I was hanging around a group of actors the other day (an often unfortunate byproduct of being a theater person) and I overheard conversations about what people were doing with their weekend. Suffice it to say, not a one of them was going to see live theater.

This coming weekend is a bit of a stretch for us. Friday we’re going to see “Days of Wine and Roses” directed by a good freind. (I apologize for the royal “we”, Jordana and I will be doing all this stuff together. There tends to be two plurals in my life, me and Jordi and Gideon. This is just me and Jordi). Then on Saturday we are watching modern dance in Brooklyn in the afternoon and seeing week 3 of the Estrogenius Festival at night.

Our weekends aren’t always like this, but we do try to at least support theater made by our friends. If they bother to make shows, we’ll go see them.

And I guess that’s my question, what I really want to ask with this blog. What are you doing? It’s a huge question, because you kind of have to boil it down before you get to the meat of the thing. Also, it’s more than the one question. What are you doing, and then, why?

If you say, “I work as a receptionist”, that’s obviously not what you’re doing, you’re making money for some other reason. If that reason is, “I have kids and a wife or husband and I love them,” then, awesome. You’re done.

But if you answer “I’m an actor” then I have to ask “why’? If you say, “because I love the theater, I love to act, I am an artist and this is how I communicate” then great. You’re done.

However, if

1. You don’t go see any other live theater, ever, unless you are hassled into going.

2. You are always trying to figure out how to turn the work you are doing now into a more commercial venture.

3. You are impressed as much or more by celebrity than you are by ability.

4. You hate rehearsal, and complain about the amount of time you have to spend making a show.

5. You complain about the space in which you are allowed to rehearse and/or perform.

6. You want to die when you tell a joke onstage and no-one laughs or you get done with a play and everyone describes it as “interesting”.

7. You spend more time trying to get an agent than you do onstage or in class.

8. You are more excited about the prospect of getting a national Coke commercial than you are about working on a large role in a musty theater by an unknown but incredibly talented playwright.

9. You joined any of the unions the first chance you got…

Okay, okay, I’m ranting. But seriously, if that describes you, then don’t tell me you love acting. You want to be famous, and that’s fine, but there is a way of going about it.

I’m sure my dad always wanted to be famous. But he wanted to be a conductor even more than that. He took a job with the Cedar Rapids Symphony and worked with them for seven years, becoming a better and better conductor.

And y’know, he was never famous, never more so than locally. But he’s a goddam great conductor. When he gets shoved up on the podium, which he has from time to time, in front of the world’s best orchestras, he knows his shit.

And that’s because there is always, and has always been, music in his house. He loves music. He’ll be in the middle of something and music will be chugging away in the background and he’ll stop and point at the speakers, frozen, with a big smile on his face. Three minutes will pass and you listen to what he’s hearing and you recognize that on top of being an artist, he’s a fan.

So, don’t tell me there’s no good theater going on. Don’t tell me there’s too much of it, there’s no way of knowing what to see. Go to

theatermania.com

smarttix.com

and start looking through the lists. Read the synopsis. Find shows that are five dollars. You’re never going to be famous, nothing you do will ever make a difference, your agent is never going to get you that national spot. *All* of our lives are interconnected, we are *all* working for five dollars a person, and all that can be counted, all that can be judged, is the exchange of ideas, the stories we tell.

So, for god’s sake, go see a damn play.

http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/

I stumbled on to this once when Kent posted something from his blog. You should go and check it out, this is a blog kept by someone who lives in Iraq and speaks our language.

That is to say, knows how to write. Everyone speaks English.

I have two blogs I want to write, and I keep waffling on which to write first. I think I’m going to write the harder one.

Assessing information free from opinion is impossible. The whole idea that there is “information” is pretty screwy. The uncertainty principle is the only definite in this world, viewing information changes it.

Divorce brings this home, boy-o. If you think there is objective truth, try dismantling a marriage, even amicably. My parents have a mythology about one another that is thick as a rump roast, and my ex-wife and I have mythologies that are, y’know, flank steak thick, but there nevertheless.

