The Blind Side.

Off to read for a Fox Sports NFL thingee with Troy Aikman today.  Could be worse, I guess.  Could be with Clay Aiken.  But then again, I can't imagine why Clay Aiken would be doing a spot for NFL.  The audition was secured by my new Commercial Agent, Pinnacle Talent.  Love that.  Keep 'em comin'.

Got the big Garbo Talks final reading coming up next week.  Got the music I need to learn via MP3 from my legit agent over at Schiowitz and Connor, et al.  The day after that a song for the producers of ANNIE at Music Theatre West in Long Beach.  Strangely, I'm looking forward to both.  I love the competition.

The Bell, Book and Candle role went non-Equity, apparently.  Oh, well, these things happen.  It was a good read, though, and I was relatively content with it, which doesn't happen often.

Angie and I watched a movie last night with Sandra Bullock called The Blind Side.  Bullock won an Oscar for it.  I have to say I really liked it.  And yet part of me is sort of ashamed that I liked it.  It is allegedly based on a 'true story' and the filmmakers even include snapshots of the real family portrayed in the movie during the end credits.  First, I'm always dubious when I see that opening disclaimer, "Based on a true story."  To me, that's a phrase that reads in my mind's eye as saying, "Get ready for a load of shit."

The family, as portrayed in the film, are a pack of conservative, republican, Christian saints.  Oxymoron written all over THAT sentence.

Sandra Bullock sees a huge, ghetto, black guy walking around on the streets in shorts and a t-shirt on a cold night, turns the Lexus around, picks him up and adopts him thus changing his life forever.  Okay.

Some years ago I gave up theatre, gave up teaching, gave up writing, gave up auditioning, gave up my life's work to pursue a new career as a drug and alcohol counselor for inner-city men plagued with alcohol and drug abuse problems.  Went back to school and got my CADC.  Was hired by the ultra-conservative, unimaginably evil organization known as The Salvation Army.  Had visions of helping people day to day.  Get my hands dirty.  Do some real work instead of this make-believe nonsense called acting and writing.

I came, over the next few years, to know more about the urban, black experience than I ever wanted to.  And yes, it's as mind-bogglingly horrible as one might imagine.  I learned first hand that the way out of the ghetto through education, drive, passion and ambition is about as common as winning the lottery.  I suppose it happens.  I suppose things like The Blind Side have taken place in the world.  I suppose there are, in fact, people like Sandra Bullock's character in the world.  But if there are, I never met them, saw them or heard of them during my stint as a counselor.

The inner-city, gang-ridden, violent, anarchistic, hate-filled black culture in Chicago (and I'm guessing elsewhere) is as terrible as anyone can possibly imagine.  The race divide is not a symbolic creek we can hope to someday leap over, it's a raging, miles-deep river that may be impossible to cross now or ever.  As a middle-class white guy pursuing his altruistic instincts, I quickly learned I didn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of making any sort of discernible difference in the lives of these men.  They were taught from birth to hate white people.  All white people.  My liberal bent refused to accept this at first.  But I soon learned it was simply a fact.  And nothing I could ever do or say would ever change that.

I remember being a bit amused at the country's reaction to Obama's "renegade" pastor, Jeremiah Wright back in the presidential campaign.  The liberals were horrified.  The white conservatives vindicated.  Me?  I was amused that anyone would ever think otherwise.  In my capacity as a counselor in Chicago, I attended many self-help meetings, black church spiritual meetings, black community gatherings, church services, etc.  Every single time I was met with a deep-seated hatred of the perceived white community's concerted effort to keep the black man down.  This is no small problem.  This is not something the government can fix.  This hatred is deeper and more complicated than one can ever conceive.  There are spots, neighborhoods, in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Atlanta and other cities that are virtually unrecognizable as having anything to do with the United States of America.  They are more violent, more hate-filled, more frightening than I can begin to convey.  I have been there.  I have seen these places.  And I have counseled the men who lived there.  This massive hole in our racial infrastructure cannot be fixed by simply electing a black president.  It can't be fixed with liberal optimism.  It can't be fixed with any magic, governmental waving of a wand.  This seething, nefarious, dark underbelly hidden in plain sight in our country is the true threat to our civilization.  Just ask any cop in any of these cities.  They'll tell you.  And as far as I can see, the racial gap is only widening.  It may be too wide to cross already.  There is too much fear on one side and hatred on the other.

All of that was running through my mind as I watched the cartoon version of how love conquers all in The Blind Side.  Late at night, your kids are in the car, HUGE black guy walking alone in a tree-laden area, murky atmosphere.  Stop and pick him up and offer to change his life.  Stop and take him home to your labeled spice racks, your photo albums of Yosemite, your new IKEA gazebo, your prized collection of 2,400 CDs. Do that.

There are no easy answers to this problem that I suspect someday will reach a pressure-cooker level of anxiety in our society.

Nonetheless, I really liked the movie because it would be really neat if that's how it could work.  Every well-to-do white family in America could adopt a troubled, angry, broken, emotionally-scarred black youth and make it all okay.  Obama could even make a it a national observance: adopt a gang-banger day.

At the end of the day the liberals are blind and the conservatives are scared.  I have been both.  I am both.  Maybe that's why I liked the movie so much.

Yeah.

See you tomorrow.

"Time it was and what a time it was, I have a photograph..."

Tara Lynn Orr and Clif Morts in Praying Small - 2010.

I got a new camera yesterday.  Or, more precisely, I got an old camera yesterday.  It's a 1969 Pentax with a built in light meter and flash attachment.  It's a beauty and it weighs about a pound and a half.  It's also in mint condition.

Now, I don't know anything about cameras.  And when I say 'anything,' I mean that.  I literally know nothing whatsoever about cameras except you point it at something and shoot and a bit later there's an image of that.  That's rather strange because I'm an image kinda guy.  I have a near photographic memory of images and still-life mental pictures I've seen throughout my life.  It's come in handy as a writer.  Also, like Truman Copote allegedly had, I have a near perfect recall of conversations that happened years ago.  That's also come in handy.

But having said all that, I have never been particularly interested in cameras and photography.  One of the reasons for that is my color blindness, I think.  My mom claimed when I was in the first grade she got a call from my teacher to come see her.  She did and my teacher (Mrs. McCrae, as I recall) showed her a bunch of pictures I'd drawn in class.  The trees were all colored brown, the sky was purple, the sun orange.  In all of them.  So it was clear I wasn't dabbling in impressionism at the age of six.  I just didn't see colors like other people saw them.

