A Toast

I'll admit it. I'm not entirely sober as I write this. So, since I've been drinking, I've just come home, and it's nearly two in the morning, I'm gonna do what you do when you're drunk and happy: I'm proposing a toast.

 To art, to the gods and animals we create and channel for an audience, and for the moments they catch their breath at our most human.

To friends, the false, the true, and those who meet us at a bar to laugh at our sorrows and everything else worth laughing about.

To this wonderful city, full of self-absorbed whiners awaiting recognition of their greatness, and the hilarious magical deeds they perform without even trying because they're here.

To nature and the fragile beauty we'll never own, conquer, or  control, no matter how hard we try or try not to.

To love and lovers, drinking each others eyes and lips and getting in the way of people who need to be somewhere else, occupying the bliss of another world that only holds them for that moment.

To the past, for the lessons it will never teach us because we're too busy to pay attention, and the ones that we learn anyway against all odds  thanks to the elders who deserve more respect than they get.

To the future, whatever the hell it turns out to be.

To cats that purr, dogs that wag their tails, and all creatures great and small that know how to smile in their own way, and have reason to do so.

To music, to capture the truth of moments I'll never be able to write in a blog post.

To smart people and their ideas, and their ability to share them.

To those who use those ideas and make the world better, both because of and in spite of their best efforts.

To death, for showing us how great life is by our fear of its absence.

To life.

To gratitude.

To you.

Thank you.

My Next Show: Dramatic Improv with DICE Theater

In just about two weeks I'm going to go onstage with a bunch of pretty, talented actors, and perform onstage. And I have no idea what any of us will be doing.

I've joined the ranks of DICE Theater. We do improv. Only we do it a little differently. Most improv groups' express goal is to make you laugh. Our goal is to make you feel like the characters you're seeing are real. Yes it can be funny sometimes, but more to the point, it's powerful.

I don't know what you'll see, but from what I've seen the rest of the company do, it's going to be good. I do know that we will also follow it up with a ten minute play inspired by a past improv session that has won a couple awards, and then host a reception.

So here is what I advise you do. Five simple steps:

Step 1: Buy a ticket for yourself and a friend (or several) or a date (....or several) here. ($10 for one)

Step 2: On Saturday, June 23rd, Come to the Drama Bookshop's black box theater at 250 40th St, before the 7:30pm showtime. Get a good seat.

Step 3: Enjoy our show.

Step 4: Clap a lot at the end. If you really really really liked it, you can stand up while clapping, too.

Step 5: Hang out with me and my friends afterwards at the reception.

You can do that, right? See you there!

Exit to Fire Island

Two nights ago I was sitting by a copper fire pit in a Long Island backyard, making s'mores, trying to look up the French word for 'Asbestos' to help an a guy from Adelaide explain something to a woman from Brittany. The something had to do with how the fire had been started by our host using a can of gasoline in such a way that prompted his one-toothed father in a sleeveless shirt to yell at him from the porch for a good couple minutes. Apparently even though asbestos being inhaled as particles is horribly dangerous for you, putting a sheet of it down on dry grass is a good idea for protecting against fire.

A group of eight couchsurfers, either living in or traveling through New York were camping in the yard so that we would be up and ready to spend the next day, Memorial Day, on Fire Island. It's a 50km long pencil shaving of a barrier island, and averaging about 300 m wide, just a bit east of where I got horrifically sunburned while on set for Men In Black III. We were headed for Atlantique Beach.

The ferry ride was half an hour on a cloudless day that left no doubt about summer's arrival. We sat in the upper deck, in the back, letting the wind do crazy things with our hair and the Aussie's beard (still substantial even after one of the slightly more inebriated locals had snipped off about five inches of it with kitchen scissors the evening before). We docked, paused for the restrooms and hilariously awkward debate with the Hong Kong native about guessing certain clothing sizes of women walking by. Then we walked the five minute walk from the bay side to the ocean side.

I've seen some beaches before, and this had some of the nicest white sand beaches I'd seen in some time. It would have been perfect had the water been warmer than ice. It was still pretty nice just hitting the sand and walking along the shore, pausing to grab a quart of Ben and Jerry's, sitting on a bench near the dock, passing it down a line and making fun of ducks.

