Tales From The Theater: We're Up and Spring Has Sprung

I'm feeling a little ragged at the moment. There's been a lot of work this week, and then last night we had a preview for the show in its run time at 11. After a run in front of 5 or 6 people, we had notes on things to tighten up and I was on my way home at about 1am. So work has that sort of looking through gauze feeling that comes with this sort of tired. I'm ready to bray out hysterical laughter at any moment, ready to tell someone to "lick it."

Aside from the usual first time in front of a "crowd" nervous dropping of lines crap, we also had an issue with the lights suddenly not working. I have to give it up to this cast, we went through it without blinking an eye, like professionals, only to meet in the green room to commiserate and reassure each other that we weren't in fact having a stroke, the lights just weren't working. We worked the show with style and with class and we got a good amount of laughs even with the cast doubling the audience members.

We open tonight:

If you find yourself in Seattle with not so great plans on a Friday or Saturday at 11, come and check it out. It's an hour and a half of inappropriate soap opera parody. There's a bar in the theater, and you can come watch me actorate all over the audience in a fury of lust and over the top hysterics.

I'm feeling good about the show, the cast is great to work with and Linda the director was giving some high praise last night. Granted, it's her job to prod us along, but when someone tells you that you're awesome, it's a little tough not to feel like King Golden Dick of Awesometown.

And so I leave you all the last post of what seemed like a long March. Warmth is beginning to enter the world up here again. Those premature glamlicous cherry blossoms have shown and are already on their way, showering feathery little kisses with the wind. Everywhere you look there's those delicate green shoots coming from all of that dormant wood and dirt I've been looking at for months now, waiting for some sign. It all just makes you want to fuck, live, taste, kiss, sing, laugh and dance an energetic and completely spastic road ode to this crazy world, an ode to making it back around one more time.

Billy's movie recommendations for your slow weekend rest times - Stranger Than Fiction. Will Ferrell does a wonderfully restrained job, and just when I didn't think it was possible for me to love sweet Maggie Gyllenhaal any more...


Confidential to Gorgeous: Thanks for the “Tell Me Something Good” reminder the other day, I’m listening right now. That is some top shelf shiznit.

Predisposed To Reflection

Grandpa was an alcoholic, but then he found God, which apparently fixed all of his problems. Apparently. Grandpa's use of God always seemed more mechanic, more a grim determination than an act of love, which in turn would shade my own sensibilities regarding spirituality and religion.

I was thinking about this while I was walking to the theater the other day. Grandpa apparently wasn't a cuddly and entertaining drunk. And when this is your basis of normalcy, this becomes your comfort zone, drunken antagonism and chaos. My aunt went and found herself a drinker to marry, cementing not only her fate but the idea that women look for their fathers when they get married. Years down the line, I was meeting up with my cousin from this union for a night of drunken revelry.

"You know he might be an alcoholic, it runs in his blood," my mother advised.

I wanted to tell her that it then, in fact, ran in my blood as well. And on thinking of that, I thought about how I would do things differently from my grandfather if things deteriorated to the point where I simply had to drink. Well, I have a little more flair than my namesake, I'm a little brighter, I would hope that I wouldn't lower myself to plain old abuse of my family.

But I realized, you can't outclass or outthink a genetic predisposition.

This opened a door to thinking about all the things that I'm genetically predisposed to, the things that my genealogical map has laid in my way, and how these stolid markers mix with the chaos of chance that occurs with just living and works to shape who I really am, not just what my blood makes me. Then I thought about the hot sparks thrown with the collision of these dispositions and those sometimes innocuous moments of living. I thought of a galaxy of moments that had changed my life; things as small as tasting sage for the first time, things as large as watching my son enter the world.

I can make myself dizzy sometimes. For a moment I wanted to lay down on a warm lawn somewhere in the dark and look back, look up at that glittering galaxy of life and just have a moment to take it in before it went and got bigger on me.

No Cars Go

This is not a prelude to suicidal activity, don't get all weird on me, but at some point I want to drive a car into a large body of water; preferably from someplace high, or off of a ferry.

First, a couple of things need to be worked out before hand. While there's bound to be some jerking motion when the car hits the water, I don't want to feel pain from it - I don't want this thing to be traumatic. I also don't want this to turn into some harrowing, time running out and car filling with water daring TV escape. I want to sit comfortably in the driver's seat, dry and warm (which I think takes the Honda Civic out of the equation as I doubt that sucker's airtight) while the car sinks slowly to the bottom.

