Chapter Twenty-Six, Which Used To Be Chapter Twenty-Eight.

     Aaaaaannnddd, we're back. The gorgeous redhead and self have returned from our European adventure. Of which I intend to write a lot about, especially about the history and the food and the fact that Europe evidently has never heard of a comfortable bed. But those are stories for another post. I've been quietly bitching to myself for a while now that I didn't have anything to write about, and I consoled myself with the fact that I've been publishing a chapter a week of the memoir, so I didn't really need to write anything additionally, and if that sounds lazy to you, it should. I'm a lazy, lazy writer. Remember the cartoon of the old hound dog on the porch who is so lazy that he just watches a cat saunter across right in front of his face? I would totally be that hound. Especially if the hound were also slightly drunk. And wondering where in the hell the tv remote had got to.

     My point is, I've returned form the Old World with a lot of stories and observations, and I intend to start interspersing them with the usual weekly chapter posts of the memoir. For those of you who have stuck with me this far, I'm absolutely going to finish out the book on this space. But I'm also actually going to start blogging again, since that's why I started this non-sensical enterprise in the first place.

     Also, publishing the book here has given me the chance to edit, and by "edit" I mean remove whole chapters that I've already written as posts on this space. (Evidently I went through a brief period writing the book where I was so desperate for pages, I plagiarized myself. If that's not the definition of laziness, I don't know what is.)

     And so: to those of you who missed me (both of you), thanks. I hope you'll keep coming back, because I had to go all the way to Europe to find out that I still have a shit-ton to say about things. But for now, let's get back to the book:

Chapter Twenty Six

Commercial Wisdom, or “Listen To Your TV Dad”

Always have a spit bucket. That’s another piece of wisdom that I stand by, especially when shooting any commercial involving food. Take any commercial where a human being is eating food, or drinking a beverage. Now, unless it’s a comedy bit, and the actor is about to spray that bite of food or slurp of milkshake all over some unsuspecting bystanders due to some real or imagined surprise, what is usually the very next thing you see the actor do after putting that food in their mouth? They smile. And that is why these kinds of commercials have a very specific name: Bite and Smile.

     It sounds like the easiest thing to do in the world. The bowl of spaghetti is in front of you. Take your fork, and slowly, sexily twirl the pasta around your fork. Raise it to your lips – not too fast, so the camera can track you. Open your mouth expectantly, close around the fork, slide that sexy-ass spaghetti off with your lips, and begin to chew. Reaction shot: wide, earnest, closed-mouth smile. This is the best goddamed spaghetti ever made by man. You are pleased. No, ecstatic! Just on the southern end of orgasmic. Aaaaaannnnd…CUT! That was beautiful! Perfect timing, excellent facial expressions, the client is thrilled. Now, we just need to do it EIGHTY-SEVEN MORE TIMES.

     I want you to try and imagine what your life would be like on a single day, if I asked you to take a bite of pasta once every 45-60 seconds or so – for ten straight hours. If you are imagining yourself dead, or contracting celiac disease, then you’re about on target. And that’s why a spit bucket.

     I remember my first bite and smile. It was a national commercial for an Italian chain called Johnny Carino’s. We had to report for work at one of the restaurants at 3AM, because the producers didn’t want any real people in the restaurant while we were filming. We were dressed in acceptable attire, arranged around tables, and the food started coming. I found out that I had one of the few close-up shots for this commercial, a tight shot on my face as I’m wrapping my lips around a wonderfully cooked piece of steak.

     The First Assistant Director asked me if I wanted a spit bucket, with a matter-of-factness that I didn’t think was appropriate for the word “spit.” I hate that word. (Irrational, I know. I’m also weird about “goiter,” and “pusillanimous.”) I replied that I did not. I had expressly not eaten dinner the evening before, knowing that I was getting up in a few hours to gorge myself on Italian food. I was ready. Bring the meat.

     And they did. And they kept bringing it. And I kept eating it, long past the point where I was actually full. But we kept shooting the scene over and over. From different angles. Multiple takes on every angle. This went on for hours. At the point where I physically started to turn green, I believe I had the thought that I was working with the Cecil B. DeMille of bite and smiles. I watched the faces of the other actors at my table, as they progressed from amused, to concerned, to disgusted, to outright horrified.

     When at long last the director (whose name I cannot remember, and I’m almost sure my mind did that on purpose, because if I did know his name my brain would probably put me in a fugue state long enough to track him down and murder him, and I’d wake up in a convenience store with no clothes on) decided he finally had the shot, and it was time to move on, I asked if I could be excused to go to the bathroom. I will not describe what I did in that bathroom; I have already told you a story that illustrates my family’s genetic pre-disposition for projectile vomiting. What I will tell you is that, by the time I was finished, the owners of Johnny Carino’s likely had no choice but to demolish that bathroom (and probably that whole side of the restaurant), but not before burning it down.