In fact, really that was what made the trip: sharing stuff. Whether it was taking a walk with the Armenian interior designer to get coffee, a loaf of bread, and two dozen eggs to augment the bacon our host had out for breakfast, or three of us in a row at the chowder house near sunset, passing down our bowls of seafood bisque, Manhattan clam chowder, and New England clam chowder in a line so everyone could try some to wash down the raw clams and oysters we'd practically inhaled minutes before. The food was only part of it. It was the times and stories we shared to that made the trip. The only one things we all had in common was that we were all travelers registered on couchsurfing.org, we all had a decent grasp of English, and we were all there. And that was all we needed.

It's good to have weekends like these.

Inspiration

I found a two minute monologue that is perfect for me, less than half an hour ago. Ten minutes ago I memorized it. This never happens. Not to me, not to anyone. But it just did.

The monologue isn't even really a monologue. It's a poem, written by the guy pictured to the left, who, one hour ago, I'd never heard of. I was having an instant messenger conversation with a good friend of mine about my tutoring, and she asked me if I would consider being a teacher. I gave my standard answer of no and my explanation, but a second later out of curiosity, I Googled "What do teachers make."

If I had used the more appropriate question "How much do teachers make," I never would have found that poem.

Taylor Mali wrote the poem, anonymously at the time, about exactly what it is teachers make. He's since performed it for a huge variety of venues. I read it once, then again, then watched him do it twice. I loved the words, and there was no doubt his performance was passionate, but a little part of me started thinking "I'd actually read it a little bit more like this..."

I printed it out, made a few cuts, and read it twice. Then I put the paper down, and recited the whole thing, top to bottom, only checking the sheet twice. The second time I did it, I was off book. And it felt good.

This never happens to me. It took me three weeks to memorize a monologue half this long. I must have read it on the subway hundreds of times. But this new piece I have down cold, and it's so good that I want to go to auditions now just to deliver it.

New Company for Me, New Facilities for You

My school always builds the cool stuff after I leave.

This is the Logan Arts Center. The University of Chicago, my alma mater, has gotten the funds for and now built a state of the art theater, film, and visual art space.

I was in Chicago and on campus these last four days for completely unrelated reasons: friends, family, and the annual world's largest scavenger hunt according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Patricia Marx was in town to write it up for the New Yorker. So instead of explaining it myself (again), I'll probably repost whatever it is that she puts up once it's available. I will just say that balsa wood bridges built to bear human weight are really hard to make (and that people really stink after they fall into Botany Pond), and that getting a mixed drink from a piano that makes a different kind of cocktail depending on what song you play is kind of amazing. I digress.

I took a quick visit of Logan with my oldest niece, who might be applying to the school next year. The facilities are drool inducing. The set shop is massive, the two theaters we saw are gorgeous, and they have catwalk and fly systems. No more running around the outdoor parapet above the windows to get backstage in deep winter, or spotting for people on ladders to hang lights. And that's just the beginning.

It's great to see that the school is starting to really giving the arts some quality facilities to work with. I'm seriously jealous of anyone who is able to participate in University Theater in the future. If nothing else, it will make a degree from the school look that much cooler, once all these serious actors start coming from the program, having benefited from the new state of the art spaces and tech available to them. Who knows, maybe they'll even go ahead and start calling their TAPS major an actual Drama program!

In the meantime, I've just joined the DICE Theater Company, and will be doing some new things with dramatic improv. I'm going to be curious to see how things work out with them-- they're cool people with an interesting concept. More news on all that soon.

Full Life

Midnight on Broadway, near Koreatown, I took this picture. It must have been about 50 degrees or less, but I was carrying my winter jacket and I was still sweating in my two t-shirts. I'd been dancing a lot, and ended the night on a fleet footed swing dance with a ballerina who'd come back to swing for the first time since college (and, she assured me, that was long time ago). I had to fight my way past a lot of drunken NY Rangers fans to get there, but it was an easy walk to the subway home.

Before that I'd been teaching Chemistry, World History, Algebra, and Spanish. Before that I'd been plotting recorded skits in my apartment while I showed a neighbor and newly returned voiceover artist a little bit about how to leverage her demo for marketing. Then after the next day, today, I had my last Alexander Technique class for a while, found a good essay to send in to a development consulting firm who wanted to see more of my writing. Then, after buying my tickets for a trip to Chicago in May, I was busy chatting with friends on the other side of the Atlantic. That's right before I go see another neighbor, having a beer together while he gives me instructions on taking care of his cats while he's in New Orleans.

