Existential Dread

On Sunday I had a previously-taken-for-granted treat: a day hanging out with Sister Virginia. It was Pride Day, but we didn't have terribly exciting plans. Just a little browsing around SoHo, visiting old haunts and generally enjoying one another's company. It was sweltering day, humid as it gets up here in NYC, and we were deep into conversation as we got on the subway platform at my stop, Astoria Boulevard. Can't recall what we were discussing. What I can recall, is being insistently spoken to by a stranger. You know that feeling, when you've recognized somebody wants somebody else's attention, but of course it couldn't be you, because you don't just run into people, but then - oh, wait - yes. Yes, that person is talking to you. And what they're saying, is this:

"Excuse me. Excuse me. Woman in the orange? Yes, I just want you both to know that I don't appreciate you following me."

"What?"

"I don't appreciate you following me onto the subway platform."

"...Okay."

And she marches past us, down to the far end of the platform.

So: Fine. Another New York crazy person. True, she didn't exactly bear the marks of the typical NYC loon -- she was very clean, small, well-dressed (as though for yoga or the park) -- but she did have that sheen to her glare that suggested a certain intensely unkempt morale. So: All right then. Jenny and I continue our conversation, veering only momentarily into "that was odd" territory.

And then, a few minutes later, our sudden enemy crosses back the other way.

"I guess you must be Team Shawna, but I'm Team Natalie, and you better stop bothering me." (Ed. - I can't remember what she said verbatim, but I'm pretty sure the name Shawna was mentioned.)

"I'm sorry. We don't know what you're talking about."

And she was gone again, this time the other way up the platform. So now I'm keeping a bit of an eye on her, because I'm fascinated, and she's got my fight-or-flight instinct up. I'm suddenly aware - for no particular reason - that we're on a platform suspended twenty-five feet over traffic and surrounded on either side by electrified metal rails. But, this woman walks on up in the other direction, beyond the bench and entrance stairwell at the middle of the platform, to where I can no longer see her. Me: "That is so strange." Jenny: "I just figure - crazy people, New York." And we try to move on in the conversation, but I have to admit that I'm now utterly puzzled and intrigued and somewhat scared. Chalk it up to reading too much Kafka and Pirandello. But the train comes, and there's no more sign of our little tormentor, so we gratefully garnish ourselves with air conditioning and grab a seat.

From there our conversation continues into more personal, important stuff than it had been, and I get engrossed enough to let go of trying to wrap my head around what is apparently the most dire "Team _______" conflict since Twilight. The benches on the N train run along either wall, and I'm turned facing the direction in which the train is running so I can talk to Jenny on that side. It's a fairly crowded train, but not jam-packed as yet. We proceed a few stops, nearing the tunnel that swoops us underground and into Manhattan, and I happen to turn to my left for a moment.

And there she is again. Staring daggers. In our car, not five feet from us. She was not, to be perfectly clear, NOT in our car to begin with. She was not, as far as I can tell, in fact able to monitor us from where she had been positioned on the platform when the train arrived. No, the woman who was accusing us of following her had seemingly traversed moving train cars to find the one in which we sat.

All this I realized as I instantaneously swirled back into Jenny's eye contact, not wanting to give Ms. Antagonist any (further?) reason to suspect we were passive-aggressively pursuing her whereabouts. She momentarily thereafter strode past us on down the car. I'm not even sure Jenny noticed she was ever there. And I never saw her again, for the rest of the day.

But I sure as hell kept looking for her. How could I not? I was half-convinced that I would run into her again, totally randomly, thereby inadvertently providing her with the final evidence she needed in order to prove her theory of our antagonism. I even - of course, though I tried to resist it - wondered if she might not be following us. That is to say, I resisted this thought because it would essentially mean that she had successfully transmitted her disease to me, the germs of her paranoia turned airborne and plague-like. The terrible likelihood is that I will indeed see our mysterious interloper again soon. She probably lives off the same subway stop as me, and will mistake Megan for Jenny some coincidental day and presume the whole espionage has begun all over again. To be totally frank . . . she didn't look unfamiliar. Maybe it was just the openness of her naked hostility, but I thought, maybe, I knew her somehow.

Now look: I'm not peering continuously over my shoulder or anything (not continuously, anyway) and I don't think there was anything profound to this woman's mistake. Odds are that she is simply going through some tough stuff in her life about now, and that has made her paranoid and/or quasi-psychotic. In fact, I feel bad about not being able to convince her that we at least were not out to get her. HOWEVER: Holy crap. Was I about to be in a Hitchcock or Fincher movie? Was I targeted for some Improv Everywhere prank, that just had yet to get joyous and un-terrifying? Was it performance art and, if so, who would think Pride Day a good day to have such a thing noticed?

All this has given me an idea that I don't think I'll get around to any time soon, so I'm putting out there for you, The World, to do with as you please. Friend Nat is frighteningly good - pun intended - at creating a sense of dread on stage, and his efforts at such effects along with some of my more hypothetical conversations with other friends about theatrical horror have me thinking that this might be a good, simple scenario for really creeping out an audience. The trouble as I see it with most staged "horror" is that it too-easily falls into a similar trap as many stage comedies do. That is, the burden of catharsis is often placed upon effects, or gags, rather than on human behavior. This results in camp, which has its place, but often doesn't know its place. It can creep in anywhere, like the annoying neighbor finding your dinner party. Before you know it, it's arguing politics and complaining about the wine and all your guests feel cheapened, like some terrible, overwrought and distended simile.

So: my behavior-based scary stage-play scenario thing: I imagine it starting with a romantic couple (A & B) meeting somewhere public, possibly a restaurant. One of them (B) is late, and by the time he or she gets there, they find their significant other (A) rattled by something. A explains that they just had the weirdest series of "coincidences" (see above) with this stranger. B listens, tries to calm down A, and gradually A relaxes to the point of laughing at him or herself a bit. B excuses him or herself to use the restroom, and as A sits there, he or she is approached by someone (C). Though seemingly relaxed, A shouts at the introduction of C: a waiter. A apologizes, making meaningless excuses, orders something, etc., and C leaves. B returns and A doesn't share what just happened. A gets a call he or she has to take, and steps away to take it. As B sits there, he or she is approached by someone he or she knows somewhat (i.e., though work - D) and D takes a seat. Of course, on A's return he or she recognizes D as his or her antagonist, and it all goes quietly haywire.

It's a sketch of a beginning (with lots of sex-generic alphabetical confusion, for which: you're welcome) but from there I see it getting more and more tense and scary, no idea of an ending yet. It starts out as a Pirandello-esque conflict between A and D, with B as something of a helpless arbiter with some interest in reaching a resolution, and C occasionally interjecting to keep the conflict from exploding into the public space. Which is to say, A and D have completely irreconcilable stories about their relationship that they each feel a growing need to convince B of. Cell phone usage should figure prominently, so long as it doesn't start to irritate; I imagine texting under the table, faking calls, etc. Personal revelations should be used sparingly, so it doesn't become all about what the audience doesn't know about their respective and interrelated pasts. That having been said, there should certainly be one or two revelatory twists, one preferably just prior to the act break. And in Act II...well...

In Act II, all are in a private space, and some time has passed. I'm imagining that our sympathies lie largely with A in Act I, and in Act II we begin to question that emotion, possibly because A forced one or more of them into this new, private space (his/her storage space?). Even if that didn't happen, A certainly turns cruel in his or her attempts to extricate him or herself from the conflict. Possibly physically cruel. Relationships change drastically, the stakes continue to mount, until it ends in a seemingly hopeful way. Seemingly, because there's also some tag moment at the very end, some bit of information that sets the whole conclusion into a teetering sense of doubt. That's what the audience leaves with: a sense of profound uncertainty.

There you go. Write me a play, The World, as close or as far from this scenario as you are so inspired. But please, The World, one request? Whichever of you was that antagonistic yogi -- stay away from me. Thanks bunches! Hugs!!!

See 4/8/09, 7/18/08 & 1/28/08.

Coulrophobia: A Voice of Dissent

Now, I don't agree entirely with the below, but it made me laugh:

"People Who Claim to Be Afraid of Clowns
"These people (and they are numerous) are attempting to cultivate a cute quirk, but they are really just aping a cute quirk cultivated by thousands of cute-quirk-cultivators before them in a giant, gross, boring feedback loop. Yes, clowns can be mildly creepy. But come on. Among the many things that are scarier than clowns: fire, earthquakes, a guy with a knife, riding the bus, colon cancer, falling down the stairs (it could happen at any time!), rapists, people who just kind of look a little rapey and are standing too close to you in line at 7-Eleven, Marlo from The Wire, influenza, and scissors." -- Lindy West @ the Stranger

[http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-different-kinds-ofpeople-that-there-are/Content?oid=1206006] The whole article is generally hilarious and true, though with coarse language by the consumption of which some of our less-jaded readers may be forever altered.

See my (potentially wasted) ruminations on coulrophobia heres: 1/28/08 & 7/18/08.

Post script: The above image may take some figuring to associate with this topic, but fans of horror fiction and 80s miniseries should be all set.

