A lack of understanding
I have always thought that there must be some way to quantify, to study and catalog the ebbs and flows of the employment opportunities for the workaday actor. As yet I have not made any kind of a dent in that problem. I don’t understand why I can work on such good projects with such success and then with no warning and sans rhyme or reason go as much as a year without any kind of work. It’s the bane of the actors existence and yet I refuse to simply accept it. When I was single and without responsibilities it didn’t matter much. Now, with a family and a mortgage and creditors, every fruitless audition is a tragedy, a heartbreak and an omen.
I don’t want to know
As artists we are obliged to approach every character with fresh eyes and an open mind. Not an easy thing to do. To be objective requires either years of experience or no experience at all, which begins to explain the delight we take in “old pros” and unschooled “natural talents”. These are the actors who take nothing for granted and who are least likely to fall into the traps of the trite and cliche’. If you find you “just know” who this character is after one reading of the script then you are in danger of undercutting the whole process and missing opportunities to find the bigger, deeper and more satisfying truths of the character. The process of discovering a character is never-ending. It continues througout the rehearsal, it continues right through the performance schedule, or the filming. It even carries on somewhere in your mind as you live your life and begin to find out more things about yourself and about the characters you have portrayed. As soon as you start “knowing” you stop learning. Any good scientist will tell you that it is impossible to truly “know” anything. This is especially true for artists and thier work. The art is in the struggle to find out.
To Begin Again
Now is the time to begin again, to begin again. There was a movie out of spain some years ago called “A Volver y Empasar” To begin again. It was about an old man who returns to the place of his birth and begins to attempt to set right all the things he screwed up in his wasted youth. I sometimes think that would be a worthy project. I could go home and be better to my Mom, more loving to my nieces, more attentive to my sister. I could marry the neighborhood girl who I was sweet on in High School. I could actually try to do well in school and really apply myself. I could stay home weekends and mow the lawn and drive my mother to church and sit with her and sing hymns in spanish. I could find that kid who used to bully me and kick his ass. Back home in San Jose I could be exactly who I was meant to be and end this lifelong struggle to “re-invent myself”. I could go to work for my Uncle George doing cement finishing, or with my Uncle Dave hanging drywall. I could get a little house on the east side and drive a Chevy and my high school sweetheart and I would have kids and go to PTA meetings and now and then treat ourselves to a Giants game. In summers we would take the boat to the reservoir and waterski and swim. I would drink Coors from frosty cans and my wife would wear a big straw hat and watch the kids. From time to time she would beckon them to her and from a straw bag produce a tube of sunblock which she would slather on their brown shoulders. I would watch this from the vantage of my captains chair, my bald head wrapped in a paisley bandanna, and there would be no complaint, no nagging desire. No devils prodding me to want more, to see more, to achieve more, more, more. I would be content. The demons and devils would be safe in the nether regions and I would be safe in an anonymous middle class existence until the end of my days. Hey, A guy can fantasize from time to time can’t he?
Today I begin rehearsal for a play. “Skylight”, by David Hare. It’s my first attempt at a Hare play and my first time on stage in several years. This is good, a little scary but good. Ironically it is the story of a man and woman who attempt to “begin again” a love affair that was doomed from it’s very start. I guess that explains my state of mind as I prepare for rehearsal.
wish me luck.
memories
Just when you think the current is running your way the tide turns. I was all psyched to do this play next month and now the opening has been pushed to September. It seems that the production was out in front of the practical matters and the practical matters couldn’t catch up. Shucks! It’s embarrassing to go public with a project only to have the thing turn to feces.
Another day in SoCal, another appointment to make, another mystery to solve without any clues….hmmmm I think I stole that line from Bob Seger. Damn…now I can’t even come up with something original for my blog.
Do you ever wonder at the faith we all put in tomorrow? Does it shock and amaze you when tomorrow comes and your faith is shattered…or affirmed? I suppose I’m talking about optimism and pessimism. When tomorrow comes do you still have faith?
This is just rambling, but I feel obliged to put down something. I’m trying to write every day.
And Yoda says,” do or do not, there is no try”. I’m doing now, I’m writing now. There is no try.
A friend of mine put out a call for memories. I deal in memories; they are my stock and trade. Some are sweet, some are wormwood. Lately I’ve been remembering my girlfriend Megan, who I lived with in New York when I was a starving young actor trying to get a break. I had a lot more hair, a lot more potential and a lot less common sense. I was a terrible boyfriend to that girl and we both knew it. She should have dumped me long before I walked out on her in the completely asinine way that I did. But she was sweet and loving all in all just a better person than me. It still hurts to remember how much I hurt her.
