River Montessori."
"Oh is that you in the little white car?"
I wave, she waves.
"Yes it is."
"Hi! Come on in! I'll just get the door open."
I pull the car around and park closer to the building, as it's now pouring rain. Ginger gets out of her car and heads toward the building. No umbrella. I'm putting my stuff into my backpack and another car pulls up. A jolly lady with white hair gets out. She sees my car and waves, walks over. I open the door.
"Hi! Are you Edward? I'm Valeen!"
"Hi there. Yes I am. Pleased to meet you."
"Welcome to Idaho Falls!" She gestures at the leaden skies and the torrential downpour. No umbrella for Valeen. "Come on inside and we'll have a chat."
"I'll just get my stuff."
"Okay! See you in there!"
Once I'm inside, Valeen invites me to have a seat. She says, "Just so you know what's going on, here: there's been some uproar because we're changing the way we do things. Part of that is having you here. Also, our Bill and Nancy aren't from Idaho Falls, but you're our big-ticket item for the production. A lot of people aren't happy about this but not so much the Fagin role because not so many people here thought they could play that part. But that's what's going on here: a lot of change and some anxiety over it, but we're going forward and we'll make the best of it."
I murmur something about change and resistance and change and art and she smilingly agrees. Then she says, "One other thing: our Oliver. He's got the look, he's got the voice -- when he chooses to sing -- but he's just not an actor."
I'm beginning to think that's a tradition with this show. The kid who played Oliver at PCPA had this goofy, complacent smile the whole time. Aside from the time he cried during a music rehearsal when Jonathan Swoboda raised his voice, I never saw that Oliver change his expression. Until I talked to him during Tech and suggested he think about what he would do if a scary man broke into his house, tied a rope to him and dragged him across the rooftops, threatening murder and worse. After that, he did some things. And he began to do more when he saw his understudy (a girl) astound us with her performance during the understudy rehearsal.
I relate this story briefly to Valeen. She says, "Oh good. You go ahead and do anything you can to get our Oliver to act. That would be wonderful."
I consider prodding him with a javelin and wonder if there's a used sporting goods store in town.
Rehearsal starts at 7:00. By 7:05 there are maybe four people in the room. Valeen introduces me to everyone. By 7:20 the room is full of screaming kids and talking adults. We have yet to begin rehearsing. I am still being introduced. By 7:45 I begin to want to die or cry or drink or all three.
Then we start to rehearse.
As of 6:15 on Monday, 2 October, I haven't had any responses to my e-mails, not even a note of, "Gosh, Edward, so sorry we didn't get back to you." (In fact, since rehearsal has begun nobody has mentioned those e-mails at all.) More perplexing is that rehearsal is ostensibly beginning in 45 minutes and I have no idea where we're rehearsing.
I'd spent the day exploring Idaho Falls a little more, looking in at the local Chamber of Commerce and learning that there's an entire mountain full of Opals here in Idaho. The lady behind the counter was taken aback when I asked if she know of any good coffeehouses. She stumblepaused and said, " ... Coffeehouses? Well, yes, I'm sure ... here, let's see ..." Producing a local eateries pamphlet, she showed me the list of potential coffee places and reads the the names, pointing syllable by syllable. "Vil-la Cof-fee-house ... Jack Mor-mon's Steam-y Brews-N'-Smokes ... Hot Wa-ter Strained Through Gran-ny Pan-ties ..." I took the pamphlet and went in search of Villa Coffeehouse.
After a day spent drinking coffee and studying my lines I was ready to jump in to rehearsals. I like to arrive at least a half hour early, if not more. And by 6:17 I had accepted the fact that they were not going to contact me with any information about rehearsal. I was the pretty-pretty-princess, expecting special treatment and such. So I called the SM and said, "Hi there, Ginger, this is Edward Hightower."
"Oh. Are you in town?"
"Yes."
"... Great! So what can I help you with?"
"Well, I'd love to come to rehearsal tonight."
"Do you need a ride? Because I'm still at work and I have to go to the store before I go to rehearsal, but I could have someone come pick you up maybe. Actually, I'm just leaving work now. Do you need a ride?"
"No, I'd just like to know where rehearsal is."
"Oh! Do you have a driver, are you taking a taxi?"
"No, I have a car."
"You drove here?"
"Yes."
"Wow."
"I like the desert."
"I'll bet."
"So rehearsal is ..."
"Oh! It's at Jefferson Montessori in Ammon."
This was the moment when I thought my senses or cell service had departed me. "I'm sorry, where?"
"Jefferson Montessori. Where are you?"
"I'm in the parking lot of the Red Lion Hotel."
"Where is that?"
The Red Lion Hotel, at about six storeys, is the tallest secular building in Idaho Falls. It's right next to the river. Pretty visible. I wanted to ask if she lived around here, but things were strange enough. "It's near the river, downtown, off Broadway."
"Okay ... um ... I'm not good with directions. You're going to take Broadway to Yellowstone ... do you know where that is?"
"Yes."
"Okay, you're going to take Yellowstone North, so you'll be turning left. I think. Left, right, yeah, it's left. So you're going to pass Les Schwab and a barbecue place on the left and then you're going under an overpass and you take the first right and that's First Street. No, I'm sorry, the second right is First Street. And you're going to take First all the way down, couple miles, you're gonna cross a little bridge but right before that you'll know you're going the right direction when you pass an Arctic Circle on your left and a gas station on your right. The school's across from a Baptist church, it's on the right and there's another school next to it that has a billboard."
"I'll pass an Arctic Circle?"
"Yes."
"Aren't those all melting?"
" ... What?"
"Nothing. What's the name of the school again?"
"Jefferson Montessori."
"Jefferson?"
"Yes."
"Okay, well, I'll see you there."
"Okay, well, I have to go to the store and get some stuff, so I'll be there soon. And just call me if you get lost and I'll rope you in."
"Too late, Ginger."
"What? Why?"
"Nothing, I'll see you there."
So I follow her directions and there's no Jefferson Montessori. Everything else is exactly as she reported. But the name of the school is Snake River Montessori. I pull into the lot and I'm sitting there and it's raining. I call her just as a PT Cruiser is pulling into the lot. I think, 'I'll bet that's her.'
"Hey Ginger, it's Edward. Just wanted to check the name of the school ..."
"Jefferson Montessori. Where are you?"
"I'm at Snake River Montessori."
"Oh is that you in the little white car?"
I wave, she waves.
"Yes it is."
"Hi! Come on in! I'll just get the door open."
I pull the car around and park closer to the building, as it's now pouring rain. Ginger gets out of her car and heads toward the building. No umbrella. I'm putting my stuff into my backpack and another car pulls up. A jolly lady with white hair gets out. She sees my car and waves, walks over. I open the door.
"Hi! Are you Edward? I'm Valeen!"
"Hi there. Yes I am. Pleased to meet you."
"Welcome to Idaho Falls!" She gestures at the leaden skies and the torrential downpour. No umbrella for Valeen. "Come on inside and we'll have a chat."
"I'll just get my stuff."
"Okay! See you in there!"
Once I'm inside, Valeen invites me to have a seat. She says, "Just so you know what's going on, here: there's been some uproar because we're changing the way we do things. Part of that is having you here. Also, our Bill and Nancy aren't from Idaho Falls, but you're our big-ticket item for the production. A lot of people aren't happy about this but not so much the Fagin role because not so many people here thought they could play that part. But that's what's going on here: a lot of change and some anxiety over it, but we're going forward and we'll make the best of it."
I murmur something about change and resistance and change and art and she smilingly agrees. Then she says, "One other thing: our Oliver. He's got the look, he's got the voice -- when he chooses to sing -- but he's just not an actor."
I'm beginning to think that's a tradition with this show. The kid who played Oliver at PCPA had this goofy, complacent smile the whole time. Aside from the time he cried during a music rehearsal when Jonathan Swoboda raised his voice, I never saw that Oliver change his expression. Until I talked to him during Tech and suggested he think about what he would do if a scary man broke into his house, tied a rope to him and dragged him across the rooftops, threatening murder and worse. After that, he did some things. And he began to do more when he saw his understudy (a girl) astound us with her performance during the understudy rehearsal.
I relate this story briefly to Valeen. She says, "Oh good. You go ahead and do anything you can to get our Oliver to act. That would be wonderful."
I consider prodding him with a javelin and wonder if there's a used sporting goods store in town.
Rehearsal starts at 7:00. By 7:05 there are maybe four people in the room. Valeen introduces me to everyone. By 7:20 the room is full of screaming kids and talking adults. We have yet to begin rehearsing. I am still being introduced. By 7:45 I begin to want to die or cry or drink or all three.
Then we start to rehearse.
Week One: OLIVER! in Idaho, Rinky-Dink Research
Oct 8, 2006
I am surrounded by Mormons. I am playing Fagin in a production of Oliver! in Idaho Falls, Idaho, for a theatre company who are paying me more than they are paying the director. We are rehearsing in the multi-purpose room of a Montessori School. The Stage Manager chats with people during rehearsals, the director has to shout to get the orphans/pickpockets to be quiet, other adults in the room are allowed to converse during rehearsal -- at full voice -- and the dialects are truly startling.
I have wandered knowingly into Guffmania. It's research, and I'm getting paid for it, and I'm writing about it here every week, but it's like taking a spiritual and artistic cheese grater to my soul. Particularly after the delights of PCPA. True, working at PCPA left me just able to cover my rent in Livermore and, by the time I returned home after A Little Night Music, financially destitute. Also true: every company has its inherent foibles. But PCPA is a great place to work. It's organized. And Chrissy Collins, Goddess of Stage Management ... I weep for lack of Chrissy.
While I say I've wandered knowingly into Guffmania, I should specify that I did not realize precisely how bad it was going to be until I heard the word, 'Montessori'. I thought my cell phone was playing tricks. But no, it was the right word. I wondered for a moment if I could afford to just drive back to Livermore there and then. But I'd already met two board members and they are very nice people. Still, I had yet to see a contract or a check. Maybe I could talk Veronica into a little return gas money and I could just drive the 15 hours straight, hopped up on coffee and the fight/flight response.
How did I get this job? Jonathan Visser, who played Mr. Erlanson in A Little Night Music, was originally going to play this part. He got a better offer in Oregon and asked me if I was interested. I didn't really have any other offers and had been more concerned about my housing situation in Santa Maria than I had future employment. That's another story. I did hear that the Great American Melodrama was interested in me, but I didn't hear any more after their artistic director came to see ALNM, and I learned later that he had stayed after to chat with people during the photo call. So maybe my work sucks. Maybe I was supposed to court him. I don't know. But the housing here in Idaho Falls is definitely better (I'm in a hotel!), and the pay is better than PCPA, and I'd never driven to Idaho before. So that all added up to something new and different. And here I am rehearsing Monday through Wednesday evenings, with four hours Saturday morning (starting at 8:00am! WHAT THE FUCK?!) and the rest of the time I have nothing to do.
So I left on Saturday, 9/30. Spent the night in Wells, NV. Arrived in Idaho Falls at around 6:12pm on Sunday, October 1. Friday, 9/29, I sent a message to the Producer (Visser's very nice Aunt Marcia), asking where I should go when I got to town. Maybe I sent it on Thursday, I'll check that later. Point is, no response. So I worry about it and call on Saturday as I'm driving East on 580 to catch 5 North in Tracy, thence to 80 in Sacramento. Someone -- I think perhaps her son -- answers the phone. I ask for Marcia. He says, "She's busy." I tell him my name and that I'm one of the Guest Artists in Oliver!, and that I would love it if she could call me back. He says okay, so I continue merrily on my way up into the Sierras and then down into the desert and thank God the sun set so I didn't have to see Winnemucca by daylight. I figure I'll get a phone call sometime that night or the next day.
Complete silence. I even dawdle a bit in Wells, taking a long breakfast in case they've decided to hire a local Idahoan and save some money. But no message is forthcoming so I get on the road in good faith; at some point between Wells, NV and Twin Falls, ID, the battery on my phone dies. I forgot to charge it the night before.
When I arrive in Idaho Falls, I am struck by two things: 1) this is a nice little town/city, with a cool old Downtown area, and 2) I have absolutely no idea where to go. Desperately needing a bathroom, I stop at the Red Lion Hotel. I ask the clerk if he knows of a coffee shop that might be open. I'm figuring coffee shop, free internet, communication, good stuff. He says there's a Starbucks at Fred Meyer on Yellowstone.
I head to Fred Meyer, which is like Albertson's meets Target and the Wolfman.
It's a Starbucks kiosk. Not even a spot to plug my phone in. So I stand near a pay phone and fake a conversation while my phone charges at the outlet beneath the phone. It charges a little. I sip my coffee. I'm impatient. I take my phone and walk outside. Pumpkins in big cardboard boxes, a vast parking lot, a truly lovely sunset.
I head back to the Red Lion. I ask the guy if he knows of anywhere I can get free internet access. I anticipate an e-mail with all sorts of good chunky info. He points behind me: there's a 1992 Hewlett Packard on a little stand in the lobby.
"It's dialup," he says. "Slow."
"Better than nothing," I say, and sit down to a very familiar computer: this is precisely the same model I bought back when I was 19. I cost around $1,492.00! Can you believe that? This one is maybe a little faster than mine was, lacking MYST and Sim Towers.
Nothing. Neither the director nor SM have responded to my e-mails. So I write another one to the effect of, "I'm here, where should I go?" I plug my phone into the powerstrip and sit on a nearby couch to wait. An hour later, no response but my phone has enough of a charge to be useful.
I call Veronica. She says, "Honey, who the fuck are you working for that they bring you to Idaho and don't have anyplace for you to go?"
I say, "I think they're new to this."
I call Visser's Aunt Marcia. She sounds delighted and a little alarmed to hear from me. (Admittedly, in one of my e-mails of the previous week, I had asked if I should arrive Sunday or Monday. Getting no response, I stuck to our original arrangement: Sunday.) Marcia tells me she's had company all day and will call me right back with a place for me to stay. I call Veronica. Veronica offers to pay for a hotel for the night. I counsel her against this on the logic that it's better to save money.
The next time my phone rings, it's not Marcia, but a very nice woman named Annette, who does props for the shows. She gives me directions to her house. I drive out there. I meet her family.
They're Mormons. There's a lovely print on the wall of Jesus surrounded by a multi-culti gaggle of kids, with angelic presences whose names I could only guess at presiding over it all behind a misty scrim. If that's not a Mormonesque picture, I'm not an unrepentant Pagan lothario (reformed).