Even now when driving at night, I can't tell the difference between orange lights and yellow lights.  I run a lot of traffic lights, bless my heart.

So I think that has something to do with my lack of interest in art and painting and photography.

But now I have this cool, new camera.  I contacted my buddy, Jay Karr, who's a professional photographer on the East Coast and told him all about it.  Described it, read some of the instruction booklet to him, etc.  Jay knows cameras.  He told me it's a professional level camera, widely used by serious camera folk in the sixties and seventies.  It's a very good camera, in other words.  I also went online and looked it up.  It's an expensive camera, too, apparently.

Now, although I've never been drawn to photography in a general way, I've always been fascinated by black and white work.  Again, this is undoubtedly due to the color blindness.

The IDEA of photography has always interested me, however.  The idea of catching a moment in time, forever frozen, there to scrutinize and pour over.  For example, and this is not exactly photography, but you catch my drift, the Zapruder film has always fascinated me.  Catching the exact moment of assassination.  That snippet of film is forever stamped on my brain.  A careless piece of film that forever changed the world.

Other shots, still shots, come to mind.  An old black and white picture of me in repose during a lapse in rehearsal of a play I did thirty years ago.  Looking down and deep in thought.  It is a perfect example of the struggle I put myself through whenever I'm trying to find a new person to be for a little while on stage.  Rehearsals are never fun for me.  They're more like the pain of Lon Cheney turning into the werewolf.  It's always a worrisome transformation.  That old photo captures that metamorphic experience perfectly.  There's another of my mother sitting on the front stoop of my childhood home, dressed in a fancy dress and pearls, sitting pristinely beside a bunch of ragamuffin neighborhood kids.  It's black and white, of course, and it takes me instantly back to 1973.  Another is a picture of me on the deck of my family's houseboat on the The Lake of the Ozarks around 1978.  I'm reading For Whom the Bell Tolls and someone has caught my attention and I am looking up at the camera in disgust.  I was always in a state of disgust during those times because something, even then, was aware that there was something terribly wrong with spending every single weekend on the lake blind drunk.  I was too young to drink so I would always stock up on books and read through the weekend while I watched the adults drink to the point of coma.  All of that is written on my face in that candid photo.

So here's what I want to do:  I want to take candid, extreme close-up, black and white shots of actors that I work with over the next couple of years or so.  I want to use my ability of conversational recall and transcribe our conversation on the day the shot is taken.  Even if the conversation is innocuous.  The picture on one page, the conversation on the other.  Essentially, an attempt to take the viewer back to that exact moment in time not only with an image but also in dialogue.  I don't want to publish the book.  I just want it for my own personal edification.  I've worked with thousands of actors over the years, some of them a cross section of the most interesting people I've ever met.  To preserve that moment forever seems to me a noble use for my new, professional, high-quality, Pentax, 1969 camera.

I with I had had it for Praying Small.  But I'll start with the very next production I do.  I think it might be a really compelling, original thing to do although I feel certain it's probably been done before.  But not with me and not with this camera and not with these people.

I'll let you know in a few years how it all worked out.

See you tomorrow.

The Last Bed.

Summer, for all intents and purposes, is over.  Labor day traditionally is the day that, while not officially so, tells us that.  Of course, here in LA there is no distinct weather pattern that goes with that passage of time.  It just gets a little cooler eventually and that's that.  In other places I've lived, New York, Chicago, Missouri...one can count on the weather being that final nail in the seasonal coffin.  Not so, here.

I'm up inordinately early today because of all the usual things on someone's mind: bills, future, concern for close friends, blithely trying to predict the unknown.  I'm an early riser by nature.  Even more so in the past few years.  Some time back I wouldn't have thought that possible.  Actually, some time back, I'd probably be getting to bed right about now.  But as I got older and my lifestyle changed, a freakish thing happened.  I became aware that I was a morning person.  Helluva thing to discover about oneself after decades of being a night owl.

Yesterday, once again, Ange and I walked over to the new house we're desperately hoping will soon be ours.  And consequently, once again last night, I dreamt of living in that house.  It appears to be everything we want in a house.  I don't have, nor have I ever claimed to have, very good taste when it comes to stuff like fixing a house up.  My idea of a cool house is based on the houses I've seen on television.  I've always thought the ideal house for me was something akin to The Ponderosa house.  The one Hoss and Adam and Little Joe lived in.  That gives some indication of my taste as a decorator.  

When it comes to this 'settling down' business, I am decidedly a late bloomer.  Yes, I've had dozens of apartments I've sort of nested in.  New York and Chicago, most pointedly.  But my idea of fixing a place up was to put a new picture on the wall.  I remember years ago I was asked to do the entire season at an Equity theatre called Mill Mountain in Roanoke, VA.  Back then they housed the out of town actors in a large communal boarding house of sorts.  We all had our own very large room with a huge kitchen that we shared.  It met all the Equity requirements for housing, however.  I traveled over to the local library and discovered one could check out famous prints of classic paintings for months at a time.  So my room ended up having Picasso and Van Gogh all over the walls for six months.  I felt very cosmopolitan.

Another idea I had about the perfect place to call home was Salinger's description of The Glass Family Apartment in Franny and Zooey.  Huge bookshelves everywhere, sagging under the weight of thousands of books, massive leather furniture, throw rugs tossed here and there, the smell of coffee and leather and reading in the air.  The late afternoon sun shining through dust motes and cigarette smoke.  But that image always seemed more appropriate for New York than Burbank.

I once parted with quite a lot of money trying to make an apartment in Queens look like that.

In any case, I never quite grasped the concept of making a home an actual home.  For one thing it just never seemed that important.  I was the kind of guy that would carry a light bulb from room to room rather than actually take the time and go out and buy more light bulbs.  I ate countless meals over the sink.  If I had a coffee maker, a well-stocked bar and a reasonably clear television, I was fine.

Now, of course, all of that has changed.  I'm actually thinking along lines of permanence.  Of growing old in one place.  Of making my surroundings a natural extension of who I am.  And it is, in a suburban dad kind of way, rather gratifying.

 A few weeks ago I found myself wandering around our backyard trying to think of things that would make it seem more inviting, more comfortable.  Ange and I spend a lot of time in our backyard.  It's very private, very secluded, with tall walls on either side, a gazebo, several concrete walkways, two horse stalls, a tack room, a large garage, a long strip of garden, lots of cast iron lawn furniture, a huge grill.  All the things I've never given a moment's thought to before very recently.

The place we're trying very hard to move into has all of that and more...a guest house, lots of trees, a huge barn, an office, a patio, a big stretch of grass and shrubbery.  The house is set on about 10,000 square feet of land, in fact.