I find myself having to assess information as if it were opinion in everything. Girls think I’m handsome, girls think I’m not handsome, for some reason they didn’t all get together and agree one way or the other. About half the people who saw Dirty Juanita loved it, about 95% of the people who saw Lucretia Jones loved it, but I love them both.

It’s important, I think, to continue to keep people close to you who seem to be working with a different set of facts. It’s important because it keeps you intellectually alert. I am fascinated by people who are in favor of the war in Iraq, I genuinely want to know why. When people hate the art I create, I am genuinely fascinated by why. Everything I do, I start out thinking it is a good idea, I want to have knowledge as broad as possible so I can make better decisions in the future.

At a certain point, though, these people become more work than they are worth. Especially if they make decisions before there are facts. Mac, who has twice been featured in festivals honoring women in the arts, was told for years that he was misogynist.

It is sort of sad when you realize that you just can’t listen to a person or a set of people. You strive and strive to maintain an open mind, but you can’t stay open to gaslighting. It isn’t necessarily that you are throwing pearls before swine, or anything that dramatic, but if you are listening to someone’s opinion of your art or your life, and they actually dislike you arbitrarily, then you have to decide it means nothing to you.

**********

My first year at Carolina, I was sitting in a room talking with Mac and about ten of our friends. Everyone was talking about what a snob Jordana was, that she was transfering to a private school where people would understand her, that she thought she was so hot and smart. Mac, who knew her best, just laughed and said, “I don’t know what Jordana would say, I think she would be amazed that you guys are taking the time to even discuss her.”

And it’s true. Ian and I have never talked about this, but there has been a lot of calories burned talking about what a pair of shits we are. It’s just now occuring to me that these people might not be my friends.

My friend Dani is just so chock full of mean-spiritedness and hideous political fury that I almost can’t talk to him. He has said things that even the Bush administration won’t admit, he is further right than the people we can’t believe are that far right. And the weird thing is that I am comforted by his politics. I can think of many people who are nowhere near as adamant about their politics as Dani, and yet I think they are ultimately somewhat more destructive.

Americans as a whole seem to be mystified by what could have driven the terrorists to attack New York City. Yet, so many of them hated New York City before the attacks, and hate it still afterwards. How many times have people talked about East Coast Bias? About the leftist newspapers in New York and Washington?

Most of my religious family won’t go see an R-rated movie. Many of them want to home school their children, to protect them from the social evils that live in the American system. Many of my friends talk about Starbucks and Walmart and McDonald’s as if they are evil institutions trying to take over the world.

I have known bible-belt Christians that were as anti-American as middle eastern Arabs. I spoke with a woman, my age, back in ’95, who insisted that the existence of Hillary Clinton was a sign of the coming apocalypse, and she quoted scripture to me to prove it. There are smart people who are in favor of curtailing the right to privacy in an attempt to thwart those who would destroy our “freedom”.

This mobius strip logic might seem idiotic. Wait, “might” has nothing to do with it. This *is* idiotic. These people, in my humble estimation, are small minded morons. Anyone who decries the loss of the general store to the Walmart can kiss my ass, Walmarts are awesome and you can get anything you want for half the price. If they’re putting you out of business, come up with a better idea, don’t whine about the winners.

Look, my business is ridiculous. The three of us *killed* ourselves to break even on this show, and when we did it was considered a frickin’ *coup*. But we don’t sit around and bitch about how movies are stealing audiences from plays, or about stunt casting or bad Broadways musicals. We’re trying our own ideas, and if they don’t work then we don’t deserve to win.

So, that’s why I like Dani. He doesn’t claim we are attacking Iraq to give them democracy, he believes we’re attacking them because we had to attack someone, and they were the easiest target. Hideous, yes, but logical.