Burlesque

Last Saturday was the day of celebration for Wife Megan's 30th anniversary of the day of her birth and she, being the woman I married, wanted to go see some good, wholesome burlesque. You know burlesque, right? It's that quaint throw-back to a more innocent time, when men were men, women were women, and occasionally they all agreed to meet somewhere with dim lighting to reveal their knees to one another. One of the things I love about living in New York is being somewhere that such nostalgia for the frilly sins of the past exists. Any town that's a friend of anything remotely related to vaudeville and old-timey fun, is a friend of mine, as I always say (or will, henceforth). Furthermore, I specifically love burlesque. It's theatrical, it's joyous, and it usually incorporates lots of humor and props with its boobies. What's not to love?

So we went to The Slipper Room.

We stayed for many acts and several hours.

We left late, and they were still going strong.

Most of us will never be the same.

So from a theatrical perspective, it was a roaring success. I mean, if I can perform in something that really evidently changes people, I consider that a pretty big success. The specificity of that change is something that's even trickier than the change itself, given that all live performance is by its nature collaborative and interpretive. So personally, if you got something out of it, I got something out of it too. This reflects my attitudes on a lot of things. Like . . . dance. Or . . . board games. Or . . . other occupations of one's quest for joyous experiences. Let's not be judgmental about anyone's pursuit of happiness, even if they spell said pursuit "happyness." Hey: Rock on. It brings you joy and, on some level, that makes me happy.

Now there were some things I witnessed Saturday last that did not, per se, make me happy. The responses I had were more along the lines of being made to feel surprised, or confused, or scared. Very, very scared. But others really enjoyed some of these things, and no one got hurt or maligned beyond repair (though of course some audience mockery is part of the idiom), and so we can all look back on it and laugh. Sure, some of us may have gone home and gone directly into the shower, do not pass "GO!", do not bother removing one's clothing. But here we all are, scarless, and with a generally broader view of our fellow man, woman, and all others.

A broader view in a smaller world, I should say. I knew one of the performers -- had performed with her before, in fact. Her stage name is Miss Saturn, and she is a dynamite hula-hoop artist. She is also, it turns out, somewhat uninhibited in her display of God's gifts. When I performed alongside her, it was at a benefit for Friend Melissa's company, Kinesis Project. She hooped it up, I clowned around, and afterward she suggested we work together again some time, but I never followed up. Now I'm left to wonder if following up would have led me to The Slipper Room. It would not have been an entirely unwelcome opportunity, assuming I would have been able to stick to my personal preferences for the content of my act. During Saturday's experience I also had the unexpected mystery of feeling I recognized another performer: one "Harvest Moon." As it turns out, I don't. She's not who I mistook her for, but she has nevertheless reminded me that secret identities are as common in this city as free newspapers.

Some may view my appetite for nostalgia with disdain, but what can I say? I like sentimental sweetness in my indulgences, and could have used a bit more at The Slipper Room. After each break, the acts grew progressively more risque and shocking, and I grew less and less interested. Of course, if I were to run a contemporary burlesque show in New York City, I've no doubt I'd have to make similar allowances. After all, what we saw was probably closer in overall effect to us as the burlesques of old were during their time. These shows were shocking, titillating not just in sensual ways, but in visceral ones. The atmosphere should be one of reckless abandon and in this sense there was nothing inapt about my experience Saturday night. It was just that I had walked into a circa-1930s Berlin burlesque, when I had been hoping for a circa-1889s French one, I suppose. C'est la vie! I regret nothing!

Looking back, it occurs to me that there's an awfully fine line between anticipation and dread, and that line is going to be set at different places for different folks. A friend of mine recently sent me some writing research that discusses the role of feedback loops in sexual experiences. The gist of it was that "healthy" sexuality involves a feedback loop of increasing focus on arousal, and "unhealthy" (or perhaps, unhelpful) sexuality involves a neurotic, self-evaluative loop. Both increase the focus, but one allows you to engage, and the other rather prevents it. If we accept that sexual feelings are erotic in the broader sense, this is a very interesting way of looking at what we as performers inspire in our audiences. Will we fill them with eager anticipation, loathsome dread, or something of a different ratio altogether? In my opinion, neither is bad, just a different effect. And whatever effect, it begs the question: What, if anything, will we make the payoff?

Ride the Snake . . .

I'm experiencing an interesting fluctuation of mood regarding the upcoming reading of my play. Maybe this is normal; it has been so long since I confronted the possibility of my creative writing being read aloud that I can't say I remember quite what it was like. I remember some anxiety, sure, but not this strange undulation of emotion. I never know how I'm going to feel when I think about it, one moment to the next. Sometimes I feel elated and excited, other times it seems like the stupidest idea I've ever had, and one bound to be my ruination. There's a variety of anticipatory strata in between. Compared to prepping for an audition, this should be a relief. For an audition, I usually feel less and less prepared as the date approaches, so experiencing alternating good feelings should somewhat compensate for the others. Yet I feel pretty unnerved. There is a very loud voice in me that's shouting, "Back out of this! Do it now!"

Yes, that voice often takes on the characteristics of early-90s Schwarzenegger.

I have had such a mixed bag of experiences in exposing my writing to the public -- even limiting it to theatrical writing -- that have happened over such different times of my life that it's impossible for me to predict my reaction, much less others'. One of the first theatre pieces I ever wrote has been well-received several times; people have loved it. And a piece from far more recently was excerpted in performance at a party a few years ago, and it stank up the room. I mean, hoo, was it bad. That's part of why I'm having the reading, quite honestly. I want to find out what happens and, if I can, keep up such exposure so that I do develop a better sense of how my writing is going.

Not that others' opinions are my yardstick for the quality of my writing but, you know: come on. I want it out there, else why would I write it (typed the 'blogger)? I'll be reminding myself left, right and center on Wednesday next (huh...I didn't plan for it to be on Odin's-day...weird) to consider my opinion first, but I won't kid myself so far as to say that I'm not calling my actor friends there for the purpose of their feedback. Revision, as I've said, is very difficult for me. I tend to hold the memory of the original draft and all that went into the process of creating it as sacred, and thereby fail to adequately re-evaluate it, much less revise. Friend WHFTTS is renewing its efforts to write more gooder too at the moment (and hopefully from now on), and we're having some very interesting meta-conversations about our personal challenges. Both of us, it would seem, regard involving other people in our processes as a necessary step to overcoming something. In my case, the something to be overcome is a quasi-mysterious barrier in the way of revision.

I think the emotions I'm experiencing these few days have to do directly with that barrier. I think that barrier (if I may anthropomorphize for a moment) knows I'm gunning for it, and it feels right at home. "Hey, listen," says My Barrier, "wha-what do you need change for? Huh? I mean, with me you know where you stand. Right? Who knows what will happen to you without me here...?!" Then My Barrier beats his chest twice and throws out his arms in the universally accepted I-am-all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips-besides gesture. But it's too late, My Barrier. My Mind's made up, in spite of your emotional sniping, and I shall be resolute in my continued work after hearing the reading. I'm putting you on notice! I shall not be deterred!

: backs slowly away, maintaining eye contact, makes it through door before shuddering collapse to ground :

Just imagine next Thursday's post. Should be a doozy.

The Rest is (Busy, Noisy) Silence

{This entry is a continuation of 11/20/08, 11/19/08 & 11/18/08...}

I'm sharp enough, gang. I'm sharp enough. I'm about to be sharpened down to a nub.

Yesterday the management agency I work with called to submit me to an audition taking place this morning, for what sounds like a potentially big commercial. They got it from an agent; like, a really real agent, who I guess shops work out to them occasionally when he can't fill it. So. Why did they call me -- who's only done one industrial for them to date -- for this peculiar assignment? Well, the casting director needs someone who can do an Italian dialect, and that's what it says, right there on my resume.

Ahhhhhh. Ah.

I could have said no. I could have said, "Oh well, you know, I mostly do a comic Italian, which doesn't actually sound anything like an actual Italian person. You know, it's all, 'I'ma gonna to tella you somethin'.' Like that." I could have said that, and I didn't, and it's either because I'm greedy, or insane, or a little of both. The audition's at 10:40. I'll write more after.

Perhaps needless to say, some of my valuable time last night was spent downloading and listening to an Italian dialect sample, over and over again.

* * *

Well. That was . . . not at all worth the stress under which I put myself. Me and a camera, slate, two lines, spoken twice, and that, as they say, was that. The director wasn't even a nutter. Not remotely, and they warned me about that. I didn't even have to wait, and there was no one there. I mean . . . COME ON! <--This addressed to myself, for being such a stressed-out goob.

I have absolutely no way of knowing how well I did. Even if I thought I did particularly well, I wouldn't know, there was so little interaction. But enough of that.

One lucky upswing from this is that it sort of temporarily released my stress over tonight's work. (Oh right! I'm performing tonight!) Similar to electroshock therapy, the possibility of facing a director furious over my crap-tastic Italian dialect has zapped an interruption into my ongoing rhythm of stage fright. It is welcome. I figure I've got a good hour or so of feeling this intense relief until my anxiety back-up generator kicks in and starts running the show, and that's good enough. I can get to 3:30, when I'll be back working on the show, on this reprieve. Thanks, Powers-That-Be!