     A few years later I did another bite and smile, this time for a well-known baked goods company. I was no longer the hip, leather blazer-wearing single guy out with his friends at Johnny Carino’s. Now I was the sensible dad, with an adoring wife and two young daughters, ready for a day at the office in a crisp suit and tie. The heroes of this commercial were the baked goods: a selection of prepackaged donuts, donut holes, cinnamon rolls, and coffee cake. Picture the Middle-American family, gathered around the kitchen island on a weekday morning, about to dash off to work and school, but not before enjoying a plethora of packaged, processed sugary carb-bricks, all laid out and presented as though Martha Stewart were about to pop in any moment.

     One of the young actors playing my daughter (let’s call her Amanda, not her real name, because I’m friends with her on Facebook and she’s a teenager now, and she would knife me if I used her real name) could not have been more excited about the fact that she was going to spend the entire day eating donuts. That is the equivalent to an eight year-old of winning the lottery while riding your trained unicorn to Disneyworld. I had worked with this young lady before, and had built some rapport. As delicately as I could, I raised the idea that eating donuts all day might not be good for her stomach, and there was an actor’s trick I could teach her so that she could avoid a bad tummy ache later. A little trick I liked to call Spit That Shit Into A Bucket (I didn’t tell her that). She was horrified at the thought of “spitting gross chewed up food” into anything.

     The cameras began to roll. Every take, we would each take a bite of something, smile, look at each other, act like it was the best shit we’d ever eaten, then – CUT! Everybody would reach for their own bucket. Me, my tv wife, and our older TV daughter - but not Amanda. She would happily keep on chewing and swallow, and look at us like we were crazy for passing up what had to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We started to get into a groove, and the shoot was going well. Until about thirty minutes later, when I heard the director yell “Action!,” and we all started moving about the kitchen, doing our thing, reaching for our baked goodies, and quite suddenly I heard “Cut!” That meant a busted take, and when I looked around the set I saw Amanda still on her first mark. She was supposed to have moved with me over to the kitchen island, but she looked rooted to the ground. And she wasn’t moving. And she was very pale.

     I walked over to her, put my arm around her.

     Me: “Hey kiddo. You okay?”

     Her: “I think I’m ready to spit now.”

     Instantly a production assistant appeared from around the corner with a large Styrofoam cup in hand, and gave it to Amanda.

     Me: “There you go.”

     Her (looking at the cup, then at me): “It needs to be bigger.”

     Cut to Larry looking directly into the camera in wide-eyed horror.

     Her: “You should probably hurry.”

     Production only had to shut down for an hour, which is about how long it took the Wardrobe Department to locate a suitable replacement for the dress that Amanda destroyed.

     Always have a spit bucket.

     Make a contribution to the book by clicking HERE.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

     Do you have any idea how fucking difficult it is for me to be sitting in front of a screen right now? It's Spring in Texas, and we're actually having a proper Spring, which means the temperatures are actually Spring-like (as opposed to temperatures that are considered "Summer" or "Deadly" to the rest of the country), it's perfect motorcycle weather, baseball is back, and somewhere there is a forlorn patio, waiting for me to sit down on it and drink margaritas until I believe I can actually speak Spanish. But I'm trying to publish a chapter a week of the book until I get to The End, after which I have no goddam idea if I'll even still feel like writing on this space (but probably yes), and so here's Chapter Twenty-Four coming at you.

     I borrowed heavily for this chapter from a piece I published on the blog right here, but it's still a decent insight into how I came to do what I do. By which I mean be funny. Not masturbation. Which I also have done, though not nearly as much these days, because I have a girlfriend. And now I'm very uncomfortably going to try and steer the conversation back to this week's chapter. And away from masturbation.

     Chapter Twenty-Four

On the Origins of Making Shit Up

   

 I am invariably asked about my early influences. Who was my inspiration? Who did I want to be when I was a kid? Well, first I thought I wanted to be Mel Blanc, until I saw a picture of Mel (pre-Internet, remember?), and I found him to be very old. I didn’t want to be old. Still, he had great character range and perfect timing. So yeah, he was an early influence.

Mighty Mel.

 So was the late, great Jonathan Winters, from whom I developed the love of making shit up as I went. You always got the feeling, watching Uncle Jonathan, that he was just as curious as you to see where the sketch was going and that he – like you – had no idea where that was. But he always got there.