So things change.  The only constant, I'm told, is change.  Change in how one perceives things, how one envisions things, how one approaches life.  I'm a poster boy for change, it would seem sometimes.  Odd, considering the one thing I dislike the most is change.  Like lots of people I know, I always wrongly assume that the way life is at any particular moment is the way life shall be forever.  That line of thinking has never worked out once, not one single time, yet I am always shocked when it doesn't.  I'm a slow learner.

The new house has somehow gotten inside my consciousness.  I think of it at the oddest moments.  I find myself dreaming about it.  In my dreams I write and act and direct short plays based on it.  I see Angie superimposed over the image of June Cleaver sashaying about the property in pearls and aprons.  I conjure up film clips of myself as Ward Cleaver, smoking a pipe, reading the paper by the fire, changed from suit coat to button down sweater, still wearing a plain, black tie.

It's almost nightmarish in its constancy, this new idea of life.

Recently, Angie and I toddled off to Target (yes, I know it's not cool to shop there these days now that we know of all the right wing contributions this corporation makes, but hey - we had a bunch of Target cards) and got a bunch of new stuff for our dining room.  A new tablecloth, a new clock on the wall, a new picture of a bird that matches the colors in the tablecloth, new candles, new placemats, new napkins that match it all...and the coup de gras, new curtains.  Now, every time I walk past the room I feel compelled to look at it and swell with pride.  It's a disturbing new era I've entered.

There's also a part of me, the nomad part of me, that quakes at the idea of staying in one place forever.  Of awaking every day to the same view.  Of finishing my life in the same familiar barco-lounger.  Not that I have a barco-lounger, but euphemistically speaking.

We don't have kids, obviously (unless we count the puppies, but I suspect they'd be happy anywhere as long as we were there with them) so it's not that.  We're not compelled to make a better life for our off-spring like many other people.  No, it's not that.

Then what?

I think, and I'm only guessing here, that it boils down to the idea of simply not having the energy or ambition to keep doing it over and over anymore.  Not having the drive to make new friends, to establish new boundaries, to start from scratch just one more time.  It's soothing to think that this might be the last time.  The final nest.  The search ended.  The holy grail attained.

It is unimaginably comforting to know this is the last bed I'll ever have to awaken in.

And, by natural extension, the last person I'll ever have to awaken to.

And, wonder of wonders, it's exactly the the bed and person I've spent a lifetime searching for.

My, oh, my, how odd life is sometimes.

See you tomorrow.

The Big Head Theory.

Robert Goulet, Julie Andrews and Richard Burton in CAMELOT.

I don't know why it is that some actors are so much more, well, watchable, for lack of a better word, than other actors.  It's an intangible thing.  It, in fact, makes no sense sometimes.  I personally know some really fine actors that bore me.  And I know some actors with really small ranges, not terribly proficient, really, but absolutely electric on stage.  It's a mystery, as the line goes in Shakespeare In Love.  And it is.  I only know that some actors simply command audience attention and others don't.

My friend and former acting teacher, Michael Moriarty, told me something interesting once.  He said one of the reasons he never became a major movie star was because his head wasn't big enough.  He said he had a theory that one of the prerequisites to becoming a movie star was a big head.  Literally.  He said, DeNiro...big head.  Nicholson...big head.  Katherine Hepburn...HUGE head.  Nick Nolte...big head.  Streep...very big head.  He said, as far as he could discern, there were no exceptions to this rule.  He told me that often times, on screen, one couldn't really see this.  But up close, in person, there was a direct correlation between stardom and the physical size of one's head.  Fascinating.  And Michael knew and worked with all of those people.

Angie, who spent over twenty years as a casting associate in this town, seconds his opinion.  She tells of people she knew and met over the years with the same observation.  Anthony Hopkins...big head.  Richard Dreyfuss...big head.

Michael said of course one has to also be a good actor but coupling that with having a big head usually means stardom.

It sounds utterly ludicrous, but I think there's some truth to it.

But that's movie stuff.  I was speaking more along the lines of seeing someone onstage.

I've met John Malkovich (big head, by the way) a few times and also seen him onstage.  I'm here to tell you, it's nearly impossible to watch someone else when Malkovich is onstage with them.  And it's not because John has such a huge range as an actor.  He doesn't.  The few times he's strayed outside of his particular niche as an actor, he flounders a bit.  Yet I can understand why he doesn't do stage a lot anymore.  It must be exhausting for him.  He never seems to relax.  Even while relaxing onstage, he is like a coiled snake.  At no moment does he seem to just pull back and coast for a few seconds.  Even when silent, when listening, when not actively involved with the immediate action, does he seem to be in repose.

I am reminded of something I read years ago about Richard Burton in Camelot.  Apparently during the out-of-New York run of that show, before they took it to Broadway, there was a scene that was eventually cut.  It involved Robert Goulet (Lancelot) and Julie Andrews (Guinevere) having a conversation, flirting, having a sexual connection, while Burton (King Arthur) stood upstage looking into the fireplace, his back to the audience.  He didn't have any lines in the scene.  The director and producers realized after awhile that the audience was missing the information in the scene because they couldn't pay attention to it.  Everyone in the theatre was staring at Burton's back.  His BACK was more interesting to them than Andrews and Goulet playing the scene.  That's precisely what I mean by 'watchable.'

In a film called Reflections in a Golden Eye, the great director, John Huston, said he did something with Marlon Brando that he would never dream of doing with another actor.  There is a moment toward the end of the film when Brando sees a man (the object of his affections in the movie) kneeling beside the sleeping Elizabeth Taylor, smelling her undergarments (yes, it's an odd film).  Brando looks on in horror and then leaves and gets a pistol and comes back and shoots him.  Huston shot the scene with the camera on Brando and when he leaves, the camera stays on the doorway where Brando had been standing.  He doesn't move the camera.  It takes Brando quite a while to get the pistol but finally, he walks back into the frame.  Huston writes in his autobiography that he didn't move the camera because Brando's presence is so palpable, so overwhelming, so powerful, that the audience continues to stare at the spot where BRANDO HAD BEEN.

In my own career I have run into this sort of thing a few times.  Years ago I did a play with an actor named Jim Petersmith.  Jim is a good friend of mine and, strangely, no longer in the business.  I hated working with Jim.  Not because he was difficult.  Quite the contrary.  He was a delight to work with.  But he had one of those stage presences that just entranced an audience.  I always got the feeling that even if I stood on my head and spit snowballs out my ass, they'd still watch Jim.