Many years after I left Megan I ran into her on the street. By that time I had married and my son Alex had been born. It was a shocking moment for both of us but we weathered it. We smiled and embraced and made small talk. I couldn’t hear her over the pounding of my heart but she was smiling and didn’t seem bitter toward me. As we talked we told each other or our respective marriages. Her husband was named Michael, “…what a coincidence, Michael is English for Miguel…” and while it was interesting it didn’t impress me as a huge thing that her husband had the English version of my name. She then told me that she had a one year old boy and that he was quite a handful. I told her about my toddler. She asked my boy’s name and I when I told her she gasped and her eyes went wide. It turns out her baby was named Alex as well. We fell silent. I could hear our respective minds trying to fathom that very crazy and frightening twist. The next words out of my mouth were, “Oh well…” and we began the usual song and dance about “we should get together”…blah, blah, blah….That was 17 years ago. We haven’t spoken since.
“Oceania, has always been at war with Iraq”
In the book 1984 George Orwell tells us of a distopian society in which no one is safe from the intrusive surveillance tactics of Big Brother and the Ministry of Love. In this society, called Oceania, the language they spoke was being systematically stripped down to fewer and fewer words. One supposes that with fewer words it is harder to express ideas and ideas are very dangerous in a society where “thought crime” the crime of thinking “un” thoughts about life, the government, or Big Brother himself, is punishable by harsh imprisonment, even death or “evaporation” as it is called. Winston, the hero of the story, is indoctrinated in the ways of “double-think”, a state of consciousness where true is false, false is true and two plus two equals 5 or 4 depending on what you are expected to believe ay any given moment. This all came to mind with the latest news of NSA data-mining of the phone records of US citizens and a quote from our president:
“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” — George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States
Be afraid people, be very afraid.
Of Squirrels and the Inevitable
I’m getting old, I’m old, I am old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.
I’m desperate. I’m fighting for my life, or what’s left of it.
I was sitting at this very seat one morning a couple of years ago and I suddenly heard a ruckus in the back yard; barking and growling and this high pitched screaming. It was a few seconds before I realized that the dogs had caught an animal and were killing it. I went into the backyard and saw the young strong dog Lucky with something brown locked in his jaws. He was shaking it wildly and the screaming that I heard was coming from that brown thing. Its screams were warbling in rhythm with Lucky’s shaking. I rushed into the yard and planted a kick on Lucky’s hind quarters that caused him to yelp and drop his quarry, a fat furry squirrel, and then square off to face me, he was excited, and there was blood on his teeth. He was ready to take me on and when I shouted at him to get the hell away, he must of come to his senses because he tucked his tail and ran to the alley behind the house. As he ran I turned and caught the last few moments of the squirrel’s life. He was broken and bleeding yet with his two front paws he was pulling himself toward a nearby tree in hopes of making it to safety. His head was lolling as he shifted his weight from left to right inching toward the tree. Suddenly he fell over onto his right side and I saw his body relax. The struggle was over. I sat down next to the dead squirrel and with no warning I began to tear up and then to flat out cry, in huge heaving sobs. I was devastated that this little animal was killed and that with his last strength he tried to survive. If he was capable of thought then his final thoughts were of being in the tree far above the barking and the teeth below. He wanted to live and he didn’t quite make it. I wept because I had again borne witness to that to that thing that long ago had been an abstract idea. I saw a fellow creature overtaken by Death. I saw it make a final dash and sure as shit I saw Death catch up to him and stop him cold. It shook me to the soles of my feet. That squirrel was me. It was Dave Hansen at the Marine Barracks in Beirut. It was Jason Dahl getting his throat cut in the cockpit of United 93. Death is going to happen to me, to the dogs, my wife, my son. We will all have a turn at trying to outrun Death and we will all be run down and left lying still and empty. As I mourned that present death and the deaths to come I saw Lucky peeking round the corner at me. I shooed him away with a look and turned back to my fallen friend. I remembered a play called “Tiger at the Gates”. There is a line in the scene when Hector has returned, from yet another campaign, to his wife Andromache. He talks about the last man that he killed in the last battle and how even though he had dispatched many enemies in his time as a warrior, this last time was different because when he knelt to deal the killing blow he saw that he was kneeling on a mirror. The man he was killing was himself.
Life the Universe and….oh hell….
The hardest thing about writing is sitting down in front of an empty screen knowing that you must fill it up with words. Not only that but the words must make some sort of sense, they must have cohesion, and they must tell a story and most of all they have to be spelled correctly. Of course folks nowadays care not of fig for good spelling and grammar. They want the input, they want the basic idea, the GIST and they want it right now….more on this later.
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