If All The World's Indeed A Stage, Where Are The Dressing Rooms?

Due to the absolutely startling response that has rocketed forth due to the reaction towards my blogging for yet another year due to my not having enough to do apparently aside from using the word “due” due to my severely limited vocabulary, I have decided to respond to your responses and indulge this wonderful audience with tales of my past performances in various theatrical productions.  Oh no, thank you!  And, as always, you’re welcome!

 

Yes, it is true that I have trodden upon those stage boards on many occasions.  While my memory is at best foggy and at worst completely full of fabrication, I can definitely remember the reason why I was thrust upon the stage while still in kindergarten: compulsory duty.  You see, my initial Lutheran grade school didn’t pride itself in sports.  Frankly, I didn’t even know the gym was used for anything other than as place to run around when it wasn’t snowing/raining/freezing/earthquaking.  Apparently there was indeed a basketball team!  Heaven knows when they actually played as I don’t even remember there being basketballs in the building.  Perhaps someone brought one from home on the odd occasion to have something to dribble with whilst jogging up and down the court.

So with the lack of a sport-based school initiative, the principal and his wife, who also taught there, decided that they would have musicals instead.  And these would be no ordinary musicals!  No sir!  Every single child in the grade school would have to be involved, whether they wanted to be there or not.  As you might imagine, this led to some of the most enormous badly tuned choruses ever assembled under one roof.  Worse yet, we all had to audition for a mandatory event.  The logic behind this escapes me, but perhaps the audition process would weed out children that were so incredibly off-key, they would be told to mime along in order to save the audience.

I remember dutifully going from my kindergarten learning wonderland and having to go up the stairs to where the intimidating 7^th and 8^th graders shared a harsh classroom.  The principal had us sing while he accompanied us with the piano in the back of the room while the other older kids tried not to noticeably laugh.  Apparently I had a passable voice, so I guess that I was checked off the “for God’s sake do not let this one sing!” list for all time while a student there.

 

Going over old family albums, I discovered a number of costumes and make-up worn for shows that I for the most part have had blocked from my memory.  There’s one of me dressed up as a fireman with a cardboard axe, which no doubt gave Ron Howard the inspiration to direct Backdraft several years later.  There’s one of me dressed up as some sort of early 20^th century immigrant waif in some chorus line.  I was in the front row and knew exactly what dance steps and arm motions to make.  I know this because every single picture my mom took has me looking stage right to the rest of the kids in the line and following their every move.  I don’t think I ever saw an audience that whole show.  My 1^st grade brain probably thought that I was being very surreptitious and clever at the time.  Instead there’s a wealth of pictures that my children can now look at and ask “Daddy, what’s wrong with your head?”

 

There was another show that involved some sort of Mississippi River riverboat hijinks that I also don’t remember.  I was dressed up like some kid that would follow Chaplin’s tramp around, if Chaplin’s tramp hung around in Louisiana wharves with children that couldn’t act out of a wet paper bag that had holes cut in it already that is.  However, this show was different as I had an actual line of dialogue!  An actual line for realsies!  The scene had me handing a pair of glasses to a riverboat captain that ran into our raft.  I would then say, “Looks like you need these, Mr. Steamboat Pilot!” and the rest of the Lost Boys wannabes in our group would cackle with laughter.  Why this river rat of a child that looks like he couldn’t find a crust of bread to save his life would all of a sudden whip out a pair of glasses from the thinnest of air to make this joke for his crew of pseudo-toughs is a question that I find unanswerable even today. 

 
Even more unanswerable is the fact that for this show many of the extras were made up in blackface to represent black laborers on the river.  My younger brother was one of these unfortunate children.  The insensitivity is striking for a show that was only about 30 years ago, but if there’s one Lutheran Caucasian child on the planet that would never in several hundred million years pass for a child of color, it would be my brother.  Even to this day, the most he has ever delved into that culture is his quest to find Sam and Dave albums on vinyl.

Then came the experience of being in the play Make a Joyful Noise! which was some sort of Christian-themed kids’ adventure with a robot named Colby that teaches kids to love Jesus.  If that doesn’t sound like a great time, you’re very perceptive.  This time the school was faced with a dilemma as there weren’t many crowd scenes to force dozens of children to sing along with.  So a solution was presented: two different casts would be assembled and they would have two different show times in order to accommodate everybody.  Aha!  And if we all cared just a smidgen more, we would have had some sort of competition between the casts, but as we didn’t, our performances weren’t as electric as they could have been. 

