Perfect

Perfect
7-25-95


I can't believe you touched me.

I just can't believe it.


What would I do, were I to
Believe that it really happened?

Change my view?

Become more accomodating of loss
Than I already am?


No.

No.


You've succeeded in making me feel things
I've never felt before, though I've
Laughed my belly sore,
Loved my dick off, and cried my eyes out
Too many times to count.

I'm sure you have too.....
Except for the dick part.


I can't even begin to express how I feel.

Unless, of course, you'd like me to try.

Kindly Collect Your Belongings

She showed you her act.

And you bought it.

But when the show was over, you wouldn't go home.

You just sat there in that dark theater, staring at an empty stage.



The act was over.

But witnessing the act had made you feel connected.

Such was your need, you confused the act for something personal.

As if you were in the play yourself.



And now you've been running around this big empty playhouse for years,

wishing the show could somehow start up again.

You've embarrassed yourself, checking all the locks and light switches, over and over.



But the show moved on to a new town long ago.

On to captivate new audiences.

You can be sure there will be new drama-starved neophytes dazzled.

New hearts engendered.



But all of that has nothing at all to do with you.

It was a travelling show that you mistook for reality.



Now, please collect your things and kindly leave the theater.


.

Dead City -- Post Mortum and Autopsy

My inaugural stint with the theatre group that produced Dead City ended last Saturday, the nineteenth of April. After just one week, the experience is already beginning to mellow into a rosy memory, full of forgiveness and forgetting. But before I allow time to melt the hard edges away forever, I want to say a few things while I still give a damn.

As I told the 1.3 cast members that would actually engage in remotely honest conversation with me, my rehearsal and performance experience reminded me of a line from the Steely Dan song, Reelin' In The Years: "The things that passed for knowledge, I can't understand."

Whether it was the difference in our ages, some X/Y-Gen rift, or some unidentifiable mental blinders I wore, this show's director and I were on different planets. I ultimately blame neither of us, of course. But at the time, I just couldn't understand his methods. And he wasn't about to explain...anything.

Nothing was discussed, unless it was discussed behind closed doors and away from the prying ears of those who needed it most. Actors performances were not discussed with the very actors acting them; each of us was left to direct his or her own self with no discussion or analysis, no tweaking or polishing. Costumes and props were not openly discussed until about four days before the show opened. Imagine that: four days before the show was to open, someone decided that maybe we should go to the effort of actually dressing ourselves in something and giving ourselves some crap to carry around. These things obviously must have been talked about earlier, but apparently only to a cadre of three or four pairs of deserving ears.

I found myself wondering whose model of theatre production this troupe based its operations upon. I'd never seen things done this way. And here I had thought that a theatre company that seemed so big for its britches must have some justification for conducting itself in this manner.

There's a concept referred to as 'actor intensive' theatre. There's another concept called 'minimalism'. These two concepts are thought to work in harmony with one another when the budget allows no sets, but when the writing and the direction and the performances are so good that the show doesn't even need a set. (%&!$@&#*!) Instead, for me, the show felt unexamined.

I'm very grateful for the chance to have been on stage, doing a bit of what I love to do, and getting to work with some extremely talented actors.

This show saved my life in ways. Back when I was first asked if I wanted to do it, I'd been sick with something intestinal for the previous couple of months, and I'd experienced a lot of emotional and physical ups and downs in that time. When the opportunity for the show came along, it created a much needed immediate purpose, something tangible to focus upon, a place I could feel needed. Very few of those mental visions of purpose and involvement actually evolved, but at least I finished the project intact. I've come out on the other side, still breathing, and with no more friends or enemies than I had on the way in. Just different ones.

There's so much more I could say about my Dead City experience, and perhaps I've said too much. I've intentionally left a lot out of this story so as not to seem as though I'm attacking anyone. In fact, as I understand it, the only individual who is responsible for the success or failure of a play is its director. Everyone else plays along with the laws set down by that entity. And we all did...to the letter, and then some.

Now that it's over and we all move forward, I'm left with the feeling that we all worked so hard at something we all must have cared about at the outset, but which got away from us somewhere along the way. I could chart those ways one by one and detail by detail, since I was there watching them happen.

I'm happy just to be alive. So being asked to be in the best play someone had read in five years (our director said that to me) presented an amazing challenge. Getting to 'wake-up' onstage next to the beautiful and talented twenty-nine year old actress playing the lead role and getting to stare into her eyes six inches away for a few fleeting moments , as well as my seven-minute monologue that closed the show every night...those two things...I'll cherish those.

Ever since the night we all parted ways for the final time, I haven't heard a peep from anyone involved in the show. I'm not pretending to be surprised by that. If I lived in NY or LA I wouldn't hear a peep out of anyone either. But, it feels funny just the same: actors act for each other even when they're off-stage, just like everybody else.

And no discussion. There will be no discussion about how this production went down. No, no. Shove this show and its memories into a box and leave it on the sidewalk for the homeless guy.

Translation: I'm ready to talk about it any time you are.