I'm wearing my festive Turkish hat and I have a big gold earring in my left ear. I talk a little too loudly and too much, making too many jokes. I'm nervous. They're very nice, they seem a little shellshocked. They didn't know I'd be staying there. The first they'd heard was a phone call ten minutes before I arrived. We're all smiling big friendly smiles. I concentrate very hard on not swearing. I begin to sweat.
Annette shows me the room I'll be staying in. It's their oldest son's. "He's in Brazil," she says. Is that a euphamism or is he on his mission? Maybe both. Maybe his mission is to wait in a secret room and kill earring-clad pagans in their sleep.
The room is spotless. There is absolutely no mess, anywhere. Not even in the closet. He's an award-winning musician, sportsman and a decorated Webelo, Cub and Boy Scout. There are posters on the wall, LDS ads about being nice to people and hugging grandma. He collects these the way Hillary collects Absolut ads.
It hits me as I'm changing into my pajamas: this boy is precisely the kind of boy Veronica liked to seduce when she was in High School. For the first time on this trip, I'm glad Veronica's still in Livermore. My girlfriend seducing local Mormon missionaries is the last thing I need.
I am surrounded by Mormons. I am playing Fagin in a production of Oliver! in Idaho Falls, Idaho, for a theatre company who are paying me more than they are paying the director. We are rehearsing in the multi-purpose room of a Montessori School. The Stage Manager chats with people during rehearsals, the director has to shout to get the orphans/pickpockets to be quiet, other adults in the room are allowed to converse during rehearsal -- at full voice -- and the dialects are truly startling.
I have wandered knowingly into Guffmania. It's research, and I'm getting paid for it, and I'm writing about it here every week, but it's like taking a spiritual and artistic cheese grater to my soul. Particularly after the delights of PCPA. True, working at PCPA left me just able to cover my rent in Livermore and, by the time I returned home after A Little Night Music, financially destitute. Also true: every company has its inherent foibles. But PCPA is a great place to work. It's organized. And Chrissy Collins, Goddess of Stage Management ... I weep for lack of Chrissy.
While I say I've wandered knowingly into Guffmania, I should specify that I did not realize precisely how bad it was going to be until I heard the word, 'Montessori'. I thought my cell phone was playing tricks. But no, it was the right word. I wondered for a moment if I could afford to just drive back to Livermore there and then. But I'd already met two board members and they are very nice people. Still, I had yet to see a contract or a check. Maybe I could talk Veronica into a little return gas money and I could just drive the 15 hours straight, hopped up on coffee and the fight/flight response.
How did I get this job? Jonathan Visser, who played Mr. Erlanson in A Little Night Music, was originally going to play this part. He got a better offer in Oregon and asked me if I was interested. I didn't really have any other offers and had been more concerned about my housing situation in Santa Maria than I had future employment. That's another story. I did hear that the Great American Melodrama was interested in me, but I didn't hear any more after their artistic director came to see ALNM, and I learned later that he had stayed after to chat with people during the photo call. So maybe my work sucks. Maybe I was supposed to court him. I don't know. But the housing here in Idaho Falls is definitely better (I'm in a hotel!), and the pay is better than PCPA, and I'd never driven to Idaho before. So that all added up to something new and different. And here I am rehearsing Monday through Wednesday evenings, with four hours Saturday morning (starting at 8:00am! WHAT THE FUCK?!) and the rest of the time I have nothing to do.
So I left on Saturday, 9/30. Spent the night in Wells, NV. Arrived in Idaho Falls at around 6:12pm on Sunday, October 1. Friday, 9/29, I sent a message to the Producer (Visser's very nice Aunt Marcia), asking where I should go when I got to town. Maybe I sent it on Thursday, I'll check that later. Point is, no response. So I worry about it and call on Saturday as I'm driving East on 580 to catch 5 North in Tracy, thence to 80 in Sacramento. Someone -- I think perhaps her son -- answers the phone. I ask for Marcia. He says, "She's busy." I tell him my name and that I'm one of the Guest Artists in Oliver!, and that I would love it if she could call me back. He says okay, so I continue merrily on my way up into the Sierras and then down into the desert and thank God the sun set so I didn't have to see Winnemucca by daylight. I figure I'll get a phone call sometime that night or the next day.
Complete silence. I even dawdle a bit in Wells, taking a long breakfast in case they've decided to hire a local Idahoan and save some money. But no message is forthcoming so I get on the road in good faith; at some point between Wells, NV and Twin Falls, ID, the battery on my phone dies. I forgot to charge it the night before.
When I arrive in Idaho Falls, I am struck by two things: 1) this is a nice little town/city, with a cool old Downtown area, and 2) I have absolutely no idea where to go. Desperately needing a bathroom, I stop at the Red Lion Hotel. I ask the clerk if he knows of a coffee shop that might be open. I'm figuring coffee shop, free internet, communication, good stuff. He says there's a Starbucks at Fred Meyer on Yellowstone.
I head to Fred Meyer, which is like Albertson's meets Target and the Wolfman.
It's a Starbucks kiosk. Not even a spot to plug my phone in. So I stand near a pay phone and fake a conversation while my phone charges at the outlet beneath the phone. It charges a little. I sip my coffee. I'm impatient. I take my phone and walk outside. Pumpkins in big cardboard boxes, a vast parking lot, a truly lovely sunset.
I head back to the Red Lion. I ask the guy if he knows of anywhere I can get free internet access. I anticipate an e-mail with all sorts of good chunky info. He points behind me: there's a 1992 Hewlett Packard on a little stand in the lobby.
"It's dialup," he says. "Slow."
"Better than nothing," I say, and sit down to a very familiar computer: this is precisely the same model I bought back when I was 19. I cost around $1,492.00! Can you believe that? This one is maybe a little faster than mine was, lacking MYST and Sim Towers.
Nothing. Neither the director nor SM have responded to my e-mails. So I write another one to the effect of, "I'm here, where should I go?" I plug my phone into the powerstrip and sit on a nearby couch to wait. An hour later, no response but my phone has enough of a charge to be useful.
I call Veronica. She says, "Honey, who the fuck are you working for that they bring you to Idaho and don't have anyplace for you to go?"
I say, "I think they're new to this."
I call Visser's Aunt Marcia. She sounds delighted and a little alarmed to hear from me. (Admittedly, in one of my e-mails of the previous week, I had asked if I should arrive Sunday or Monday. Getting no response, I stuck to our original arrangement: Sunday.) Marcia tells me she's had company all day and will call me right back with a place for me to stay. I call Veronica. Veronica offers to pay for a hotel for the night. I counsel her against this on the logic that it's better to save money.
The next time my phone rings, it's not Marcia, but a very nice woman named Annette, who does props for the shows. She gives me directions to her house. I drive out there. I meet her family.
They're Mormons. There's a lovely print on the wall of Jesus surrounded by a multi-culti gaggle of kids, with angelic presences whose names I could only guess at presiding over it all behind a misty scrim. If that's not a Mormonesque picture, I'm not an unrepentant Pagan lothario (reformed).
I'm wearing my festive Turkish hat and I have a big gold earring in my left ear. I talk a little too loudly and too much, making too many jokes. I'm nervous. They're very nice, they seem a little shellshocked. They didn't know I'd be staying there. The first they'd heard was a phone call ten minutes before I arrived. We're all smiling big friendly smiles. I concentrate very hard on not swearing. I begin to sweat.
Annette shows me the room I'll be staying in. It's their oldest son's. "He's in Brazil," she says. Is that a euphamism or is he on his mission? Maybe both. Maybe his mission is to wait in a secret room and kill earring-clad pagans in their sleep.
The room is spotless. There is absolutely no mess, anywhere. Not even in the closet. He's an award-winning musician, sportsman and a decorated Webelo, Cub and Boy Scout. There are posters on the wall, LDS ads about being nice to people and hugging grandma. He collects these the way Hillary collects Absolut ads.
It hits me as I'm changing into my pajamas: this boy is precisely the kind of boy Veronica liked to seduce when she was in High School. For the first time on this trip, I'm glad Veronica's still in Livermore. My girlfriend seducing local Mormon missionaries is the last thing I need.
My Chat Room Hook-up
Aug 17, 2007
Brandee: nite Jay
Jay: feel free to add...
Edward: Anyone here 925?
Jay: nite brandee
********** at 10:32 PM kelly left the room
jeremy: later jay
********** at 10:33 PM Marqui†a de Sade left the room
Live yours,not MINE!: como estan esta noche?
Edward: Wanto to join a cult?
Jay: later jer
********** at 10:33 PM Jay left the room
Jeff: hey everyone
********** at 10:33 PM oscar left the room
Edward: Hey everyone.
********** at 10:33 PM Live yours,not MINE! left the room
jeremy: waz up jeff
Brandee: nada
~Jill~: O.K. all.......Gotta run.....Gotta get that beauty sleep.....G'Nite Brandee....stay
gorgeous!!
********** at 10:33 PM jimmy left the room
Edward: donde estas el pollo sucio?
jeremy: waz up edward
jeremy: gnite jill
Ian: Goodnight Jill
Brandee: isn't pollo chicken
Edward: Waz up, Mrs. Santa Claus?
Mark: yes brandee
Brandee: nite Jill
Mark: pollo is chix
Jeff: how is everybody
~Jill~: G'Nite Jeremy...G'Nite Ian and good luck with everything!!
Brandee: I'm going to bed too
Edward: muy caliente, muchacho!
Ian: thanks
********** at 10:34 PM ~Jill~ left the room
Brandee: nite all
newshapenetwork.com: hey, i think i am going to bow out gracefully now.........my
forehead is doing the typing for me here...........
jeremy: gnite brandee
Brandee:
newshapenetwork.com: nite!
Edward: yes we're all getting old.
********** at 10:34 PM Ian left the room
Brandee: well
Brandee: nite
Edward: old and flabby
Mark: might brandee....you too
********** at 10:34 PM MISSMATTY2007 joined the room
Brandee: niyr nred
********** at 10:35 PM MISSMATTY2007 left the room
Edward: tired easily
jeremy: not me
Mark: night*
********** at 10:35 PM *****Elliott joined the room
********** at 10:35 PM jimmy joined the room
Brandee: nite news that is
Edward: angrily flatulent in Target on a sunday mornin'
jeremy: i'm not getting flabbyedward
********** at 10:35 PM Brandee left the room
********** at 10:35 PM Jeff left the room
Edward: I'm not getting flabbyedward either!
jimmy: hey room
Edward: he's gross
Edward: and flabby
newshapenetwork.com: nite brandee! nice talking to you
Edward: not like limberkimmy
********** at 10:35 PM finny left the room
Edward: she's the most fun
********** at 10:36 PM Mark left the room
********** at 10:36 PM Jerry joined the room
jeremy: yea i forgot to space it there edward
********** at 10:36 PM Jerry left the room
Edward: good night, everyone!
jeremy: is everyone leaving
********** at 10:37 PM newshapenetwork.com left the room
Edward: I'm like a pixie with stubble
********** at 10:37 PM Jenn joined the room
Brandee: nite Jay
Jay: feel free to add...
Edward: Anyone here 925?
Jay: nite brandee
********** at 10:32 PM kelly left the room
jeremy: later jay
********** at 10:33 PM Marqui†a de Sade left the room
Live yours,not MINE!: como estan esta noche?
Edward: Wanto to join a cult?
Jay: later jer
********** at 10:33 PM Jay left the room
Jeff: hey everyone
********** at 10:33 PM oscar left the room
Edward: Hey everyone.
********** at 10:33 PM Live yours,not MINE! left the room
jeremy: waz up jeff
Brandee: nada
~Jill~: O.K. all.......Gotta run.....Gotta get that beauty sleep.....G'Nite Brandee....stay
gorgeous!!
********** at 10:33 PM jimmy left the room
Edward: donde estas el pollo sucio?
jeremy: waz up edward
jeremy: gnite jill
Ian: Goodnight Jill
Brandee: isn't pollo chicken
Edward: Waz up, Mrs. Santa Claus?
Mark: yes brandee
Brandee: nite Jill
Mark: pollo is chix
Jeff: how is everybody
~Jill~: G'Nite Jeremy...G'Nite Ian and good luck with everything!!
Brandee: I'm going to bed too
Edward: muy caliente, muchacho!
Ian: thanks
********** at 10:34 PM ~Jill~ left the room
Brandee: nite all
newshapenetwork.com: hey, i think i am going to bow out gracefully now.........my
forehead is doing the typing for me here...........
jeremy: gnite brandee
Brandee:
newshapenetwork.com: nite!
Edward: yes we're all getting old.
********** at 10:34 PM Ian left the room
Brandee: well
Brandee: nite
Edward: old and flabby
Mark: might brandee....you too
********** at 10:34 PM MISSMATTY2007 joined the room
Brandee: niyr nred
********** at 10:35 PM MISSMATTY2007 left the room
Edward: tired easily
jeremy: not me
Mark: night*
********** at 10:35 PM *****Elliott joined the room
********** at 10:35 PM jimmy joined the room
Brandee: nite news that is
Edward: angrily flatulent in Target on a sunday mornin'
jeremy: i'm not getting flabbyedward
********** at 10:35 PM Brandee left the room
********** at 10:35 PM Jeff left the room
Edward: I'm not getting flabbyedward either!
jimmy: hey room
Edward: he's gross
Edward: and flabby
newshapenetwork.com: nite brandee! nice talking to you
Edward: not like limberkimmy
********** at 10:35 PM finny left the room
Edward: she's the most fun
********** at 10:36 PM Mark left the room
********** at 10:36 PM Jerry joined the room
jeremy: yea i forgot to space it there edward
********** at 10:36 PM Jerry left the room
Edward: good night, everyone!
jeremy: is everyone leaving
********** at 10:37 PM newshapenetwork.com left the room
Edward: I'm like a pixie with stubble
********** at 10:37 PM Jenn joined the room
Friday, November 12, 2010
Adventures in Hair
I'm generally an affable, easy-going sort of fellow. But my recent stories about shaving my head have brought to mind some experiences I've had in theatre that are worth telling here. I'm not sure how many of these stories I'll tell today. I may restrict it to one, as I suspect that my overlong blogs turn off those of you with a third-grade attention span.
I drive through Walnut Creek every day en route to Solano College, where I am currently faculty in the Actor Training Program. I teach Musical Theatre Audition Technique. Like anything, you get out of it what you put into it. Like Walnut Creek, it has its nice parts and its not-so-nice parts. CTA/Crossroads was in a set of buildings in a not-so-nice part of Walnut Creek that aspired to the status of strip mall on Olympic Way, across from a 7/11. I heard recently that it had shut down. I don't know if that's true or not.
