Stop Giving Me Paying Work. I'm Busy.

Wouldn't it be nice? (And do you now have that Beach Boys song stuck in your head?)(Well, you do now, don't you [And how many of you think instantaneously of the montage in

Roger & Me

when you think of that song?]?) I'd love to say that. More to the point, to be able to make a majority of my decisions based on something other than money. The common cure to capitalism leaving you cold is to make so much money that it becomes "no object." Apart from being common, this may be the only known "cure." Can you "sense" my "scepticism" by my use of

"

quotes

"

?

Sometimes I feel like the title of this 'blog should be "Don't Get Me Wrong": Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm hoping to win the lottery someday. (Without ever playing? Yes. Without ever playing.) I will not kick thirty million dollars out of bed. Mostly because I would be smothered to death by it, and what a way to go. I'd love to be rich and famous. There. I've said it. I've put it out there, universe. Now, according to The Secret(TM), I should be getting smothered to death any day now. (And for those of you who followed the link, I beg of you: Stop playing on the conveyor belt of the universe.)

The issue of income is a constant one, but perhaps not quite so piquant with the odor of fear as when a person of modest income (read: me) finds him or herself in a position of A) Needing to spend a large amount of money, and B) Likely to soon incur large expenses owing to a lot of work coming up. Now, for a lot of people (I nearly typed "most people"--a wicked assumption on my part) a lot of work equates to more money. Not so in the case of struggling . . . well, anybodies. You're struggling. That's the unspoken struggle. You're not getting paid (or not getting paid much) for the thing you spend the most of your time on. Actors, at least, can have a certain limitation on this poverty when they pursue their careers in the most conventional sense. That is, we have to struggle to actually get the work, whereas visual artists or musicians or comedians can pretty much plunge themselves recklessly into a continuing downward spiral of self-nullifying, non-paying struggle. Yet an actor can, if said actor is so inclined, fulfill the same prophecy on his or her self. They just have to self-produce. That's the fast lane to destitution, right there.

It's not as bad as all that, I must admit. I am adopting a cynical tone for the purpose of humor, but (and maybe this is just the weather, and a cold coming on) it is rapidly growing darker than I really feel. It's great to do what you love, in almost any context. It's a trade-off, a blessing and a curse, to make your job your love, and vice versa. It's a little chicken-and-egg, but perhaps that's why so many actors one meets seem to have something to prove.

The other day I plopped down $2,400 in money orders to secure my new apartment. I had thought, due to a misinterpretation of the ad, that it needed only to be $1,600, and so part of my time spent off the day-job clock securing this apartment involved running out to my bank and acquiring another money order for $800 (and acquiring one more service fee of $5, thank you HSBC). Thankfully, I had it in checking. Often times, I don't. My account balances are a dance of heart-warming delicacy, between the needy Checking and the generous--albeit nary well-endowed--Savings. (There's also a much-neglected IRA, but he doesn't feel inferior, just unappreciated.) I got it done, and keys in hand, and then it was off to spend money on van rental and cleaning supplies. And soon I'll be off to Italy, where it is not exactly clear--as the whole venture now must be bank-rolled by the artistic director--whether or not we'll receive any per diem or such. Between gigs this summer, I have probably eight full weeks of day-job money to fund an upcoming 12+ weeks of low- or no-pay acting.

But it is ever thus. Especially in the summer, when everyone gets inspired to work. Inspiration can take one a long way, and not just into credit card debt. I schedule my summer work regardless of budget--to a certain extent--assuming I can maintain enough liquid flow through discipline or fund-juggling to make it through, and then make up the differences and debts in the Fall. I do it this way because one never knows from where one's next job is going to come, because the work can fuel itself longer than I might imagine at first assessment and because it is freeing, which is a quality an actor really can't overrate.

This is my last full week of work at my day job before beginning the sporadic and varied travel involved in my real job. It's important that I work as much as possible in order to squeeze out as much hourly waging as possible, in spite of having a new apartment to adapt and writing homework for

As Far As We Know

and the big three-O coming in for a landing this weekend. I'll do it, all the while contemplating the experience of working with Italian comedians. Of course, the best part about working in Italy is that my cell phone won't work there.

There is absolutely no way that my boss can find me to offer me paying work.

That Is The Subject To Which I Am Referring!

It's a joke. It doesn't translate very well when typed. Friend Adam used to be quite fond of celebrating a victory--his or someone else's--by jumping up and shouting, "

That's

what I'm talking about!" (That's what he used to say. Now it's usually, "What!

What!