Uncle Jonathan.

      I discovered Monty Python’s Flying Circus around the same time I discovered masturbation – which is to say that age 12 was a very good year for me. That was the first time I ever saw a group of people working together for the express purpose of being funny. I didn’t know what “creative collaboration” was back then; I only knew that it took all of those guys to make the show so good. Circus was also my first exposure to a culturally different kind of funny, and I can tie that experience directly to my love of history. As a twelve year-old American boy, I could watch sketches like Dead Parrot and Upper Class Twit of the Year and Cheese Shop, and understand that they were funny. But I wanted to know why English people thought they were funny. Python taught me that a real understanding of your audience can make what you’re doing even funnier. This was a huge influence for me as I began doing Wishbone, and learning that it wasn’t just little kids watching our show, but college students, parents, etc. I began to develop an irreverence in the character of the dog that played well to older viewers. I began to understand my audience, and I owe that nugget of wisdom to the Pythons. 

Funny fucking Brits. And one weird American.

      But the biggest influence of all – the guy who taught me that making shit up was not only funny, but could be done for a living - was Robin Williams.

     And I even got to meet him, once.

     There was some video industry award ceremony in Los Angeles, and Wishbone

had been asked to be a presenter. So the dog, the dog's trainer, our

producers and I got on a plane and went to California. I don't remember most of that

evening. I remember getting to see Kenny Loggins doing his sound check. I

remember Howie Mandel was the emcee, and he was an egotistical prick. The only

 other thing I remember from that evening was being backstage, just hanging

 around until we were told what to do, when the hairiest man I'd ever seen walked

 right up to Jackie Kaptan (Wishbone's trainer), and asked, very politely, "Is it okay if

I pet him?"

     And he knelt down to pet the dog. Three feet in front of me. The man whose

 comedic hurricane blew into my sails at an early age, and charted the only course I

 was ever going to take.

     In 1979, everybody knew who Robin Williams was. Literally. Everybody. 60 million people a week tuned in to watch Mork & Mindy. And when the show aired on Thursday night, I memorized every good line and repeated them all day Friday at O.A. Reaves Intermediate, in my sixth grade homeroom class. But what most of the god-fearing, conservative citizens of Conroe, Texas did NOT know about Mr. Williams was his cutting-edge, stream-of-consciousness, and very adult-themed stand-up material.

     My best friend, Steve Woodson, managed to get his hands on that album. Probably because his parents were way cooler than mine. We played the shit out of that record. When Williams opened his show impersonating a Russian doing a New York echo (“Helloooooo.........Shut the fuck up!”), that's when I knew. I had already cemented my reputation as the class clown. Robin showed me that I could take it further. He revealed to me that I could - if I chose - actually make my tiny part of the world just a little brighter; that I could make comedy stop being for me, and make it for all of them.

     Flash forward to 1997. A stupid video industry award show. Backstage. And he's on one knee, three feet in front of me, petting a dog. My long-distance mentor. My hero. And an opportunity I knew I would never, ever, have again:

     Me: Mr. Williams? 

    RW (standing and shaking my hand): Hello.

     Me: Thank you. For everything. You're the reason I decided to make my living being funny.

     RW: Wow. You're welcome. What an incredible thing to say.

    That was it. His handlers whisked him off to wherever he was supposed to be. I looked around at my friends, the people I had spent so much time with working on our own show. We were all blinking rapidly, like we'd just looked directly into the sun for a second. How many kids get to meet their hero?

     When I heard of his death by suicide in 2014, I was a hot fucking mess for days. Naturally, I thought about my father, and how it could be that now two of my male role models had checked out of this existence in the same manner. In the end, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to look my comedy hero in his eye, and say, simply, thank you. Not “Oh my God, you’re so awesome!,” or “Where do you come up with this shit?”

     Just Thank You.

     

     Next Week, Chapter Twenty-Five: Gratitudinal Propers

     Make a contribution to the book by clicking HERE.

    

Chapter Twenty-Two.

     So, here's the thing:

     I didn't post Chapter Twenty-One last week, because it's been bat-shit crazy at my part-time job (Medieval Times, and yes, it's as kick-ass as it sounds to ride horses and play with swords), because March is our busiest month of the year because of Spring Break, when kids want to not think about school but do want to watch guys fight with sharp objects while falling off of horses, because isn't that every Spring Breaker's dream?

     Probably not. My point is, I was busy last week. Then I sat down today to actually publish Chapter Twenty-One, and I did what I always do before I publish another chapter on the blog. I read it. And I discovered something important. Something I hadn't noticed the dozen or so other times I've read Chapter Twenty-One.

