2009-07-29 - 8:59 p.m.
"Your mom is so mad cause she's got a kid who's almost 30."
"I don't get how a man your age can grow a goatee but is still so babyfaced he shaves once a week whether he needs to or not."
Um...thanks, I guess. It was a quiet birthday, as practically everyone was busy or working or out of town or something. Dinner and a movie, and during the course of the day, I maybe learned a thing or two. What more can you ask for? I mean, other than a birthday on a weekend night so I can actually go out and pretend I'm still a kid. I'll just have to do some belated partying this weekend.
Why didn't I party last weekend? Oh, probably cause I was too busy transporting people and injecting their lives with catharsis in that believable if a bit stilted manner that only I can manage. Sexual Perversity In Chicago at the Alchemist Theatre was a hit and beloved by audiences and critics alike. If you missed it, shame on you, but you will have another chance, as we take the show on the road to Kenosha at the end of August.
Saturday, July 25-
2:00am- I finally start heading to bed after deliberately keeping myself up in order to try to get my sleep cycle ready for the coming day. IN order to make sure I stay down for awhile, I take a little NyQuil nightcap before I turn in. And by a little, I mean half a bottle.
7:00am- ANd I'm awake, despite the fatigue keeping me from being able to open my eyes fully, the drawn curtains allowing no light into the room, and the fact that I really needed to sleep till about noon in order to pull this off. Fuck you too, physiology. Thanks for making me a morning person despite the fact that I don't sleep restfully.
4:00pm- after a rousing day of cleaning the house and running errands, it's time to head to the theatre and make some magic happen. ON the bus on the way there, a kid of indeterminate gender sits down in front of me. When I look up from my crossword, I see the back of a head, painted fingernails holding a cigarillo, and a pair of capri pants...then the head turns a bit and I make out chin fuzz on a guy who can't possibly be old enough to have purchased that tobacco product legally. WE both get off at 2nd and National- i head for the bus stop heading down first street, he starts walking toward La Cage, and I vaguely wonder if I'll get to my ultimate destination of the theatre before or after he winds up at his ultimate destination of an ABC after-school special. I realize I'm definitely in a mood tonight.
7:30 pm- the show goes well, except it's plagued by people who seem to find it impossible to sit still through a one hour show without getting up for more drinks and the bathroom two or three times. One drunk bitch falls down trying to make it to the door and actually bangs herself against the stage. My sympathy is minimal. Another woman completely squashes a joke in one scene by walking in as I'm delivering the punchline, so the audience is focusing on her at exactly the wrong moment.
"Childbirth is such a miracle....wrong...you know what a miracle is? A miracle is raising a kid who doesn't talk in a fucking movie theatre."
I'd say the same applies to people shutting up during live theatre too, Bill.
Despite all this crap, the show goes well, the audience loves it, hates me and Bernie, and Torii, Gloria, and Mike, who surprised me by coming to the early show and not telling me, alternate between telling me they liked it and telling me off for not warning them about the shorts.
THe shorts, for those of you who hadn't heard, are the swimming trunks I wear in the final scene. Period trunks for the 1976 setting, and red for one of the show's motifs. And short. I cannot emphasize enough how short these things are. How short? Well, to give you a clue without being too graphic, I knew immediately that I would have to wear something underneath them to avoid wardrobe malfunctions (they're tight, but you can never be too careful) I took a pass on K-Mart's helpful suggestion of a 3-pack of men's thongs, because A) those shouldn't exist and B) even if youdo buy those, not at k-mart, please. So I go with the old standby of the boxer briefs- and I have to roll them up in order to make sure they aren't sticking out of the shorts. add in a pair of aviator sunglasses and I looked like the sleaziest sleaze that ever sleazed.
9:30- meet and greet with the audience is over and it's time for dinner! As usual, I am ravenously hungry post-performance, so I make my way down to Bella's for a burger. Never having been there, I order the double, not realizing that they dont' mean 2 patties, they mean two sides of beef on the bun. What i'm saying is it was a big burger. This proves to be a tactical error on my part, because the combination of red meat and the cuervo I treated myself to during the break combines to start making my eyelids droop at 11:15. Not a good sign. I look around for sources of caffeine.
"But can you fake it/For just one more show?"
11:50- I haul myself back into costume and start trying to psyche myself up for show number two.
Sunday, July 26th-
12:01am- The opening music dies down and it's time to do what I do best, w hich in this case is apparently do scenes on muscle memory and reflex, trusting my mouth to deliver the right lines while my higher brain functions go on strike because they hate me.