Apart from training to open my As and turn my Is into Es, last night was spent very similarly to how I imagined it yesterday. Which is a hell of an accomplishment, because I feel I'm at that level of stress that gets disruptive to my entire being. I'm sure most of you can relate; particularly the air-traffic controllers in my vasty readership. I'm talking in my sleep, getting awoken by cramps, having trouble focusing on one thing for an extended period and generally losing my place all over. It's silly, I know. I'm working on it, but in the meantime, I managed to rig my props and cobble a costume together and dub my sound effects and music last night instead of running around my general neighborhood, clucking like a chicken and clawing at litter with my sneakers. I didn't run the piece at all, and it wasn't until this morning that I played with my new props a bit, but there truly wasn't time.

A lot of this stress has been self-generated. Yes, it's a last-minute, original performance, but it's also all of ten minutes long and I've no idea who will actually see it -- likely no one who will have an immediate and profound effect on my creative and professional life. Plus I do exactly this kind of work ALL the TIME. Some could handle this with greater panache, and some wouldn't even feel stressed at all. Not THIS guy, though. (sigh...) Without getting self-aggrandizing, some of it has to do with how important the work is to me. Without getting self-deprecating, some of it has to do with a finely honed sense of insecurity. Add a dash of general excitement at being allowed to make stuff up and show it to people, and you've got a giddy stress souffle just ripe for voracious consumption!

A lot is waiting on today's pre-show tech time and run. It had to. There was just little way for me to work things out without the space itself and all its quirky accoutrement. So this afternoon will tell the tale, and adjustments will likely be numerous and made as I go. I think I might even be able to relax into it a bit, if I try hard enough. Er, uh: if I don't try hard . . . enough. Wait. Oh, to hell with it. A relaxed person, I am not. But I do enjoy good, hard work, and I've plenty of that to do, which is always better than just waiting for curtain.

Of course, the end of the tale isn't until the fall of that curtain...

The Rest is Silence

Aw crap; aw balls; aw crappy balls.

Sorry. That's a bit more graphic than I had intended.

I am up to my eyeballs in stress, and it's all of my doing. This weekend I'm performing as a part of Six Figures' Artists of Tomorrow festival, and I'm performing solo work, and I have no idea what I'm going to do. None, as of this moment. I said "yes" to this last-minute opportunity because I want to be working, and because Friend Melissa coerced me. Yes: I was coerced. She specifically mentioned my silent-film work, and she knew that it would entice me, and so it's her fault that I'm a concentrated ball of uncertain stress right now.

Not really, though.

I've scheduled some time to work in a rehearsal space tonight, for about three hours. We'll see what comes of it.

That's it. No, really: That's it. More to follow.

Open Up

So.

On Wednesday last (Odin's-day, oddly enough), while I was guest teaching in a high school, the school went into what was referred to as a "lock down." It was the start of second period, and the gym had just about acquired all of its students for the period when an announcement came over the loudspeaker. At least, that's what I'm told happened. I heard about it from the gym teachers, as the school-wide announcements do not penetrate the gymnasium itself, and I heard it whilst basing Friend Heather in a thigh stand for a photograph. We held until the photograph was taken, as a "lock down" doesn't particularly mean anything to us. After we got down, we asked what it meant, and were instructed that I had to go into the boys' locker room, Heather into the girls'. Okay, thought I, I'm not about to hang in the locker room; I'll go into the teacher's office.

And I did. And I wondered if I should lock the door (I understand language! [So long as it's English!]). It's a tiny office, and no one else was in there, though I could hear the raised voices of the boys in the adjacent locker room. Just as I was contemplating joining them, the male gym teacher for that period entered from there. He said a few noncommittal things to me about it being an eventful day, then turned back around and yelled at the boys to shut up, admonishing them for thinking everything's a joke, until all was silence. Then he turned back to me as if he'd barely interrupted himself and explained the situation a little better in a subdued tone. I felt bad, hearing him talk to me after he'd been so aggressive about the boys' silence, but I was also gradually coming to appreciate the motivations behind his severity.

In 1999, just a couple of months before I would graduate from college, two young men executed a plan to take their high school hostage with a murder spree that included the use of planned explosives. The whole thing was elaborately planned out, actually, and -- notwithstanding all the death and destruction wrought that day -- it could have been much worse had the plan gone accordingly. "Columbine" is now a word with tragic and unfortunate associations, probably for the foreseeable future, here in America. It's an Anglicization of the Italian colombino, which means dove, and "Colombina/Columbine" was a character popular in both the Italian and English commedia dell'arte traditions. I don't know what came first, but pictured above is a Columbine flower. Perhaps they're named for their resemblance to a dove; they characteristically hang in a shape like a dove with its wings tucked until they blossom, but they also aren't all white. Some are a rather vivid shade of red.

The main preoccupation for the gym teacher was the fact that the door out the back of the locker room seemed to be locked and he wasn't sure if he could unlock it. His feeling was that everyone would be safer in a certain back hallway, and he set about finding the key to those doors. Eventually he found it, and we all filed out of the locker room. I trailed the group, and found myself in a narrow, dim hallway that soon bent to the left and became a landing to two flights of concrete stairs that made a sort of u-turn, where there was a second, smaller landing. At the top, where I remained, were double doors that led outside and were locked with a heavy-duty wedge bar; presumably this was part of the appeal of this room, such as it was. The students all just fit on the two flights of stairs and landings, and most sat, preparing for a long wait. From the top landing, I could see everyone but a couple of boys at the base. It was cramped once people sat, but no one thought of spreading out a bit back toward the direction from which we came. We waited.

I went to one of these mega-schools that were popular to build in the 70s -- James W. Robinson Secondary School. Robinson, as we and everyone in the area called it, was named in honor of a certain Sergeant James W. Robinson, Jr., the first Virginia resident to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Vietnam conflict. The school is massive, and it needs to be to hold the some 4,000 students day in and day out. I found its size intimidating when I first arrived (in spite of attending the almost equally massive Lake Braddock Secondary for two years), aggravating throughout my middle years there and ultimately it became a weird point of pride in my final months there and thereafter. I would never have admitted this at the time, though. I felt largely oppressed by my circumstances, due to too many factors to get into just now, not the least of which was simply a seeming inability to understand that I was going through profound changes. I turned it around just before my senior year, but up until that time I was increasingly falling into stereotype (or archetype, if you will). You know the type. I kept to myself as much as I could. I even took to wearing the ubiquitous black trenchcoat.

The students had already changed into shorts and t-shirts for their gym classes, and the stairwell was pretty chilly. By and large, they were very well-behaved. It was only natural that their whispering would occasionally escalate, and we'd remind them, or they'd remind each other, with a "shh!" The teacher explained to me, as I tried to look responsive without actually making any sound (I wanted to avoid any hypocrisy, and figured that lacking any rapport I ought to lead by example), that they ran drills in lock-down procedure frequently -- too frequently, he felt. It made the students take it less seriously than they ought. Then again, this particular time could be a case of an aggravated parent on campus, or perhaps a building search for contraband. He didn't name the other possibility. He didn't have to. He went on to explain that they didn't hear all the announcements in the gym, certainly not in the stairwell. So, periodically he would call his fellow gym teachers on his cell phone to see what they knew. He even called someone at the elementary school (a separate building). No one had any information for him. We shushed the students again, and he told them all to just relax.

I've been pretty quiet in my 300+ entries to date on the subject of September 11, 2001, but that's not because I'm at all removed from the experience. On bad days, I'm avoiding it; on good days, I'm rising above and moving on. Both explanations are to say that it was the kind of event that one never quite epitomises in description. You had to be there, as the old comic excuse goes. What I can say about that day, for myself, is that it has a lasting and highly personal effect on me. It's a little darkly humorous for me, these people who advertise "Never forget." The memory of it lives at the back of my head like a patient worker, occasionally pressing his button or pulling his lever. I was rather alone that day: new guy at a temp job in Rockefeller Center, the phones mostly didn't work, giving me only the briefest opportunities to touch base with my girlfriend in Brooklyn, I was trapped for hours in Manhattan, picking up news from car radios and strangers' conversation. Eventually I found my way to the apartment of the only person I knew at the time who lived on the island. He wasn't really a friend of mine, but of my girlfriend's, and his place was packed with strangers watching the news. Sitting silent on a stool there, I worried about my dad in D.C., and relived the surreal morning, with its evacuation from the 50s down the twisting, disused fire stairwell of 30 Rockefeller Center. It seemed like we'd never get to the bottom.