Another was an actress named Katherine Kelly, whom you can see in one of the photos to the right of this blog.  Katherine played Laura in a production of Glass Menagerie I did.  During rehearsal I realized I couldn't pull any of my tricks (every actor has a whole bag of tricks he carries around...'tricks' are things that have always worked for him, tried and true mannerisms that have proved fruitful in past productions).  Katherine is incapable of being dishonest onstage.  She is blazingly truthful.  So anything less from me would have made me look like bad soap actor next to her.  And her honesty is such that the audience, again, only watches her.  She's still in the business and a staple with the famous Arena Stage in Washington D.C.  I adored working with her.

And then there are actors that are entrancing on stage but not so much on screen.  Kevin Kline is like that.  His stage work is absolutely mesmerizing.  But on screen he's just okay.

Pacino is a perfect example of all this regardless of whether he's on stage or on screen, and I've seen him on both.  One just can't help watching him.  The only time I've seen another actor take the stage (screen) from him is The Godfather.  Brando did it.

George C. Scott, like Malkovich, is another actor on stage that simply demands the audience watch him.  The very fine actor, Charles Durning, once did the play Inherit the Wind with him.  He says if he had to do it again, he wouldn't because people didn't SEE him in that play.  They only saw Scott.  He says in his autobiography that he once even asked Scott about it.  George C. apparently said, "I have no idea, Chuck.  You're a better actor than I am.  You always were.  I don't know know why I even get hired."

It's a mystery.  Some have it, others don't.  Often times it has absolutely nothing to do with talent.  It just is.

Maybe it's just me, but stuff like that just fascinates the hell out of me.

See you tomorrow.

Pipe Dreams.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, in fact I'm not sure the numbers exist anywhere, but I honestly think Los Angeles has more small theaters than New York and Chicago combined.  Odd for a town that is not a 'theatre town.'  I lived in NY, off and on (I was on the road a lot) for fifteen years.  Another ten years in the miserable city of Chicago.  And now, of course, Los Angeles.  There are dozens and dozens of small 99 seat houses in The Valley here and another gaggle of them on theatre row in Hollywood.  You can't swing a dead cat in this city without hitting a small theatre.

In Chicago they're called 'storefront' theaters, in NY they're called off-off Broadway.  Here, they're called 'Equity Waiver' theaters.  About half or more of them are 'pay to act' theaters.  That is to say, one joins the company, pays 75 bucks a month, and gets cast in a play.  Or, as in the case of a theater in which I was recently and briefly involved, you pay 75 bucks a month and get to paint a set.  They should call it a 'pay to paint' theater.

In Chicago I was the playwright-in-residence for a small theater for a long while called Redtwist (actually, it was called 'Actors Workshop' but they changed their name).  Redtwist did not require 'dues.'  Instead, they offered a variety of classes from highly qualified teachers that the company members were encouraged to attend.  The classes cost money, of course.  But everyone benefitted.  I don't see a lot of that in LA, certainly not in the theaters I know of.  I suppose some actors might want to pay 75 bucks to get their picture in a lobby, but I can't imagine why.

In any event, my buddy Jimmy Barbour and I often talk of opening our own small, repertory theater here in Los Angeles.  NoHo would be ideal, although Burbank would be a good spot, too.  We want to use the Chicago prototype; offer classes (scene study, audition technique, musical theatre classes, voice classes, directing classes, maybe even dance classes) and make the monetary commitment to the theater more of an 'investment' rather than 'a chance to act in front of people' kind of thing.  The entry process would be tough.  The auditions would be based on talent rather than 'um, do you have any money?  Yes?  Okay, you're in.'

Jim and I differ here, but personally, I'd like the theater to be completely about new plays, new work.  I really have no interest in mounting another Death of a Salesman or another Odd Couple.  Use the space entirely for new work - cast, directed and produced from within the company.  It's sort of like a movie theater opening and showing old films.  Yes, there's certainly a niche for that, but I'm not moved by that notion.  But like any other art form, one would have to be really, really picky about what was put on display for public consumption.  International play competitions, pay the playwrights for their work (for some reason, a lot of theaters in LA think playwrights are so anxious to have their words spoken, they'll relinquish their writing for free) and at least give the actors a nominal fee to let them know their work is appreciated.  In LA, the Equity Waiver program, actors are supposed to get 15 bucks a show to cover gas, etc.  Most theaters either simply ignore this or they demand that the money go straight back into the theater's coffers.  Criminal.  Not to mention really disrespectful.

Now, it's easy to sit on the sidelines and say all of this, but there is a way to do it.  The Chicago theaters do it, a lot of NY theaters do it.  Why not here?  Why is it Los Angeles holds such a small premium on the actors' work?  Because actors are a dime a dozen?  Yes.  As callous as that sounds, that is precisely the reason.

In our small theater (it's still a pipe dream at this point, but I honestly think we'll do it eventually) we would spend a considerable chunk of our budget on marketing and publicity.  Let's face it.  If no one comes to see the work, why do it?  It's like acting in the shower.  The last small theater I in which I was involved routinely played to 3 or 4 people in the audience.  The cast numbered about 20, so it was a bit awkward, to say the least.  What's the point in that?  I honestly don't know.  So it's crucial to get butts in the seats.  The friends and family plan of live theater, I call it.

Anyway, it's fun to dream.  It's fun to plan it.  It's fun to map it all out.  Someday.  Mark my word.  Someday.

See you tomorrow.

The Troubadour Theater Company.

Last night Angie and I ventured over to The Falcon Theatre to catch Matt Walker's Troubadour Theater Company's A Wither's Tale.  Actually, 'ventured' may be a bit strong because the theatre (The Falcon is Garry Marshall's beautiful 130 seat venue) is about five minutes from us.  We often eat at Mo's right across the street and I've always wanted to see the inside of The Falcon.

If there is a more perfect example of  'the complete actor' than Matt Walker on the planet earth, I've not seen it. He's a breathtakingly talented man.  At times singing soulfully, dancing with complete confidence and control, exhibiting razor sharp comic timing and then, astonishingly, acting snippets of Shakespeare like nobody's business.  He is surrounded by some tremendously talented folk but still manages to tower over everyone else on stage with absolute ease.  The last time I saw someone command a stage so overwhelmingly was Ian McKellan in the exhausting Wild Honey by Chekov on Broadway some twenty years ago.  Malkovich managed to do the same sort of thing in Burn This but he had a good stretch of time off stage in that play.

