Getting On With It

I was talking to my therapist last week about acting, which I sort of do, and he and I were exploring the possibility of it one day (far, far away) becoming more than just an amateur, "sometimes" pursuit, and making it a professional, bread-and-butter pursuit, since it's really the only thing I'm reasonably sure I do well, and it's definitely the only thing for which I'm qualified.

"How do you reconcile, though, what I think is your core belief about acting," he asked me, astutely crossing his legs and cocking his head slightly in the manner of an inquisitive Border Collie, "that it's vainglorious and indulgent?"

"Well," I said, "it is.  But, I suppose, if one is going to make the decision to pursue it professionally, you kind of have to just get over that and get on with it."

I feel that way about writing, too.  It can be purported to be done for the writer's own demon-wrestling purposes, but I think we all know I'm after the comments.

(Gimme.)

While the twins are napping, there are other things I could be doing.  I could be dusting the... thing in the dining room.  I could do dishes, wash bottles, clean the high chair trays, prepare lunch, organize... things.  But here I am, at the computer, writing.  Writing for the first time since we put our sad old dog to sleep.  That pain and that loss has subsided some over the weeks-- has it been months?  I don't even know.  But, after I'd dressed the babies this morning, and we were playing around with toys on the bed, as I was tickling my daughter's foot, I caught myself thinking about Finley.  My wife gets triggered when she sees a dog, who maybe looks like him, or maybe doesn't, around the neighborhood, or when she sees a "Science Diet" commercial on TV.  That stuff doesn't strike me in quite the same way.  Finley comes to me at random, quiet moments, times where his rough panting would have been the background noise, times where I wish that the babies, who are far more interactive, could have spent more time with him.

There's a lot of things I wish for, and most of those things center around time, and wishing I had more of it.  More time to spend with my wife and children.  More time away from work.  More time for writing.  I've been working every other weekend, that's Saturday and Sunday from 7am-3pm, friends, for more than two years now, and I'm so tired of having my weekend family time halved like a grapefruit.  I'm so sick of cramming things into my weekends "off" (you don't really have time "off" anymore when you have children, for those of you who don't and consequently don't know) and I'm fed up with disappointing my wife, who, good fortune be praised, actually likes it when I'm home.

That fact is part of what's stopped me, incidentally, from writing more-- either on this blog or as part of something else.  When I'm home, and the babies have gone to bed at 7:00 and I know we have to be in bed by 10ish or I'll be a drooling idiot at work the next day, and there are lunches and bottles and wash to prepare for the next day, how can I reasonably justify excusing myself from my love's presence while I shutter myself away in the office for an hour clacking away at the keyboard?  To be honest, I know that, if she really believed it was important to me, she wouldn't mind, but I can't justify it to myself.  I guess it's too vainglorious and indulgent after all.  I even feel guilty doing it while the babies are napping and there's no dog to walk anymore.  If I close my eyes for a moment, though, I can visualize all the dishes and bottles in the sink, and they're calling to me.

The babies are probably going to wake up soon.  There's so much in my head that I want to talk about-- no, write about.  I hate talking.  My voice is flat and heady and boring, and my words come out in a jumble of sleep-deprived fits and starts and half-cocked ideas and trailing off sentiments.  I want to write about politics (sort of) and George Takei Facebook bullshit and memories and dreams and my family but I don't really think I know them anymore so what would I say anyway and the mess in the basement and the crawling and the teething and the changing and the graying and the rolling and the tolling of the bells bells bells and I want to connect-- with you, I suppose-- and that's what we all want, isn't it?  Your time, your thoughts, your attention.  If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:

I am the very model of a modern major-general.

I am the monarch of the sea.

I have a song to sing, O!

I am a writer, I suppose.  One who writes.  I string words and thoughts and phrases and ideas together and I give you paragraphs and periods and you make of it what you will, and I like that.  I think I do.  I really think I like that.  If you give me two numbers and ask me to put them together, I will give you a fucking mess in return.  But words I can cope with.  I'll take words for eight hundred, Alex.

No, a thousand.

Give me a thousand: I have twins to feed.  

What a Trip (A Review: Sort Of)

Film classifications/genres kind of get on my nerves.