When the bell for change of classes rang, no one needed to be shushed. It seemed to remind everyone that time was passing, and the longer we had to wait, the more likely it seemed that whatever motivated our lock-down was a dire circumstance. Minutes after the bell rang, the whispering started up again amongst the boys. As our time in the stairwell passed the hour mark, I stretched against the railing and the cold, and some of the students began to be more aggressive in their efforts to make sense of the situation, or at least lighten the mood. Some were playing a silent game (save for occasional involuntary victory cheers) that involved flicking out digits on both hands against one another. Some asked me who exactly I was; they'd never gotten an explanation on what they were doing in class that day. Others tried to nap or discuss quietly. One young man seemed to continually take it on himself to take charge of the mood and, by and large, he was pretty good at disrupting expectation and continuity with his joking. He seemed popular with the class, in a jester kind of way. Soon, talking to no one in particular, his kidding turned to half-serious plans for what to do when someone burst in with an automatic weapon. It was on everyone's mind. You'd occasionally hear one of them add a onomatopoetic gun noise to his whispered conversation. The jester was still trying to be light, but he was scared too, and losing his audience, boys getting variously agitated into signs of despair, or aggression. So I took a gamble. "Hey, seagull," I said in a normal tone of voice (he was wearing a t-shirt with a seagull silhouette on the front), then whispered, "If you're going to plan for us, whisper it." Then I offered a wry smile, hoping he'd get me. He did, simultaneously embarrassed at being caught out and pleased with the attention and the hushed chuckles of his peers. The tension did not stay away for long before mounting again.

After about a hour and a half of nothing, we got the call that the lock-down was over, and we could return to our third-period classes. It didn't quite engender the relief you might imagine, though everyone was pleased to march out from the chilly stairwell. We all returned to the locker room and changed, then walked out into the brightly lit gym to learn what we could. The students quickly took to the halls to access their community of gossip. Heather and I soon learned that the official announcement had actually stated that classes could take place -- just in the same locked room, until further notice. None of the gym teachers heard that. I felt a little ashamed at my relief over not having had to teach an hour-and-a-half gym class, but not at my hiding with all the men. It was the only sensible course of action, given the information we had. As we watched students flow out from the doors that faced onto a windowed hallway, one of the gym teachers said, "Look at the cop car pulling away. See that dog in the seat? It must have been a drug search." We went on to teach an abbreviated third period before leaving campus for lunch, a necessary diversion. The beginning of our last class for the day, seventh period, was interrupted a few minutes in by an announcement from the principal. He congratulated everyone on a clean report for drugs, including some students themselves who had been pulled from their classrooms. In something of a tangent, he went on to admonish those older students who were violating traffic laws when driving off school property, and let them know that they could expect an increased police surveillance along the road at that hour. "But overall: good job today."

When I was in high school, I was often very angry. I was also, often, terrifically depressed. I'd have a lot of answers for you if you asked me why, and I believed in them very much. I was creating so much -- my world view, my appetites, my self -- at such a frenzied pace that it was important to me to know the things I knew. We complain a lot about teenagers' personalities, but in terms of life stages it's really where the rubber meets the road, more often than not. All that ambitious, energetic emotion for learning that children have meets all that complex, interactive consequence that adults enjoy. It's confusing even without the sea change that released hormones bring to . . . well, everything. It's exciting. It's terrifying. Particularly for those of us who've been through it already, and understand the potential for disaster, and feel responsible for them.

It's hard to write about this without offering some sweeping verdict on it all (harder still, in some respects, not to relate it back to government or religious issues). That's not what I'm writing for, though. I'd like to avoid that. Instead, I mean to do what I do with other, less traumatic events here at the Aviary. That is, write out my experience in an effort to come to some kind of better understanding about it. Opinions must enter into it: I don't agree with using a "lock down" as any sort of practical device for something other than an immediate emergency. To wit, I disagree with using it to facilitate investigation, or set an example for teenagers to let them know they stand a chance of being caught at something. Yet I appreciate its necessity for preparedness. It seems extreme, but if you read the details of the Columbine incident, it's evident that the scenario was disastrously mismanaged by the authorities. Of course it was -- it was virtually unprecedented. And if the authorities have to shape up procedurally, so ought the schools. We drill for the potential of fire, of earthquake. This is another kind of natural disaster.

But. "Natural" does not mean it is without cause. Quite the opposite, in fact. I've read the details, and I saw Elephant in the theatre, and I wore a black trenchcoat through high school, and played Doom and fantasized about all sorts of socially morbid scenarios, and I still don't presume to explain the reasons behind Klebold and Harris' actions. What I do mean is to suggest that regularly cowering in a darkened room and being forbidden to speak might, just might, be more a part of the problem than of any sort of solution. Giving a society (and what else is high school than a constantly evolving society?) a little information and then turning their ignorance back on them as a kind of preemptive punishment, that's frustrating. In fact, revolutions have been begun for less. Unfortunately, most teenagers aren't yet capable of revolution, of the organization and long-view perspective required to make a social change. What they are capable of is making louder, more extreme choices until someone hears them. Hell: Most of my so-called choices in high school, in retrospect, were little more than reactions. Teenagers are exceptional at reacting, and we discount that ability at our, and their, risk.

Let people talk. Listen. Please.

Friendly Neighborhood

I am straight-up terrified of musical-theatre auditions. If you gave me a choice between publicly humiliating myself in some way, or standing in a room with one other person and singing for them, I'd go with the former, nine-out-of-ten. I don't know why. I can sing. I'm not trained, but I have a natural ear and a strong, albeit somewhat limited, baritone voice. I even enjoy singing. There's just something to be overcome in my psyche when it comes to singing for an audience; particularly an audience of one. I often claim to be something less than a fan of musical theatre, and it's true for the most part. I usually find the idiom a bit too coy for my tastes and, though I'm not great fan of opera, either, prefer musical theatre that's raw, and passionate, and in which the characters are more often struggling than they are bursting with rapturous joy. The fact of the matter is, I'd love to be in a "good musical" (read: one that adheres to my personal criteria). So my policy when it comes to auditioning for musicals is, and has been since I was eleven years old, not to. I have a couple on my resume from summer stock gigs that required a full season from me, and that's about it.

A little over a week ago, a friend of mine who is in no way connected to my theatre life these days shared an item on his Google Reader account about the holding of an open call for the upcoming Spider-Man musical. Specifically, the call was to troll for actors to play Mary Jane, a high school principal character and Mr. Peter Parker. I've known about this musical for a while, marvelling at its seemingly disparate elements: Spider-Man, Broadway, Bono and The Edge doing the music and Julie Taymor directing. I was surprised to hear of open calls, because I knew it had been in development for some time now. A guy who was working with them to develop rigging looked at subletting my old apartment back in the fall. I understood rehearsals had begun July 2. And an open call? Madness. If it were just for Peter, you could chalk it up to a stunt or a Superman-The-Movie priority for a fresh face. But for Mary Jane and an anonymous adult character? Madness.

It stuck in my head. I suppose, in some ways, I had been thinking about this show with some curiosity ever since I first heard of it. When I imagine a Spider-Man musical involving aerial rigging and directed by Mz. Taymor (who is famous for, amongst other things, the Broadway production of The Lion King with all its puppetry and stilt-giraffes) I picture some wild, fairly circus-y stuff. But come on, I thought, too. It's a huge, big-budget production. It must be pre-cast within an inch of its life. It was probably cast in large part from the moment of its initial conception. So when I heard of an open call, it must have opened up that little well-spring of hope in me for a huge, circus-y, comicbook musical. Because I proceeded to do something very, very stupid. I talked to everyone about it. I even claimed to be planning on going. Because...why not? Hey: It's just talk. I can not go. They'll be staying away in hordes, the rest of my peers. It sounds terrible. Open call? Who does that anymore? And hey, here's a list of reasons I'm all wrong for Peter Parker:

1. Too old. They extended the casting age into the "20's" (sic; somebody get a proofreader into that casting office), but come on now. Would I really be fresh-faced enough for the sweetest dork in the Marvel universe?



2. Not pretty enough. Well, this is Broadway. You should see some of these magnificent bastards.



3. Can't sing. Yes so I can sing. It's just that I don't. Ever. Upon threat of injury, even.



4. Doesn't know what he's doing. In some things, sure. In a musical? It's like any other specialized field. You jump right in, and the learning curve is going to be terribly steep. Nearly everybody thinks they could be an film actor. Hardly anyone says, "Hey, I know all I need to know about Broadway from watching it."



5. Can't dance. Oh I'll act the hell from a good bit of circus or fight choreography. I'll even make picking up a coin feel specific and significant. But a shuffle-ball-change? Next, please.



6. Is shaking. And...sweating; profusely. And what is that smell? So scared. So very very scared.

The alarm went off at 5:30 this morning, and I shot up like a rocket. My carefully-chosen t-shirt and my carefully-chosen slacks were donned, followed up by sneakers. It took me longer than usual to get ready, but I blamed the hour and was out the door by 7:30. When I got to Leonard Street, the line hadn't quite gotten to the end of the block. I walked to a nearby bodega, grabbed a large cup of coffee, and took my place at the end of the line. It was a matter of seconds before more people joined the line behind me, and very soon the line snaked back around its first corner. It's been years since I stood in line for an open call, I thought. All this just to sign up for a time-slot. I looked around me, and wasn't surprised to see largely teens and early-twenty-somethings. I was surprised to see some of them be over six feet tall, or rather robust, or whatever other features you wouldn't expect to see on your Peter Parker or your Mary Jane. I did see some older women in line, which was a comfort, until I remembered the high-school principal role was described as older.

