The Annotated Tour Diaries: End of the Road

In keeping with “the challenge” I was poring over some old notebooks and found the diary I’d kept  from when I was traversing the Eastern and Southern United States on tour with a children’s theatre operation. So I will reprint some entries here.  This blog experiment owes a conceptual debt to Matthew Gallaway’s Saturnine Tour Diaries Project.  (Though my travels in a van with a company of actors is in no way comparable to being in a rock band.  It could quite possibly be the EXACT OPPOSITE.  Still!)  So we’ll begin at the end. Why not?

Last show of the tour at a high school in Silver Springs, Maryland.  Hungover as a motherfucker.  Hurled in a trashcan off-stage during “Magi”…”good gifts” *barf” “sacrificed…” *barf*.  [This so did happen, and the big industrial-sized trash bin was unfortunately located near our unflappable stage manager, K.  I delivered my few lines in the adaptation of "The Gift of the Magi" then exited the stage to perfunctorily vomit in the available receptacle.  I believe this is known in certain acting circles as the Peter O'Toole method.]

I didn’t feel as sad ending this show, I just wanted to depart.  Hate that I was ill but c’est la vie.  We had gone the night before to Ruby Tuesday and they had a special–buy one drink get the next one for a penny. I had four glasses of the house Burgundy.  Big mistake!  I was so trashed.  Apparently I fell on the floor, though I remember none of this.  Hope I didn’t embarrass myself too much.  [Though I remembered the hangover and the performance distinctly, it was not until re-reading this entry that I was reminded it was due to terrible house wine at a terrible chain restaurant.  Serves me right?  Who quaffs the house Burgundy at Ruby Tuesday?  Oh, poor actors, that's who.]

It’s so weird that the van just drops us off back in NYC, like  we’re returning alien abductees or kidnap victims.  It’s hard to integrate back into “real life” after an experience like this.  After establishing a social hierarchy, a common language (i.e. poop jokes), it becomes necessary to dismantle all that and go back to the previously established customs and norms.  [The return to "civilian life" is jarring.  Poop talk is universal and a great bonding subject among disparate personalities.  Everybody poops!  Right?]

I hope I learned something on this tour.  Now it’s uncertainty, confusion, jealousy, frustration.  Well, until the next gig.  Do I want a next gig?  I certainly want things…union benefits, an agent.  These are goals for the new year.  [These goals were never manifest.  In fact, my next gig was as a performer with the children's theatre program at the Central Park Zoo.]

I Was a Teenage Game Show Contestant

My freshman year of high school, I was a contestant on “Nick Arcade.”  The game show, filmed at Universal Studios Orlando, which was located conveniently and directly across the street from my school, was no “Double Dare,” but it had its own particular attraction, given that kids, they love playing them some video games.  And not only did the competing teams get to square off by answering trivia questions and performing video challenges, the winners, for the final round, did  battle for the grand prize..inside a video game.

This was around the time that Central Florida was angling to become the Hollywood of the South, presenting itself as a cheaper alternative to filming in Los Angeles or New York.  A lofty ambition, and obviously, one which didn’t work out as planned.  Though, a few lackluster cable shows and movies did shoot there:  “SeaQuest DSV“  and “Swamp Thing” to name two. (I was at one point supposed to be an extra in the movie Matinee, but I came down with pink eye and stayed home.)  What no one bothered to realize, or chose to ignore, is that Orlando has no distinct skyline, and could not in any realistic way sub for a major metropolis, unlike Toronto, say.  Miami fared better, but still it’s hard to make Miami look like anything other than the Deco, sandy, flashy city that it is.  Shooting on a sound stage was fine, but on location, there was no disguising the setting.  It was not in Florida’s destiny to become the new film capitol, but it did as we know turn out to be quite the boy band factory.

Looking Back At The ‘House Book’

A staple while in college was  the “house book.”   The book was your basic journal, the kind that can be purchased for a nominal price at any chain bookstore, and wherein we residents and guests could jot various observations.  Not every house or apartment possessed one, this was college not some hippie commune,  but the most populous locale, i.e. the one with the most party space and okay probably available drugs, was the locale of the tome.  I came into possession of one, a purple velvet-covered journal, when my roommates and I moved into the pink house with maroon shag carpet, off of a dirt road, down the street from the cow pasture,  where the local teens would forage shrooms and once sold us a batch of tea for a reasonable price.  Before the purple book, fun to pet when on Ecstasy someone I think noted, our groupthink was collected in “the Mushroom Book” — which, naturally, was a bound journal with various fungi on the front.