 

All I remember about my character was that he was supposed to be short and couldn’t reach something.  This was a major plot point that led into yet another song about how we’re all different but the same in the eyes of God or something else that is more accurate than the earlier part of this sentence.  Now in the other cast, the boy that played that character was indeed short, so this wasn’t a problem.  However even at that age, I wasn’t short and to make matters worse, the kid that was cast to be able to reach the whatzit that I couldn’t reach in the story was in actuality shorter than me.  This meant that an audience would see that not only wasn’t I convincingly short, but that apparently I was also dumber than a bag of cheaply made hammers.  How could I pull off a role that even Olivier would have walked away from in disgust?  I certainly hoped my years of mandatory chorusing that I had under my belt would now lead me to the same well that great actors manage to pull buckets of great performances out of in order to play this somehow.  In the end it didn’t matter as the spectators for these things generally are happy parents that will be glowing in their every review of the show regardless of whether or not I could portray some whiny shrimp that was led to the Christ by an automaton on the stage.

Now dear reader, as I have to prepare myself to fictionalize the other years of my lollygagging in front of patient audiences, I shall leave you for now.  Part 2 will follow momentarily at some procrastinated point.  Well, whenever I fill out the pages of my blank diaries from 1989 onwards, I’ll have a better grasp of my fictional backstory.  But rest assured, the theater world sobs with mournful regret over not having me around even longer.  Sure I can see the brave smiles and hear the shouts of “Good riddance!” but I know they are merely acting to hide their true feelings.

 

 

The Anniversary Of Commemorations Of Remembrances Past

What a difference a year makes!  I’ve heard others use that turn of a phrase and decided that I would use it to open up this first blog post of January of 2015.  Another year of promise, of failure, of hope, of hopes dashed.  For instance I never thought that my 4.5 year old daughter would ever use the phrase “Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?”  Yet she said it today and kept repeating it.  My bride and I never use that lyric in any way, shape, or form even in our uncommon parlance about the house, so naturally we were confused as to how she heard it.  She confessed that she heard it from her best friend at preschool.  Even at this early age, one can see the damage that friends can do to someone.  We might never get our daughter back to the innocent she was before ever hearing that phrase.  This is how a new year starts?  Barely two weeks in and I’ve been given an old pop cultural middle finger.  God only knows what February will bring.  Perhaps Right Said Fred is getting warmed up in the on deck circle.

With the passing into a new year often one takes stock of life, seeing what they could have done different, what they should do the same.  Resolutions are made with the best of intentions and are usually dashed by Valentine’s Day at the very latest.  My personal resolution consisted of continuing my hatred of tomatoes, thinking about pondering in wonder that I might actually consider reading War and Peace, and of course avoiding as many tiring duties as possible.  I enjoyed the moments that I rested in 2014, so I think resting even more in 2015 will definitely make my outlook brighter.  In fact this whole paragraph has gotten rather tiring, so I shall rest a bit before continuing with yet another malformed thought.

Ah, welcome back!  That was refreshing!  Anyway as we enter into another year, let us look back fondly on the milestones mankind achieved and commemorate them accordingly.  It has been 70 years since Hitler decided that he was bored of bunker living.  It has been 150 years since General Lee surrendered in Hazzard County.  It has been 200 years since the War of 1812 ended.  The War of 1812.  In 1815.  Ahem.  Anyway, despite misnomered conflicts, there are many wonderful anniversaries that occur this year.  And as I can’t pass up yet another opportunity to make myself and others feel old, I shall mention just a few of these wonderful commemorations.

(Also as these are all film related, any DVD/BluRay producing companies can feel free to wire me a cut of the profits engendered from your re-re-re-releasing these flicks in special super-duper, double or triple dipped anniversary editions.  And you're welcome!) 

Can you believe it has been 10 years since George Lucas gave us the opus of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith?  A decade has passed since my being angry in a theater for having been suckered into a movie theater again, watching yet another ravaging of my childhood by this Happy Meal-friendly franchise.  Oh sure Batman Began this year as well, but that managed to eventually result in an even maddeninglier franchise.

Can you believe it has been 20 years since Pierce Brosnan was the “new” Bond in GoldenEye?  I always liked Pierce, but always felt that his Bonds were “eh” compared to those that came before.  Granted he began with a good one, but every one after that just diminished the good will returns more and more.  He started with fighting Sean Bean and ended with an invisible car.  Yeah, that's not good.  Still the year 1995 also gave us Apollo 13, Casino, The Usual Suspects, and Nixon which were all excellent films across the board.  Of course we also got the opportunity to see Val Kilmer in a rubber bat suit.  This almost negates everything else.