My dad once said that Angie Harmon had a big butt. Aside from the fact that she doesn’t (and that, if she’s got a big butt, then I’m a rhino), I liked the fact that he said what actually bothered him, he didn’t start talking about her acting. Say something ridiculous that you actually believe, not something reasonable based in half truths.

Ah, the highs and lows. Or rather, the ups and downs.

We needed to sell ten tickets a night in order to pay for the space, and we needed to sell about twice that in order to make money. We averaged about 22-23 tickets sold a night, and more like 26-27 people seeing the show with comps.

We have one more weekend (provided we don’t move the show) and there was some concern that we would be able to sustain the pace that the rest of the show had. As of right now, we’ve sold out completely tonight and we have about 25 reservations for tomorrow. If we sell out the show both nights, we will have sold as many tickets the last weekend as we did the rest of the run.

More on that in a second. I got food poisoning last night. It’s amazing how you know what it is, you recognize it immediately, once you’ve had it once. You think you have the flu, you think you have a fever, you suddenly realize you’re exhausted, and then you start with the barfing. Once everything is out of your system, you feel a little but better.

Mac called, we talked for a minute, he expressed concern, and then we had a classic moment. “I mean, I just want you to be good in the play tomorrow, I don’t really care how you’re feeling.” “Sure, yeah, well, let’s be honest, no matter how sick I am , I’m still going to be amazing in the show tomorrow, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

If people give you what you pay for, you gotta pay ’em back in kind.

So, for the show, there is a tendency to want to somehow milk this cow while she’s still walking to the barn. We will have covered our costs, which is unfortunately a huge success to us, but we covered our costs because we aimed right with this show. We knew we could get 150 or so people to come see the show, and we will have ended up right around that.

So, although there is the sense that we want to extend the show, the fact is that we can’t unless someone outside our actual PR circle comes in and wants to move it. Unless someone else who thinks they can get another five hundred people to see it wants to move the show, there’s no reason to move it.

One idea is to take it to Napa for a week, play in one of the smaller venues out there and stay at my Dad’s. But even that’s really sketchy.

The one good thing is that the show is ours, totally. We own the set pieces and the costumes, we own the play and the actors. We don’t have to pass it by anyone but ourselves. I mean, if there was *any* chance of the show moving, we would drag John along.

My friend Mac claims that my autobiography ought to be titled “How I’m Winning”. Every time something happens, no matter how good or bad, I figure out exactly how it has affected me in the best possible way. I’m not trying to claim to be a *positive* person at all, I just try to put the best face on whatever shit just hit the fan.

That’s right. The best face on shit. You want sensible metaphors, go somewhere else.

Anyway, the most potent aspect of this self-celebration is the fact that I always adore whatever community I am living in. No matter where I am, I can’t imagine trying to live anywhere else. Even when I lived on 35th street, basically putting my head down each night on top of the Lincoln Tunnel, I thought I would never be happy if I moved.

So, y’know, grain of salt and all that, but I absolutely adore Astoria. This morning I walked with Jordana to the trainstop because I needed to pick up potatoes for a dinner party tonight. As I walked back, I noticed for the first time that there is a wave of couples that walk to the train together each morning holding hands. Everyone is probably going to different places, but half the train is riding in tight twos like they’re boarding the Ark.

The other half are all nerds. Once in a great while you will get someone who looks like they spend a little money on their clothes, or like they spend a lot of money on their hair and a lot of thrift store money on their clothes, but mostly it’s just guys and dolls heading in to their jobs. No downtown dicks, just guys with jobs, musicians, playwrights, actors, heading in to the city to get their manpower checks.

I mean, the couples are all nerds too. Everyone is nerds.

I’ve lived here a year now, officially, today. And I am still so in love with the walk around my neighborhood. We seem to be just far enough away from the city that we don’t have that aggressive urban feel, but we still have roaming groups of twelve year olds swearing too loud to prove how tough they are. I live near two basketball courts, one covered with teenagers in baggy baggies, and the other, much nicer, usually abandoned right next to the east river.