The house book was the understood repository of random quotes, ideas or mind tangents, funny sayings or odd cartoon scribblings, the existential worries and “deep” thoughts and sincere bursts of emotion that burble up in the fecund minds of matriculating liberal arts majors with a penchant for pop culture and a taste for recreational drugs.  We were not some sort of collegiate Algonquin Round Table, trading highly rehearsed barbs and bits of witticism. Usually we were too high or drunk or indifferent. But the book was useful as a catch-all for random thoughts or feeeeelings, or if someone dropped a needle-scratch/head-tilt/say-wha? quote in the middle of conversation.  For example, K.T.:  “I only take as much weed with me as I can eat.”  Moments like that, then, the book was fished from the couch cushions or from the counter top for someone to write the line down.  Or at parties, someone would scribble an observation or vent a grudge, the pen-and-ink of version of one of those reality show video confessional booths. Otherwise, the moment would be forgotten, tossed out like so many over-full ashtrays and empty beer bottles the next day, as stagnant as bongwater. (The velvet book, for a time, also became the repository for chicken recipes and wine ratings.  It was versatile in its function.) (Speaking of tossing things out, there was a week when it had been so long that anyone had done dishes, we contemplated chucking the food-encrusted lot piling up in the sink and going to Wal-Mart to replace them, but sanity prevailed.)

Keep in mind, this is before the age of Facebook, when else we would be status-updating or twittering or the like on our laptops, but this was a veritable dark age.  And though we took pictures, they were not digital ones, instantly uploaded online to validate the fact that we were at the party we knew we were at.  Is it real or is it Memorex?  Still!  The impulse, really, is the same:  to remember a moment in time that was “fun” or “cool” or angst-inducing or whatnot, and then to place it in a forum for public consumption.  In this moment in time, it just happened to be in a book.

And flipping through the book again recently, I’m not necessarily struck by one item over another, no lost “million dollar idea” or philosophical “game-changer,”  the quotes and doodles sometimes as cringe-worthy as an old high school journal.  But they make me smile.  What value, then?  I suppose the value that one adds to a previously blank page, what was once empty is not?  Something instead of nothing, however inane or innocent-seeming or wrong-headed or touching through the lens of time.  Or just that I was there, we were there, like carving initials in a heart on an oak tree in the park.  Either way.

Off to the (Drag) Races

RuPaul is back!  Again!  With something called “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Though we all know old drag queens never really “go away,” they just take extended holidays to Mexico for unlicensed medical procedures or whatever.  Anyway!  It is a cable teevee reality show in which contestants compete to be the  next top drag queen or female impersonation or gender illusionist or whatever term is the pc thing to say these days.  And, true to form, there is a catchphrase at the elimination round:  “chantez, you stay,” to those who’ve made the cut and “sashay, away” for those dismissed.  There are the requisite “celebrity” judges, in this case former Destiny’s Child-er Michelle Williams and king of the sequin Bob Mackie.  Uck!  But!  Having not seen the show, I’m not out to critique.  I’m just rather struck by this weird,  I suppose cyclical, drag revival.  I was all prepping to live 2k9 like it was 1982, given our current economic clime, and now I’m sucked into some ’90s k-hole with all this drag race business.  It makes me thing of college, Orlando, Florida in the mid-nineties, and the Club at Firestone.

The Club was housed in an old tire factory, natch, and was the — given the alternatives — place to dance to electronic music, back when we were all high on ecstasy and maybe believed to our error that the stake had been put in the heart of rock ‘n’ roll for good, so it was all about pills and hugs and beats.  Hahahaha, folly.  So, the club.  It was around this time written up in Rolling Stone, and imported “superstar” DJs (I blame the ’90s for elevating every seemingly pedestrian occupation to superstar status– models, DJs, x-treme athletes, etc.) like Keoki and DJ Icey and whoever happened to be passing through.  And usually it was 18 and up, so I could go with my older college friends and not have to worry about being carded.  Though, for a time, I had a fake ID;  fake in so much as I did not seek it out and  pay for it to be made but found it by the side of the road after a fender bender likely caused by a girl known at the time by the sobriquet  “the Sequined Beasty” — who is now a happily-married  mother and a lawyer to boot,  proving people change!  Well, the fellow in this ID, he was over six feet tall with black hair and blue eyes, I was, at the time, about five-foot-ten with ash blond hair and a good thirty pounds lighter than the guy.  The license worked when buying beer at the corner gas station but the diligent bouncers at the door of the club rightly called foul and asked me to recite the vital stats, birth date, etc., from memory, of which I could not.  Good sports they, they took the ID away and said I could gain entrance when I came back with my actual driver’s license.