In any event, I've heard about this company since I first arrived in LA.  Angie is friends with Matt and a couple of others in the company and has been a fan of their work for some years now.  She tried to explain what the company did to me and, frankly, I thought it sounded a bit on the silly side.  Which it is.  It's also executed with the precision of a marine drill.  As readers of this blog will know, I fancy myself, while not exactly a Shakespearean purist, certainly someone who takes exception with the liberties often taken with the Aristotlean Unities with regards to his work.  But again, sometimes it doesn't bother me at all as with, again, McKellan's remarkable Richard III done at Brooklyn Academy of the Arts.  In that famous production, later filmed, McKellan set the whole thing in NAZI Germany.  It worked beautifully.

But back to A Wither's Tale.  The company takes the plays of The Bard and envelops them in the music of a particular contemporary artist/musician.  Earlier productions include Fleetwood Macbeth and As U2 Like It.

The energy and irreverence of the company reminded me of The House Theater of Chicago, although in their case the work is all original.

Honestly, I was fully prepared for an evening of dumb theatre.  And in a few instances, it was.  But it is the smartest 'dumb theatre' I think I've ever seen.  Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale is one of his more complicated and predictable plays.  There is a reason it is not known as one of his magnum opuses.  Or is it Opi?  Hm.

Nothing pleases me more than to take in a night of theatre with a small company and be utterly surprised and delighted.  It happens so rarely.  There is, I'm sorry to say, so very, very much bad theatre out there.  It is one  of the reasons it is so difficult to get an audience with small theatre - people are gun shy.  They've been burned so often in the past, they're just not willing to part with 20 or 25 bucks to see another bad play badly done.  And what's more, I completely understand that.  It's one of the reasons we had so much trouble finding an audience the first couple of weeks with Praying Small.  The play mounted at NoHo Arts immediately before Praying Small was a night of one acts that was as bad as it gets.  Just awful stuff.  The difference is, of course, is that The Troubadour Company, rightly so, already has a host of die hard fans.  They've been doing this sort of thing, according to the program, some 15 years or so.

Well, Matt Walker can now count me as one of his die hard fans.  I can't wait to see the next production from this group.

Aside from Walker, who is quite simply electric on stage, there are some amazing performance from some of the other cast members: Brandon Breault is very funny as is Katherine Malak.  Joseph Keane is a really remarkable dancer/actor/singer.  It's difficult to watch anyone else during the dance numbers.  Travis Clark is wholly connected to the material and gives a stodgy and always amusing and centered performance.  Beth Kennedy, too, really, really funny at times.  Any one of them would have stolen a show that did not have Matt Walker in it.

For my LA readers, here's something you've never seen me write:  Go See This Play.  It's some of the most original, intelligent, outrageous stuff on stage anywhere, anytime.  It made me envious of those who have been in the loop with this company for productions past.

Angie was, yet again, absolutely right.  This is great theatre.

See you tomorrow.

 

To Thine Own Self Be True...

Seventy one years ago today the German Blitzkrieg started to roll into Poland.  World War II had started.  Just thought I'd point that out.

Yesterday my agent sent me the music I need to learn for the Garbo Talks project in Long Beach.  I'll need to print that out and get started on it today.  He also confirmed my audition for ANNIE at Music Theatre West, also in Long Beach.  I told him unless the actual Daddy Warbucks showed up for the auditions, I can't imagine a role more suited to me at this particular point in my career.  Physically and vocally the role is perfect for me.  Plus it's a great Equity Contract.  I have until September 13 to learn the Garbo Talks music and the ANNIE audition is the following day.  Good.

I have never considered myself a musical theater performer even though I've done fifty or sixty musicals throughout my career.  My favorite role (did it three times) is probably Arthur in Camelot.  A great role for an actor who sings.  Although the play itself is really not all that good.  Too long and too little to do for the ensemble.  It's basically a three person show - Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere.  It is not, however, my favorite musical.  That would be Sunday in the Park with George.

I have done a bunch of the old musical battle wagons over the years - Camelot, The Music Man, South Pacific, Carousel, Gypsy, West Side Story (Shrank, in case you're wondering), Hello Dolly, Funny Girl, Guys and Dolls, Big River, 1776, Two by Two...many others.  In fact, Guys and Dolls, which I've done twice, was one of the more interesting ones, because the first time I did it I found myself in the unique position of being able to do both Sky (the first half of the run) and then Nathan.  I much preferred doing Nathan as Sky is a thankless role.  1776 was fun, too.  I did it twice as well, the first time as Lee and the second as Adams.  I remember that one fondly not so much for the show itself as the cast.  Both productions were full of fun actors.

But Sunday in the Park with George has always towered over the others.  It is a remarkable piece of writing from both Sondhem and Lapine.  Every time I did it and every time I listen to it, I hear something different.

I've done another Sondheim piece, too - Company.  That was my first introduction to the genius of Mr. Sondheim.  I'd love to take a shot at Sweeny Todd or Assassins someday.

Anyway, the point is, even though I've done a ton of musicals over the years, I've never really considered myself that kind of performer.  One of the reasons for that, I think, is because a lot of my close friends are REAL singers...REAL musicians.  I'm a pretender when it comes to that stuff.  Jim Barbour, one of my best buds, is a real musical theater performer.  Jim and I have done a lot of work together back in the day.  He was good when he was younger...now he's astonishing.  I honestly think Jimmy may have one of the five or six finest musical theater voices in the country right now.  I recently saw him do the lead in Nightmare Alley at The Geffen out here in L.A.  The show was mediocre at best.  But Jim was incredible.  His voice is a force of nature.

I've also been fortunate enough to do a few shows with the amazing Kyle Puccia.  Again, here's a guy who has a voice that actually stops me in my tracks.  Kyle did the lead in one of the Big River's I've had the chance to do (I did it three times)...the first time I heard him sing the role of Huck Finn, honest to God, I was struck dumb.  Now, THAT is a singer.  Jim is a singer.  Me?  I'm a guy that on his best day can carry a tune.  It's an uncomfortable truth I've learned to live with.  When I was first starting out in the business, I really thought I had a good voice, I thought I had a crack at being a major musical theater talent.  But as I began to move up in the business, getting higher quality work, I realized how deluded I had been.  This is not false modesty.  It is a way of saying how important it is in this business to honestly assess one's own talent.