Crossword puzzles make for great distraction from an open call wait line, I find. I had a good book and four New York magazine crosswords to keep me from obsessing. It was hard, though, to block out the energy around me. And probably wrong, as far as choices go. Better to absorb and reflect energy than block it, in just about any situation. Maybe it was my nervousness (I doubt but that it was the main), but I was immediately turned off by the conversation around me. Directly in front of me in line was a group of three uber-musical-theatre types and they, like, were clearly very excited to be, like, there and yet somehow, like, better than a lot of the like, people there. They yammered non-stop, alternating between musical-theatre topics and gossiping, and they knew every third person who walked by, and greeted them with a stock phrase: "Oh my God!" Directly in front of them was a sixteen-year-old girl whose father had driven her in from New Jersey for the day. She sat patiently, quietly, in line while he called in regularly to tell her what he had gotten into exploring Chinatown. Behind me, a woman (one of the elder) promptly started making business calls on her Blackberry at 9:00, checking on leases and contracts and spreading little white lies about where she actually was. I tried to block it out, lose time (and thereby anxiety) and remember the damn name of the damn dog in the damn The Thin Man movies. "Asta," by the way.

I soon had reason to be grateful for my surrounding musical-theatre enthusiasts. Their support network had someone ahead in the line, who informed them via cell phone that the auditions would actually be acapella. This was very useful information, as I learned 1) I could stop sweating that the sheet music I had brought would sound as I thought it ought, and 2) I now knew the line wasn't going to just sign up for time slots. They were moving us through FAST. We'd get the name sheet, put down our information, then get ushered in pronto. It was around 10:00 when I got the vicarious news. At approximately 11:15 I was in a tiny room, taking my first breath.

The auditions were being held at The Knitting Factory, a downtown music venue I had visited once before for a reading and concert by Friend Nat. It's a dark and intricate space, with many rooms on different levels and a very rock-n-roll vibe. We were brought inside in a group of about ten, and taken downstairs. On our way we heard singing in various rooms, and passed lines of people waiting to enter one room or another to give up their sixteen bars of enticing magic. They were auditioning in no less than four rooms, simultaneously, and possibly many more. The room I was brought into to wait in line actually had people auditioning at one end, in the open. I was terrified that I was seeing where I would have to audition, in front of everyone. It took me a couple of nerve-steeling minutes to realize that, no, in fact we were in line for a teeny-tiny room with a door. I could hear the people audition on the other side, but it looked private, and the voices were somewhat muffled. Mine would be most of all, because I can't belt like the others waiting for their shot at spandex. Finally, my turn came and I stepped inside with no introduction.

The room was literally about 5x7 feet, and seated in it at a desk was a very pleasant looking woman of nondescript age. "Jeff?" "Yes." "Please step down (there was a lower section in all that space, somehow) and begin." So I stepped down, took a nice, deep breath, and began my pop selection: The theme song from The Greatest American Hero.

Should my choice of song have been reason number 7 that I'm totally wrong for the part, not to mention the entire environment? Perhaps, and perhaps not. Probably. Let me tell you how it went: Awfully. I could look on the bright side, and say it could have gone much worse. It could have. There was a very definite danger of my losing the lyrics in my panic, of my throat drying out completely in the final moments before entering, of hitting all the wrong notes in my adrenaline-fueled state, of my crashing into the door on my way out. None of these things happened, and I feel very fortunate in this regard. In some ways, even accomplished. But I was dreadfully frightened, and moved too quickly, too tensely, and my voice vibrato-ed almost into sharp-toned errors, and in no way did I act the song, I was so nervous. It didn't get a laugh, as was half my hope, either because I was too nervous or my proctor was too busy or a little of both. In a word, it was bad. A bad audition.

I am so proud to have done it. I spend so much time subconsciously defending my professionalism and experience, trying to prove myself a wise investment, an asset, to other people. At 31, I am tired of unfulfilling work, and find myself re-evaluating my choices in almost every pursuit. My life, in unexpected ways, is becoming about taking risks once again, just when it maybe ought to be simmering down to a more-settled form. It was absurd of me to go to the Spider-Man audition for numerous sensible reasons, a waste of time and effort from the perspective of supposed "adult priorities." And I rationalized it in any number of ways, to myself and others. I just want to get my circus-y resume in the door. I thought it'd be funny. I have to find out more about this show. I know it'll make for a good story. But the fact of the matter is, the real reason I subjected myself to it is, I think, that when I was very young indeed, that theme song was my favorite song in the world, and I had all the lyrics memorized. And sometimes, when I feel really good, I feel like I could fly, and when I have the means at hand it drives me to climb things and jump from tall places. Hope is a thing with wings, someone with far less opportunities than I have once wrote. I think sometimes it's the best thing one can do for oneself, to just go ahead and believe, and dream big, because...what the hell? It feels good. And who knows where it might lead?

Believe it or not, I'm walking on air,

I never thought I could feel so free!

Flying away on a wing and a prayer,

Who could it be?

Believe it or not, it's just me.

Murderous Clowns

In honor of MY NOT BEING ABLE TO SEE THE DARK KNIGHT FOR DAYS AND DAYS, I thought I'd finally get around to writing the sequel (heh heh) to this little gem of an entry. I wasn't sure if I'd ever write about this. It's a difficult entry to justify in the ethos of the Aviary (because I've been so dedicated to my mission statement to date) except perhaps to say that: 1 - my doing clown work makes for a very real interest in the sociological implications of any clown identity; B - my early cultural influences have untold ramifications on what I choose to create today; and * - it's BATMAN weekend, people! And I've got to be a part of it!

Really though, it's Joker week. That's the big excitement over the movie and, I'd wager, would be even if it were not for Heath's untimely exit from the stage. The Joker is almost as iconic a character as Batman himself, and certainly as graphic and emblematic a villain as has ever risen from popular media. He may even indicate that a pervasive fear of clowns has been around a lot longer than some of the current media we have to propagate it. Before The Dark Knight, or Batman, or Killer Klowns from Outer Space, or It, or John Wayne Gacy, Jr., or the original appearance of the Joker in Batman #1. Maybe it's always been around, pre-Punch. Maybe the fear was first, and the laughter second. That's certainly in keeping with my general theory of humor. [Laughter = self awareness * inevitability, squared.] And for those of you who consider the Joker a relatively trivial source of terror, consider this, too: In his first dozen appearances in the comics, he averaged about three murders per issue.

In my deep, unending and intricate research into coulrophobia (sp?) I have discovered some amazing things. Unfortunately, I can not share these things with you, because they are far too intricate, deep and, uh, unending, to . . .. Okay. I haven't exactly been to the library yet. But I've spoken with people about it, and I'm amazed by how few people know who John Wayne Gacy, Jr., was. (He was executed in 1994; one less clown to deal with, coulrophobes.) I thought he was sort of a household name, right up there with Dahmer and Manson, but I only spoke to one or two people who even had an inkling of who he was. Well, he was a seemingly pedophilic mass-murderer with a penchant for imprisonment and grisly dismemberment, who apparently can't even properly be classified as a psychopath. He also enjoyed moonlighting as a birthday clown. Pogo the clown.

So it's difficult to discount coulrophobia as absurd or irrelevant. It could even be a pretty basic survival instinct, as some have suggested. Some of the most ancient human rites involve masks and grinning figures that don't necessarily mean us well. The Joker's white face may as well be the clay pasted to an aboriginal witch-doctor, or the bleached skull an African shaman paints on his face. And death is absurd, too. Well, it seems absurd to the living, anyway. Living is to some extent based on ignoring the fact that we're going to die. This is such a prevalent philosophy that those who embrace death, or even simply associate themselves with it, are seen as somehow mystic or insane. The skull of a deceased comedian grins back at Hamlet's philosophizing, and when anyone grins, they expose the teeth -- the only "bones" directly visible on a living human body.

The Joker makes a great villain for Batman, and the two sum up a very basic human struggle pretty succinctly, so I have to forgive this perpetuation of the coulrophobic phenomenon. Batman is serious, and the events of his life have meaning -- he's a believer. Hell: His whole "superpower" is a character trait, that of determination. And Joker, well, he stands in absolute contrast to that. My favorite characterizations of him never allow him a moment to regret even his own failure. For him, it is all absurd, all pointless. He's not appetite-driven or suppressed, like Gacy, nor a traumatized child who is endlessly acting out his worst fantasies and fears. The story has no significance to the conclusion because, at the end, all our stories end the exact, same, way. If only he could convince Batman of that, maybe then he'd be able to rest. If only the Yorick had survived into Hamlet's story, maybe he could have made everyone see the folly of their ways.

So how do you tell the difference between the jester, who just wants to make fools of us all, and the joker, who wants to make us all corpses? Well, sadly, you can't. That's part of the dread of comedy, and the thrill of death. You just have to take your chances.

Shopping Out Our Work

Yesterday I ventured out to Pennsylvania to once again teach a workshop with Friend Heather under the auspices of Zuppa del Giorno, our contemporary commedia dell'arte troupe. The workshop took place on Marywood University's campus, and was about five hours long. All of this is exceedingly normal. From our first production, Zuppa del Giorno has been teaching more and more workshops, either as educational appendages to our shows or as independent entities that spread the word of us and hopefully bring in more students, not to mention occasional income. Marywood University is gradually becoming a regular collaborator with The Northeast Theatre (last fall we worked with their theatre department to create Prohibitive Standards), and I have just about learned the routes between New York City and Scranton so well I could probably walk them if I had to (and gas prices being what they are...). This venture, however, had a distinctive element. It represented our first foray into the world of "corporate training."