But to the point!  On one of the “official” gay nights, cause really at that time it was all a little fluid, the club had this thing called the Drag Race.  It went as such (if memory serves):  contestants would come onstage, and the first (timed) challenge would be to assemble an outfit from the tat in the costume trunks.  Then:  take a shot.  Next, there would be the applying of make-up.  Then: take a shot.  Finally:  each contestant would lip-sync thirty seconds to a minute of a song of the DJ’s choosing.  My roommate Jason was a frequent participant and a frequent winner.  Theater majors!  We know from make-up and costumes and showmanship!  There was a cash prize that was always applied towards rent.  Or maybe pot.  Or both.  Victory loot in hand, Jay would join the rest of us and we’d celebrate dancing with the rest of the shiny-shirted (nary an natural fiber to be found on those terrible rave tops) and JNCO-jeaned revelers.

To this day, when someone says “drag race,” I”m more inclined to think of a man hurriedly applying lipstick and wigs than two cars gunning their motors at a stoplight, ready to peal out.

I heard later that the club owner had started narc-ing on the the petty dealers who trafficked in the club, and the vibe took a nasty turn as it did with much of that scene across the country, the monster took over the party.  But by that time interest had dissipated for the most part, who could afford the cost of the ecstasy and the cost of the  recovery time the next day?

I’m sure Ru’s show is as entertaining as any formulaic reality show can be, but I’d rather watch a drag race in a sweaty, dark nightclub, with participants chugging jewel-colored shots, swerving in and out of their respective lanes in the race to the finish.  I like the danger and spontaneity, not the Klieg lights and camera marks, when it comes to the races.

Wrestling: Then and Now

The acclaim being heaped on Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, and particularly Mickey Rourke’s  wounded animal “comeback” performance, has sparked a bit of nostalgia for the outsize, spandex-clad halcyon days of ’80s professional wrestling.  The Daily News has a “Then and Now” slideshow featuring some of the breakout stars of the circuit.  Remember, there was a time before Hulk Hogan starred in a reality show with his Britney manqué daughter and Jesse Ventura held elected office.

Confession!  Coming of age in that decade, when wrestling seeped into the broader culture, when there were not only televised matches but a cartoon show, an album, a line of toys and cameos in Cyndi Lauper videos, I was a big fan.  The costumes!  The drama!  The clear delineation between good and evil!  (Okay, so sometimes the good guys defected.  But they usually saw the error of their ways.) WrestleMania!  Before the WWF became the WWE, when the stars of the wrestling firmament included Jake “The Snake” Roberts (pictured above), The Iron Sheik, Hillbilly Jim, George “The Animal” Steele, and Bret “Hitman” Hart, under the Svengali-like rule of mustachioed promoter Vince McMahon.  My father even took me to a match.  I was maybe eight or so?  I remember it was exciting, and loud, but honestly, I probably would have rather been watching it on the teevee.  In that big arena, the practiced snarls, the hyperbolic one-liners, the forced machismo, didn’t read.  It was just overly-pumped hunks of meat thwapping into each other from the turnbuckle.  Television captured the soap-operatic pageantry and spectacle and hackneyed story lines that being there live did not. And it was that myth-making that I’d bought into, I could have done without being squeezed next to jerky-eating, beer swilling, no-necked fans. (Clearly, I’ve changed.)  I embraced wrestling and embraced it hard, but like so many childhood fancies,  playing army and collecting arrowheads, wrestling got left behind.

I hadn’t thought of wrestling again until I first moved to the city and was working in a souvenir shop, selling XXL Phantom of the Opera sweatshirts to gabby Midwesterners, where one of my co-workers was a wrestling fanatic.   He would rush home to watch it on television, and set his VCR to tape the matches he was going to miss, later savoring them with a six pack of Coors Light next to his recliner.  Ben, we’ll call him, would get into arguments with our fellow wage slaves, jaded wanna-be actors and snippy show queens, about his adoration of the “sport.” There was speculation that Ben was in the closet, and the idea of these meaty men in outfits that would make Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters blush pounding into each other was how he dealt with his latent gay urges.  Then there was poor Leslie, the girl who had a crush on him, who would spend her evenings watching wrestling just to be close to him.  I don’t think he never responded to her advances.

No real point to the above anecdote, other than, say, I suppose wrestling will still have a hold over a certain segment of the populace.  Though probably never again like it did during that brief few years, when being a professional wrestler was on par with being a supermodel or the like, a niche interest that for a time captured the imagination and interest of the culture at large.