Academia is mostly to blame for this.  One of the things that bothers me the most (for the constant, Gentle Reader of this blog, you'll know what I'm talking about) in the biz.  Actors seem unable, for whatever reason, to honestly assess their own worth.  It is essential to know what one's forte' is in this wacky world of show business.  For example, I also know that even though I love Shakespeare, adore watching him, love his writing above all other, study it relentlessly, I am, quite frankly, really not very good with the language.  Like musical theater, I can recognize great Shakespearean work when I see it - Kevin Kline, Laurence Olivier, Michael Moriarty, John Geilgud, Ralph Richardson, Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, etc. - I also know that it is not what I, personally, do best.  Years ago, I had the wonderful opportunity of doing Brutus in Julius Caesar in NY for a long run.  I loved every second of it.  But I wasn't really that good at it.

It is so terribly important for an actor to know what he does well and what he doesn't.  I don't know why actors, deep into their careers sometimes, have no idea that they're not very good at something.  Ego alone?  I honestly don't know.  But to trudge through years of this business without a truthful assessment of one's own worth is just heartbreaking, it would seem.  And yet, I see it all the time.  Is the desire to be on stage so overwhelmingly massive that one just overlooks the fact that one might not be so good at one particular element of it?  Again, I don't know.  It seems to be a dangerous kind of denial.

Know what you're good at.  Know what you're not good at.  If you're not sure, ask someone you trust.

When I first started studying with the brilliant Michael Moriarty, one of the things I did was bring in audition monologue after audition monologue for him to criticize.  And he was always spot on and incredibly insightful. Finally, one day, he asked me to bring in some Shakespeare.  So I found the "Edmond the Bastard" speech form King Lear and worked on it.  After a couple of weeks I brought it to class.  I did my very best with it.  When I finished, there was a long, somewhat ominous pause.  Michael then said, "You're an extraordinary actor.  One of my favorites, in fact.  But Shakespeare may not be your cup of tea.  That's nothing to be ashamed of.  It's just a fact."  At the time I was devastated.  Now I'm eternally grateful.

And that's the way it should work.

See you tomorrow.

Full of Sound and Fury and Signifying Nothing...

I have read that it is impossible to dream one's own death.  Because we have nothing to compare it to, no reference.  We dream that we fall off a tall building and awake suddenly as we plummet to the earth.  Why?  Because the brain has no conception of what might happen when we hit the ground.  I know I certainly can't envision it, get my mind around it.

Of course, the religious folk have all sorts of fancy and euphoric pictures of such a thing.  I envy them on one hand and scoff on the other.  I have actually heard sermons, back in my days as a drug and alcohol counselor with the nefarious Salvation Army, about sitting on clouds, listening to harps, strolling down streets of gold, playing Scrabble with Jesus, whatever.  Of course, those people are biblical literalists.  Mind-boggling as that may seem.

In any event, I have a couple of close friends at the moment dealing with the painful and inevitable death of their parents.  One is literally sitting beside his mother on her deathbed and the other is navigating the red tape of trying to get his mom in a nursing home.  I can't imagine the weight either of them is carrying.  The best I can do is offer moral support.  It seems hardly enough.

My own mother died quickly and violently in a boat accident twenty three years ago.  I was spared her decline.  At the same time, not being prepared for something so tragic, it took me nearly ten years to adjust to the circumstances of her death.  Ten long, self-destructive years.

About a year ago I read an article on Woody Allen in GQ or Time or one of those magazines.  In it, Allen said he worked not to create art, not to try and best his last film, not to make another brilliant film, but rather to keep his mind occupied so that he wouldn't dwell on the fact that he is "hurtling toward the void."  He said, "If any of us knew how quickly and inevitably we were all charging toward nothingness, we would all be too frightened to even get out of bed everyday."  Wow.

Allen is an avowed atheist.  I can certainly understand his overwhelming fear.  Plus he's in his seventies and knows that time is not on his side.  That interview has stuck with me.  There are much smarter people than myself that have pondered the mysteries of death.  Anything I might add to the subject would be sophomoric at best.  Nonetheless, any thinking person has to muse on it now and again.  It's natural to do so, I think.  It separates us from the beasts, as Karl Rogers wrote, this musing over our demise.  Hemingway was obsessed with it in his own way.  So was Faulkner.  Hemingway all but predicted his own suicide, in fact.  He wrote of living quickly and boldly as a lion in the wild, dying young and violently in the midst of natural selection, having lived a free and eventful life, no regrets, rather than dying old and passive as a lion captured and pacing in a cage in a zoo.

Teddy Roosevelt spoke of striving to be "the man in the arena," demanding every ounce of excitement life could offer, striving to do great things, even impossible things, rather than living in the shadows of the great, the ambitious, and dying without accomplishment or challenge.

It's easy to write or speak of such a thing.  But I would think the tune changes as the inevitable end approaches.  Shakespeare calls death, "the great, undiscovered country."  That's as good a description as I can think of.  He wrote of death eloquently and reverentially, more so than anyone I can think of, in fact.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The last line, especially, I find haunting.  "Signifying nothing."  Puts things in perspective, alarmingly so, in fact.  Is that why I write?  To try and counter that truism?  I don't know.  To leave a legacy beyond simple memory?  Is this the basis of procreation itself?  The instinct, paternal and maternal, to leave something of ourselves?  I don't know.  As I said, a lot smarter people than I have wrestled this demon.

Years ago I was driving from New York City to Florida for a gig.  I used to work in Florida a lot back in those days and the drive was not a new one.  In South Carolina, late at night, I crested a small hill and was horrified to see a car still spinning from a terrible crash that had obviously happened only moments before.  I was the first on the scene.  One car was on its back, the wheels still spinning.  The other finally came to a rest some fifty yards off in a field.  It was a moonless, pitch black night and I pulled my car up in such a manner so that the headlights shone on the crumpled car in the field.  The mind works unbelievable fast at times like this.  I remember sitting in the car for just a split second before getting out to see if I could help.  In that split second I calmly thought of what my reaction was going to be if I saw a dead body.  Odd thought, but there you have it.  I ran to the crushed car in the field first.  No one was in it.  I looked around and saw a lump off in the distance.  I knew it was a person.  I trotted over there and, sure enough, the guy was dead.  His eyes were open, staring, clearly gone.  I couldn't see anyone else.  So I ran to the car that was on its back. That guy was still in the car and hurt but alive.  This was before cell phones, remember, so I couldn't just call 911.  Fortunately, a trucker with a CB was pulling over at about the same time and he had already radioed the incident in.  We simply had to wait.  While doing so, I wandered back to the dead guy in the field.  I looked at him for a long time.  A long time.  Surprisingly, the State Police were there in just a few minutes and took charge.  I was ushered back to my car.  Asked about what I knew.  Waited a while longer.  And eventually was told to just go on.  Through the years I have often thought of that dead guy laying there in that field.  He was about fifty, maybe older.  Balding.  Some cuts on his face and head, but not grossly so.  Eyes open.  Looking straight into the stars on that clear night.  I remember wondering if he had a wife.  If he had kids.  If he had a good life.  And now it was all, in an instant, gone and irrevocably changed for whoever knew him.  A billion, trillion images and memories and accomplishments disappeared in an instant.  So this is it, I thought.  This is what happens to us.