" As in, "What do you think of me now?") I got to sharing/mocking Adam's enthusiasm by chiming in with overly formal versions of this phrase, said with the same enthusiasm. Ergo: That is the subject to which I am referring! Other faves include:

• That is the topic of my conversation!

• That is what I am expositing upon!

• That is the approximate meaning of the words I am speaking!

Silliness, but it taps into a very personal aspect of my humor; specifically, the self-deprecating aspect of it. More specifically, mocking my formality, relative intellectualism and very sincere desire to join in the fun of rowdier, more relaxed personalities. It's interesting to me to think that, to some of my friends, I am that type. I do crazy things, like go to Italy and forego income for a month, or stilt walking, or standing on a platform in front of hundreds of people and crying. I have a job at a desk, and yet I insist on risking my health (usually sans health insurance) in order to elicit a few gasps or chuckles from people who probably haven't even paid for the privilege to see me do so. But most people I know, other performers, see me mostly as the conservative type.

This is on my mind today owing mostly to the apartment hunt. (ALL HAIL THE APARTMENT HUNT! ALL SERVE THE APARTMENT HUNT!) It's hard for me to phone strangers, to visit their apartments and stroll through neighborhoods that are A) unfamiliar, and B) usually not terribly similar to where I come from. I have lots of actors friends who

rule

at this sort of thing. Absolutely rule. They walk in a room smiling, shake your hand and make you feel like you're the one they've been looking for all day, yet not in a way that's overwhelming or artificial. Somehow they do it in a way that just makes you want more of their attention.

It seems like a natural extension of their craft. If you think about it, it means every part of their day is in some sense acted. We always talk about wanting to act more, we actors, and complain of not having enough opportunities. These may not be the exact circumstances we crave, these moments of conversational dexterity, but it incorporates a lot of the same skills, and it feeds so nicely into creating more opportunities for the real thing. Practice, praise, good vibes and more work, what's not to love about it?

This, however, is not me. I have my moments, true, when I captivate attention, but never in a sense that puts people at ease. Gets them excited or, at best, laughing suddenly, sure, but never relaxing or enticing them. In fact, my best bet for charming the socks off people is to trip when I come in the room and just keep up that clownish energy throughout. I used to perform in shows this way, always going, always with a forcefully klutzy energy. Hopefully I've learned enough to back off of that now and again on stage. In life, it has become balanced with a slightly more limited resource of energy and an almost complete intolerance for bullshit. Which is to say: I don't have time for this, people. Let's just say what we mean and mean what we say, and if you don't care, you don't care, and that's fine. I frequently don't care.

You've had a hard day, and want to share the details with me? Yeah, I don't care. I just want me coffee, thanks. You feel insulted to be the one who has to proctor the auditions when the show doesn't actually even need replacements right now, and want to at least feel like the actors coming in to audition find you attractive? Yeah, I don't care. I just want a job, or at least to feel like I'm fulfilling my obligation for useless auditions. You really, really enjoy walking around your apartment naked except for combat boots, and what's so wrong with that, and if that isn't cool with your roommate she should just get married already? Yeah, I DON'T CARE. I just want to find an apartment, get to the rehearsals for

As Far As We Know

already and get the hell off this subway car.

Sometimes it seems as though to be a high-functioning member of contemporary society is to be capable of dealing with a lot of bullshit. I am not functioning highly. I am done with this. But can I really be done with this? If it's going to make me unlikable and, worse, threaten my ability to get cast? I'm not talking about being a genuine person here. I want to be that regardless of my attitude toward bullshit. It's like the difference between having a great performance in which you didn't really feel in it, and the great performance in which you felt somehow like you were transcending all the pretense and sleight-of-hand to really embody the story. I want the latter. It's not enough to do good, but to do good right.

That

is the matter under discussion in my 'blog entry!

I Kicked a Boy

And I may do it again!

Many of you who are regular perusers of my 'blogination also occasionally jaunt over to my friends' (yes--I have more than one) journals, just to mix things up a bit, or see if I only hang out with people who use equally pretentious vocabulary. In case you don't generally do this, I refer you to Friend Nat's latest 'blog entry for a little context. Nat, take it away:

Everybody do the Wilhelm Scream

.

Didja read it? Huh? Didja didja didja? 'Cause if you didn't, the rest of this will make less sense to you.