These buildings, nestled up against 680 Northbound, housed mostly automotive, florist, art supply businesses. And a theatre academy. With a theatre attached to it. The theatre itself had been a pet shop. This posed some problems, as apparently the stage manager -- someone's Dad, as I remember -- didn't think it was necessary to sweep or mop anywhere before, during or after it had been converted into a theatre space. Even when actors were sneezing and having asthma attacks, action was deemed unnecessary.
This tiny little theatre had chosen as its inaugural production the sophisticated Sondheim musical, A Little Night Music. This is a show about infidelity, familial love triangles, courtesans and suicide -- among other things. The theatre was run by Mormons. Many of you might see a disconnect there; the management did not. However, they had lost their director and the fellow playing Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm the day before they were to start rehearsing. Or perhaps when I arrived they'd been rehearsing for a week. I know they were freaking out, looking for someone to play Carl-Magnus. I got a call, so I figured I would go audition for them. I had never heard of the company, but then, I had been living and doing theatre on the East Coast since 1995. This was 2001.
Lesson Number One: Always Do Your Research
A theatre in a third-world strip mall, next to a freeway, in a former pet store, run by Mormons. I would never have gone anywhere near the place, had I known. (I think my then girlfriend knew some things, but she hesitated to tell me, as there were reflective surfaces in the vicinity.) I want to be clear: the only reason I took the job was out of boredom and because I hadn't actually done any theatre since 1998. Long story, I'll safe it for another post.
Lesson Number Two: $tick To Your Gun$
When you ask for $1,500.00. stick to it. If they refuse, thank them politely and leave. They will either capitulate or they will not. If they pay you what you ask, that's great. Invite whom you will. But if you give in to their offer of a third of that amount, do not invite anyone. You have sealed your own doom.
Lesson Number Three: Hold Them To The Dates They Give You
Write down performance dates the moment you get them. Do not trust the management to stick to those dates. They will probably extend the show without telling you, and when your performances conflict with rehearsals for your next project, you might find yourself in conflict with the Artistic Director of a far better company. Note: if you are ever in a situation where Crappy Group's show conflicts with Superb Group's show, choose Superb Group. Crappy group will probably fold due to financial mismanagement within five years.
So I was playing opposite a woman who was a little bit older than me. The management were concerned that I looked too young next to her, and in an effort to remedy this they brought a professional hairdresser in to "frost" my hair. I told them I could easily do it with makeup and they said, no, no, it's our pleasure. She's the real deal. She'll frost it and it will look natural and everything will be fine.
Next thing I know, there's this borderline morbidly obese woman in a tube top crowding into a handicap restroom with me, mixing some sort of paste in a plastic cup. It starts to smell, the fumes burn my eyes, and she's telling me, "We're going to just brush this on and see how it looks."
I'm assuming that this is step one of frosting. The paste begins to burn my skin. I can smell burning hair. I mention this, she doesn't seem concerned, I rinse my hair out and I have orange patches at each temple and an orange patch in the center of the hair above my forehead. I look like a Smoky Calico.
"What's step two?"
"Step two of what?"
"Of the frosting process."
"The what process?"
"Aren't we frosting my hair?"
"Maybe we can add some more ..."
So she daubs more caustic paste onto my hair. By the time it rinses out, it's made very large light yellow patches in my hair. I look like an idiot who has mated with a clown. A large clown. In a tube top.
One of the management people sees what has happened to my hair and does not immediately take steps to intervene. After rinsing my hair again, and again, and again, I ask what the next step is.
"That's it. There is no next step."
"What?"
"You're done. Don't you like it?"
"Well, it's not terribly natural-looking, is it?"
"Edward, trust me: our audiences don't care."
When I walk into the theatre to rehearse that evening, it goes quiet. The actress playing Anne gets oh-my-God eyes and starts studying her script very closely. I still don't understand where the hairdresser lady has gone and why she didn't finish the job. I ask someone if she'll be back, but rehearsal gets started and I forget about my hair until I get back to my parents' house and my sister Hillary says, "Tad, what THE FUCK did you do to your hair?"
The woman playing my wife wears enough makeup in the role that our age difference is hardly noticeable. But now I have to darken my hair with brown makeup and try to silver over that to cover the orange patches. On stage, my grey looks a deep, chlorinated green. In certain lights, because not all of the lighting is for theatre and some pieces are outdoor flood lamps, my hair seems to glow dully, like irradiated old copper. I look dead, possessed or cancerous by turns.
The production is generally terrible, but it does lead to further employment for me: because of a connection I make in that cast, I eventually direct The Cocktail Hour at Pleasanton Playhouse. But that's down the road. And, frankly, everything else is eclipsed by the savory tidbit they saved for opening night.
"Edward, we'd like to ask you not to say a couple of words in your performance."
"I'm sorry?"
"Our audience is very conservative and there are a couple of words we'd like you not to say."
"What words are these?" I'm polite, but now my hackles are really starting to rise. Do they point to the words or say them? I don't remember. I choose say:
"God-damn, please don't say God-damn."
"But it's in the script."
"We'd just like to ask you to consider not saying it, please. You can say anything else you want, just not those words."
"Have you asked Sondheim's permission?"
Silence.
This polite pressure continues. I agree to replace the word. Ordinarily, I would sing,
"The papers ... he mentioned papers,
Some legal papers which I didn't see there.
Where were they, the goddamn papers she had to sign?"
That night, and ever after, I sing something like this:
"The frongly-brongly papers ... he mentioned papers,
Some legal papers which I didn't see there.
Where were they, the krinkly-frankle papers she had to sign?"
Other variations include the golly-gee-whillikers papers, the baby-eating papers, the dog-fart papers, the invisible papers, the fly papers, the oofly-doodler papers, the penis papers. Anything is fine, as long as I don't say God-damn. And they never bat an eye. Neither the audience nor the management seems to notice.
The best and simplest substitution comes to me on closing night. It comes to me right before the line. One word, to perfectly describe my experience with that production:
Toilet.
The audience doesn't even twitch. I'd say my hair had them in its cobra-like gaze, but by this time Hillary had dyed it for me and the silver looked normal. No more Boris Karloff toupee for me, alas. So I must assume that this conservative audience simply had no idea what they were watching. They were there to be polite. They neither cared nor understood. Just stupid Americans, sitting in an old pet store, trying not to sneeze as the Liebeslieders shriek off-pitch at them and the ingenue runs around with band-aids up her shin from the giant hole backstage next to the stairs that the Stage Manager (someone's Dad) couldn't be troubled to patch.
I drive through Walnut Creek every day en route to Solano College, where I am currently faculty in the Actor Training Program. I teach Musical Theatre Audition Technique. Like anything, you get out of it what you put into it. Like Walnut Creek, it has its nice parts and its not-so-nice parts. CTA/Crossroads was in a set of buildings in a not-so-nice part of Walnut Creek that aspired to the status of strip mall on Olympic Way, across from a 7/11. I heard recently that it had shut down. I don't know if that's true or not.
These buildings, nestled up against 680 Northbound, housed mostly automotive, florist, art supply businesses. And a theatre academy. With a theatre attached to it. The theatre itself had been a pet shop. This posed some problems, as apparently the stage manager -- someone's Dad, as I remember -- didn't think it was necessary to sweep or mop anywhere before, during or after it had been converted into a theatre space. Even when actors were sneezing and having asthma attacks, action was deemed unnecessary.
This tiny little theatre had chosen as its inaugural production the sophisticated Sondheim musical, A Little Night Music. This is a show about infidelity, familial love triangles, courtesans and suicide -- among other things. The theatre was run by Mormons. Many of you might see a disconnect there; the management did not. However, they had lost their director and the fellow playing Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm the day before they were to start rehearsing. Or perhaps when I arrived they'd been rehearsing for a week. I know they were freaking out, looking for someone to play Carl-Magnus. I got a call, so I figured I would go audition for them. I had never heard of the company, but then, I had been living and doing theatre on the East Coast since 1995. This was 2001.
Lesson Number One: Always Do Your Research
A theatre in a third-world strip mall, next to a freeway, in a former pet store, run by Mormons. I would never have gone anywhere near the place, had I known. (I think my then girlfriend knew some things, but she hesitated to tell me, as there were reflective surfaces in the vicinity.) I want to be clear: the only reason I took the job was out of boredom and because I hadn't actually done any theatre since 1998. Long story, I'll safe it for another post.
Lesson Number Two: $tick To Your Gun$
When you ask for $1,500.00. stick to it. If they refuse, thank them politely and leave. They will either capitulate or they will not. If they pay you what you ask, that's great. Invite whom you will. But if you give in to their offer of a third of that amount, do not invite anyone. You have sealed your own doom.
Lesson Number Three: Hold Them To The Dates They Give You
Write down performance dates the moment you get them. Do not trust the management to stick to those dates. They will probably extend the show without telling you, and when your performances conflict with rehearsals for your next project, you might find yourself in conflict with the Artistic Director of a far better company. Note: if you are ever in a situation where Crappy Group's show conflicts with Superb Group's show, choose Superb Group. Crappy group will probably fold due to financial mismanagement within five years.
So I was playing opposite a woman who was a little bit older than me. The management were concerned that I looked too young next to her, and in an effort to remedy this they brought a professional hairdresser in to "frost" my hair. I told them I could easily do it with makeup and they said, no, no, it's our pleasure. She's the real deal. She'll frost it and it will look natural and everything will be fine.
Next thing I know, there's this borderline morbidly obese woman in a tube top crowding into a handicap restroom with me, mixing some sort of paste in a plastic cup. It starts to smell, the fumes burn my eyes, and she's telling me, "We're going to just brush this on and see how it looks."
I'm assuming that this is step one of frosting. The paste begins to burn my skin. I can smell burning hair. I mention this, she doesn't seem concerned, I rinse my hair out and I have orange patches at each temple and an orange patch in the center of the hair above my forehead. I look like a Smoky Calico.
"What's step two?"
"Step two of what?"
"Of the frosting process."
"The what process?"
"Aren't we frosting my hair?"
"Maybe we can add some more ..."
So she daubs more caustic paste onto my hair. By the time it rinses out, it's made very large light yellow patches in my hair. I look like an idiot who has mated with a clown. A large clown. In a tube top.
One of the management people sees what has happened to my hair and does not immediately take steps to intervene. After rinsing my hair again, and again, and again, I ask what the next step is.
"That's it. There is no next step."
"What?"
"You're done. Don't you like it?"
"Well, it's not terribly natural-looking, is it?"
"Edward, trust me: our audiences don't care."
When I walk into the theatre to rehearse that evening, it goes quiet. The actress playing Anne gets oh-my-God eyes and starts studying her script very closely. I still don't understand where the hairdresser lady has gone and why she didn't finish the job. I ask someone if she'll be back, but rehearsal gets started and I forget about my hair until I get back to my parents' house and my sister Hillary says, "Tad, what THE FUCK did you do to your hair?"
The woman playing my wife wears enough makeup in the role that our age difference is hardly noticeable. But now I have to darken my hair with brown makeup and try to silver over that to cover the orange patches. On stage, my grey looks a deep, chlorinated green. In certain lights, because not all of the lighting is for theatre and some pieces are outdoor flood lamps, my hair seems to glow dully, like irradiated old copper. I look dead, possessed or cancerous by turns.
The production is generally terrible, but it does lead to further employment for me: because of a connection I make in that cast, I eventually direct The Cocktail Hour at Pleasanton Playhouse. But that's down the road. And, frankly, everything else is eclipsed by the savory tidbit they saved for opening night.
"Edward, we'd like to ask you not to say a couple of words in your performance."
"I'm sorry?"
"Our audience is very conservative and there are a couple of words we'd like you not to say."
"What words are these?" I'm polite, but now my hackles are really starting to rise. Do they point to the words or say them? I don't remember. I choose say:
"God-damn, please don't say God-damn."
"But it's in the script."
"We'd just like to ask you to consider not saying it, please. You can say anything else you want, just not those words."
"Have you asked Sondheim's permission?"
Silence.
This polite pressure continues. I agree to replace the word. Ordinarily, I would sing,
"The papers ... he mentioned papers,
Some legal papers which I didn't see there.
Where were they, the goddamn papers she had to sign?"
That night, and ever after, I sing something like this:
"The frongly-brongly papers ... he mentioned papers,
Some legal papers which I didn't see there.
Where were they, the krinkly-frankle papers she had to sign?"
Other variations include the golly-gee-whillikers papers, the baby-eating papers, the dog-fart papers, the invisible papers, the fly papers, the oofly-doodler papers, the penis papers. Anything is fine, as long as I don't say God-damn. And they never bat an eye. Neither the audience nor the management seems to notice.
The best and simplest substitution comes to me on closing night. It comes to me right before the line. One word, to perfectly describe my experience with that production:
Toilet.
The audience doesn't even twitch. I'd say my hair had them in its cobra-like gaze, but by this time Hillary had dyed it for me and the silver looked normal. No more Boris Karloff toupee for me, alas. So I must assume that this conservative audience simply had no idea what they were watching. They were there to be polite. They neither cared nor understood. Just stupid Americans, sitting in an old pet store, trying not to sneeze as the Liebeslieders shriek off-pitch at them and the ingenue runs around with band-aids up her shin from the giant hole backstage next to the stairs that the Stage Manager (someone's Dad) couldn't be troubled to patch.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Shaving Daddy W.
The first time I shaved my head was because I didn't have the money for a haircut in the summer of 1997. This was in Boston, Massachusetts. I was staying at a friend's apartment before a bunch of us moved in to a huge old place in the South End, and it was just easier at the time than going to a barber and paying for a trim: I had short hair for the entire Summer, a definite plus. I think I used a beard trimming clipper to trim it short, then shaved it clean with a Gillette razor. If you shave your head, I strongly suggest that you avoid the temptation to splash afterhsave or cologne on your freshly-shorn scalp afterwards: I suspect that it can burn the follicles. If you know better, please feel free to comment.
The next time I shaved my head was for the role of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, later in 1997/98 at The Boston Conservatory. Fancy name, excellent training, so-so facilities. I hear the facilities are improving, so that's good news. At the time, I was totally willing to shave my head, so the facilities weren't really a factor in my decision; I mention them here in case any prospective students read this and think from the name that they'd be working in incredible facilities. The training is incredible, and in many ways it makes up for the facilities: correctly used, the training allows any actor or director to surpass the limitations of space. Ironically, Emerson College, also in Boston, has lovely facilities and generally shitty training. Perhaps this was not always the case, but as of 1999 they were churning out crappy actors.