Goodbye, Sheila Callaghan's Dead City.

Acting Can Be A Lonely Job

Especially when you're not being paid for it. And, it's true, money can't buy friendship, or love, but at least when you're paid for it you can walk away and know you're taking something tangible home with you.

Wait...what?...that's true of every human endeavor? Oh, pishsaw!

I suppose most of my fellow thespians have 'a life' to go home to, (well, yippee) and I suppose I'm pretty damned sure I don't, judging from the loneliness I feel after the rehearsal is over.

It's a loneliness born from not being able to discuss the deeper details and ramifications of what the play is about and why we're breaking our asses to bother with it in the first place.

A good while ago I began to notice how strange it is that the characters in whatever show we're doing know each other infinitely better than the actors in the production ever will.

Acting does seem to be a quite unnatural art form; pretending you're someone else for and hour and a damn half. God, what was I thinking?

I'm rather convinced it's a personal problem of my own. If or when I actually have a significant other to come home to to bitch about rehearsal, I'm sure everything will be fine. Or not.

In the final analysis it's me I come home to, I mean in'nit? And that's mostly just fine, since that's the human condition. Actually, the whole animal kingdom condition, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes...even as I write, animals of every stripe are steadfastly or otherwise coping and dealing with timeless hierarchical red tape...and loneliness...and much worse.

Gosh...suddenly what's happening in my own tiny world is rendered ridiculously insignificant, faced with the larger universe unfolding all around me.


Never mind.

.

Small Town Friday Night

I'm in rehearsals for a play right now. It's called Dead City. It was written by a thirty-three year old playwright named Sheila Callaghan. She's a New Yorker and this play is about New York. That's her in the cemetery picture.

More to the point, it's the portrayal of a 'banal' day in the life of a fictional woman named Samantha Blossom, based ever so cannily on a fictional character named Leopold Bloom from another work of fiction called Ulysses by a guy named James Joyce, who, in about 1918, based his own adaptation on the original story of Ulysses by Homer. Yeah, that Homer...the The Iliad guy.

So, like...hilarity ensues, n'stuff.

Dead City was first produced in New York in 2006, then in Chicago, also in 2006.

I better be good, that's all I know. I better not be a faker. I better not be phonin' it in. I better be rested and ready and whatever it takes to transport a viewer somewhere she or he couldn't be if they stayed home and sat on their own couch contemplating their own mortality instead of the fictional mortality I go out of my way for five nights a week until opening and then about three times a week.

Like I care. I do care, but...like I can afford to care. Which, as it so happens, I can.

"But that's not what I wanted to tell you, what I wanted to tell you is..."

About four hours ago I went to see The Bluesville Drifters at The Thirsty Ear on West Third Avenue in the Grandview part of Columbus Ohio.

Tim Browning, the lead singer and fellow Dead City cast member, invited our cast a few nights ago; I was the only one who showed-up. I was hoping a few more of us would, but no.

Tim is an honest actor with whom it is simply a pleasure to work.

I could go on, so I won't, except to say:

Google "The rest is silence."

The Us We Used To Know

I used to draw a lot. Pencil, pen, ink, that sort of thing. Of course, I was in school then and they made me draw. But I wanted to do it and I was good at it. These days I feel as though there's no time for drawing. But I know that's not true; it's more the case that I should start drawing again and, this time, not stop.

When I was younger I took my 'artistic' abilities for granted. I used to think that drawing was something I could do later in life when other options were no longer available to me. Well, that time has more than arrived. Life seems to speed-up when you're at the late end of it looking back. Most of those tomorrows are yesterdays now, and I have to remind myself that if I'm ever going to get around to painting and drawing anything, the time is now.

When we're young, life is about all the things we're going to do. When we're older, it tends to be about all the things we never got around to doing. And that's most of the things on the list, since life demands that we carve that list down to a managable few. And that's if we're lucky. If we're not lucky, life just pretty much cancels out anything we originally had in mind and replaces it with a bunch of things we never counted on in the first place.

First Entry...Like, Ever.

Golly. Here I am. It's almost 3:am here in Columbus, Ohio. More than before, that means it's almost time to read myself to sleep. Or review and recite the lines I'm still learning for a play that opens on April 10th.

Blog or not, this entry is gonna be short. Wednesday (today) I take ye old hour-and-a-half long bus trip to Gahanna, then sit in a MacDonalds for another 40 minutes or so, waiting for rehearsal at 7:30pm. I'm not only used to it now, I've actually structured the time somewhat, and grown somewhat accustomed to the drill. Still, it's a lot of time to do not much but read and drink coffee.

I'm calling this blog 'Not Entirely There' because I'm pretty sure I'm not quite really entirely here anymore. I remember being entirely here in my pre-thirties. Now...not so much. I guess (and have been told) the post-fifties are a time of adjusting to not being entirely here and learning to enjoy it. Paul Simon had it right in his lyrics, "the nearer your destination, the more you're slip-sliding away."

But fret not, fellow soon-to-be not entirely here either-ers! All is well. As far as I know.


And what do I know?


g'night