Can you believe it has been 25 years since The Hunt For Red October, Miller’s Crossing, and Goodfellas?  Arnold exploded his eyeballs in Total Recall.  Francis Ford Coppola decided to cash out in making a third chapter in The Godfather saga.  Coppola’s daughter’s acting definitely showed us that it is just grand she became a director instead.  Of course we would be remiss in not mentioning the other sequels of 1990: Die Hard 2, Gremlins 2, Highlander 2, and of course the biggest blockbuster of them all, aside from the fact that it wasn’t, Predator 2.

Can you believe it has been 30 years since…wow.  This list is impressive.  I wish I could be snarkier and less fanboyish, but I shall just list the list: Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Fletch, Clue, Weird Science, The Goonies, and Brazil.  And Spies Like Us?  Unreal!  Quite a year for sequels too: Rambo: Frist Blood Part II, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, Friday the 13^th Part V: A New Beginning, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge, George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead, Rocky IV, and the Bond movie that makes me cringe to this day, A View To A Kill.  I think Roger Moore is a lovely person and not that bad of an actor.  But that last Bond movie of his just makes me uncomfortable and when I hear the Beach Boys I just want to hit George Lazenby for deciding to leave the series as early as he did.

Can you believe that is has been 35 years since the last truly great Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back?  How about Airplane! or The Blues Brothers or Caddyshack?  How about the first movie where you actually sympathize with the killer and you can completely understand his motivation for violence?  You’ve heard of The Shining, right?  Who wouldn’t have turned to attempt to murder Shelley Duvall?  Picture yourself trapped in a snowbound hotel with her for a winter.  Yeah, Jack becomes almost the hero of the piece in that context, doesn’t he?

Can you believe that Steven Spielberg has now spent 40 years trying to recapture the greatness of Jaws?

Now for the next chunks of time there are a bunch of films that I know I’ve seen but chances are you haven’t.  Hey, it is okay, I understand.  Not that it makes you a bad person, just not as great as you could be.  And while I love a great Hitchcock joke as much as you don’t, I’ll pass my retreading of comments and just do a random list of movies.  After all, this is why the Internet was invented due to the public’s insatiable need to list things in order of something or other.

Commemorating 45 years: Patton, M*A*S*H, Kelly’s Heroes, and Tora! Tora! Tora!  There were other non-war-related movies made, I'm sure, but nothing springs to mind.

Commemorating 50 years: For A Few Dollars More, Thunderball, Doctor Zhivago, and The Greatest Story Ever Told.  Clint, Sean, Omar, and Jesus: Now THERE’S a cast list!

Commemorating 60 years: Rebel Without A Cause, To Catch A Thief, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Conqueror.  That last one is notable for being made downwind of nuclear testing which resulted in many bombs making this bomb.  (I am now the 756th person to call this film a bomb in this week alone.  And it isn't even Thursday yet.)

Commemorating 75 years: His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, Rebecca, and The Great Dictator, where Chaplin mocks Hitler and in doing so makes his last great comedy involving little mustaches.

Commemorating 80 years: A Night At The Opera and The Bride Of Frankenstein.  You’re still reading?  I’m amazing at your love of film or your lack of life.  Both usually go hand in hand.

Commemorating 90 years: Battleship Potemkin, The Gold Rush, The Freshman, and The Phantom of the Opera.  Why don’t they make them like this anymore, eh?  Well, chances are it is because Eisenstein, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Chaney are all dead. 

And finally commemorating an entire century since it first came upon cinema screens: The Birth Of A Nation.  Woodrow Wilson according to legend said that the film was like writing history with lightning.  I personally don’t believe that Bic makes refills like that for their pen lines.  Of course Wilson, a progressive racist hero, would love how the Ku Klux Klan comes off like the cavalry in this epic tome.  Granted for modern audiences that truly love film…it still is a bit of a slog to get through.  You eventually refrain from giving up hope because you know in your heart that DVDs can only hold so much storage and it has to end sometime.

So I hope that this walk down the memory lane of film accomplished my one main thought about film.  Film is timeless as long as there are eyes to watch it long after your eyes are decomposing in the ground.  Or something to that effect.  Happy New Year!