Anyway, I shaved my head for the role. It was easy to do, since I'd done it the previous Summer, and now that I had more knowledge of what was required, I went and bought a pair of Oster barber clippers and what had taken me well over an hour the first time was done in about 20 minutes. Looking back, the clippers cost more than a haircut, but I was very DIY at the time. That's when my love of learning to do things I didn't previously know really blossomed. As an example, by the summer of 1999, when everyone from the South End apartment had scattered to the winds and I was subletting a two-room place near Fenway Park (we would watch one corner of the field from the roof), I had purchased a straight razor and was teaching myself to shave while smoking a cigar, rolling the cigar from one side of my mouth to the other without taking it out ... until I had finished or until my eyes were watering so hard from the smoke that I couldn't see. I used hot coffee as the hot water for my shaving soap, and yes, I had a mug and a shaving brush; I wore a wifebeater at the time, so I think I had reached some sort of personal early-20th-Century apex of the Manly Arts. To clarify: I was not shaving my head with a straight razor while smoking a cigar; that seems like dangerous idiocy to me. Nor did I beat anyone while wearing the wifebeater. I do not see beating a woman as any part of the Manly Arts. Men who hit their wives or girlfriends are weak and like to have sex with their dads. Their own dad, not their girlfriend's dad. Having sex with their girlfriend's dad strikes me as making the man less likely to hit the girlfriend; leave her for her father? Possibly. But hit her? Less likely than if a male who considers himself straight is actively enjoying sex with his own father. That's a recipe for wifebeating if ever I saw one.
"Honey, why are you home late, and why do you smell of your father's cologne and of tears?" she asks from the doorway.
He stands in the half-light from the windows, glowering. "I've told you never to ask me about my father's cologne. Or his tears ... of pleasure!"
The couple above don't know it, but more Church is not going to help.
I haven't shaved my head since my days in Boston for a couple of reasons. The first is that I haven't had a role that required it. The second is that certain members of my family love to harp on the subject of my hairline. They think it's funny to point out thinning spots. This is never funny to an actor, and I don't think it's really funny to anyone whose hair is thinning, even marginally. So take my advice: if you have family or friends whose hair is thinning and you think it might be funny to point it out and laugh about it at every gathering, shut the fuck up. It makes us not want to be around you. Seriously. And if you're getting old and you want your family close by, pointing out their hairline every time they come for dinner is going to earn you a lonely, Edward-free death. So enjoy that, or shut the fuck up. Those are your options.
Oddly, when the role of Daddy Warbucks at Solano College Theatre came up in discussion, I was not remotely concerned about the prospect of shaving my head. This is because I have a very attractively-shaped head. Lex Luthor and Oliver Warbucks are roles for which I was made. Actually, they are like flip sides of the same coin, when one thinks about it. Perhaps it was Oliver Warbucks' having been born in poverty and orphaned at a young age that properly aligned his moral compass. I'll look into this and get back to you. The truth is, I've been secretly anticipating the moment of shaving ever since I was cast in the role.
Imagine my delight when I was told in early October that I would need to shave my head earlier than we'd thought, because of the photo shoot on October 25. Frankly, I would have shaved it the next day, but I was in the process of planning a film shoot in which I was a key player. A full head of hair was needed. So it had to wait until after that shoot, which was about a week before October 25. The only question now was, how to do it? I still own the Oster clippers, so that was an option. But first, a word about the film project:
I'm producing an indie short, in which I star. We are shooting on location this Winter. We've got our project at Kickstarter.com, and I would love it if you would take a look at it. If you like the video -- and if the movie seems like one that you would actually want to watch -- then please, share it all over Facebook and with everyone you know. The film is called A Waltz, and I'd love it if you would comment on the project.
So, the day we shot the final sequence in the promo video, literally within an hour of finishing the shoot, I went to Vaughn's Barbershop, here in Livermore. I prefer Barbershops to salons. I like the atmosphere, the craft of their work, the heated shaving cream and the straight razor they use to edge the base of the neck. I also like having a conversation with the person cutting my hair. The number of times I've had a bad haircut from an ESL Asian woman who spends most of the haircut squacking to her fellow hairdressers and doesn't understand or ignores the specificity of my haircutting needs ... so frustrating. To be clear, it's the language barrier that's the problem. I'm sure there would be the same issue if the hairdresser was German ... though in my experience Germans speak better English than Americans. So, assuming that I found a German hairdresser who could not speak any English, I'm guessing it would be the same. I suspect that a German Barber, on the other hand, would perhaps command multiple languages. Such is the esteem in which I hold the mighty Barber.
I decided on the Barbershop for several reasons. Chief among them: time. I had to get it done and then drive to Vallejo, where I'm directing a youth cast of Annie. Standing over my sink with clippers, making a mess that Veronica would be angry about, possibly cutting myself in my rush to get it done ... none of this appealed to me. Vaughn's was the best choice.
After making it clear that I wanted it shaved clean, the Barber buzzed me down to almost nothing. Then he lathered me up with heated foam and got out the straight razor. He told me something then that I did not know: Barbers are not allowed to use the traditional straight razor anymore. It's considered unsafe. They have to use a "safety" version of the straight razor, same shape, same folding into the handle, but from what I could see, maybe less likely to be used in a murderous revenge-and-meat-pie plot.
The feeling of having someone else shave one's head is really quite pleasant. I would go get it done every week, were I made of money and were I not gauging the rate at which my hair will grow back for the film shoot in February. I like how I look with a goatee and moustache and shaved head, but Warbucks has to be clean-shaven. So I'm fine with that. Lots of salads.
Usually, when I'm facially clean-shaven, Veronica can't look at me. I think she thinks I'm ugly without a beard. It's a pleasant surprise that having no hair on my head except my eyebrows did not repulse her. So, should the thinning that certain family members so lovingly rhapsodize at Thanksgiving take the course they hungrily predict, I know that Veronica will still find me attractive. And I can play the gentleman heavy on cop shows.
Until then, I shall continue sacrificing goats to the Gods of lustrous hair.
The next time I shaved my head was for the role of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, later in 1997/98 at The Boston Conservatory. Fancy name, excellent training, so-so facilities. I hear the facilities are improving, so that's good news. At the time, I was totally willing to shave my head, so the facilities weren't really a factor in my decision; I mention them here in case any prospective students read this and think from the name that they'd be working in incredible facilities. The training is incredible, and in many ways it makes up for the facilities: correctly used, the training allows any actor or director to surpass the limitations of space. Ironically, Emerson College, also in Boston, has lovely facilities and generally shitty training. Perhaps this was not always the case, but as of 1999 they were churning out crappy actors.
Anyway, I shaved my head for the role. It was easy to do, since I'd done it the previous Summer, and now that I had more knowledge of what was required, I went and bought a pair of Oster barber clippers and what had taken me well over an hour the first time was done in about 20 minutes. Looking back, the clippers cost more than a haircut, but I was very DIY at the time. That's when my love of learning to do things I didn't previously know really blossomed. As an example, by the summer of 1999, when everyone from the South End apartment had scattered to the winds and I was subletting a two-room place near Fenway Park (we would watch one corner of the field from the roof), I had purchased a straight razor and was teaching myself to shave while smoking a cigar, rolling the cigar from one side of my mouth to the other without taking it out ... until I had finished or until my eyes were watering so hard from the smoke that I couldn't see. I used hot coffee as the hot water for my shaving soap, and yes, I had a mug and a shaving brush; I wore a wifebeater at the time, so I think I had reached some sort of personal early-20th-Century apex of the Manly Arts. To clarify: I was not shaving my head with a straight razor while smoking a cigar; that seems like dangerous idiocy to me. Nor did I beat anyone while wearing the wifebeater. I do not see beating a woman as any part of the Manly Arts. Men who hit their wives or girlfriends are weak and like to have sex with their dads. Their own dad, not their girlfriend's dad. Having sex with their girlfriend's dad strikes me as making the man less likely to hit the girlfriend; leave her for her father? Possibly. But hit her? Less likely than if a male who considers himself straight is actively enjoying sex with his own father. That's a recipe for wifebeating if ever I saw one.
"Honey, why are you home late, and why do you smell of your father's cologne and of tears?" she asks from the doorway.
He stands in the half-light from the windows, glowering. "I've told you never to ask me about my father's cologne. Or his tears ... of pleasure!"
The couple above don't know it, but more Church is not going to help.
I haven't shaved my head since my days in Boston for a couple of reasons. The first is that I haven't had a role that required it. The second is that certain members of my family love to harp on the subject of my hairline. They think it's funny to point out thinning spots. This is never funny to an actor, and I don't think it's really funny to anyone whose hair is thinning, even marginally. So take my advice: if you have family or friends whose hair is thinning and you think it might be funny to point it out and laugh about it at every gathering, shut the fuck up. It makes us not want to be around you. Seriously. And if you're getting old and you want your family close by, pointing out their hairline every time they come for dinner is going to earn you a lonely, Edward-free death. So enjoy that, or shut the fuck up. Those are your options.
Oddly, when the role of Daddy Warbucks at Solano College Theatre came up in discussion, I was not remotely concerned about the prospect of shaving my head. This is because I have a very attractively-shaped head. Lex Luthor and Oliver Warbucks are roles for which I was made. Actually, they are like flip sides of the same coin, when one thinks about it. Perhaps it was Oliver Warbucks' having been born in poverty and orphaned at a young age that properly aligned his moral compass. I'll look into this and get back to you. The truth is, I've been secretly anticipating the moment of shaving ever since I was cast in the role.
Imagine my delight when I was told in early October that I would need to shave my head earlier than we'd thought, because of the photo shoot on October 25. Frankly, I would have shaved it the next day, but I was in the process of planning a film shoot in which I was a key player. A full head of hair was needed. So it had to wait until after that shoot, which was about a week before October 25. The only question now was, how to do it? I still own the Oster clippers, so that was an option. But first, a word about the film project:
I'm producing an indie short, in which I star. We are shooting on location this Winter. We've got our project at Kickstarter.com, and I would love it if you would take a look at it. If you like the video -- and if the movie seems like one that you would actually want to watch -- then please, share it all over Facebook and with everyone you know. The film is called A Waltz, and I'd love it if you would comment on the project.
So, the day we shot the final sequence in the promo video, literally within an hour of finishing the shoot, I went to Vaughn's Barbershop, here in Livermore. I prefer Barbershops to salons. I like the atmosphere, the craft of their work, the heated shaving cream and the straight razor they use to edge the base of the neck. I also like having a conversation with the person cutting my hair. The number of times I've had a bad haircut from an ESL Asian woman who spends most of the haircut squacking to her fellow hairdressers and doesn't understand or ignores the specificity of my haircutting needs ... so frustrating. To be clear, it's the language barrier that's the problem. I'm sure there would be the same issue if the hairdresser was German ... though in my experience Germans speak better English than Americans. So, assuming that I found a German hairdresser who could not speak any English, I'm guessing it would be the same. I suspect that a German Barber, on the other hand, would perhaps command multiple languages. Such is the esteem in which I hold the mighty Barber.
I decided on the Barbershop for several reasons. Chief among them: time. I had to get it done and then drive to Vallejo, where I'm directing a youth cast of Annie. Standing over my sink with clippers, making a mess that Veronica would be angry about, possibly cutting myself in my rush to get it done ... none of this appealed to me. Vaughn's was the best choice.
After making it clear that I wanted it shaved clean, the Barber buzzed me down to almost nothing. Then he lathered me up with heated foam and got out the straight razor. He told me something then that I did not know: Barbers are not allowed to use the traditional straight razor anymore. It's considered unsafe. They have to use a "safety" version of the straight razor, same shape, same folding into the handle, but from what I could see, maybe less likely to be used in a murderous revenge-and-meat-pie plot.
The feeling of having someone else shave one's head is really quite pleasant. I would go get it done every week, were I made of money and were I not gauging the rate at which my hair will grow back for the film shoot in February. I like how I look with a goatee and moustache and shaved head, but Warbucks has to be clean-shaven. So I'm fine with that. Lots of salads.
Usually, when I'm facially clean-shaven, Veronica can't look at me. I think she thinks I'm ugly without a beard. It's a pleasant surprise that having no hair on my head except my eyebrows did not repulse her. So, should the thinning that certain family members so lovingly rhapsodize at Thanksgiving take the course they hungrily predict, I know that Veronica will still find me attractive. And I can play the gentleman heavy on cop shows.
Until then, I shall continue sacrificing goats to the Gods of lustrous hair.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Oliver Warbucks Beyond Thunderdome
I'm sure that, somewhere in this great nation of ours, there is an adult male actor playing Oliver Warbucks who -- for any number of reasons -- is opting out of shaving his head. This poor bastard has to arrive much earlier every day and take the time and effort to put on a bald cap and make it look real, make sure that there are no visible lines at the border between the cap and his actual flesh. Depending on the resources available to this actor, he might be struggling to get it right every night, because someone helpfully 'trimmed' the cap for him, thus making it impossible for the thing to fit correctly. In order to make his job easier, he might even have gotten a very close-cropped haircut -- even a buzz cut -- so that his hair is not as bulky beneath the cap.
Chances are, the actor is in this position because he is a) young, b) polite, c) stupid, d) all of the above. I speak from experience. I played Cyrano de Bergerac when I was 22. For those of you who don't know, Cyrano has a very large nose. My nose is, for lack of a better term, Welsh. Clearly, I needed to bulk up the proboscis. The director was relatively new to the department, she had been hired the year before and had suddenly become head of the theatre department. She brought in a costumer who did not know how to costume, firing the long-time costume and makeup designer, effectively halting any artistic cohesion between costumes and makeup. The result? Our makeup "designer" for Cyrano was a young woman of 19 who considered herself a makeup artist because she had taken a one-week workshop over the summer and been given a Microsoft Print Shop certificate saying she was certified.
Certifiable, perhaps. So I picture our fictional actor, the one struggling with the bald cap like some bad PSA actor in a video series on theatrical etiquette, sitting politely by in a similar situation as a teenage idiot blathers about her certificate and trims a good two inches off the edges of the bald cap. He should go talk to the director immediately. He doesn't know this. If he could trust his Stage Manager, he would know to go to said Stage Manager immediately for advice/assistance. The Stage Manager is a young woman of about 20, best friends with the makeup "designer," and is upset because her German boyfriend is leaving for Berlin next week. If he had an agent, the actor would call his agent. He does not have an agent. This guy is maybe talented, but he took his parents' advice and became a podiatrist. He's getting fat, he's got three kids, his wife indulges his "little hobby" and he is grateful that she never inquires with anyone at the theatre as to what his exact rehearsal schedule is, or why he gets home so late smelling of trendy cologne. This is not the life he pictured when he was 22. He should have gone to Boston. And to his credit, he looks at his hairline in the mirror as the moron with the nose piercing is butchering the bald caps and thinks, "I could just do it, I could shave my head and make my life much easier."