(If you just asked yourself the question, "But, what doesn't?" then I love you.)

Oftentimes, I'll see a comedy and come away sad, and will know for sure that I just watched a great comedy. It's kind of just how I roll. If a comedy made me laugh and nothing else, I'm pretty sure it can be stated that it was basically a mediocre event-- like "Hear No Evil, See No Evil" or "Fletch". Not that those movies are really designed to get you to do anything other than laugh and possibly pee on yourself (it's been a while for me) but I tend to think the measure of a particularly great comedy is whether or not it makes me sad.

Michael Winterbottom's "The Trip", starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, was a film that made me sad, but I'm not sure that it was a particularly great comedy. The synopses that I read of the film piqued my interest: two eccentric English comedians tooling around in a Range Rover doing impressions and eating expensive food seemed right up my alley, but you can never really go by those synopses. Almost without exception, they refer to Brydon's character as "annoying" or "irritating" or, to really throw it out there, "the source of eternal aggravation". After seeing the film, that seems funny to me, because Coogan's character, at least to me, was just as annoying and obnoxious, if not more so, because he was all of that combined with an acidic narcissim, lack of charity, and a voracious, predatory lust for anything with a pair of tits.

The film struck a chord with me because it reminded me of a friendship that I have which seems to hang by a tenuous thread-- it's an old friendship, formed when I was ten and when my friend was thirteen. Fortunately, I was precocious enough back then to pass for appropriate company for him and the age gap closed somewhat as we both entered college and stayed in touch. Instead of both being English, as are Brydon and Coogan, we were (and still are) Jewish and American but desperately wanted to be (and still want to be) English, and we gave lusty voice to this fetish by collaborating on Monty Python-style sketches in our teenage years and cajoling my father into filming them.

He became a professional actor, an extraordinarily talented musician, and has enjoyed the company of many an attractive, lithe and sensual young female, and I didn't.

I got married and bought a house and have stable employment and am starting a family. And he didn't.

And to say that there isn't any jealousy that exists on both sides of our relationship would be patently unfair. A few years ago, in a spurt of creativity and confidence, I helped him develop a one-man show that has now been produced in several different venues in New York City, and I have had the privilege of watching my friend perform the piece excellently at two different theatres. And I'm proud of the work I put into the piece as far as editing and suggesting material, but mostly in providing emotional support during the creative process. Do I sometimes wish it was me up there, embodying characters and receiving adulation?

Yes. I do.

Back in 2003, he asked me to run away with him. He tried to seduce me, you see. He asked me to take his hand and run away with him to New York City. At this time in my life, we were spending more time together, huddled in his tiny $400-a-month South Philly apartment, replete with the requisite pizza boxes strewn around on the floor, doing together what we did best: writing. He asked me to come to New York City with him and develop a stage show-- a comedy act-- a sketch show. A who-knows-what. But, at this time, a girl was working on seducing me, too-- and we all know how that goes. She became Mrs. Apron, and my friend went to New York by himself, and he flowered. And maybe I say it to make myself feel better about the choice I made, but part of me thinks that, were I shackled to his shin, the poor bastard might have wilted.

And I might have, too.

Watching the interplay between Coogan and Brydon, watching the tension simmering underneath as they try to out-do each other's Michael Caine impression was very hard to watch for me. Because it made me think about my friend, and my relationship with him, and how it's changed and stopped and started over the years-- over twenty-one years... Jesus Christ-- that is hard to write out like that.

I love him. I do. And love is not easy to bear, just like a good film is not easy to watch. See, it was a good film-- but I'm not sure if it was a great film. It did make me sad, though-- but I think that had more to do with my own baggage than with the film's technical and artistic aspects. We all lug tons of baggage into a movie theatre with us. There really should be overhead compartments for all that stuff.

My Memesonic Apron

In addition to working at a psychiatric hospital, I also teach theatre to impressionable youngsters.

(Of course I do.)

Mostly, I do private audition coaching and monologue work, on an individual basis which, I guess, the word "private" implies. Just me and the student, one-on-one, sparring intellectually, dodging each other's witticisms and engaging in the kind of reparte that, I suppose, college professors find stimulating during office hours.