There is no urgency here. Old men and young girls stroll around the neighborhood like they are conserving energy. For some reason, almost none of the buildings are higher than two stories. There are some, it can’t be a zoning thing. But there is sky everywhere, trees everywhere.

The afore-mentioned Astoria Park is a perfect example of the whole neighborhood. You can see people sailing and boating down the east river while playing between the huge lawns and ancient overhanging trees. But, they are boating down right under the Troboro bridge, which is suspended over you while you are playing basketball or tennis or running on the track. It isn’t natural, this park, it’s concrete and there are buildings across the way. It’s saying, “Here’s some nature, but don’t lie to yourself, you’re in New York. This is gorgeous, but it’s also packed with people. That’s why they call it Queens, not Queen.”

I always love wherever I am. There is nothing quite like being in Napa Valley at my Dad’s house and I really love visiting my family in Brooklyn because 7th Avenue is just amazing. I also love every second that I am in the city. God, New York City is just the most incredible place on earth, there is no feeling like walking through Manhattan, it’s like Gershwin and Babe Ruth are two blocks ahead of you yelling, ‘Come on, come on, drink down, breathe deep and run, it just gets better!’

But the twenty or so blocks around my apartment right now have everything I could ever want, and if I actually need Taco Bell or a Home Depot, they are five minutes by car. I would love it if the Kew Gardens Movie Theater (a whole blog will be written about that place) and a really great big clean deli were right around the corner. But maybe that would be just too much.

As it is now, without kids and without more concerns, there is no place I would rather be.

Anyone who has ever spoken to me on the phone knows that I always begin conversations the same way. I identify myself and then I ask the person if they have a minute or two to talk. Even if it’s my mother or father, I identify myself and ask if they have a minute. I would never assume that the person I am calling wants to talk to me, unless that person’s job is to answer my phone call. I learned these lessons as a telemarketer.

I was very good at cold calling. I never worked in a part of the industry that demands that you call people at home, although that doesn’t seem like such an invasion to me. If you have a phone line and you answer the phone, you are giving permission to the person to call you. If you don’t want to be called, turn the phone off and get some sort of answering system to deal with your incoming calls. And don’t tell me you don’t want to spend money on a system or a service, you had to buy a phone and pay for the phone line. You have to pay for stuff you want.

This “Do-Not-Call” list is going to be really tough on a lot of smaller businesses. The truth is, there is no better way to get someone to take a look at your product than to speak to them person to person. The Mormons have always known this, it’s why they go door to door instead of doing ad campaigns.

I run a pathetically small business, one that might make a hundred dollars this year if we’re lucky. In order to get people to come to my show, I have to send out tons of postcards and emails and set up reminders in parts of the city where my customers might be. But the very best way for me to get people to be interested in my show is to speak to them.

We have a responsibility as Americans to investigate the advertising that is given to us. If you believe in the free market system, you have to do your part as a consumer to discover the goods and services available to you. The people who buy my product (in other words, come see the play I’m producing) have been really happy that they did. Many people are coming back our last weekend, implying that the experience wasn’t just worth the asking price, but actually worth twice that for twice the experience.

But if direct marketing ceases to be an option, what is a guy like me supposed to do? What are all those telemarketers going to do? Why, when hours and hours of our television viewing, a majority of the print we read and a large chunk of our mail and email is advertising are we making it more difficult for people to call us and offer us their product. Advertising is the way we learn about stuff we didn’t know we want.

Seriously, those knives on tv that can cut through a boot? I’d never buy them off TV or the internet. But if someone came to my door with a set of those knives, I’d probably buy them. Hell, I’d definitely buy them.

When you get spam, don’t you wish you could tell the person who sent it to you not to send you any more? With telemarketers, you can. People did all the time. I was calling businesses and offering them competitive quotes for their business insurance. But many of the people had long standing relationships with their insurance provider, some even got their insurance through family members. So when they told me they weren’t interested, I took them off the list. FOREVER. No-one ever called them again.