I was thinking something similar as the fictional idiot's real-life twin trimmed my nose. Not the tip, but the edges. This was a Kryolan foam latex nose, truly a remarkable piece of makeup: lightweight, these false noses fit right over your own; held in place with medical adhesive, they don't come off until you take them off (I recommend olive oil). You breathe through your own nostrils, over which the false nostrils fit nicely. There is no gross buildup of condensation that one gets in a hollow latex rubber piece, and the nose looks like flesh. On the edges of the piece, the foam latex thins out to a very light, skin-like consistency. To be honest, our "designer" had read the instructions, which stated that the edges could be trimmed if needed. This last phrase did not sink much deeper than the surface of her eyes. She cut about 1/8 of an inch off, all around the nose. This made it impossible to blend the edge of the nose easily with my skin, so that I had to spend an hour or two every night applying liquid latex to the edge of the nose and hoping I got the makeup on it in time to avoid having what appeared to be a big pink scar running around the bridge of my now gigantic nose.
It almost never worked, and I see our fictional bald-cap actor in the same boat. He gamely applies various substances and various powders or creams, but his hair shows just enough at his forehead or the nape of his neck that he realizes he has to cut ... some of it. He starts with the neck, getting a very conservative haircut and asking the barber to shave up to the base of his skull. This is an improvement, but during the first tech rehearsal, the bald cap pulls back from his hairline in the waltz and it looks like he is turning werewolf. Old ladies from the local Baptist congregation, who come to tech rehearsals to be able to assure the faithful that the show is of good moral quality, are rushed from the building in a panic. Murmurs of monstrosities are heard. The director insists that the actor shave two or three inches back from his forehead. The actor suggests that he just get his head shaved, but the director is one of those who must have every good idea be his own, and shoots the actor's suggestion down as ridiculous. The Stage Manager hands the actor a janky electric beard trimmer. It looks like it has pubes in the blade. "Better take three inches off, all the way around, it will be easier," saith the Stage Manager. Quoth the actor, "Don't you think I should just shave my head?" "And piss off Bill? Think about it," returneth the Stage Manager. There are rumors that the director hired the makeup girl for skills that have less to do with how she applied lipstick and more with how she applied.
No such rumors in the case of my botched nose, but the director did not have the control or wisdom to step in and help me. I did ask for help. She said there was one other nose, but that these noses were super expensive and the department couldn't afford to use them all. So, could I please make the first nose work for the run of the show? And I did my best. But this added about two hours to my preparation every night, so that I was just barely getting into my costume by the time places was called. This pissed the director off. She would come backstage yelling at me, and I would go as fast as I could, but I was caught between logic (use the fresh nose and be ready sooner) and following orders (use the shitty nose and always be late) and irrational demands (use the shitty nose and ALWAYS be ON TIME!). I am always amazed when a director works to make things more difficult or complex for a leading actor. For any actor, really, but particularly for a lead. There is enough stress involved in leading roles, why add bullshit to the platter?
The Bald Cap Actor has gone to a barber to try to fix his odd self-administered haircut; the barber has gamely faded the sides and back, resulting in what resembles a monk in negative. Or, more correctly, Bert and Ernie. The barber asks the actor, "Why don't you just shave it?" The actor responds, "The director doesn't want me to." He looks like some inbred backwoods pinhead. The twenty-something who was flirting with him is now totally uninterested. His wife and children cannot meet his eyes. His neighbor laughs a lot whenever he is outside. He is glad he is a podiatrist, because the frustration of this kind of thing day in and day out would be too much. He's taken to wearing a baseball cap at work.
I had applied the latex three times to the edge of the nose and each time had to peel it off because I was so stressed that I messed up with the makeup. Suddenly, a gigantic bearded man I'd seen backstage during Tech appeared at the door and said quietly, "I hear you may need some help. Let me show you something." He sat down and showed me how to make a slurry with my makeup, filling in all cracks on the sides and edges of the nose. He was a massively calm presence, and he spoke quietly about where he'd learned this and how it had helped him in the past. Turns out he had learned it from Margaret, former head of makeup and costumes. The one who had been fired. The one who, had she been there, would have made certain that my nose was amazing from day one. That moment was the first time I realized the importance of politics in theatre, and how one bad decision can affect everything to follow. I looked at the tech pirate. "What would you do in my case?" I asked. "I'd use the fresh nose. What's she going to do, fire you? There's no understudy."
Bald Cap hasn't got an understudy, either. Nor has he a tech pirate to advise him. He takes a break from theatre after playing Warbucks. This break lasts the rest of his life, though one reviewer does point out, "Bill Billing's stroke of genius in making Warbucks as misshapen cranially as he must be spiritually is to be commended. Finally, someone has recognized Warbucks as the Halliburton of 1933."
I was too cautious to use the fresh nose on my own, but the next night the makeup moron tore the first nose as she was removing it, something she insisted on every night. I tried to patch it the next day, but it wasn't working. I opened the new package, trimmed only the part that would get stuck in my moustache, and had the new nose on in record time. When Makeup Girl arrived and saw me with the better nose on, she freaked out: "You're not supposed to use it!" When she arrived with the angry director in tow, I may have said something along the lines of, "You're not the one who has to wear this thing," or, "The other nose ripped," or, "It was just taking too long." I don't remember. What I should have said, and what I'm sure I didn't, was, "If you had been doing your job as a director, none of this would happen. These noses cost $12.00. I'll give you the money. So back the fuck off and let me do my job."
Which is all to explain why I am shaving my head when I play Daddy Warbucks. I will detail my recent shearing in my next blog. Do please comment.
Chances are, the actor is in this position because he is a) young, b) polite, c) stupid, d) all of the above. I speak from experience. I played Cyrano de Bergerac when I was 22. For those of you who don't know, Cyrano has a very large nose. My nose is, for lack of a better term, Welsh. Clearly, I needed to bulk up the proboscis. The director was relatively new to the department, she had been hired the year before and had suddenly become head of the theatre department. She brought in a costumer who did not know how to costume, firing the long-time costume and makeup designer, effectively halting any artistic cohesion between costumes and makeup. The result? Our makeup "designer" for Cyrano was a young woman of 19 who considered herself a makeup artist because she had taken a one-week workshop over the summer and been given a Microsoft Print Shop certificate saying she was certified.
Certifiable, perhaps. So I picture our fictional actor, the one struggling with the bald cap like some bad PSA actor in a video series on theatrical etiquette, sitting politely by in a similar situation as a teenage idiot blathers about her certificate and trims a good two inches off the edges of the bald cap. He should go talk to the director immediately. He doesn't know this. If he could trust his Stage Manager, he would know to go to said Stage Manager immediately for advice/assistance. The Stage Manager is a young woman of about 20, best friends with the makeup "designer," and is upset because her German boyfriend is leaving for Berlin next week. If he had an agent, the actor would call his agent. He does not have an agent. This guy is maybe talented, but he took his parents' advice and became a podiatrist. He's getting fat, he's got three kids, his wife indulges his "little hobby" and he is grateful that she never inquires with anyone at the theatre as to what his exact rehearsal schedule is, or why he gets home so late smelling of trendy cologne. This is not the life he pictured when he was 22. He should have gone to Boston. And to his credit, he looks at his hairline in the mirror as the moron with the nose piercing is butchering the bald caps and thinks, "I could just do it, I could shave my head and make my life much easier."
I was thinking something similar as the fictional idiot's real-life twin trimmed my nose. Not the tip, but the edges. This was a Kryolan foam latex nose, truly a remarkable piece of makeup: lightweight, these false noses fit right over your own; held in place with medical adhesive, they don't come off until you take them off (I recommend olive oil). You breathe through your own nostrils, over which the false nostrils fit nicely. There is no gross buildup of condensation that one gets in a hollow latex rubber piece, and the nose looks like flesh. On the edges of the piece, the foam latex thins out to a very light, skin-like consistency. To be honest, our "designer" had read the instructions, which stated that the edges could be trimmed if needed. This last phrase did not sink much deeper than the surface of her eyes. She cut about 1/8 of an inch off, all around the nose. This made it impossible to blend the edge of the nose easily with my skin, so that I had to spend an hour or two every night applying liquid latex to the edge of the nose and hoping I got the makeup on it in time to avoid having what appeared to be a big pink scar running around the bridge of my now gigantic nose.
It almost never worked, and I see our fictional bald-cap actor in the same boat. He gamely applies various substances and various powders or creams, but his hair shows just enough at his forehead or the nape of his neck that he realizes he has to cut ... some of it. He starts with the neck, getting a very conservative haircut and asking the barber to shave up to the base of his skull. This is an improvement, but during the first tech rehearsal, the bald cap pulls back from his hairline in the waltz and it looks like he is turning werewolf. Old ladies from the local Baptist congregation, who come to tech rehearsals to be able to assure the faithful that the show is of good moral quality, are rushed from the building in a panic. Murmurs of monstrosities are heard. The director insists that the actor shave two or three inches back from his forehead. The actor suggests that he just get his head shaved, but the director is one of those who must have every good idea be his own, and shoots the actor's suggestion down as ridiculous. The Stage Manager hands the actor a janky electric beard trimmer. It looks like it has pubes in the blade. "Better take three inches off, all the way around, it will be easier," saith the Stage Manager. Quoth the actor, "Don't you think I should just shave my head?" "And piss off Bill? Think about it," returneth the Stage Manager. There are rumors that the director hired the makeup girl for skills that have less to do with how she applied lipstick and more with how she applied.
No such rumors in the case of my botched nose, but the director did not have the control or wisdom to step in and help me. I did ask for help. She said there was one other nose, but that these noses were super expensive and the department couldn't afford to use them all. So, could I please make the first nose work for the run of the show? And I did my best. But this added about two hours to my preparation every night, so that I was just barely getting into my costume by the time places was called. This pissed the director off. She would come backstage yelling at me, and I would go as fast as I could, but I was caught between logic (use the fresh nose and be ready sooner) and following orders (use the shitty nose and always be late) and irrational demands (use the shitty nose and ALWAYS be ON TIME!). I am always amazed when a director works to make things more difficult or complex for a leading actor. For any actor, really, but particularly for a lead. There is enough stress involved in leading roles, why add bullshit to the platter?
The Bald Cap Actor has gone to a barber to try to fix his odd self-administered haircut; the barber has gamely faded the sides and back, resulting in what resembles a monk in negative. Or, more correctly, Bert and Ernie. The barber asks the actor, "Why don't you just shave it?" The actor responds, "The director doesn't want me to." He looks like some inbred backwoods pinhead. The twenty-something who was flirting with him is now totally uninterested. His wife and children cannot meet his eyes. His neighbor laughs a lot whenever he is outside. He is glad he is a podiatrist, because the frustration of this kind of thing day in and day out would be too much. He's taken to wearing a baseball cap at work.
I had applied the latex three times to the edge of the nose and each time had to peel it off because I was so stressed that I messed up with the makeup. Suddenly, a gigantic bearded man I'd seen backstage during Tech appeared at the door and said quietly, "I hear you may need some help. Let me show you something." He sat down and showed me how to make a slurry with my makeup, filling in all cracks on the sides and edges of the nose. He was a massively calm presence, and he spoke quietly about where he'd learned this and how it had helped him in the past. Turns out he had learned it from Margaret, former head of makeup and costumes. The one who had been fired. The one who, had she been there, would have made certain that my nose was amazing from day one. That moment was the first time I realized the importance of politics in theatre, and how one bad decision can affect everything to follow. I looked at the tech pirate. "What would you do in my case?" I asked. "I'd use the fresh nose. What's she going to do, fire you? There's no understudy."
Bald Cap hasn't got an understudy, either. Nor has he a tech pirate to advise him. He takes a break from theatre after playing Warbucks. This break lasts the rest of his life, though one reviewer does point out, "Bill Billing's stroke of genius in making Warbucks as misshapen cranially as he must be spiritually is to be commended. Finally, someone has recognized Warbucks as the Halliburton of 1933."
I was too cautious to use the fresh nose on my own, but the next night the makeup moron tore the first nose as she was removing it, something she insisted on every night. I tried to patch it the next day, but it wasn't working. I opened the new package, trimmed only the part that would get stuck in my moustache, and had the new nose on in record time. When Makeup Girl arrived and saw me with the better nose on, she freaked out: "You're not supposed to use it!" When she arrived with the angry director in tow, I may have said something along the lines of, "You're not the one who has to wear this thing," or, "The other nose ripped," or, "It was just taking too long." I don't remember. What I should have said, and what I'm sure I didn't, was, "If you had been doing your job as a director, none of this would happen. These noses cost $12.00. I'll give you the money. So back the fuck off and let me do my job."
Which is all to explain why I am shaving my head when I play Daddy Warbucks. I will detail my recent shearing in my next blog. Do please comment.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Debacle, Part IV
"There's a moth in your wine."
"I know."
"It's dead."
"Yep."
"That why you're not drinking it?"
"Yep."
"Want a fresh glass?"
"Nope."
"Want a fresh glass with fresh wine in it?"
"Yep."
"'Kay. Be right back."
His sister goes into the house and he is struck by the power of the relief that flooded through him when it was she, and not the peculiar callers, who stepped onto the back patio a few moments ago. It occurs to X. to wonder if perhaps the phone call is part of an elaborate ruse, a joke played by some college friends or part of a massive revenge scheme perpetrated by an ex-girlfriend. He has discarded both of these ideas by the time his sister returns with two glasses, the remaining bottle of Riesling and a fresh bottle of something she will not let him see.
"You are uncharacteristically quiet tonight, Brother Mine."
"I am uncharacteristically alarmed, O Sister, My Sister."
"What by, O Respected Elder Sibling?"
"A series of odd and seemingly unconnected events which now appear either connected or so misshapen in their randomness that they have overlapped one another and now threaten to intersect unpleasantly with my everyday life, such as it is."
"'Such as it is,' he murmured, gesturing lazily about him with his wineglass before raising it to sip."
"Mock, mock, mock."
"Detail these events and I will clarify for you, Fellow Offspring of our Progenitor and Progenitrix."
"Are you quite prepared to marinate in details over the next several hours?"
"As long as you come with me to the Secret Barn Dance in Lost Canyon."
"Done. Shall I begin?"
"Do."
"Very well, then: as you know, I've been looking for a way to finance my eventual return to NYC or a foray into the wilds of Chicago."
"And you took the job with the creepy dusty office people."
"Yes. It appears that they nor their company do not exist. Nobody contacted the school and the only reason I have any money is because the staff took up a collection."