Occasionally, we also do scenework.

I'm fortunate enough, pretty much, to have my pick of the litter. A student gets recommended to me, or referred to me, or suggested to me, and I get to give thumbs up or thumbs down whether I want to work with him or her. For the past year, I've been working one-on-one with a fine, upstanding young man whom I will call Jack, because that's not his name. Jack is a rabbi's son, comes from a pretty well-to-do family, and travels quite a distance for our lessons, which is kind of flattering. I have little doubt that there are perfectly suitable and competent acting instructors closer to his front door, some of whom would probably be willing to travel to his front door. But I'm not. I make him schlep out to see me, and, for the past year, he has done just that.

Apparently, it's paid off. Last month, he applied to and auditioned for, and just got accepted to my alma mater. And I didn't even have to grease a single wheel.

Jack works hard, and he works on hard material. I throw challenging playwrights his way-- Sam Shepherd, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Israel Horovitz, just to name a few. He doesn't blink, he doesn't say "I can't," and he never comes to class unprepared. He knows I would kill him.

We have a great relationship. I'm casual in demeanor with him, loose with my language, but, when it's time to work, it's time to work-- I'm supportive and encouraging, but I'm also firm, demanding, and, when I spy bullshit, I call him out on it. If he's mugging or indicating or phoning it in, it does not continue. He likes to be called out. "Nobody's ever done that to me before," he says. Well, welcome to Hell, son.

Sometimes, the hour we have together stretches into an hour and fifteen minutes, or an hour and a half. We philosophize, we story-tell, we talk shop, but also we talk life. I remember one conversation recently we had about television. I was in the midst of enjoying a significant amount of "The Carol Burnett Show" sketches on YouTube, and I asked Jack,

"As someone who has grown up completely saturated by and with reality television, can you tell me honestly, from your perspective, why television is all shit nowadays?"

He smiled at me.

"Uh-oh, I just said something cantankerous about television, and I also just used the words 'nowadays' and 'cantankerous.' Did I just age in your eyes by forty-five years?"

Jack laughed.

"Yeah, you did. You talk like my Zayda." Then, like in our lessons, he got serious. I could tell it was coming by the way he furrowed his brow. "Look, what is reality TV? Shows like 'Teen Mom' and 'Jersey Shore'? They're people behaving badly-- like idiots. Assholes. And what is everybody obsessed with? The latest YouTube clip of some asshole doing something idiotic."

"Right, or it's a cat belching the French alphabet," I chimed in, "or a baby creating a telescope out of a paper towel roll."

"Yeah," Jack said, "and that's all bullshit, and I think the television producers and execs see us going ape over this dumb, mindless crap and they say, 'That's it-- that's what they want to see!'"

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of his day off watching Tim Conway breaking up the late Harvey Korman with just a knowing, sideways glance before an expertly-placed bit of improv, this precient statement by my pupil struck a chord in me.

"It's as if there's nothing well-crafted anymore, like, the market for that has simply dried up," I complained, as an elderly man might when confronted by a poorly-constructed corned beef sandwich at a faux-deli.

"Right, that's because there's nothing well-crafted online either. It's all drug-addicted retards doing crappy animation in their basements being funny or 'Shit My Dad Says' or blogs that are all just pics and videos or other shitty user-generated content, like, I don't know if you know what a 'meme' is--"

I stared at him.

"I want to murder you right now," I said. He cracked up.

"Okay," he said, "sorry, but, like Double Rainbow guy-- like, that's just total bullshit and, in two weeks, nobody's going to give a shit about that,"

"Right, because this culture is so vapid and ridiculous that a video of a 4-year-old ballerina dancing with a terrier is going to take the country by storm."

"Right," Jack agreed, "we're all about the next meme. Who can share what with whom first. That's what we're all about."

And that talented sonofabitch is right. And that gave me pause. What also gave me pause was that an eighteen-year-old high school senior suddenly suspected that I might be too old, no, perhaps too out-of-touch to know what a "meme" was.

Though he sometimes places his foot strategically inside his mouth when he's in my company, he is a smart kid. But I'm sure my alma mater will fix that.