I Act Mainly So I Can Time Travel

Whoa, hey there loyal readers. It’s been a while. I’ve been busy as hell stuck in a sort of starving actor’s heaven: acting a shitload but not getting paid for it, BUT doing it front of large appreciative crowds and doing it many, many nights in a row. Acting in that capacity does wonders for the part of you that slowly and surely gets marginalized and destroyed as you plug through the “business” half of show business week after month after year. When you’re stressed, emotionally and mentally and artistically wiped out, walking off of a stage with jellylegs and drinking like a celebratory hockey team (ugh, congratulations Chicago), just simply because you were acting, and the only payment were laughs and that pre-show buzz of people murmuring before the house lights go down, it makes you feel, well, like an artist.

Yeah, I got kind of kicked in the pants after a long two weeks of touring festival circuits with various live shows. It is beyond painful to admit, but it’s been a while — I’m talking probably since college — since I’ve felt really electrified by my craft. Now, I know I’m sounding a little bit too much like people I have soapboxed against in past posts of mine: pretentious, over-the-top, holier than thou, “my words are my weapon” type artistes, who are so ingrained in the cultural cheesecloth of their art that they live in artistic, dumpy apartments and wear artistic, tattered clothes and smoke artistic, Parliament cigarettes and spend more of their parents’ artistic money all the while pursuing less than artistic art. I have always been a realist but still an optimist. Not exactly a dreamer, more of a worker and a doer with a little faith and confidence to back it up. Dreamers are asleep; workers have a reason to dream when it’s all said and done.

But, I am back to being that idealistic, drunk on love, I don’t need a dime to be happy, fourteen year old actor again (okay, 14 to 21 year old actor (I probably began to get jaded and frustrated shortly before graduating college)). You see, maybe not everybody has a definite, known moment when they were going to be an actor, or realized they were at least good at it. I do, though. I was in 8th grade and was selected, because of a friendly (READ: unsexual) relationship with my homeroom teacher, who was organizing a school wide talent show, to be co-emcee of this talent show. In between acts, I or another girl would get out there on the mic, in front of our 800-strong student and faculty body, and kill some time, while the next dance crew or band or theatrical sketch set up behind the carpet. But four times throughout the show, I went out there and did impressions of teachers from the school. Teachers in the audience. Teachers who I may or may not have said I got permission from, but may or may not have had permission from.

My first line, impersonating my gym teacher, fell flat on 1600 open yet unresponsive ears. “Shit, I’m losing them!” A classic line of panic that only (but every) comedian(s) can relate to and have recited thousands of times. I went forward with my loosely scripted bit and in the next line, said the name of the teacher. In a split second, it all made sense; my giant fake beard, the mesh short shorts, my half-assed attempt to squeeze out an adult’s voice through my pubescent cracks and squeals. As a fourteen year old, I heard 800 legitimate laughs, in unison, at me. Or with me. Whatever, they were because of me. Still in that decades-long split second, I had a thought, before plodding through the rest of the character monologue. And this thought is verbatim as it was passing through my brain, THAT is how perfect and cinematic this moment was to me: “I could get used to this.”

A couple hours later and three more impressions, of the shell-shocked Veteran Geography teacher, my 6th grade fat math teacher, and the friendly, unsexual homeroom teacher, and I was walking home from school, convinced I would be an actor. My dreams of playing semi-pro European soccer or being a baseball announcer (okay, that one is still there a little) faded away as I began to realize that acting was my calling, that I was good at it, and that it made me feel like something I had never felt before. It’s that feeling I’ve mentioned and described many times here but can’t really truly pinpoint unless you’ve felt it too. Like that NHL Playoffs commercial (again?! Fuck you, Chicago!): There Are No Words.

I’ve had that feeling hundreds of times since. In high school plays or improv, onstage in college, the rare (one) time I completed a successful stand-up bit. But I regret to say I hadn’t felt it that strongly in quite some time, until I was knee deep in my favorite pasttime: live acting just for the sake of acting. It’s self-righteous, it’s narcissistic and it’s totally only because people were laughing at me and telling me how much they enjoyed the shows after the fact, but it’s true. To tell yourself you’re good enough to do something, to muster the courage and corral the skill to execute it, and then to bask in the knowledge that you were right all along, and have everyone — newly converted — agree with you? With no agents or delayed checks or contracts to get in the way? To act, to entertain, to be a part of something truly and purely artistic? Well, that’s the sort of thing that makes you feel young again.

But what the fuck would I know, I’m just an actor.