     Chapter Twenty-One sucks ass.

     I'm serious. It's awful. Even though it's a completely true story, I read it out loud and it sounded like a giant, Titanic-sized boatload of bullshit. Poorly written bullshit. Now, I'm not saying everything up to this point would have made Papa Hemingway wet with jealousy, but I at least think I've been swinging for par. Chapter Twenty-One is just a great big slice into the trees, where there's poison ivy and coyotes. So, I am going to do with Chapter Twenty-One what the makers of the new Spider-Man film are doing with the first FIVE Spider-Man movies: namely, pretend like it never happened.

     And, with that in mind, I (mostly) proudly present Chapter Twenty-Two of Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. 

(Oh, and plus there's no snappy photo this week. I tried. Everything looked like shit. You'll just have to read the words. You can do it. I believe in you.)

Chapter Twenty-Two

Some Shit I Learned While Making Shit Up

  

  I rarely get asked for advice about working on camera, even though I’ve been doing it for over twenty years. Maybe it’s because people have seen my work and believe I don’t have shit to contribute. But I think it’s mostly because I don’t hang out with actors. I don’t belong to any actor support group, or club, or fraternity, or whatever actors in groups call themselves. I have lots of nice acquaintances who are actors; I see them all the time at auditions, and I work with them frequently. But I wouldn’t call many of them friends. Not drop-what-you’re-doing-and-bail-me-out-of-this-Mexican-jail friends, anyway. That’s mostly on me, not them. I choose the company I keep.

     Still, I’ve learned a few things, doing this shit for twenty years. And some of these things I believe are worth sharing, on the very slight chance that a budding young actor is going to pick up this book because I was on a moderately successful PBS series back when his parents were children. So, here goes. Take it or leave it.

     Play well with others. One of the very first things you had better learn about working in television or film – or even theatre, for that matter, even though I never have – is that it is a collaborative effort. Even to pull off a thirty-second commercial takes a team of people, all knowing and doing their jobs to the best of their ability. That’s a whole bunch of folks with a whole lot of different personalities and opinions, who all believe in their bones that their job is just as important as the fucking actor’s. If you work on a set as an actor, get to know the crew; they’re the ones who actually make shit happen. Learn their names, and at least one or two personal facts about them. Understand that you will be working closely (sometimes quite literally) with them, and that you all have a job to do. You’re trying to make something that’s bigger and more important than your individual contribution. And yes, that means even if it’s just a donut commercial. And in order to work collaboratively and be successful, it would help to:

     Have some fucking humility. For me, the first rule in working in television is to remember this phrase: You ain’t all that. I say it to myself before every gig, as a sort of ground wire for my ego. I am not the most important person on the set, so I don’t need to act like it. I don’t need to bitch about how hot the lights are, or how itchy my wardrobe is, or how terrible craft service tastes. I don’t need to monopolize a Production Assistant’s time by asking them to get me a double-soy latte every fifteen minutes. And while I’ve gained some wisdom over scores of commercial shoots, I’m not a director, or a cinematographer, or a lighting designer, or a sound engineer, and I should do my level best to keep my nose out of their business. Show up on time. Do your job well. Be nice. Go home. It’s not rocket surgery.

     Thicken your skin. As an actor, you know what will be the single biggest reality you ever have to deal with? REJECTION. You are going to be told – a lot – that you’re not the person we are looking for. And here’s my problem with so many actors who consider themselves artists: they take it personally. They react to a rejection as though the client or director or producer were deliberately targeting them for cruelty. I suppose, in some very rare instances, that’s true. But overwhelmingly, your not getting cast for a particular part is just business. Okay? Especially in advertising, ad folk and their clients are looking for something specific – even if they don’t really know what it is until the moment they see it at a casting session. Nine out of ten times, it’s going to be someone who is not you. Deal with it. If you can’t handle a lot of rejection, stay out of this business. Hell, for that matter, stay out of most creative endeavors. If you ever want to act something, or write something, or sing something in front of people who are not blood family or very close friends, then you are always going to have someone in the audience who thinks that you suck. Throughout the whole of recorded history, there have always been more critics of the creative arts than people with the courage and conviction to actually practice them. So buck up, camper. Or get a regular job.