12:04am- During the longest scene I'm not in, I get the surge of adrenaline I need in the form of a piece of dust or grit roughly the size of an extinction level asteroid landing with astonishing force directly in my left eye. Most people would blink this out and be fine in a few moments. Oh no, not the guy with the hard contact lenses. Again, for the uninitiated, I wear hard contact lenses to help deal with my "I'm going to be blind by the time I'm 50" disease (my body really hates me). If you want to simulate what it's like to wear a piece of rigid plastic in your eye for an extended period of time, have someone lay one of your eyelashes across your retina, then start blinking and try to hold your eye open, all the while being told you "will just have to get used to that feeling". Good luck.
ANyway, the dust particle sticks to my lens because it (the lens) is fairly dry by this point but just moist enough to allow things to stick to it easily. I am screwed. I dash back to the green room to hastily pull out my lenses and do the rest of the show almost totally blind (my night vision rivals Mr. Magoo without my contacts, and it's dark in the theatre). Thankfully this didn't happen DURING a scene, or I'd have really been screwed.
12:25am- The adrenaline rush lasted all of ten minutes, and I'm back to feeling like my head's full of jello, only now I can't see anything too! I'm so sluggish and low energy I'm thinking I need to give the audience a refund for having to watch me suck so hard this show. Luckily there were all of 6 paying customers at this show anyway.
Amazingly, despite being so low energy, I'm sweating like Trent Lott on BET, even when I'm offstage. I'm starting to think that I managed to dehydrate myself despite drinking 15 water bottles that day. Amazingly, the warm Old Style bottles I drink during the beer scenes do nothing to alleviate any of these problems. World's greatest beer, my ass.
2:00am- Beth, bless her heart, drives me home (I dunno if the buses were even running anymore) and I stagger into the shower to wash the smell of warm Old Style, cigarettes, and flop sweat off me. I pull myself to bed vaguely wondering if i'd remembered to shut the front door and deciding that I wasn't going to bother checking, as nothing worth stealing in the downstairs part of the house belongs to me anyway. I'm the greatest roommate ever.
9:00am- SOmehow I'm able to sleep this late today and wake up feeling almost rested. I force myself to stay in bed until 11 dozing and reading until I am unable to ignore the demands of the morning any longer and have to get up to use the euphemism and brush my teeth. Getting all my errands done yesterday was for the win, as I don't actually have to do much today except sit around trying not to be tired. It occurs to me that if I had been gifted with the ability to actually nap I'd be much better off.
2:00pm- and we're off to the theatre again for the 5pm show.
5:00pm- Curtain goes up on the last show in Milwaukee and last one period until we go to Kenosha on August 27. I'm going to miss these folks!
5:25pm- Proving that "It could be worse" is actually an invitation and not a consolation, as I flip on my trench coat during an office scene, a second dust mote, possibly angry with me for killing his brother, lands in my right eye. During a scene. A scene where I am supposed to be angry and surly. Instead, as I give Bernie the finger and storm out of the office, I cannot hold my eyes open for longer than a half second and tears are streaming out of my eyes, so it looks like Bernie just made Dan cry and run off to pout, rather than like Dan was a half second away from pounding the hobbit snot out of Bernie. Acting is all about discovery!
5:26pm- I have another scene immediately after the one that I just did, with a costume change, and so I have all of .25 seconds to solve this contact lens issue. Out it pops, and into my t-shirt breast pocket it goes. That's gotta be good for it, right? ANd I do the rest of this show with one lens in. My eyes dont' focus correctly for the rest of the evening because of how much this fucks my vision. It doesn't help that I forget to take the other one out until several hours later, but that's cause I'm an idiot.
7:00pm- Cast party at Botano's. Enchiladas and Margaritas are wonderful for killing off both the headache I have and the hunger pangs, all for the low low cost of the shooting pains in my stomach that will trouble me for the rest of the evening. It was a great time though, and I am actually eagerly looking forward to the shows in Kenosha.
Epilogue:
Monday, July 27-
6:00pm- After dragging myself through most of a workday, I get to go to the Brewer game with a beautiful lady on my arm tonight, which will at least make me look a little bit less dorky. This game is going to be fun!
9:00pm- Josh Willingham just hit his second straight grand slam, and the brewers are now officially getting curb-stomped, 13-5. People are flocking to the exits.
9:02- A man I've never seen before comes up to me as I'm watching the game.
"I wanted to thank you for the show. I really enjoyed it."
"The show?"
"Sexual Perversity in Chicago. My wife and I saw it the other night. You were really good. We had a great time."
"Oh. Well, thank you for coming. I'm really glad you liked it."
His name was Ernie, and he was effusive in his praise of the show. He listened eagerly as I pimped my next show this fall to him, promising he and his wife will be there to see me. He shook my hand and headed back to his seat in the next section over. Sadly, the seats are so empty that no total strangers were within earshot to be awed and impressed by this conversation, but I don't mind. I'll take my little triumphs where I can get them.
Ken
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