I only had one indignant person the whole time I was working the phones. Someone owned a chain of dry cleaners, he had about twenty employees, and I asked him if he was the person who made the decisions about the company’s insurance. He flew off the handle. “DO you really think I have the time to answer these questions?”

“I don’t really know, sir, but if you aren’t the person who can answer this question, can you put me in touch with the person who does?”

“Oh no. I’m the boss around here. I make these decisions. What makes you think I have the time to answer your questions? I have a string of businesses and they all take my attention. Why do you think I can just sit here and answer your questions about my business? What are you trying to sell me, exactly, and why are you wasting my time?”

“Actually, sir, I’m not trying to sell anything. We’d like to prepare a quote for you, but only if you are actually looking for quotes each year when your insurance comes up for renewal. If you don’t take quotes for your insurance, I’ll mark that in our list.”

“I didn’t agree to be on any list. Where did you get that list?”

“Dunn and Bradstreet, sir. They prepare a list of companies in your community that make a certain amount of money and have more than eight employees.”

There was a pause and he said, “We take quotes, but only from local businesses, we keep our business here in Texas” and I told him who I was calling for (a company down the street from him) and not only did he set an appointment, he went with that company on his insurance three months later.

And, y’know, the part where he was yelling at me about how much time he was wasting was less time than it took to set an appointment.

Look, I’m not interested in breast implants and I don’t want your fake vacation giveaway, but there are already laws against that. If you really think that the seven seconds it takes for you to tell someone to take you off their call list, even if you have to tell them ten times, is too precious a gift to give up in order to live in a free market society then you need to re-evaluate your priorities.

I’m on the “go ahead and call me” list. I got thirty seconds, no matter what I’m doing. And if you’re selling those knives, call me soon.

Hey, I know I said your blog sucked but… go ahead and write. I mean, if you want to.

Look, I wasn’t saying your blog sucks. I know, I know, it *sounded* like I was saying your blog sucks, but I was just… it’s just that sometimes I feel bad and I have to lash out, y’know? I feel so all alone, and that makes me say things I wouldn’t normally say.

C’mon, baby. Write something. Go ahead. Tell me how you’re feeling. C’mon honey. Remember when you had all that knitting? That was *great*, you should tell me about it again. Remember when you thought that thing? You should totally tell me about it again. The famous person you met at that wedding…?

Okay, honey, I just checked again and there have been no blogs posted. You really should. Just think about what’s happened the last little while and post a blog about it. Honey, I don’t want to have to be like this, but, y’know, it’s your responsibility to post a blog. I mean, I don’t want to pressure you, but if you don’t write a blog, I can’t promise you that I’ll keep writing mine.

Look. I’ve been nice. But there’s still no posting.

You know what? Your blog sucks. Don’t post, I don’t care. No. No, don’t even try. Don’t you fucking post, not after all this. I don’t even *want* to read your crap.

Our show opened tonight, I just got done writing the production Blog about it. It was warmly received and well attended.

I was asked afterwards which of the pieces in the show were my favorite, and which were my least favorite. It was only after answering the question that I discovered how much distance there is between the kind of artist I am now and the kind of artist I was ten years ago.

We start off as actors for a thousand different reasons, maybe we didn’t get enough attention as children, maybe we feel like telling stories means we don’t have to be ourselves, maybe we’re just handsome, whatever. But at a certain point you do the math and you realize, almost immediately, that you have to be famous in order to do the work you want.

It’s this bullshit mantra repeated a thousand times over and over. I want to get a sitcom so I can have enough money to run my regional theater. I want to be on Oprah’s book list so I can go back to writing short non-linear fiction and poetry. I need to shoot my indie film with pseudo-stars so I can get enough industry attention so I can work with real stars, so I can be famous enough to make my indy movies with the actors I want. It’s a kind of lying logic that we tell ourselves constantly, and meanwhile our actual art is getting made by these focus groups in our minds…

It’s this internal combustion engine who’s petrol is celebrity. It isn’t as important to be good as it is to appear to be good. What you do is just slightly less important than the number of people who know that you exist.