I have to own up to the fact that I get excited when I hang out with people with whom I feel I can really be myself. This excitement, more often than not, comes out in physical expression. (Minds: There's a ladder out of this gutter, I swear.) Now. I'm accustomed these days to channeling that particular enthusiasm into circus work. That's just what I get up to, physically speaking, most often, and it turns out I feel very free amongst circus freaks (by which I mean people freakishly into circus, not so much flipper babies and Siamese twins). It has also become increasingly apparent that I am losing some distinction between

circus folk

and ordinary Joes. Oftentimes in rehearsal for one thing or another, I'll just stop myself from leaping onto someone's back, hearing that voice in my head

just

in the nick of tick that chimes reasonably in to say, "Hey there, Sparky . . . that 90-pound girl might not necessarily be capable of sustaining your weight. She might, in fact, be a little surprised by having her ribcage summarily flattened for no apparent reason. And anyway, you're rehearsing

A Doll's House

. 'Smatter whitchoo?"

Similarly, I really didn't get enough time hanging with males when I was growing up. Somewhere around age eight or nine I kind of gave up on it as a lost cause, not understanding the priorities of sports and derision, and being as I was (am?)--admittedly--an insecure little bugger. I've been making up for lost time in that regard, and that translates to violence. Well, it

does!

I can't help it! All guys do this, to some extent. Here's your movie quote: "Why is it that when men play, they always play at killing each other?"

Fight Club

(not the source of that quote) was actually quite vindicating for me, expressing this need in a very sincere, albeit ultimately sociopathic, manner. Hell, Friend Mark and I spent a couple of seasons prescribing to the

Fight Club

ethos a bit, because we appreciated it so much. Sometimes to this day, one of us will spontaneously punch the other--

really, really hard

--and say matter-of-fact-ly: "Conditioning."

Add to that a little greasing by

America's oldest brewery

, and, uh, well . . .

So the moral of the story is, nobody male should hang out with me without wearing

protective gear

. And if you have to rehearse with me, do some push-ups, for God's sake, because I might decide Masha really ought to carry Dmitri to Moscow herself. And I'm not saying I kick ass here, at all. It's not anything to do with pride in my skills, rather with shame over my irrepressible urge to kill everyone. That's nothing to celebrate.

Still and all. I

did

kick a six-foot-something guy in the head.

I'm just saying.

Don't Lie to Your Mind. It's Unkind.

Yet we all do it. Why? Why should it be so difficult to resist deceiving ourselves? I suppose it has something to do with hope. We need a certain instinct for imaginative creation just to get by, to hypothesize and perceive long-term rewards. This is part of what helped us as a species get to where we are today, the ability to imagine ourselves happier if:

• We kill a mastodon instead of a grass rat;
• We take a little longer to find a sharper rock to skin it with; and
•  
• We avoid killing Ghlugg every time he does that stupid interpretive dance thing.

Sure, it's become more abstract in recent eons. It's not so much about immediate survival, hence the emphasis on the idea of hope. Things are bad now? Don't likey the president? Hatey your job? Have hope, lil' soldier! Hope's good for what ails you.

And relatively speaking (or writing), as long as your hope-o-meter (or fiction-o-gramme, for you

Europeans

) is in fairly regular interaction with the outside world, you get helpful feedback. Helpful in the sense of:

• Hey! You are a little more awesome than that. Don't dress so poorly.
• Hey! That may look an awful lot like a good thing to eat, but those in the know know it will eventually kill you.
• Hey! You can not fly, no matter how much you want to. Step away from the ledge. Step away . . .

Not so much, when it comes to one's internal imagination system.

Hope

has a much more enhanced ability--nigh mutagenic, one might say--to polymorph into utter falsity. Anyone read the report of

Gingrich

confessing his extramarital affair, which occurred during Lewinskygate? Holla back, Newt! Holla back. Did he perceive the moral loophole afforded him by his religious views, or was it a subconscious struggle? We may never know. What we do know is that not one of us is without self-deception on some level, so we may not throw the first stone. Even if he did totally project his own self-hatred on someone with more responsibility. Even if it turned him into the same kind of liar he railed against in those halcyon days. And even if I do say, "Jehovah."

Don't worry guys: I'm only bringing this up because of the title of the

play I'm working on now

. Yep. And yes, sometimes there is a strange, coincidental reflection between the show one is working on and one's own life. But that's just superstition. And yeah, fate does make fools of us all, and the Oracle can not be broken, and all that, but I'm sure my life is going to be just peachy no matter what portents come my way. And--though this may seem something of a non-sequitor--someday I'll be

Batman

. Yep. Uh-

huh

. . .

Three is funny.