"Hence the pile of cash on the table here in the out-of-doors."
"Quite. But, mysteriously you will no doubt agree, I have received several phone calls from a 408 number and no voicemails on my phone, but a strange and disconcerting one on the home number just before you arrived."
"No!"
"O, indeed. Go. Listen to it. Discern, if you can, the dialect."
"Curiouser and curiouser," she says, heading in through the French Doors to hit play on the machine.
And now X. discovers that it is not, in fact, the first such message on his parents' machine.
"I know."
"It's dead."
"Yep."
"That why you're not drinking it?"
"Yep."
"Want a fresh glass?"
"Nope."
"Want a fresh glass with fresh wine in it?"
"Yep."
"'Kay. Be right back."
His sister goes into the house and he is struck by the power of the relief that flooded through him when it was she, and not the peculiar callers, who stepped onto the back patio a few moments ago. It occurs to X. to wonder if perhaps the phone call is part of an elaborate ruse, a joke played by some college friends or part of a massive revenge scheme perpetrated by an ex-girlfriend. He has discarded both of these ideas by the time his sister returns with two glasses, the remaining bottle of Riesling and a fresh bottle of something she will not let him see.
"You are uncharacteristically quiet tonight, Brother Mine."
"I am uncharacteristically alarmed, O Sister, My Sister."
"What by, O Respected Elder Sibling?"
"A series of odd and seemingly unconnected events which now appear either connected or so misshapen in their randomness that they have overlapped one another and now threaten to intersect unpleasantly with my everyday life, such as it is."
"'Such as it is,' he murmured, gesturing lazily about him with his wineglass before raising it to sip."
"Mock, mock, mock."
"Detail these events and I will clarify for you, Fellow Offspring of our Progenitor and Progenitrix."
"Are you quite prepared to marinate in details over the next several hours?"
"As long as you come with me to the Secret Barn Dance in Lost Canyon."
"Done. Shall I begin?"
"Do."
"Very well, then: as you know, I've been looking for a way to finance my eventual return to NYC or a foray into the wilds of Chicago."
"And you took the job with the creepy dusty office people."
"Yes. It appears that they nor their company do not exist. Nobody contacted the school and the only reason I have any money is because the staff took up a collection."
"Hence the pile of cash on the table here in the out-of-doors."
"Quite. But, mysteriously you will no doubt agree, I have received several phone calls from a 408 number and no voicemails on my phone, but a strange and disconcerting one on the home number just before you arrived."
"No!"
"O, indeed. Go. Listen to it. Discern, if you can, the dialect."
"Curiouser and curiouser," she says, heading in through the French Doors to hit play on the machine.
And now X. discovers that it is not, in fact, the first such message on his parents' machine.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Debacle, Part III
Mr. X. is a very popular teacher with the kids at Cherrywood. He makes them laugh, keeps them interested, and prepares a superb adaptation of a little-known childrens' book for their final performance.
About 30 parents show for the performance. Three leave midway to "take calls", but he sees them outside smoking cigarettes. Mr. Singh appears to point them toward the parking lot, as tobacco is not permitted anywhere near the buildings.
The performance lasts all of 20 minutes. The kids are delighted, the parents who stayed are thrilled, Mr. Singh is kind and Mr. X. has never been able to find LouAnne or Miss Smith since he realized his check was gone.
He had driven down to San Jose, but the office was closed, empty and deserted. With the help of one of his father's patients he had contacted the owner of the building to try to find LouAnne; the owner had never heard of LouAnne.
As they are saying goodbye, many of the kids start to cry. X. is moved by this and gives them all their paper-plate masks as they go, admonishing them to return their cotton ball T-Rex eggs to nature by putting them in the garden "so they can sleep and dream of being roses." The girl with the serious eyes is the last to go. She tugs on his shirt, he turns and bends down to her. She's hardly said a word for the entire month.
"Will you take my egg?" she asks in a serious whisper.
"Why, don't you want it?" he whispers back.
"There are snails in my mommy's garden, I'm afraid they'll eat the baby T-Rex," she whispers, her hand on his shoulder.
He starts to laugh, to make a joke, then sees her eyes. She is seriously frightened for the little dinosaur cotton ball baby. He cannot tell her that if it were a real T-Rex it would want to eat her and the snails in one gulp.
"Okay. I will put it safely in my garden, under my Mr. Lincoln rose, where it will sleep and smell roses and return slowly to nature forever," as he says this, he begins to choke up.
"Promise," she is squeezing his shoulder. He's shocked at her strength.
"I promise," he says. She reaches into the pocket of her skirt and pulls out the cotton ball, pristine. She pets it three times with her index finger, whispers, "Goodbye," and gives it one gentle kiss, then places it in his hand. His heart breaks for a cotton ball. She grabs her Obi-Wan backpack and runs to the door, outside, into June and a life of perhaps less mediocrity than his own, he hopes.
Mr. Singh is waiting for him as he walks to his car.
"You made quite an impression on these children, Mr. X. Have you ever thought of becoming a teacher?"
"My Dad won't shut up about it, Mr. Singh," he says with forced jollity, trying to bluster through his emotions. The cotton ball is in the breast pocket of his shirt.
"And should I shut up about it?" asks Mr. Singh, not unkindly.
X. stops and turns to face him.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I've just been charged with finding the right spot for a cotton ball to sleep, I'm a little distracted."
"That's all right," says Mr. Singh. "She's already put three hundred of them in our garden; as none of them are hatched yet, she's hoping that one will hatch in your garden."
X. stares at him, uncomprehending.
"Alysha is my daughter. One of the perks here is that our kids attend for free. Think about it, should you ever settle down."
"I will, thank you," says X. A minivan drives by, an astonishingly beautiful woman behind the wheel, Alysha in the passenger seat. Both wave. Mr. Singh waves back. X. waves after a moment, a little slow in the sunlight.
"One final thing, Mr. X.," says Mr. Singh.
"Yes, sir?"
"I hesitated to tell you this, but we have never actually been contacted by the organization who hired you."
Shocked silence from X.
"What do you mean?" he asks.
"I mean that we paid for no after school theatre program and we did not hire that company to send you here --"
"Am I in trouble?"
"No. Because I had you checked out after the first day," and Mr. Singh nonchalantly brushes his lapel where X. notices for the first time a tiny silver pin, the insignia of a group of like-minded individuals of which both of his grandfathers were prestigious members.
"I see," says X. "Well, I've been completely unable to get in touch with them."
"My theory is that they do not exist. You have been thoroughly scammed, Mr. X. Do you agree?"
And it all comes into focus: the heat, the dust, the condition of the building, the sudden fart after money changed hands, the strength of the odor, LouAnne's immediate disappearance and then Miss Smith's mysterious check, which he'd never actually seen. Mr. Singh watches as X. makes all the connections.
"I agree, Mr. Singh, and I feel ... very foolish," says X., putting the tub of crafts down. He wants to sit down, maybe to cry, but not with Mr. Singh watching in the late June afternoon as the occasional staff member walks to her car or an occasional student runs to waiting parents. He suddenly feels very alone, and realizes for how long he's been hoping that Miss Smith would arrive to watch him like a hawk.
"No need to feel so foolish," says Mr. Singh. He removes an envelope from within his left breast pocket, taps it once or twice on his left wrist as he says, "I explained your situation to the staff and some of the other parents; we were waiting to see if you would finish the job, we figured if you finished then you were legit. So we've taken up a collection. I only ask that you wait to open that envelope until you get home. And secure it on your person, I wouldn't want you to gift some lucky family like those people on 880." He smiles as he holds out the envelope.
"880?" X. asks, accepting the envelope; it's thick. Surprise registers on his face.
"About a month ago, a family about to lose their house driving South on 880 and an envelope flies into their car with a check in it, made out to cash, for some ungodly amount of money. The check was good, they cashed it and their dreams have come true."
X. goes pale.
"Are you all right?" asks Mr. Singh.
"I'm fine. Do you remember the date this happened?"
Mr. Singh checks his iPhone. "Looks like ... the Friday before you started."
"Holy shit," X. really does sit down now, on the plastic tub. Singh kneels next to him.
"That envelope in your hand. It's in small bills; we weren't sure how much it should be, I hope it's enough; you've made a difference in these kids' lives and most of us are pretty happy about it. I've got to go. Put the envelope in that zippered pocket there; good. Think about teaching, Mr. X."
X. stands, they shake hands, and Mr. Singh smiles as he walks back into Cherywood Prep.
At his parents' house that evening, X. finds an envelope addressed to him has arrived in the mail. Inside is a note from the Office Secretary of Cherrywood, with a business card taped to it. The note reads,
"Mr. X., This card was left for you last week; Mr. Singh forgot to give it to you and I won't be in after today, so I'm mailing it now so I don't forget. Have a great summer and see you next year!
Thanks, Jeanette."
The business card reads, Miss Smith -- Lost and Found -- Conundrums, Ltd.
On the back of the card is a note in an elegant hand, written with a fountain pen: "X: do not try to contact me. They are watching."
He pours himself a glass of Riesling and sits on the back patio under the oaks, listening to the creek and watching fireflies in the purple twilight. He stares at the card and re-reads the message several times before he remembers the envelope in his pocket.
Inside is a stack of cash. Counting it out, he finds $4,000.00
He's just counted it out for the third time when his cell phone rings. It's an unknown number, 408 area code. That's South Bay. San Jose. He sets it on the table, weighing down the loose cash with it, then changes his mind and returns the cash to the envelope; he does not want that number touching the cash.
The call goes to voicemail, but no message is left.
He waits.
The phone rings again. Picked up by voicemail again. No message left.
Another call, same number. Three rings this time, then no more. No voicemail.
He sits in silence in the twilight for several minutes, and is just raising his wineglass to sip when his parents' phone rings.
The answering machine picks up. This message, in a sing-song European accent, is left on the phone:
"Mr. X., Mr. X., we know where you are. Ha ha ha, we know where you are for we followed your car. We want that money, we want that check. We know you've cashed it, what in the heck were you thinking? Been drinking? We know where you live, so you'd better just give that money."
The message ends. Headlights flash across the oaks as a car pulls into the drive. He goes to sip his wine, but a moth has drowned in it.
© 2010, Edward Hightower. All Rights Reserved.
About 30 parents show for the performance. Three leave midway to "take calls", but he sees them outside smoking cigarettes. Mr. Singh appears to point them toward the parking lot, as tobacco is not permitted anywhere near the buildings.
The performance lasts all of 20 minutes. The kids are delighted, the parents who stayed are thrilled, Mr. Singh is kind and Mr. X. has never been able to find LouAnne or Miss Smith since he realized his check was gone.
He had driven down to San Jose, but the office was closed, empty and deserted. With the help of one of his father's patients he had contacted the owner of the building to try to find LouAnne; the owner had never heard of LouAnne.
As they are saying goodbye, many of the kids start to cry. X. is moved by this and gives them all their paper-plate masks as they go, admonishing them to return their cotton ball T-Rex eggs to nature by putting them in the garden "so they can sleep and dream of being roses." The girl with the serious eyes is the last to go. She tugs on his shirt, he turns and bends down to her. She's hardly said a word for the entire month.
"Will you take my egg?" she asks in a serious whisper.
"Why, don't you want it?" he whispers back.
"There are snails in my mommy's garden, I'm afraid they'll eat the baby T-Rex," she whispers, her hand on his shoulder.
He starts to laugh, to make a joke, then sees her eyes. She is seriously frightened for the little dinosaur cotton ball baby. He cannot tell her that if it were a real T-Rex it would want to eat her and the snails in one gulp.
"Okay. I will put it safely in my garden, under my Mr. Lincoln rose, where it will sleep and smell roses and return slowly to nature forever," as he says this, he begins to choke up.
"Promise," she is squeezing his shoulder. He's shocked at her strength.
"I promise," he says. She reaches into the pocket of her skirt and pulls out the cotton ball, pristine. She pets it three times with her index finger, whispers, "Goodbye," and gives it one gentle kiss, then places it in his hand. His heart breaks for a cotton ball. She grabs her Obi-Wan backpack and runs to the door, outside, into June and a life of perhaps less mediocrity than his own, he hopes.
Mr. Singh is waiting for him as he walks to his car.
"You made quite an impression on these children, Mr. X. Have you ever thought of becoming a teacher?"
"My Dad won't shut up about it, Mr. Singh," he says with forced jollity, trying to bluster through his emotions. The cotton ball is in the breast pocket of his shirt.
"And should I shut up about it?" asks Mr. Singh, not unkindly.
X. stops and turns to face him.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I've just been charged with finding the right spot for a cotton ball to sleep, I'm a little distracted."
"That's all right," says Mr. Singh. "She's already put three hundred of them in our garden; as none of them are hatched yet, she's hoping that one will hatch in your garden."
X. stares at him, uncomprehending.
"Alysha is my daughter. One of the perks here is that our kids attend for free. Think about it, should you ever settle down."
"I will, thank you," says X. A minivan drives by, an astonishingly beautiful woman behind the wheel, Alysha in the passenger seat. Both wave. Mr. Singh waves back. X. waves after a moment, a little slow in the sunlight.
"One final thing, Mr. X.," says Mr. Singh.
"Yes, sir?"
"I hesitated to tell you this, but we have never actually been contacted by the organization who hired you."
Shocked silence from X.
"What do you mean?" he asks.
"I mean that we paid for no after school theatre program and we did not hire that company to send you here --"
"Am I in trouble?"
"No. Because I had you checked out after the first day," and Mr. Singh nonchalantly brushes his lapel where X. notices for the first time a tiny silver pin, the insignia of a group of like-minded individuals of which both of his grandfathers were prestigious members.
"I see," says X. "Well, I've been completely unable to get in touch with them."
"My theory is that they do not exist. You have been thoroughly scammed, Mr. X. Do you agree?"
And it all comes into focus: the heat, the dust, the condition of the building, the sudden fart after money changed hands, the strength of the odor, LouAnne's immediate disappearance and then Miss Smith's mysterious check, which he'd never actually seen. Mr. Singh watches as X. makes all the connections.
"I agree, Mr. Singh, and I feel ... very foolish," says X., putting the tub of crafts down. He wants to sit down, maybe to cry, but not with Mr. Singh watching in the late June afternoon as the occasional staff member walks to her car or an occasional student runs to waiting parents. He suddenly feels very alone, and realizes for how long he's been hoping that Miss Smith would arrive to watch him like a hawk.