And that’s fine, I mean, it’s just that most people don’t know what to like, especially anymore. When you see some chick in the subway and she sounds better than Jewel, but she’s ugly and that’s why she’s in the subway, and you just think, ‘well, if she was as good as I think she is, someone would know about her, and since they don’t, I must be wrong.’ I understand that impulse. It’s just being lazy, and God knows, I aint got that on anyone.

But at some point, that pursuit started to kill me. I think it was when my first marriage died. It died because I forgot that famous people aren’t any better, and I started trying to get commercials and sitcoms so that I could open my regional theater. I started sprinting towards these lies.

Those lies poisoned me. It is a purely artificial way of looking at the world, and it invalidates the personal and small things that happen between me and my friends. I say John Hurley, I say Dan Kois, I say Mike Johnson, what does it mean to you? I get desperate and say “John Hurley, graduated from Syracuse, works all the time as a director…” and I’m already buying in to the poison, I’m drinking it down. Then it becomes, ‘works with APAC, with John Knutson, who is doing the Royal Shakespeare…” God, how do I make this man mean something to you? TV? Movie? Remember the write-up, remember the review, didn’t your friend have a friend with a friend and a friend’s friend who said they saw that he was with the guy who everyone…?

What the fuck ever. It’s all part of those lies. John Hurley, the man who gave me the experience I had tonight, along with Jordana and Mac. I don’t even want to tell you his name, I just want you to not know. I don’t want you near, even. I don’t want you to come.

I have a long, long list of people I haven’t told about this show. Every company I produced in Indivisible doesn’t know about this show, even though I get emails every day from these people about shows they’re in. No-one in any of my other casts knows about this show. I just can’t make this show an opportunity for the next thing. I would love it if someone else did, but I just can’t.

When I was asked which parts were my favorite, I described the scenes in which I got to play something true. They weren’t the funniest moments- actually I take that back, one of them is a really funny moment. But there are moments where the character exists not as a type or as an inside joke, but as a person.

And the lies of this industry have poisoned me so much that creating characters whose job is to create opportunity, even for other characters, is much harder for me. That actor in me died at the same time that my ability to work on my career did. I just want something this good, and if I have to make it from the ground up like we just did, then so be it.

I didn’t do anything I didn’t want to for this show. I didn’t work with anyone I didn’t want to, and I didn’t have to bend on anything. It’s an hour long, it’s funny as hell, you get a free brownie, and if you don’t come, that’s fine by me. I can’t ask you, I can’t do anything else but put out this expression, and if it becomes part of a larger thing, I can’t be the one to do that.

Hey. They’re called ‘rants’ for a reason.

Fortunately, I can at least still try to make a little money as a musician.

I woke up at about 9:45 this morning, about half an hour earlier than I wanted to. I was alone in the room, but I woke up because of the palpable air of panic in the house. At 3 minutes to ten, Jordana came in the bedroom and sort of stood there shifting her weight.

“Home Depot. Toys R Us. Brownies don’t look done. Are you, y’know, finished sleeping?”

So I got up, made some coffee and said, “Give me ten minutes to get through the news and stuff and then I’m all yours.” “Sure, no problem.” Then, about thirty seconds later. “Um, seriously, I think we need to cook these brownies longer…”

It’s childish to assume you can set parameters around things like anxiety. Jordana’s parents are coming tonight to our opening, they are going to comment on everything from her outfit to the lighting to the language to, well, to the brownies. And although I think they’re funny, for Jordana, these comments are real.

So, I closed the laptop, heated up the oven to cook the brownies another fifteen minutes (they just came out a second ago and they’re perfect now) and we went to get the last minute props we were missing.

Sometimes loving someone is prioritizing away a tiny little thing. For me though, I generally don’t make any sacrifices or do any work without expecting tons of credit. Which is why I write this blog.