I have never spoken or written about that incident my entire life until just now.  It somehow seemed more private than anything I can think of.  Staring at that dead man was something so personal, I felt, that to tell someone about it seemed unspeakably trivial.

"Hurtling toward the void."  A couple of decades later when I read that line from Woody Allen's interview I immediately was standing in that field again and looking at that man.

I have often tried to imagine what my own mother's last thoughts were before the accident.  I can't.

My heart aches for my two friends dealing with the death and decline of their own parents.  It is, I suppose, part of a life cycle too sad and hopeless to even contemplate.  Some days, when I do think back to that anonymous man in the field, with his glassy eyes staring at the sky, it is, in fact, hard to get out of bed and go about the myriad mundanities that make up my life.  And I think, 'that guy did it.  Every day up until his car crashed into that other car, he got up and made coffee and brushed his teeth and read the paper and kissed his wife and maybe did a little fishing on the weekends and maybe laughed at a dumb joke and maybe bought some new sneakers and watched TV and followed the local news and had his in-laws over for dinner.  And after all that, he ended up tossed and bloody in a weedy field in South Carolina and none of it counted for anything.'

We put a brave and hopeful face on this 'hurtling toward the void' business.  To do otherwise would simply be too depressing.  Or we don't contemplate it at all.  We steadfastly refuse to let something so crippling into our daily thoughts.  That's probably for the best.

See you tomorrow.

 

"Nick Nolte Interviews Nick Nolte" on The Sundance Channel

I watched an utterly fascinating film on The Sundance Channel yesterday.  It was called "NIck Nolte Interviews Nick Nolte" and it was exactly that.  At first glance it appears to be a vanity project, much in the same way "Looking for Richard" is for Al Pacino.  But as I kept watching I realized it was something else altogether.  It is an artistic exorcism of sorts.  Nolte, at the age of 67 (it was made in 08), rationalizing some of his behavior and artistic choices over a fairly distinguished career.  There are some fine insights, I must say, and some of them really struck a chord.  He addresses his alcoholism, his sometimes questionable attitudes about his on-set behavior, his ideas of 'good work' as opposed to bad work and finally, his fascination with Marlon Brando.  Why Nolte would feel compelled to do it at all is interesting.  He's always been a rather private actor, marching to the beat of his own drummer, openly criticizing Hollywood sometimes.

I have always liked Nolte as an actor.  I've never been knocked out by his work, although his stuff in "Q and A" and even Streisand's much maligned "Prince of Tides," is certainly watchable.  The thing about Nick Nolte is he has never surprised me as an actor.  It's the one thing above all else that he clearly aspired to do, too;  surprise people, be unpredictable.  And clearly, as the film unfolds, this is his ultimate goal as an artist.  Nonetheless, it has eluded him.  As I watched, I realized this comes from his Method training, not so much from Nolte himself.  The Method, as I've outlined several times in this blog, encourages lowest common denominator acting.  It does not allow for eccentricity.  It fails to take into account the most fascinating part of the human character: whim.  Nolte is an acolyte for the Method.  So it is not really in him to be unpredictable.  He is solid, infinitely believable, honest, thoughtful, subtextual, committed, in the moment, fun and funny, but ultimately predictable as an actor.  And yet he holds the work of Brando, as do so many others, up as an example of genius.  He is right to do so.  The problem is, he doesn't see that Brando long ago abandoned the tenants of the Method and played straight into the one truly magical gift of the human spirit: whim and whimsy.  And not only that, Brando acted upon it every chance he got.  Brando was never really, honestly, down-deep interested in absolute truth on stage.  He was far more interested in absolute fascination.  He instinctively understood that honesty is easy.  Especially for someone as gifted as an actor as he was, but honesty was and is only the first step.  No one pays to see honesty.  Lots of people can do that.  Just attend any church anywhere for free on any given Sunday.  Honest acting is a dime a dozen acting.  But eccentricity stemming from the very fact of being human...well, that's something entirely different.  The Method disdains ambiguity.  The very lifeblood of the Method solidly rests on the rock hard agenda of "making a choice," picking a feeling, pinpointing an emotion, the magic, "if", play it this way, not that, let the audience know what you're thinking at all times.  Brando, in his bottomless grasp of human behavior, inherently understood that that makes for good scenework, maybe, but dull characterization.  Being honest and making a choice came to Brando as easily as lacing one's shoes does to someone else.  Go back and look at "The Men," his very first film.  It is often hailed today as a forgotten gem.  Mostly from Method actors.  Brando abhorred himself in that.  Thought he was boring.  He was 24 years old.  He learned fast, however.  That's why he's Brando.  His next time at bat was "Streetcar Named Desire" and his Stanley Kowalski in that film forever changed the face of acting.  I watched the film again just a few months ago.  It was then, and remains today, one of the most unpredictable, ambiguous, eccentric performance in all of filmdom.  It is the kind of work Nick Nolte has spent forty years trying to emulate.  It is the difference between Brando, a brilliant actor, and Nolte, a very good actor.

To his credit, Nolte is not alone in chasing Brando's countless examples.  Any truly fine actor (and there are fewer than one might think - in a career of thirty years as a professional actor, I have met maybe...MAYBE five or six) can see that Brando's work towers over the usual A to B to C work of the pedestrian yet well-meaning Plebean artist of the stage.  Now, of course, most young actors have no idea who he even was, outside the name recognition.  While teaching for many years in Chicago I finally had to put together a reel of Brando moments so that my students might finally understand some of the references I was making.  In one instance I remember a promising young actor saying, "That's fucking awesome, man.  Who IS that" as he watched Brando accuse Steiger of ruining his career in the backseat of a car in "On the Waterfront."