"No need to feel so foolish," says Mr. Singh. He removes an envelope from within his left breast pocket, taps it once or twice on his left wrist as he says, "I explained your situation to the staff and some of the other parents; we were waiting to see if you would finish the job, we figured if you finished then you were legit. So we've taken up a collection. I only ask that you wait to open that envelope until you get home. And secure it on your person, I wouldn't want you to gift some lucky family like those people on 880." He smiles as he holds out the envelope.
"880?" X. asks, accepting the envelope; it's thick. Surprise registers on his face.
"About a month ago, a family about to lose their house driving South on 880 and an envelope flies into their car with a check in it, made out to cash, for some ungodly amount of money. The check was good, they cashed it and their dreams have come true."
X. goes pale.
"Are you all right?" asks Mr. Singh.
"I'm fine. Do you remember the date this happened?"
Mr. Singh checks his iPhone. "Looks like ... the Friday before you started."
"Holy shit," X. really does sit down now, on the plastic tub. Singh kneels next to him.
"That envelope in your hand. It's in small bills; we weren't sure how much it should be, I hope it's enough; you've made a difference in these kids' lives and most of us are pretty happy about it. I've got to go. Put the envelope in that zippered pocket there; good. Think about teaching, Mr. X."
X. stands, they shake hands, and Mr. Singh smiles as he walks back into Cherywood Prep.
At his parents' house that evening, X. finds an envelope addressed to him has arrived in the mail. Inside is a note from the Office Secretary of Cherrywood, with a business card taped to it. The note reads,
"Mr. X., This card was left for you last week; Mr. Singh forgot to give it to you and I won't be in after today, so I'm mailing it now so I don't forget. Have a great summer and see you next year!
Thanks, Jeanette."
The business card reads, Miss Smith -- Lost and Found -- Conundrums, Ltd.
On the back of the card is a note in an elegant hand, written with a fountain pen: "X: do not try to contact me. They are watching."
He pours himself a glass of Riesling and sits on the back patio under the oaks, listening to the creek and watching fireflies in the purple twilight. He stares at the card and re-reads the message several times before he remembers the envelope in his pocket.
Inside is a stack of cash. Counting it out, he finds $4,000.00
He's just counted it out for the third time when his cell phone rings. It's an unknown number, 408 area code. That's South Bay. San Jose. He sets it on the table, weighing down the loose cash with it, then changes his mind and returns the cash to the envelope; he does not want that number touching the cash.
The call goes to voicemail, but no message is left.
He waits.
The phone rings again. Picked up by voicemail again. No message left.
Another call, same number. Three rings this time, then no more. No voicemail.
He sits in silence in the twilight for several minutes, and is just raising his wineglass to sip when his parents' phone rings.
The answering machine picks up. This message, in a sing-song European accent, is left on the phone:
"Mr. X., Mr. X., we know where you are. Ha ha ha, we know where you are for we followed your car. We want that money, we want that check. We know you've cashed it, what in the heck were you thinking? Been drinking? We know where you live, so you'd better just give that money."
The message ends. Headlights flash across the oaks as a car pulls into the drive. He goes to sip his wine, but a moth has drowned in it.
© 2010, Edward Hightower. All Rights Reserved.
Debacle, Part II
He begins teaching the class the following Monday. Only it's not a theatre class at all. It's after-school babysitting. A cafeteria full of 60 kids, all yelling and playing and chasing and hitting. He is the only adult in the room. He tries to get their attention. It does not work. He yells, "Hey, everyone, free ice cream!"
The room is silent. They all turn to him. A little Asian Indian girl with sincere brown eyes says, "Really?"
"No, but --" and it's too late, they're all running and bellowing again.
He is uncertain what to do, until he sees the microphone. He goes over to it, next to an old piano that looks just like the piano from his elementary school; he taps the mic twice. It is on. He picks it up. No one has noticed the sounds. He takes a breath, and lets out a long, slow, "Moooooooooooooooo!" into the mic. Some of the kids pause.
He moos a second time and more of the kids pause. He moos a third time and they are still, silent, staring at him. He says, in a thick German accent, "You vill all be sittink DOWN or you vill all be fed to ze ogre I have HIDDEN in my plasticken tubben."
They sit, silent, wherever they are, he replaces the mic and reaches into the tub. They all gasp, sitting back, terror in their faces. He grasps something soft and flings it into the air. The children, frozen, are at once delighted: he's thrown the entire contents of a jumbo bag of cotton balls, and they are falling over the assembly like giant Charlie Brown Special snowballs. The noise level starts to rise and he shouts, "HALT!"
They halt.
"You vill each grab ONE cotton ball. You vill take this cotton ball to a table and sit, silent, pretending this cotton ball is your baby tyrannosaurus. IF you are silent, it vill not eat you and poop you out like so much poo." A few of the kids giggle. They are shushed by the others.
They move immediately to the tables, cotton balls in hand. There are only a few cotton balls left. They are all staring at the cotton. The little girl with the sincere, serious eyes is quietly whispering to hers.
"You vill tell me your NAMES vehn I point to you. Your NAMES und ONE szing about yourself zat nooooobody knows, as lonk as it does NOT involve creepy personal details."
In this way he goes around the room and gets them to say their names and he learns that this is a room full of exceptionally smart young people. As the last boy finishes talking about his pet tadpoles that are turning into frogs that make his mother "uncomfterble b'cause of Darwin", he prepares to talk about theatre. But the girl with the serious eyes says, softly, "What's your name?"
He is at a loss. What does he say? A title? A professorship? He remembers an instructor from Arkham: "Tell the truth about yourself to everyone except the Press; those fuckers don't deserve it."
"My name," he says, "Is Mr. X. I am here to teach you about Theatre."
Almost every hand in the room shoots up.
He points to a Chinese-American boy named Dean with a round face and a penchant for fossils; the boy says, "Like movies?"
And the room is full of questions: "Are you a Movie Star?" "Do you know Harry Potter?" "Why are you so fat?"
Then a bell rings and they all run out of the room to their parents' waiting cars. He is alone. Two hours have somehow passed. He is exhausted. He's just putting the lid on the plastic tub when the door opens and an Asian Indian man in his forties comes in.
"Mr. X.? Hello, I am Sanjay Singh, the Principal. I wanted to come talk to you earlier, but we had an altercation with a parent in the front office."
"Everything okay?" he asks as they shake hands.
"It's fine, just some philosophical differences. We're a private academy and we teach science in our science classrooms, not theology. Some parents are angered by this. When this sometimes happens, my motto is, 'Show 'em the fine print and if they don't like it, show 'em the door."
"That's a superb motto."
"How did it go today?"
"They seemed to have a great time."
"That's good. One of our teachers peeped in earlier and came running to tell on you, you know."
"What did I do?" he asks, thinking of the microphone.
"You managed to get an entire room of sixty children silent and attentive for two hours. Keep this up, and we'll try to hire you." Mr. Singh laughs and waggles a finger at him. The PA crackles, "Mr. Singh to the Office, please."
"Oh God, I have to go, we'll talk again tomorrow. Thank you, Mr. X."
Singh was gone, the room was silent.
He realizes suddenly that Miss Smith has never shown. He hopes to see her the next day. Which reminds him of the check. He takes the tub to his sister's car, drives back toward his parents' house in Rowell's Corner before heading to the bank.
It's under the shade of the oak trees in their front drive that he first searches the tub for the check. It's there in the drive that he meticulously empties and reorganizes the tub. It's there that he sits, sweating and a little panicky, against the right front tire as he dials LouAnne's number. Busy signal.
He dials again.
Busy signal.
He dials again.
He searches the car.
He searches his clothes.
He goes into the house and searches his suitcase, sleeping bag and the entire area around the den where he's been living since he came home (they'd turned his old bedroom into storage).
He walks out to the car and sits down in shock. The check is gone.
"I'll just ask for another one," he says, putting the tub into the passenger seat and locking the car. He heads inside and starts making a salad for his family, turning on 91.1 FM for jazz instead of 88.5 FM for news and information.
So it is that he misses the news story about the Mexican family in Hayward who experienced a miracle: they were in danger of losing their house and on their way to ask family for a place to stay when an envelope containing a cashier's check for an undisclosed amount flew into their open car window as they drove South on 880.
"It's a miracle from Jesus! We can make our payments! We can live at home! Oh, thank you, thank you whoever you are!"
His salad is acclaimed that evening as one of the finest his parents and sister have ever had.
© 2010, Edward Hightower. All Rights Reserved.
The room is silent. They all turn to him. A little Asian Indian girl with sincere brown eyes says, "Really?"
"No, but --" and it's too late, they're all running and bellowing again.
He is uncertain what to do, until he sees the microphone. He goes over to it, next to an old piano that looks just like the piano from his elementary school; he taps the mic twice. It is on. He picks it up. No one has noticed the sounds. He takes a breath, and lets out a long, slow, "Moooooooooooooooo!" into the mic. Some of the kids pause.
He moos a second time and more of the kids pause. He moos a third time and they are still, silent, staring at him. He says, in a thick German accent, "You vill all be sittink DOWN or you vill all be fed to ze ogre I have HIDDEN in my plasticken tubben."
They sit, silent, wherever they are, he replaces the mic and reaches into the tub. They all gasp, sitting back, terror in their faces. He grasps something soft and flings it into the air. The children, frozen, are at once delighted: he's thrown the entire contents of a jumbo bag of cotton balls, and they are falling over the assembly like giant Charlie Brown Special snowballs. The noise level starts to rise and he shouts, "HALT!"
They halt.
"You vill each grab ONE cotton ball. You vill take this cotton ball to a table and sit, silent, pretending this cotton ball is your baby tyrannosaurus. IF you are silent, it vill not eat you and poop you out like so much poo." A few of the kids giggle. They are shushed by the others.
They move immediately to the tables, cotton balls in hand. There are only a few cotton balls left. They are all staring at the cotton. The little girl with the sincere, serious eyes is quietly whispering to hers.
"You vill tell me your NAMES vehn I point to you. Your NAMES und ONE szing about yourself zat nooooobody knows, as lonk as it does NOT involve creepy personal details."
In this way he goes around the room and gets them to say their names and he learns that this is a room full of exceptionally smart young people. As the last boy finishes talking about his pet tadpoles that are turning into frogs that make his mother "uncomfterble b'cause of Darwin", he prepares to talk about theatre. But the girl with the serious eyes says, softly, "What's your name?"
He is at a loss. What does he say? A title? A professorship? He remembers an instructor from Arkham: "Tell the truth about yourself to everyone except the Press; those fuckers don't deserve it."
"My name," he says, "Is Mr. X. I am here to teach you about Theatre."
Almost every hand in the room shoots up.
He points to a Chinese-American boy named Dean with a round face and a penchant for fossils; the boy says, "Like movies?"
And the room is full of questions: "Are you a Movie Star?" "Do you know Harry Potter?" "Why are you so fat?"
Then a bell rings and they all run out of the room to their parents' waiting cars. He is alone. Two hours have somehow passed. He is exhausted. He's just putting the lid on the plastic tub when the door opens and an Asian Indian man in his forties comes in.
"Mr. X.? Hello, I am Sanjay Singh, the Principal. I wanted to come talk to you earlier, but we had an altercation with a parent in the front office."
"Everything okay?" he asks as they shake hands.
"It's fine, just some philosophical differences. We're a private academy and we teach science in our science classrooms, not theology. Some parents are angered by this. When this sometimes happens, my motto is, 'Show 'em the fine print and if they don't like it, show 'em the door."
"That's a superb motto."
"How did it go today?"
"They seemed to have a great time."
"That's good. One of our teachers peeped in earlier and came running to tell on you, you know."
"What did I do?" he asks, thinking of the microphone.
"You managed to get an entire room of sixty children silent and attentive for two hours. Keep this up, and we'll try to hire you." Mr. Singh laughs and waggles a finger at him. The PA crackles, "Mr. Singh to the Office, please."
"Oh God, I have to go, we'll talk again tomorrow. Thank you, Mr. X."
Singh was gone, the room was silent.
He realizes suddenly that Miss Smith has never shown. He hopes to see her the next day. Which reminds him of the check. He takes the tub to his sister's car, drives back toward his parents' house in Rowell's Corner before heading to the bank.
It's under the shade of the oak trees in their front drive that he first searches the tub for the check. It's there in the drive that he meticulously empties and reorganizes the tub. It's there that he sits, sweating and a little panicky, against the right front tire as he dials LouAnne's number. Busy signal.
He dials again.
Busy signal.
He dials again.
He searches the car.
He searches his clothes.
He goes into the house and searches his suitcase, sleeping bag and the entire area around the den where he's been living since he came home (they'd turned his old bedroom into storage).
He walks out to the car and sits down in shock. The check is gone.
"I'll just ask for another one," he says, putting the tub into the passenger seat and locking the car. He heads inside and starts making a salad for his family, turning on 91.1 FM for jazz instead of 88.5 FM for news and information.
So it is that he misses the news story about the Mexican family in Hayward who experienced a miracle: they were in danger of losing their house and on their way to ask family for a place to stay when an envelope containing a cashier's check for an undisclosed amount flew into their open car window as they drove South on 880.
"It's a miracle from Jesus! We can make our payments! We can live at home! Oh, thank you, thank you whoever you are!"
His salad is acclaimed that evening as one of the finest his parents and sister have ever had.
© 2010, Edward Hightower. All Rights Reserved.
Debacle, Part I
The actor has graduated from a prestigious conservatory on the East Coast. Owing to a family emergency, he finds himself back home in California for a time, and must find temporary employment in order to fund his return to New York. Casting about for theatrical work that pays, he finds a teaching opportunity in a small town not twenty minutes from his family's home.
He is interviewed by a man several years younger than himself, who seems to doubt the actor's training and qualifications. The actor leaves the interview somewhat shocked that the interviewer only asked if he could teach specific classes and never asked what he could teach. He takes a job with an outfit called, "TheaterSmartiez Theater For Kidz!!!"
Smartiez is run by a somewhat desperate woman in her late forties. Her name is LouAnne. She likes to be called Ann. She specifies, "Ann, A-n-n. Don't pronounce the E."
"Isn't it silent, anyway?"
Long silence.
"I can see you've got a lot of training," she smiles. Genuinely pleased, for some reason. He's uncomfortable, having borrowed his sister's car to drive to this very hot little alleyway in San Jose to pick up the supplies for this theatre class he's supposed to teach. There's no air conditioning in this building, but she is not sweating. On his father's advice, he has worn a suit. It does not fit well. He can feel his sweat soaking through his undershirt, shirt, tie and jacket. But he is afraid to take any of it off in case he has to beat a hasty retreat.