Several of my friends work for companies that shop actors out into the corporate world to lead seminars in communication and team-building. Some time ago, it became apparent to we lunatics at Zuppa that this was an occupation well within our reach. We have over the past several years taught amazing things to people, I modestly confess. We usually come out of such sessions impressed with how well they went, and what everyone learned not only to do, but about themselves. That learning includes us, I'm hasty to add. Every time I try to teach new people how to execute a reasonable thigh-stand, I learn something new. Crazy? Sure. Crazy gets the job done really well in my little world.

Friend Heather has been particularly interested in getting the Zuppa del Giorno corporate education arm out there and swinging for the fences ever since she picked up and moved to Scranton. By and large, that move has been a good one for her. She's doing more acting work than ever since, and good work at that, and she's finding for herself a particular sense of community that those of us here in New York view with a certain envious uncertainty. ("That seems so great, that kind of intimate society; yet, where would I hide?") Hell: The Northeast Theatre is even ushering in a new era by becoming more of an ensemble company, of which Heather is a member, heralded with a name change and everything. More of that ahead. In the meantime, Heather still owes to Caesar what is owed to Caesar, and her desire is to be paid in full without the addition of another mind-numbing day job. Hence her particular enthusiasm for getting "Corporate Zuppa" to hit a homer.

Now, Thursday wasn't exactly our official corporate debut. In fact, it was a sort of paid audition for the Marywood staff who handle events and marketing, to see if they'd be interested in sort of advertising such workshops as part of what they can offer to private interests. Like most universities these days, every summer Marywood hosts conferences and such to keep up the rent payments and stay active in the commercial community. Our being a part of that would certainly provide a lot of opportunities we might not otherwise have. So we had ourselves a sort of dry run for adapting our skills (audiences only like theatre troupes with skills) to the "corporate" milieu.

It was, um.... It was okay. I think, by the end, everyone had enjoyed themselves at least a little bit. We definitely got a lot of helpful feedback, both from the experience itself and from discussion with the dozen-or-so participants afterward. It was a bit jarring, I must admit, to discover myself teaching a class of people who were required to be there. I mean to say, although we've taught high school classes under similar circumstances, this was a rather new domain. The bosses of the two departments required their employees to attend, and not all of them were happy to be there. In fact, the anxiety was increased by their ignorance of what exactly we were going to be subjecting them to. I was surprised, about two-thirds of the way through the initial warm-up, when I tried to help someone figure out a stretch we were doing. We were stretching our hips and glutes, and she had turned her torso the wrong way from her knees. I informed her she should twist the other way and, misreading me, she prepared to unfold her legs and turn everything in reverse. Realizing my miscommunication, I stood up from across the circle and said, "Oh, no--" preparing to demonstrate just for her. When she saw me coming, though, she immediately went on the defensive, saying, "It's me, I get confused, no, don't touch me!" I stopped in my tracks. "It's okay. I'm not going to touch you. It's okay."

But it threw me. I'm not going to lie to you. What I should have done was take a moment to acknowledge feeling affronted, and then move on both internally and externally. I did okay. I acknowledged she was scared, saying, "It's okay, I'm not going to touch you," and backed away. What I failed to do, however, was either find an alternate way to engage her or to put the rest of the class at ease after that kind of confrontation. I was surprised, to be sure, and it would be easy to chalk up my failure to simple shock over suddenly being confronted. But it was more than that. I took it personally, somehow. I reeled back, at least internally, and Heather took over for a moment or two. It made sense that the woman would respond the way she did. How often does the average person find themselves seated in an uncomfortable, confusing position on the floor while someone standing comes at them? I understood this logically; emotionally, I was offended. I didn't feel I could help it. It's a terrible feeling, that you and your work are unwelcome, and I never get used to it, and actors confront exactly this situation on a daily basis.

As I say, the day resolved itself, and everyone got involved. There was even a sort of blossoming from that particular woman as the course moved on. She went from flicking off her boss (totally permissible given the exercise we were doing) and exclaiming her hatred of having to be there to being one of the more engaged and entertained people overall. I can't take any credit at all for that evolution, and we were assisted by the fact that these people all generally had a rapport prior to the workshop. (I quiver at the thought of working with a group of people who are strangers to one another.) The work, however, does its work, and Heather and I can at least take a little credit for creating the most nurturing environment imaginable for risk-taking (short of installing emotion-sensitive airbags throughout the room [which, frankly, would be hilarious--you could distinguish the moment anyone started to feel insecure in themselves because they'd be immediately engulfed in pillowing]).

We're finding our balance. The course is predominantly aimed at using improvisation exercises to teach communication skills, but we reference acrobalance a bit (I'd like more, but can't quite figure how to do that without excluding injured or more corpulent folks) and are trying to develop ways to communicate the unique collaborative techniques we use in creating shows together. I'd like, frankly, to shift the focus off of improvisation, because I feel it's the least unique training we have to offer and that our enthusiasm lies elsewhere. (Plus improv's got a certain stigma built-in, thanks to its widespread use in such venues and the popularity of The Office [US].) I enjoy improvisation, so maybe it's just a way of incorporating it in a new way. Several times during the teaching I thought of the tremendous success of the Jeepform game The Upgrade that I played at Camp Nerdly 2. Some of the overt game theory applied in that particular improvisation may be a good model for easing people out of their fears and trepidations. Then again, that was another case of having all willing participants.

I'm remaining positive ("yes, and..."), but in so doing avoiding a strong reaction I had to the experience. There was something in that refusal, that fear reaction from the participant, that made me feel a complex wave of negativity. Verbalized that response would, compressed within less than a second, sound something like this, "Okay, I won't touch you! Hey, guess what? There's stuff I'd rather be doing too, but I've come here in spite of my fears and in the hopes of creating something together. I can tell that's unwelcome, and that pisses me off royal. I get enough of that in auditions. In fact, next time you want an actor to lay off, try 'thank you...'. Just like that: 'THANK you...'. Every actor will immediately understand that you aren't buyin' what they're sellin', and get the hell out of there just as fast as he or she can. In fact, maybe I'll do that altogether. No one wants a live experience, no one wants to connect, no one wants a leading man who can't bench press the state of North Dakota. So I'll just go, all right? Will that make your life so much better? Will that make it so much easier? MY. PLEASURE."

I'm glad I didn't go there at the moment it happened, but I'm also glad I went there just now. I'm not looking forward to our next go at corporate training (this feeling always reminds me of my private trombone lessons in high school, which I regarded with inevitable terror), but I'm aware that it's simply a challenge to be overcome step-by-step. I do like challenges. I just don't like when people think they have something to gain by avoiding them.

So Low

Last night was my solo clown debut.

Well, not precisely. I have done a number of solo clown performances in my time. Last night merely marked the first time I did so on an actual stage. Up until this event, my solo clowning was largely busked and/or filmic. In fact, I volunteered for the festival hosting clown and puppet events because I wanted to have a good deadline for adapting this particular solo routine to a stage. Plus I was desperate for work, at the time. Naturally, I completely ignored this opportunity to work on the piece, and found myself panicky all day yesterday, contemplating exactly what I was going to do up there that night.

It went okay, rife with the peaks and valleys I might have expected from a debut work in a nurturing yet unexpectedly intimate environment of strangers. I didn't, of course, expect these variances in my experience. No, I find that when contemplating performance I'm usually surprised by the comparisons between my expectations and the experience. I expect complete victory or total failure; the median is difficult to imagine, the variable completely confounding. This is possibly because the more intense the stage fright or adrenaline, the more apt I am to think in absolutes. Or, it could be that the (utterly erroneous) stereotypical mentality of a struggling actor has infected my imagination deeper than I, er, imagined. In other words, the idea that just one big hit could change everything for me may contribute to the absolutes I contemplate. Either way, the product was, in some respect, just like every other. Some things went over great. Others, not so much.

I have yet to attempt any kind of monodrama, or extended solo performance as such. Outside of a few scattered soliloquies, I'm always acting with other performers. Last night I found a popular axiom to be doubly true and especially so for live silent comedy: When you lose the audience, there's no one to turn to but yourself.

Not so backstage. The worlds of circus, clown and other "gig acts" is a small one anywhere, I'd imagine. That goes double for New York, where you're just as likely to run into your babysitter from age 5 as you are to never see current friends who live just two neighborhoods over. I happened to get ensnared in this show's clutches through an email sent out by one Ms. Jenny Lee Mitchell requesting acts. I know Jenny through Friend Dave (Berent [nee Gochfeld]), whom I know through Friend Heather (whom I know from having worked with her in Zuppa del Giorno), but I also knew Dave as the more male half of The Kourageous Kiplingers, and vaudeville act he did with Friend Rachel (Kramer). Dave and Jenny have also done shows with The Northeast Theatre (which is the home of Zuppa del Giorno). I did one of those with Dave, but not Jenny. BUT, I did do A Lie of the Mind with Jenny's mom, Emily Mitchell, long before I ever met Jenny herself. And finally, who was MCing last night, but the very same clown act, Bambouk, that was recently recommended to me by the good and fine people at Bond Street Theatre, whom I met through working with Cirque Boom (which is also where I met Rachel).