There are quite a few axioms in Comedy. (I choose here to make a distinction between "comedy" and "Comedy"; comedy is when you pay $10.75 for the privilege of seeing the other half of the jokes, those

not

exposed in the trailers, and Comedy is the process of making the funny sans benefit of editing and CGI [I briefly considered making the distinction between the terms the way we {read: Americans} do with theater/theatre, but "comedye" looks too much like an emo band name.]) Some axioms that spring readily to mind:

• Three is funny. Generally speaking, there's something about repetition in threes that just works.
• It's all in the timing. Both an axiom and a warning akin to "Starve a cold, feed a fever." Some people think the funny relies on volume and energy, and these so-called people should be dragged into the street and shot.
• Never work with children or animals. They will always upstage you.
• Always work with children and/or animals. They are often unpredictable, hence always funny. This is a producer's rule, and, therefore, inherently flawed.
• Wear a funny hat. Ridiculous? Cheap? What are you, Richelieu?

So we have these "rules," wheresoever they may spring from. Some are fond of saying they definitively come from the vaudeville tradition but, frankly, I think vaudeville is more likely responsible for developing them into one-liner phrasing. Chances are that these ideas stretch about as far back as any oral tradition. My opinion in this is, of course, biased by the fact that I have devoted a certain percentage of my adult (HA!) career (HA-HA!) studying

Commedia dell'arte

and adapting it into a contemporary context. So I have become a little concrete in my views of evolving performance traditions, at least insofar as my belief that everything-steals-from-everything goes.

As a result of my associations, I began to wonder yesterday (yesterday's when I thought in actual language, the idea's been floating about in me for sometime in the form of a mental, "Huh...") if a particular axiom of comedy and a certain law of improvisation weren't existing in conflict to one another.

(Interestingly enough [to me, anyway], yesterday I also impulse-bought a movie,

Imagine Me and You

, that I had impulse-seen about a year ago. One of the cleverer bits of dialogue involves a paradox: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? This leads me to be more willing to accept that the question I'm about to pose is unanswerable, which, in turn, leads me to question how much credence romantic comedies bear in my worldview.)

So here they are:

In improvisation, the players must say "yes" to one another in all things.

and/but

In comedy, contradiction and reversal of expectation are funny.

Sew. Perhaps it isn't an omnipotence paradox, but if you've ever been on stage and trying to make a scene fly, it sure as hell can feel omni-important. I'd be curious to hear anyone's comments on this. I'm aware that it's not directly contradictory. In a given improvisation, you can introduce elements that defy expectation, and your scene partner(s) can support that choice, and/or supplement it with more surprises. The contradiction humor, however, is virtually impossible to incorporate into free-form improv. As an (admittedly stilted) example of what I mean:

"Konstantine, we've got to get to Moscow."

"Da."

"I've got the perfect solution."

"Da?"

"You know how you've always been good at yodelling?"

"Da..."

"And I've always been an excellent knitter?"

"Da..."

"And we are descended from the Czars, and our favorite band is The Exploding Yurts, and we can seduce any woman so long as Saturn is in retrograde?"

"Da, da and da!"

"Then all we have to do is invent a knitted iPod that fits into a woman's hiking pack and comes preloaded with The Exploding Yurts covering 'Styurgenburginfjordinhewt-yay-hee-hoo,' stamp it with the royal seal, and we'll make enough to finally, finally get to Moscow. Whadaya say?"

"Nyet."

"What? For God's sake, why not?"

"You never say 'please' anymore."

I wish I had enough of a grasp of Russian vernacular to translate "whadaya."

Okay, admittedly, the dialogue sucks. But I assure you the structure is classic. And in a free-form improvisation, you can't use it. Why? Because negation of ideas in an improvised scene that has no underlying structure almost guarantees that you'll send the scene into a dizzying downward spiral of bickery and waffling (sounds like excellent UK cuisine, but terrible to happen on stage). Now, sure, if you have pre-agreement that the scene will end in a particular way or something will be accomplished by the end (structured improvisation, see Commedia dell'arte) you can certainly bicker, because your characters are nice and established, and the goal is imminent and agreed. Creating all on the fly, however, is another matter.

Normally, what happens in this scenario is the "yes" law trumps the "contradiction" axiom. The object continues to exist. And that's fine. But I find it fascinating that rules of comedy and rules of improvisation may be in conflict. In this sense, we prioritize of necessity the scene above the laugh. That's as well as may be (theatre teachers from my past are bristling with potential indignation) but are we, in some cases, gypping our audiences? Is there one among us who is not guilty of breaking that cardinal rule once (or twice) because s/he could practically precognate the uproariousness of their audience?

Another rule of comedy is:

• Defy all rules.

That one rather speaks for itself.