"You've read my resume? That's a relief, the last two people I interviewed with didn't even glance at it," and here he pauses, having looked at the envelope he sent with a fancy resume printed on fancy paper, sealed in a fancy presentation folder with a wax seal. An unbroken wax seal. She hasn't, in fact, seen his resume. The only thing she's read is his cover letter; it's there, on her desk, his phone number circled in red. There's a coffee stain on the resume. She glances at it and she blushes, but it looks more like a spiderwebbing of varicose veins and gin blossoms pulsing across her face under her skin. She laughs and her gums look like she is cultivating plankton under her lips. He is deeply alarmed.
"I didn't need to read your resume, I know you by reputation, Mr. ..." a glance at his last name, "Mr. X."
He is genuinely surprised and a little pleased. "Who did you talk to?"
"The guy at that theatre over there in ... what's the name of that town ... ?"
"Livermore?"
"Yes! Nice man."
"Yes, he is. Want to see my impersonation of him?"
"Sure, another time. Anyway, he said to hire you, so here you are. Now: the box of supplies requires a forty-five dollar deposit on your part and if you don't return them, I keep that forty-five dollars. You'll arrive at the Cherrywood Preparatory Academy in Newark at 3:10 pm, you'll check in at the office and proceed to the cafeteria where you will run a theater program. This is Monday through Friday 3:10 pm to 5:10 pm. If you miss a day, you're fired; if you're late, you're fired; if you swear or blaspheme or touch a kid, you're fired. Miss Smith will be there with you every day as your assistant, and she will watch you like a hawk. Miss Smith reports directly to me. Miss Smith hates homosexuals, so watch yourself."
He's a little shocked, and sits silent for a minute. Then he says, "If Ken had such good things to say about me, why would you think I'd touch a kid?"
She grins. "Standard fare. I have to say that to all of our instructors. Nothing personal."
"Don't you require fingerprinting?"
"Not for after-school programs," she's all business now, putting forms in a folder and putting the folder in a plastic bin full of crafts supplies.
"Why not?"
"The instructors are on campus, the school is there to watch out for the kids, if something goes wrong, it's their responsibility."
She shoves the tub at him.
"Fill out the forms and send them in when the class is complete, you'll get your check 90 days after that."
"Should I sign a contract?"
"Oh! Right, of course," she looks around, a little perplexed. "Where did I put them?" She starts rummaging, mumbling about the newly reorganized office. It does not look reorganized to him. The only newly-anything about it is the newly-settled layer of dust on the piles of paper on the table and file cabinets behind her. She searches for so long, knocks over so many things looking, that he decides to cut it short:
"You know what? Send me the contract. I'll sign it and send it back to you. Here's my money-order for the supplies."
She ceases her search immediately and grabs the money-order, perusing it thoroughly, her beady eyes screwed up like Buddy Hackett. In fact, she looks and acts so much like the old comedian that he chokes back an involuntary laugh. She bends down to put the check in a drawer and farts.
The laughter dies in his soul. The fart has a thick and meaty sound to it, as though it's been squeezed through two very wet slabs of salted beef. It ends with a high, liquid squirt that leaves little to the imagination. The room is filled with the smell of old, old cabbage and musty pumpkins and something deeper, something darker, something like what one would expect to find in a recently-raided crypt.
He can't breathe, he's afraid he'll vomit. He is smiling as hard as he can, pretending he didn't notice as she flaps some papers around in the drawer. He wants to leave, and he can feel the vomit rising as he begins to feel faint from the heat. He is certain he will die if she tries to revive him. Her ineptitude is only surpassed by the odor of her undead flatus.
"Thanks so much, bye!" he gasps out, then turns and runs smack into the door, falling over and hitting his head on the desk, biting his tongue hard as he hits the floor. The last thing he hears before losing consciousness is, "Smith! Get in here!"
He isn't out for long. Or perhaps he dreams it. But Miss Smith, svelte and twenty-something, comes in from another place and there must be air conditioning because the room is cool and it smells nice and she is wearing a white ankle-length skirt and when she steps over him to get water from the cooler he sees that she is wearing no panties and she is a real redhead, au naturel. He is instantly aroused but cannot do anything about it. He's unable to move. Or breathe. Sudden panic hits: he's knocked the wind out of himself! Struggling to breathe, afraid of smelling that fart again, he despairs of ever escaping this small, hot, dusty place. He closes his eyes again, every bad fall from childhood clear in his mind as he fights the panic and makes gasping noises like a dying frog in Death Valley.
The pain eases. He can breathe. He opens his eyes. Miss Smith is indeed a redhead, quite lovely and very hot-for-teacher with her green cat's eye glasses. She is mopping his brow. He smells oranges. He takes an exploratory breath, his lungs aching.
"Where's --"
"LouAnne went to the bank. Thank God. Are you here to pick up your paycheck?"
"No," he tries to move his hands to cover his embarrassment, but there's no way without being obvious or grazing her inner thigh with his knuckle.
"Are you sure? Because I can write you the check right now, I'm authorized," she says, still mopping his brow.
He sits up slightly, she hands him a cup of cool water.
"I haven't started teaching yet. I start Monday," he sips the water and looks at her face, her freckles, her green eyes, her full lips. He wants to ask her to marry him. Instead, he tries to adjust his pants, only enhancing the appearance of his excitement. Her eyes follow his hand, her head tilts and her eyes widen. There is the briefest of deeply pregnant silences. She takes a breath.
"I'll get you your check," and she is gone. He hears typing in the other room as he adjusts himself, tucking it under the band of his boxer-briefs.
Five minutes pass. He sips the water. He feels better. Miss Smith returns and offers him a hand up. She's smiling.
"Here's your check. Take it to the bank today," she hands him an envelope with the check inside, the flap folded inward. She grasps his hand, looks him in the eyes. His pulse leaps. "Today," she says.
He picks up the plastic tub and says, "Thank you, Miss Smith."
She walks him to the door, opens it for him. He is trying to think of something to say. He cannot. He turns once he's outside. She's got the door half-closed, he can only see the right side of her face.
"You're welcome," she says, unblinking eye contact lasting a full ten seconds. Then the door is closed and she locks it. He stands there in the dusk of San Jose, wondering idly how hours had passed. The sun has just set. The OPEN light switches off, the blinds are already closed. The small, brown cinderblock building looks as though it has been abandoned for years.
He walks to his sister's car, hoping to see Miss Smith in the lot. His is the sole vehicle in the freshly-painted lot. He puts the tub in, gets into the car, rolls down all the windows and cranks the air conditioning.
As he is driving North on 880, he begins to feel better. Miss Smith will be at every class, "watching him". He will see her again. He will make a point of never mentioning his angry ex-girlfriend or the broken hearts, mostly his, of his years in Arkham, MA. He drives North with all the windows down, air conditioning off, enjoying the dry heat of a California summer evening.
Consequently, he does not notice that the check flies out the window somewhere around the Tennyson exit.
© 2010, Edward Hightower. All Rights Reserved.
He is interviewed by a man several years younger than himself, who seems to doubt the actor's training and qualifications. The actor leaves the interview somewhat shocked that the interviewer only asked if he could teach specific classes and never asked what he could teach. He takes a job with an outfit called, "TheaterSmartiez Theater For Kidz!!!"
Smartiez is run by a somewhat desperate woman in her late forties. Her name is LouAnne. She likes to be called Ann. She specifies, "Ann, A-n-n. Don't pronounce the E."
"Isn't it silent, anyway?"
Long silence.
"I can see you've got a lot of training," she smiles. Genuinely pleased, for some reason. He's uncomfortable, having borrowed his sister's car to drive to this very hot little alleyway in San Jose to pick up the supplies for this theatre class he's supposed to teach. There's no air conditioning in this building, but she is not sweating. On his father's advice, he has worn a suit. It does not fit well. He can feel his sweat soaking through his undershirt, shirt, tie and jacket. But he is afraid to take any of it off in case he has to beat a hasty retreat.
"You've read my resume? That's a relief, the last two people I interviewed with didn't even glance at it," and here he pauses, having looked at the envelope he sent with a fancy resume printed on fancy paper, sealed in a fancy presentation folder with a wax seal. An unbroken wax seal. She hasn't, in fact, seen his resume. The only thing she's read is his cover letter; it's there, on her desk, his phone number circled in red. There's a coffee stain on the resume. She glances at it and she blushes, but it looks more like a spiderwebbing of varicose veins and gin blossoms pulsing across her face under her skin. She laughs and her gums look like she is cultivating plankton under her lips. He is deeply alarmed.
"I didn't need to read your resume, I know you by reputation, Mr. ..." a glance at his last name, "Mr. X."
He is genuinely surprised and a little pleased. "Who did you talk to?"
"The guy at that theatre over there in ... what's the name of that town ... ?"
"Livermore?"
"Yes! Nice man."
"Yes, he is. Want to see my impersonation of him?"
"Sure, another time. Anyway, he said to hire you, so here you are. Now: the box of supplies requires a forty-five dollar deposit on your part and if you don't return them, I keep that forty-five dollars. You'll arrive at the Cherrywood Preparatory Academy in Newark at 3:10 pm, you'll check in at the office and proceed to the cafeteria where you will run a theater program. This is Monday through Friday 3:10 pm to 5:10 pm. If you miss a day, you're fired; if you're late, you're fired; if you swear or blaspheme or touch a kid, you're fired. Miss Smith will be there with you every day as your assistant, and she will watch you like a hawk. Miss Smith reports directly to me. Miss Smith hates homosexuals, so watch yourself."
He's a little shocked, and sits silent for a minute. Then he says, "If Ken had such good things to say about me, why would you think I'd touch a kid?"
She grins. "Standard fare. I have to say that to all of our instructors. Nothing personal."
"Don't you require fingerprinting?"
"Not for after-school programs," she's all business now, putting forms in a folder and putting the folder in a plastic bin full of crafts supplies.
"Why not?"
"The instructors are on campus, the school is there to watch out for the kids, if something goes wrong, it's their responsibility."
She shoves the tub at him.
"Fill out the forms and send them in when the class is complete, you'll get your check 90 days after that."
"Should I sign a contract?"
"Oh! Right, of course," she looks around, a little perplexed. "Where did I put them?" She starts rummaging, mumbling about the newly reorganized office. It does not look reorganized to him. The only newly-anything about it is the newly-settled layer of dust on the piles of paper on the table and file cabinets behind her. She searches for so long, knocks over so many things looking, that he decides to cut it short:
"You know what? Send me the contract. I'll sign it and send it back to you. Here's my money-order for the supplies."
She ceases her search immediately and grabs the money-order, perusing it thoroughly, her beady eyes screwed up like Buddy Hackett. In fact, she looks and acts so much like the old comedian that he chokes back an involuntary laugh. She bends down to put the check in a drawer and farts.
The laughter dies in his soul. The fart has a thick and meaty sound to it, as though it's been squeezed through two very wet slabs of salted beef. It ends with a high, liquid squirt that leaves little to the imagination. The room is filled with the smell of old, old cabbage and musty pumpkins and something deeper, something darker, something like what one would expect to find in a recently-raided crypt.
He can't breathe, he's afraid he'll vomit. He is smiling as hard as he can, pretending he didn't notice as she flaps some papers around in the drawer. He wants to leave, and he can feel the vomit rising as he begins to feel faint from the heat. He is certain he will die if she tries to revive him. Her ineptitude is only surpassed by the odor of her undead flatus.
"Thanks so much, bye!" he gasps out, then turns and runs smack into the door, falling over and hitting his head on the desk, biting his tongue hard as he hits the floor. The last thing he hears before losing consciousness is, "Smith! Get in here!"
He isn't out for long. Or perhaps he dreams it. But Miss Smith, svelte and twenty-something, comes in from another place and there must be air conditioning because the room is cool and it smells nice and she is wearing a white ankle-length skirt and when she steps over him to get water from the cooler he sees that she is wearing no panties and she is a real redhead, au naturel. He is instantly aroused but cannot do anything about it. He's unable to move. Or breathe. Sudden panic hits: he's knocked the wind out of himself! Struggling to breathe, afraid of smelling that fart again, he despairs of ever escaping this small, hot, dusty place. He closes his eyes again, every bad fall from childhood clear in his mind as he fights the panic and makes gasping noises like a dying frog in Death Valley.
The pain eases. He can breathe. He opens his eyes. Miss Smith is indeed a redhead, quite lovely and very hot-for-teacher with her green cat's eye glasses. She is mopping his brow. He smells oranges. He takes an exploratory breath, his lungs aching.
"Where's --"
"LouAnne went to the bank. Thank God. Are you here to pick up your paycheck?"
"No," he tries to move his hands to cover his embarrassment, but there's no way without being obvious or grazing her inner thigh with his knuckle.
"Are you sure? Because I can write you the check right now, I'm authorized," she says, still mopping his brow.
He sits up slightly, she hands him a cup of cool water.
"I haven't started teaching yet. I start Monday," he sips the water and looks at her face, her freckles, her green eyes, her full lips. He wants to ask her to marry him. Instead, he tries to adjust his pants, only enhancing the appearance of his excitement. Her eyes follow his hand, her head tilts and her eyes widen. There is the briefest of deeply pregnant silences. She takes a breath.
"I'll get you your check," and she is gone. He hears typing in the other room as he adjusts himself, tucking it under the band of his boxer-briefs.
Five minutes pass. He sips the water. He feels better. Miss Smith returns and offers him a hand up. She's smiling.
"Here's your check. Take it to the bank today," she hands him an envelope with the check inside, the flap folded inward. She grasps his hand, looks him in the eyes. His pulse leaps. "Today," she says.
He picks up the plastic tub and says, "Thank you, Miss Smith."
She walks him to the door, opens it for him. He is trying to think of something to say. He cannot. He turns once he's outside. She's got the door half-closed, he can only see the right side of her face.
"You're welcome," she says, unblinking eye contact lasting a full ten seconds. Then the door is closed and she locks it. He stands there in the dusk of San Jose, wondering idly how hours had passed. The sun has just set. The OPEN light switches off, the blinds are already closed. The small, brown cinderblock building looks as though it has been abandoned for years.
He walks to his sister's car, hoping to see Miss Smith in the lot. His is the sole vehicle in the freshly-painted lot. He puts the tub in, gets into the car, rolls down all the windows and cranks the air conditioning.
As he is driving North on 880, he begins to feel better. Miss Smith will be at every class, "watching him". He will see her again. He will make a point of never mentioning his angry ex-girlfriend or the broken hearts, mostly his, of his years in Arkham, MA. He drives North with all the windows down, air conditioning off, enjoying the dry heat of a California summer evening.
Consequently, he does not notice that the check flies out the window somewhere around the Tennyson exit.
© 2010, Edward Hightower. All Rights Reserved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)