It would seem, after this assault of name-dropping and six-degrees-of-network-makin', that I had all the world backing me up as I prepared for my show. Didn't feel that way, though. Felt very, very alone. Each performers was doing his or her own thing, for the most part, and I was in an advanced state of freak-out. It reminded me of the intense stage fright I felt just before the first show of Noble Aspirations, Zuppa's first production. I stood backstage, the first to enter for that show, and suddenly realized, "I have no script. I HAVE NO SCRIPT! It's just ME out there!" I did all I could to dispel it, and I actually owe a debt of gratitude to one half of Bambouk, Brian Foley, who stood in front of me and asked, "So, could you use some distracting conversation, or are you better staying in the zone?" Thankfully I had the presence of mind to opt for conversation, and it made for smoother passage into the time spent along backstage.

The trouble in adapting the piece to the stage was in taking some of the fun of its original venue(s) -- places where people are relaxing and not necessarily expecting spontaneous fun -- and translating that into a stage setting, with an audience that had no choice but to pay attention. This is a powerfully appealing aspect: choice. It may go a long way toward explaining the historically recent success of cinema over live theatre, in fact. Theatre, in the conventional sense, is a gamble. A movie costs little (comparatively speaking) and can be voluntarily escaped in any of its forms. Walking into a theatre, you know very little about what to expect, and can get subjected to something confusing, unappealing, or just plain ill-executed. And there seems to be no escape. The space I was performing in last night had the advantage of being intimate, with very little audience/performer separation, but that was just about its only similarity to the piazzas I was used to doing the piece in.

What I did to adapt it was very much shaped by having to create an entrance. In the square, you just start acting doofy and see what grabs people, then mold your performance based on feedback and a skeleton. In the theatre, you need to put them at ease, to apply balm to their sense of disorientation at the beginning of any new piece. In public, you grab them, and they tell you where to go next. In the theatre, you have their attention, and then you have to justify it. (Speaking in generalities here, of course; much overlap between the venues.) Needing to create an entrance helped shape my given circumstances. Whereas previously the act was based on the idea of the character as a quasi-homeless, drunk reveler who interrupts a party, last night's incarnation was an awkward fellow escaping a party into the kitchen. This allowed for a less invasive characterization at first, and my hope was to put the audience a bit more at ease. Also, whereas previous incarnations took place amongst relaxed (often inebriated) party-goers, this crowd, at a relatively early show in a theatre, seemed to me more likely to be at the energy of such kitchen-clingers. It also allowed for my using a song I have longed longed to use in a show; it closed with the irascibly awkward "You'll Always Find Me In the Kitchen at Parties," by Jona Lewie.

And it worked fairly well. I would say, all factors considered, I had the audience pretty well on my side throughout. They did best with bits in which I suffered and they weren't threatened. (This would seem natural enough, save for experiences I've had in which the only way you could begin to entertain certain audiences was to mix things up with them.) Keeping things simple, singular, and taking one's time is essential in clown work. The piece suffered the most at times when I got carried away with my energy, racing the audience and only pouring on more fuel if I felt myself losing them.

The scenario is that Lloyd Schlemiel (my noseless [or silent-filmic] clown character) is trying to quietly escape a party. He backs into the kitchen, all the while munching on Cheetos(R) from an orange bowl. Once he's cleared the doorway, he closes it, and the sounds of the party fade out. He breathes a sigh of relief, and raises another Cheeto to his mouth when he suddenly notices the audience. The Cheeto snaps in his hand. He races for the door again, but is too scared to return to the party, so turns to the audience and makes due. From there it proceeds along fairly typical Lecoq lines, with dabblings of silent-film comics thrown in here and there. He adjusts his clothing, thinking the audience will better approve of him. He decides he doesn't like his hat, and trades it for the "bowl" he was snacking from, which proves to be a mistake. The rest of the sequence involves his trying to escape this hat, which just won't leave him be. He tosses it away, and it returns to him. It clings to his head, despite acrobatic endeavors to remove it, and obscures his vision. He finally frees himself from it, but it's changed him into an extrovert. He performs a striptease (only down to undies, mind), puts the hat back on and rejoins the party.

It needs work, even in verbal explanation, but the performance was a tremendous jump forward for me in making discoveries about it. My hope is to break it out in Italy a bit, and play with it there. We can only pray that they sell Cheetos there. Hell: They end in an "o." They probably are Italian.

The Vasty Deep

I grew up around Washington, D.C., so the first time I went to a museum in New York and was asked for $15 "suggested" admission, I did a double take. I wondered if I had wandered into some incredibly large Imax movie theatre instead of the MoMA. The students around the D.C. area are quite accustomed to all their field trips taking them to some place in or around the Smithsonian Institute. We hear of touring factories or a post office on such trips, and think, "Why would you go somewhere like that, when you could have dinosaurs instead?" I took it for granted. I also took it for granted that, at some point, at least one field trip per year would terrify me beyond my endurance.

I had many powerful, irrational fears when I was young. I feared standing near tall buildings, or under high ceilings, homeless people, alternately cats and dogs, etc. I've gotten past all of those, even going as far with most of them as to learn to love them, in their various ways. I retain, however, my fear of large sea creatures. Even fictional ones. It makes me pretty jumpy even to think of them enough to write the words. Suffice it to say, when you see me having to act fearful on stage, I may just be resorting to a little sense-memory indulgence.

As one enters the National Museum of Natural History, you are immediately confronted by an impressive rotunda and a stuffed elephant smack dab in the middle. That was all well and good, once I got over my fear of being under high ceilings, but to one's left upon entering was a room in which I'm still not entirely comfortable. It contains a giant model of a Blue Whale suspended from the ceiling in such a way as to greet you upon your entrance with its face. The lighting, too, is especially dim and moves in lazy waves, simulating the effect of being deep underwater. If I'm remembering correctly, they even have whale-song playing in there. Relaxing, no?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! [Man runs screaming from own memories...]

I don't know quite why this manner of thing is frightening to me. The model Blue Whale in the New York museum doesn't scare me quite so badly. It's suspended in a much larger room, with generally brighter lighting. But if I go to the far left corner, to see the diorama of a fight between a Giant Squid and a whale, I get panicky again. That's a much darker scene, and I'm reminded of Natalie Wood's fear of "dark water." I think the dark-water part is key in my anxiety, but certainly there are plenty of creatures to augment anxiety into outright dread.

Case in point: Not only are there Giant Squid out there, menacing the depths, but apparently now there are also Colossal Squid. It's like the giants of the sea are victims of an escalating Japanese advertising campaign. I next expect to hear about the Super-Amazing-Healthiest-Truly-Enormous Squid. Not only is the Colossal Squid scary in its bigness, its suckers have rotating claws within, it has the largest eyes of anything we know of ever, and a freaking "conveyor-belt-like tongue," with teeth jutting from it. If there is a more literal killing machine, would it please step forward now and politely go extinct immediately?

Finally, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I fear fictional animals of the deep. It's true. The supposed Loch Ness creature scares the bejeezus out of me. All I have to do is imagine seeing such a thing in the water, and I am immediately fearful for my life. Do I feel this way when I see a tiger, or someone I think is a gang member? No. Imagine a plesiosaur surprising me from out of a lake, though, and I lose all feeling in my knees.

Why? What does it all mean? Who can ultimately say? I don't really buy into past-life explanations. Reincarnation be what it may, I find it romantic to a fault to presume that "memories" from past lives could exert a strong influence on the present. Repressed memories are another somewhat romantic explanation, in my opinion (though certainly more arguable than centuries-old personal habits). I'm more inclined to explain these things in two ways: in evolutionary terms and psychological theory. From my point of view, most emotions can be pretty directly linked to instinct, particularly survival instinct. Self-awareness brought us to a more detailed evaluation of our inner experiences, and so words like anger and irritation came to replace "that feeling of badly needing to kill something," and the word "hunger" took on multiple duties, applied to all sorts of things unrelated to food. From this perspective, it's natural for me to fear large, unpredictable forces in a dark environment; an environment in which, incidentally, I am not overly capable. Rather a weak swimmer here, actually. But that's a chicken/egg/chicken thing if ever there were one. Am I a'feared of deep water because I don't swim well, or do I not swim well because I'm so a'feared of deep water?

Ultimately, from the more psychological perspective, the connections are pretty explicit. I'm a meticulous sort at heart, someone who needs to understand everything he can and savors spontaneity only so long as it doesn't surprise him too much. Is there anything more surprising than discovering an alien creature right next to you, where one never was before? That's the effect of dark water -- nothing can be seen coming until it's already close, and it can come from literally any direction. The Y axis enters the picture in a big way underwater. Of course, what's most interesting to me about this fear is that the terror is not contained in the creature, be it whale, squid or Dread Cthulhu. The creature involved only actualizes the terror, forcing me to acknowledge it. No, the persistent, inescapable fear, the real psychological consideration, is me, in that deep, dark water, waiting. And given that environment, that solitude, who's to say what I even am to myself? Who am I, that alone? Identity is lost so completely, even crying out may do no good to remind me that I am still there.

These waters deep enough for you? Watch out for the Colossal Squid.