I imagine falling slowly and gracefully while the water gets darker with depth and I eventually have to turn on the headlights. I might also jokingly turn on one of the blinkers, because I'm a conscientious driver and I laugh at my own stupid jokes. I imagine hitting the bottom with a soft thump, a cloud of sediment rising. As the car coming through the environment is bound to scare a lot of the local wildlife away at first, I imagine myself sitting there, seat belted in and waiting for the return, listening to the new Arcade Fire album.

Which I honestly wasn't crazy about to begin with - Neon Bible by Arcade Fire that is. Their first album really sort of stormed my senses and I wasn't immediately taken with the follow up, but the more time I spend with it, the more I want to go back.

So there'd I'd be, waiting on the dark bottom. I'd turn the radio down a bit so as not to have the sound keep the fish away longer than necessary. I would probably occasionally turn on the windshield wipers - again just to entertain myself with stupidity. I imagine doing this in Puget Sound (particularly if I'm driving off a ferry), and as such I expect to see salmon and octopi eventually flitting by. At one point I flash my high beams just in time to see an orca passing in the murky distance, checking out this reckless interloper for a moment before surfacing.

I probably would have thought ahead and brought a snack, some jerky or something, so I'd eat that and look at the fish, finish listening to the Arcade Fire. But eventually it's going to get cold in there at the bottom of the Sound. I mean c'mon, I'm not going to keep the engine running to keep the heater going. What sort of monster do you think I am? When it gets to this point, I calmly strap on my scuba tank, use the secret fold down back seat to get into the trunk and then pop said trunk open and wait for it to quickly fill with water.

I cannot imagine a hero’s return when I surface. I’m guessing Department of Transportation officials and Coast Guard people and the cops brandishing weapons and yelling profanities. Then there’s also the wife asking why I trashed a perfectly good car. Which is where my school of trained salmon comes in…

Mood Music

I'm in a mood. I feel outside forces pressing down and prying angry little fingers in. What's worse is that I can feel myself toying with letting the mood sink; running my tongue over that sore spot in my mouth, not looking out the window for fear that there's no storm.

Well folks, I don't want to be in a shitty mood, I'm fighting against the dying of the light - or some such nonsense. I'm attempting a little self medication, a little musical therapy. I want to share my top 5 musical mood lifters for today.

(There's so, so many - these are just the first five that popped to mind this morning)

1) “For Real” by Okkerville River. When the lead singer actually spits out the word “fine” as if he's in the middle of some sort of passion driven, apoplectic fit of abandon I get giddy.

2) "Talking World War III Blues" by Bob Dylan. Dylan sort of quotes Abraham Lincoln and then busts out with, "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours. I said that." The balls, the youthful boldness in proclaiming your own quote, the sense of humor with which it's done... Shit, it makes me smile.

3) "Styrofoam Boots/It's Always Nice On Ice" by Modest Mouse. The bass and drums kicking in with a crash at the end makes my heart jump. If I'm walking down the street when this happens it makes me feel full of power, it makes me feel like I'm floating over the ground.

4) Any number of Pixies songs where Kim Deal comes in with a breathy backup. It's like some lascivious angel whispering in your ear, raising the hair on the back of your neck; an angel that got a little too close to the ground, a little dirty, a little roughed up at the hem.

5) “The Weight” by The Band. Levon Helms' growl of "yeah" after the 'Crazy Chester' verse seems like he feels that tickling pull of anticipation in his stomach and just can't wait to dive back into the song, like he's gotta let out that "yeah" no matter what. It makes me clap my hands and want to join in on some down home musical revival - friends and booze and instruments on a porch somewhere.

Sending you all some love out there, have a good Tuesday.

Tales From The Theater: WWPBD

My weekend was eaten up by a foul beast called Tech. It is also referred to in some circles as hell week. Whatever, it's actory nonsense and I can't imagine it being terribly interesting to anyone (even other actors). But as it's all I did this weekend, and what I will be spending my non work time on this week I feel pressed to write about it. Read on at your peril!

A glossary of terms:
10 of 12's - The theater is booked for twelve hours (10am to 10pm) and actors are expected to be there 10 of those 12 hours.
Cue to cue - A start and stop run through the show, stopping and starting at each sound cue. Same to be done again for each lighting cue.

Honestly I could complain about having to go through our 10 of 12's, it's tedious and frustrating and tiring, but when it comes down to it, it's acting. I spent close to 20 hours this weekend doing something that I love, something that I'm constantly surprised people let me do. But because there is a lot of idle waiting around, people are bound to get on other people's nerves. And better yet, people are bound to get effing delirious.

It started unraveling with talk of the abandoned baby polar bear that some animal rights activists argue should not be allowed to live.

Actors began to throw out random polar bear facts: Polar bears hunt men (as do koala bears I pointed out to no one's belief, they just don't do it that well), polar bears cover their noses with their paws when their hunting, polar bears and penguins do not co-exist. It was when I volunteered the information that it was in fact a polar bear that went back in time and killed JFK, well the train derailed.