And then I sat down to write this before I go join more new friends for a near midnight show at the Tribeca Film Festival. I love getting free tickets to stuff.

Then the next day, tomorrow, I will attend the wedding of one of my oldest friends.

The day after that... oh, who knows.

Every day of my life for the last few weeks has been like this, and if I could be happier right now, it remains to be seen how.

Gotta run...

Where's the Floor?

What's with the picture, you might ask. Well, the round thing next to the door is something we're required by law to have in apartments here in New York City. It's a carbon monoxide alarm. But what it is really isn't that important. What is important is that the round hole in the top is just about 67.5" off the floor. Right at my eye level.

This is something of a surprise. Not that that particular object is there, but that that height is at my eye level. I'd never measured it before, nor had I any idea what the number was supposed to be like. But I did know that if I stood the way I normally stand, it would look like it's a good two or three inches above my eye level.

As a child, I was predicted to be 6'2". I was tall for my age. My brief stint with a piano teacher left few lasting impressions, but one of them was her looking at me in surprise after a lesson one day and saying "You're tall. You don't walk tall. You should walk tall."

I didn't know how to do that. I only ever hit 6', but it used to be people outside of my family didn't believe me when I told them I was that tall. My mother's side of the family averages to be about 5'6" on a good day, so to talk to any of them requires some bending. My father's side of the family tells legends of how relatives who'd never known each other recognized each other by the way they slouched. Standing up straight was an idea I'd heard about and knew I should aspire to, similar to being popular. I saw other people do it, and had a vague idea of how to try, but never had the sense I was doing it properly.

Enter Alexander Technique. WordIQ.com defines Alexander Technique as "an educational discipline practiced to prevent the physical decline caused by habituated mannerisms. Learning it can lead the way to improved sensory discrimination, a greater awareness of both body and mind and their interconnection, along with ease of movement." This encompasses a huge variety of things. But for me, more than anything else, this meant actually learning how to stand up straight.

After dating the daughter of two Alexander Technique experts while I was in college, lugging an internal frame backpack around the world for a year and a half, moving to NYC, and then procrastinating even more for no good reason, I finally used my connections in the Seattle-based Performance School for a referral, then signing up for lessons with Belinda Mello at AT Motion.

I'm now working on my second set of classes. They're fun! There's a lot of stuff that seems very basic when you read it, but that when you actively think about it, changes how you move and use your body. My favorite is probably what I used to title this post: "Where's the floor?" The point being that the floor is holding you up. It's rigid enough to support your whole body. So you don't actually have to create any "false floor" in your body to hold anything else up. You're meant to move anyway, so just trust the floor.

I've got a lot to learn still, but I'm feeling a lot of dramatic improvement already in how I stand, sit, and walk. I've made a few adjustments to my home. The three chairs I use the most have rather thick cushions on them now so that my knees are no longer higher than my pelvis when I sit down (fun with long legs). I've mentally marked a couple of key points in the place that are actually at eye level when I stand up straight as a reminder. When I'm not near them, I keep having to remind myself that I'm not looking up at them, I'm looking level at them (as long as I'm really standing up).

The most gratifying part is having tricks that let me have good posture without being stiff. All the other things people kept saying to me while I was growing up often sounded nice, but didn't make much sense. "Push your shoulders back," "pretend you're hanging from a string in the ceiling," or more frequently and most frustratingly, "Stop slouching!" Now I know how to do all those things without doing any of them.

The big change is now how I'm perceived by the rest of the world. I did a monologue at my usual Shakespeare workshop and had one person say it was the most "leading man"-like thing she'd ever seen me do. Strangers trying to get my attention on the street have started yelling out "Hey, you, big guy!" I even had a one speaker at a panel yesterday tell me afterwards that he kept looking at me and directing his talk to me for some reason he couldn't put his finger on. I suspect it was because I was sitting taller than anyone else in the room (including several people who, if measured standing straight up, are a bit taller than I am).

I've got three more classes in this set, not just in standing up tall, but specifically in moving with less tension, and then applying those concepts to my acting. Looking forward to learning more!
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If you want to give this a shot yourself, I do recommend it. From working with them firsthand, I can especially recommend coaches Catherine Kettrick and David Mills in Seattle, as well as my coach here in New York City, Belinda Mello. If you aren't in the area, or their schedules don't line up with yours, they can always give you a referral.