Meat Growth

Now if that title doesn't earn me pornographic status in the various 'blog rating systems, I don't know what will. Right-wingers beware -- I use ambiguities in our God-given language to my advantage. Now:

I am not one who condones senseless paranoia inspired by emerging technologies and based in pulp fiction, but this is going to turn us all into zombies. You can see that, right? Even without the abstractly disturbing visual attached to the article, the facts read like the prologue to a dreadful zombie film.

The world thought it had reached equipoise at last -- genetically engineered food sources eliminated hunger, and peace began to evolve from a dream into a standard of living. No one could see anything wrong with the technology . . . until one day, the horrible latent virus in the meat that gradually atrophied the reason center of the human brain reached a critical mass. Panic swept the globe, surviving only as long as most of the population maintained its reason. Soon, however, all that was left of humanity was an awful conglomerate of vicious, shambling undead, feeding on all the live, un-vat-grown flesh they could find.

Or so it seemed. Subversively, on a small island in the North Sea, a group of passionate vegetarians lived and planned an uprising. They had never accepted the practice of consuming meat, despite the supposed lack of cruelty to animals in consuming Vat Meat(TM). Now this pack of loners must gather its disparate groups from around the world and, much like the virus that seemed heaven-sent to destroy the meat eaters, come to life and destroy the new race of cannibals. They may be relatively weak and rather anemic, and they'll have to overcome some certain scruples as regards mammal murder but -- by God -- they'll take the planet back.

Meat may be murder, but these zombies are nothing but vegetables . . . and the vegetarians love them some crudité.

Romero: Call me. I get 20%.

BE MORE FUNNY, CLOWN!

Friend Grey has a great story about a teacher she had at Dell'Arte. The students there had to present an original, solo clown piece at least every week, and this teacher had a habit of viewing these pieces with a bucket of tennis balls by his side. If, in his opinion, the scene was not playing up to snuff, he would begin to peg these tennis balls at the performer, all the while shouting, "NOT...FUNNY...!" This became something of an inside joke as we worked on various Zuppa del Giorno shows. That, and our favorite, gentle way of telling someone their idea sucked: "Hm. That might be a great idea for next year's show...."

Friend Adam (if I haven't completely alienated him with my response [and if my atrocious XBox playing hasn't alienated him, how could a caustic response to his opinions?]) posted a comment on my last entry regarding clowning (see 1/28/08) that suggested that clowns are not funny, and that the reason for this is that they overwhelm, and turn a cathartic fear response into more of a Godzilla!-Run-for-your-meager-lives! response. I guess my entry didn't clear up any of Adam's feelings in this matter. Or, at least, I failed to extricate the word "clown" from the American stigma for it. To me, you see, "clown" is not a fair word to use to describe the circus or birthday clown. Hell: I don't even like "circus clown," because the word "circus" means a whole lot of different things, too, once you step outside the three rings of Barnum & Bailey.

So before I continue, let me break some things down. I see the stereotypical western clown as a kind of collage of comic traditions. (Note: THIS IS NOT A SCHOLARLY TEXT. For heaven's sakes, don't cite me as any kind of authority. It's been a decade since I took any kind of history class, and I didn't start taking an interest in clowning until about five years ago.) As I stated so elegantly, and ineffectively, on the 28th, the "birthday clown" has become a kind of grotesque take on some time-worn and valid comic traditions:

• The clothing. We know the score (scare?). Baggy pants. Enormous shoes. Funny hat. Usually layered clothing (vests, jackets, skirts, etc.), and usually brightly colored. Obnoxious, some would say, but put the same shapes--perhaps slightly muted--into tweeds and patches, and you're looking at "charming." At least, that's how most people described the likes of Keaton, Chaplin and Arbuckle. You've also got a low-status character, someone who's poor, who carries all he or she owns around with him or her. Take it back to 16th century Italy, and you're looking at one of the most beloved characters in comedy: Arlecchino (see shamelessly uncredited photo above). He was famous for being one of the funniest clever-servant characters, easily identified by his costume made almost completely of patches. That costume, once the character caught on in England, became represented by a body suit decorated in numerous diamond-shaped, multi-colored patches.
• The props. For our sworn enemy, the arsenal is awfully typical: horn, bludgeon, balloons, magic paraphenalia, etc. Prop comedy, too, has been much maligned of late, mostly owing to its not translating into a stand-up-comedy milieu very well. (Damn you, Gallagher! Damn you straight to hell!) I could write a whole entry on prop comedy alone -- and wouldn't my readership just spike over that? -- but for now suffice it to say that props, too, have suffered from senseless exaggeration. The term "slapstick" actually refers to a special bludgeon used in commedia (and probably dating back to the Romans) made of two flatish sticks banded together that, when properly struck, made an amped-up whacking noise. Such a device required a sense of musical timing for proper use, and had a transformative effect. Comedy's great for transformations, and not just of a balloon into a poodle.
• The violence. In our birthday clown, this is harmless stuff, mostly. Cream pies and inflated clubs. In this case, I witness mistake in toning down the consequences. It may seem odd to say, but birthday clowns glorify violence more than more traditional clowns do, in that the violence more often than not has virtually no effect. Therefore, they are free to gleefully enact it, and with complete disregard to the effects. It's not a great leap to imagine such a clown, then, accidentally committing horrible violence on one of us and doing it smilingly. Whereas, in most other forms, violence is regarded -- if also occasionally valued -- as something consequential. Cut Shylock, and not only will he bleed, he'll probably try to harvest your organs in revenge.
• The not-speaking. Boy, this one bugs people. It seems to make them feel -- now-a-days, anyway -- that the performer is an even more alien, pretentious thing. I can relate to this feeling, especially when the silence is being peddled to me by some well-intentioned, poorly (or not-at-all) trained moron. It's fun to mock a mime. They can't argue back. (I myself am guilty of making a mime joke part of a recent show, Prohibitive Standards, but it was a sure-fire punchline and under such circumstances I have no scruples.) But I have a theory about obnoxious silence. Silent performance irritates us when the performer is still shouting throughout, "Look at me! Look at me!" It's a fine distinction, but someone performing in silence with a more inviting subtext, regardless of how much they may want you to look at them, is really complimentary to an audience. It's fascinating, and feels special. You're included in the silence, and it's nice there.
• The mask. What mask? Oh, there's a mask, dudes. Isn't that the most terrifying aspect of a birthday clown? The grotesquely exaggerated features, done in colorful contours on a death-white face? I admit: I get shivers at the thought. People these days don'ta like-a the mask. What are they hiding? Who are they, really? WHY CAN'T THEY JUST LOOK NORMAL? Well, as Friend Patrick will attest, the traditions of masks are too numerous, wide-spread and intricate to address . . . in any one place, really. As to the horrid birthday-clown make-up, it is derived a great deal from commedia dell'arte, as well as other places. Time was, when anyone was going to tell a story with power, they'd use some kind of disguise. Masks were common-place in parties and festivals and ceremonies. Theatre just used that, and it has changed throughout the years. The birthday clown adopted Pierrot's white face, Dottore or a zanni's bulbous nose (originally red from drink) and merged it with the color scheme of an American circus of the 1800s. The effect is admittedly garish and disturbing. The mask, be it a commedia one, face paint or just a strap-on red nose, used to serve to free the performer to go to greater lengths to entertain his or her audience. The red nose is often referred to as "the mask that reveals," serving as it does to let it all hang out and expose a person in the most entertaining fashion. Birthday clowns, once again, seem to use it simply to advertise.
• The murders. In traditional clowning, the . . .. Wait. WHAT?! Murders? What kind of performance philosophy is this? I write "The murders" because, in researching this topic, I got sucked into a little reading about John Wayne Gacy, Jr., and that man was a scary S.O.B. He was, in addition to being a serial killer, a birthday clown: Pogo the Clown. This is not the fault of clowndom in general of course, any more than George W. Bush is the fault of Texans, or diseased howler monkeys. Still and all, the concept of a criminal clown predates Gacy. This summer, The Dark Knight will relaunch the iconic figure of the Joker, Batman's nemesis, and I suspect that this time his aberrant behavior will not be quite as disarming as Nicholson portrayed it. Terrifying, most likely it will be, even without the unthinkable recent demise of Mr. Ledger. I wish I could say that the figure of a murderous clown doesn't go back very far, but I'm afraid it does. The Punch & Judy puppetry of England has its roots in Italian commedia dell'arte, and the stories of P&J consist mainly of Punch offing a variety of other puppets. This is clearly a subject under its own heading. What more can I say than: Not all clowns are killers, just as not all killers are clowns.

The past week has for me been very clowny. I continue to read my Buster book. I've had two auditions (auditions themselves being very similar to the torment a clown experiences moment-to-moment [at least, my clown does]), and one of them required an original movement piece. To top it all off, I had a conference with the Exploding Yurts -- my little creative-encouragement group with a strange name -- regarding the draft of a screenplay for a clown film I'm writing. (Because struggling to become a renowned theatre actor just isn't frustrating enough.) I don't know why I'm turning to the clown in me so much these days. I suppose it could have something to do with working on that whole "what kind of work is MY kind of work" question I began asking some months back.

And it seems I'm getting an answer. Or three.