We talked about great actors who had done amazing portrayals of polar bears in their careers: Kevin Bacon, Lee Marvin and Morgan Freeman to name a few. I mentioned Steven Spielberg's ill advised attempt to make a film about a robot polar bear who goes on a search for his mother. Matt nodded in affirmation, "Yeah I saw that one. It was called P.B."

Gone. I wish I could give you more details on the day, but everything took on that haze of 3 day drug binge; a little headachey and a little surreal. For some reason a bunch of us started doing bad Irish accents which led to Matt singing Captain Quint's "Farewell and ado to you fair Spanish ladies" song from Jaws in said bad Irish accent. In a move that endeared him to me forever, Matt then began Captain Quint's U.S.S. Indianapolis speech, but replacing sharks with polar bears. I finished up with, "300 men went into the water, 15 1/2 came out, polar bears took the rest..."

It was good, we were laughing hard at this point. But when we began pointing out our polar bear attack scars to each other, and I (ala Richard Dreyfuss) pointed to my chest and said, "Mary Ellen Moffet", it was off the charts. We were so delirious that we had to run away from each other and try to cover up our screaming laughter. This was seconds before being called onto stage.

Instead of the normal cue to cue, we were actually going through the entire scene and both of us had eyes bulging from trying not to laugh, both let out snorts of vicious laughter trying way too hard to escape. The director, brave lass that she is, tried to give us notes and I had to let her know that although I had just done it a minute and a half ago, I had no memory whatsoever of the scene she was talking about.

So, lock a group of attention whores with a modicum of improv training into a dark basement for 10 hours and you take your chances. I'm worn out, as I'm sure is the rest of the cast, and while I'm sort of leery of going back in for more tonight after work, I'm also kinda looking forward to it.

I've a got a full week of tech and dress rehearsals. We open Friday, presure's on...

At The Anarchist Collective

Montgomery carefully poured liquid into a pitcher, making sure that Adam was watching with just the right amount of interest and reverence. "And now we add the ingredient which makes this so volatile, the key ingredient, the one thing that will allow for the lasting impression that we're hoping for, what the French call the 'water of life'," Montgomery raised his eyebrows impressively. "Crème de menthe!"

"Um," Adam looked at him questioningly. "I'm basing this on the small amount of French that I've managed to pick up from Pepe le Pew and the flip side of Canadian groceries, but I think that crème de menthe actually means... cream... of mint?"

Montgomery glared at him. "Do you want to make this bomb?"

"Not at all."

"Because, I can walk away, I can forget about the knowledge that I've gathered over the years and let a hack like you take care of it, to endanger us all. Do you want me to do that?"

"No."

Montgomery measured out first one shot glass of the crème de menthe and then a second, pouring them both into the pitcher. He slowly stirred the pitcher, holding his breath. He let the contents settle before picking up the pitcher and slowly pouring the contents into a series of glasses. "You learned things from Pepe le Pew? The capitalist tool?" Montgomery asked.

"Well I learned that he couldn't tell the difference between a female skunk and cat with a well placed but accidental white stripe of paint."

"Okay everyone! Here's my world famous Time Bomb, come and get ‘em. Cheers! Now let's talk about how to stop that Chuck E. Cheese from going in."

2 Years

Billy Cleans His Plate is two years old today. I was hoping to hit the 500 post mark today so we could celebrate two meaningless milestones in one day, but I came a little short. Two years ago, I tossed out a simple little paragraph about that funny little two person, trying to get around you dance. Was I ever that young?

If I could go back and tell anything to the two years ago version of myself, typing away at that temp half desk, well I probably wouldn't for fear of messing up the space-time continuum. But if I got over that, I would tell the two years ago version of myself:
1) When Bif tells you she's pregnant, avoid that long stage of freak out, completely unnecessary.
2) Settle down, yeah, Bif's gonna get pregnant. Seriously it's cool.
3) All right, put your head between your legs and breathe. I'm not kidding, it's going to be rad.

Once I calmed down, I might also let me know that Chris Marker's Sans Soleil is coming out on DVD in a couple of years, as is the long awaited release of El Topo, but then again I wouldn’t want to deprive me of the slight rush I got when I found this out on my own. Oh, and don't wait so long to pick up Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat, you'll thank me (you) for it.

Thanks to all of you once again for providing the illusion that my random thought processes are entertaining.


Confidential to kc!: I've meant to call you back for like 5 days and I'm feeling lame about it, I'm sorry.
Confidential to Panda Girl: Congrats! You're a sexy little minx!