I see it over and over and over.  Actors steeped in the teachings of Sandy Meisner or Uta Hagen or Lee Strasberg steadfastly refusing to embrace the most fascinating part of the human condition - unpredictability.  They have been taught, to admittedly over generalize here, to play a sad line sad and a happy line happy.  It is a dead end, artistically speaking, allowing no room for simple whim.  Look at Brando's work in the "tango" scene in "Last Tango in Paris," arguably the finest performance I have ever seen on film.   Watch how he veers from hopelessness to giddiness to lust to full-out comedy to pathos and back again to hopelessness.  Watch how, in the same film, he turns his anger at his ex-wife in the coffin to a full-blown accusation of God himself.  Watch how he takes the simple action of turning a light on and off while thinking into a moment of unspeakable private angst.  He has, in the words of George C. Scott, gone beyond acting and into the realm of impressionism.

Nolte is not to be blamed for his inability to emulate Brando and in effect capture lightning in a bottle.  Just as countless other actors are not to be blamed for seeing Brando's brilliance but being unable to reproduce Brando's brilliance.  In other words, Nolte and thousands of other actors, have been taught math.  Brando is working with quantum physics.

Honesty on stage, on screen, is easy.  Good actors can do it for the exact reason they ARE good actors.  That's what they do.  They've realized early in their lives that it IS easy.  That's why they've chosen the incredibly difficult path in life of being a professional actor.  Other people can't do this.  Ninety nine point nine, nine, nine, nine, nine percent of the world CAN'T do it.  It's a mystery to them.  But even these actors, the ones with "the gift" of honesty, can't step into the new, undiscovered country of acting when they've been taught not to take that chance.  The very essence of Method work disallows unpredictability.  Nolte has never been able to see past those erred teachings.  Brando discarded them as easily as Picasso discarded realism.  Therin lies the uncomfortable truth of "Nick Nolte interviews Nick Nolte."  Understanding genuis is not the same as being a genius.

See you tomorrow.

Imitating Orson Welles...

The auditions keep coming fast and furious, thank god.  One a day, minimum.  Love that.  Gotta love agents for that reason alone.

Yesterday, I read for The Colony Theater's upcoming production of Bell, Book and Candle as I mentioned in my earlier post.  It was a good read, I think, and unless the role is already cast (sometimes it is) I think there will probably be a call back at the very least.  It's a full Equity contract, of course, but not a great one, financially speaking. Nonetheless it's a nine week contract and covers health and pension.  Always good to have that.

I actually had some fun with this one.  More than I expected.  I didn't nail it until about two hours before the audition.  I always like to go into an audition situation with a "hook."  Something I can hang my hat on.  Something I can keep firmly in the forefront of my mind while auditioning.  Sometimes I can't find it and I just fly by the seat of my pants.  Those are the tricky auditions because my confidence is tested.  Yesterday was not one of those times.

The breakdowns included these words in the description, "a shambling, sloppy alcoholic...very intelligent...good heart."  As I've said before, I like to go in with an image in mind.  For this particular role I kept hearing, for some reason, a British accent.  Now, there's absolutely nothing in the script to indicate that.  Nonetheless, I kept hearing it.  Maybe it was the cadence in the script for this character.  But it didn't fit.  So I didn't want to add something that wasn't there.  Finally, about two hours before I left for the read, I zeroed in on the word "shambling."

Years ago I had an English professor, Contemporary American Short Story.  He was a big bear of a guy that sort of lumbered about while speaking in this booming yet halting cadence.  He sounded like I always thought Hemingway should've sounded (now I know Hemingway had kind of a high, squeeky voice...but at the time, I didn't know that).  So I started, here in the privacy of my office, imitating him.  The professor, that is.  And then I started saying the lines in that voice.  Suddenly, voila', there it was.  I had it.  I added a bit of befuddled drink to my thought pattern (not really a stretch for me) and out came this rhythm and voice I liked a lot.

The audition itself was at The Colony Theater in one of the rehearsal rooms upstairs.  I love that theater.  Angie and I had seen Jimmy Barbour do his Christmas Concert (wonderful) there last December and I remember remarking to her about my wanting to work on that stage someday.

There were only three of us waiting to audition.  Myself and two young, leading men types.  They were very nervous and kept pacing about and mouthing the words to their scenes.  I never do that.  I hate looking nervous at auditions.  Even if I am nervous.  I prefer to set the text aside and appear outwardly calm.  There were only three of us because this was agent submission only.  Which meant no cattle calls.  Finally, after a half hour or so I was called in and began reading opposite a young lady sitting in a chair saying all the other parts and lines.  I shut my eyes for a second and visualized this professor I'd had many years ago and started in.  It was a long scene, two full pages, and they didn't interrupt.  About halfway through a part of my brain suddenly realized I was doing a fairly decent impression of Orson Welles.  And what's more, it fit.

Now, I have no idea whatsoever if the guys on the other side of the table liked what I did.  After it was over it was the usual, "Good job, thank you, we'll call you, goodbye."  But that doesn't matter.  I knew I'd nailed it.  After about 10,000 auditions over a lifetime one starts to get a sixth sense about these things.  So unless they've already got someone in mind, which is entirely possible, I expect a call back.

Today I've downloaded a huge chunk of dialogue for an industrial to be shot in Virginia in a few weeks.  I'm not memorizing it (as if I could) but simply familiarizing myself with it.  It's a major chunk of money or otherwise I'd never do it.  Plus a few days in Virginia, travel, lodging, per diem, etc.  That's today at noon in Culver City.

Tomorrow I've got an interesting one, too.  It's a one day shoot of a new music video to be shot in Burbank.  I'm playing a "baker," gruff and tough-looking, who goes about his morning routine in the kitchen and suddenly looks up and sings "in an angelic voice."  Naturally, I'll be lip-syncing.  That's at four-thirty, but it's not far away from our house.

No idea what's in store next week audition-wise but I hope this pace continues.

Angie and I found a drive-in theater about twenty miles from us.  An actual, honest-to-god drive-in theater.  I have a buddy in Colorado and now and then he takes his family to a drive-in there.  I'm green with envy.  So finally I just went online and found one close to me.  Turns out it's really close and one of the only ones still open in Southern California.  So Angie contacted our friends Don and Donna and tomorrow night we're double-dating at the drive-in.  I'm very excited.  I haven't been to a drive-in theatre in thirty years.  I'm thinking about getting in the trunk and sneaking in just for nostalgia's sake.

I'm having a wonderful time these days.  "For all it's drudgery and sham, it's still a beautiful world.  Strive to be happy."  Those are two of the last lines from one of my very favorite pieces of writing called Desiderada.  It IS a beautiful world.  And we can strive to be happy.  Even when our brain is crowded with memories of unhappiness, it's still possible to fit a moment of happiness in there somewhere.  One thing about Angela...it's almost impossible to stay unhappy around her for too long.  She simply won't allow it.  Damn woman.

See you tomorrow.