     Don’t lie on your fucking resume. That sounds like common sense, right? Guess again. I’ve seen it too many times. This is the most basic of rules; if you can’t speak fluent Portuguese, or do magic tricks, or walk on a high-wire, or competently ride a horse, don’t put it on your resume. The worst cases I’ve seen of this both involved people who said they could ride horses, when they clearly could not. In one case it was funny; an extra on a commercial lied and said he could ride for a trail riding scene we were shooting. The trail guide asked each of us individually if we were comfortable on horseback. Then we were all warned about river crossings. It was summer, and some of the horses liked to get out in the middle of the river and lay down, whether or not somebody was on their back. I don’t know if this twenty-something kid was listening to this part, or just thought he was too cool to pay attention to an actual cowboy who was trying to keep us all safe. But sure enough, we got out in the middle of the Medina River, and his horse started giving all the warning signs, and he panicked and started kicking the horse and pulling in the reins at the same time, at which point you might as well just shout to the horse, “I got no fucking clue what I’m doing up here!” which the horse was like, “No shit,” and promptly laid down in the river. The guy wasn’t hurt, just mortally embarrassed – and fired.

     The second incident was serious, because it involved a much older actor who should have known better. This gentleman was a very accomplished theater actor, and assured all involved he was comfortable on horseback. All he had to do was nudge the horse forward into a Point Of View shot from ground level. When the cameras rolled, he didn’t nudge the horse so much as kick it in the ribs, causing the horse to rear, causing him to go ass-over-teakettle backwards off the horse, landing hard and breaking several ribs and his collarbone in the process. He could just as easily have broken his neck.

     Being in front of the camera is not the place for skills learning. If there’s a particular skill you’d like to be able to put on your resume, invest your time and money and go learn it. Take music lessons. Learn to ride a horse. Go to the firing range. Find someone who is good at what you want to learn, and learn from them. And still don’t put that shit on your resume until someone qualified at that skill tells you it’s okay to do so.

     Here endeth the shit.

     Next Week, Chapter Twenty-Three: Near-Death Vacations (Interlude)

     Make a contribution to the book by clicking HERE.

Chapter Twenty.

     So, I remembered this morning that I actually posted this chapter before, way back when I was still in the middle of writing the book, and wasn't too confident that I could actually finish writing it. Except I did finish writing it, and I have been publishing one chapter a week for the last nineteen weeks, and it would be kind of stupid not to publish this one just because I'd previously put it out here. Besides all that, it's a pretty good chapter, and one every aspiring actor should probably read. Because you might not be an aspiring actor by the time you finish it, and you might just decide it's worth working just a little harder in school so you can get a real job. I'm nothing if not a cautionary tale.

     Anyway: here's is the latest chapter of Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. Enjoy!

Chapter Twenty

Commercials and Shit

  

  The first commercial I ever did I was dressed up as a giant green number 5. No shit. The Texas Lottery was launching a new game – or, as some would state it, a new way to take money from desperate people who had a better chance of being struck by lightning while being mauled by a grizzly than they had of winning the lottery. The game was called Pick 3, and some ad guys in a room somewhere, who drank way too much coffee and probably never liked actors, thought it would be a capital idea to dress ten people up in giant, foam-rubber Gumby costumes shaped like numbers. I was the fifth of those people.

Like this. Except I was Number 5. Also, I'm not black.

     I think we shot the commercial on the stage of The Majestic Theater in Dallas. I also thought the Majestic had not been paying its utility bills, because the A/C was off, and it was summer, and I was in a black unitard and wearing a huge foam costume that sealed in, rather than ventilated, heat. I later learned that the producers turned off the air conditioning because it was too loud, and it interfered with the recording of our dialogue. That there were ten of us in suffocating costumes, in an old theater in the middle of a sweltering summer, with no conditioned air, seems not to have bothered – or even occurred – to the director, producer, and ad agency folk. At least, not until a couple of the female numbers started to pass out from heat exhaustion and dehydration.

     I was the “spokesperson” for the spot, which meant I had the most lines. There weren’t many, as this was only a thirty second commercial. But I found it difficult to concentrate, suffocating as I was and about to drown in my own sweat. People who work on commercials very often have to solve problems on the fly, because when ad agency guys think up the crazy shit they want actors to do, they rarely pause in their brainstorming to consider potential problems. Example: Once we all got into our costumes (no easy feat), we soon discovered that mine had a problem. Picture the number 5 in your head. See that straight line across the top? That was resting on top of my head, and my face was poking out in the sidewall of the 5. Except the costume was made of foam rubber, and so the top line of the 5 drooped on either side, making me look like a very depressed and sad number. What was needed was something to place on the inside of the top of my costume that would keep the foam rubber straight and true.

     Somebody’s ingenious solution? Glue a piece of two-by-four inside the top of the costume. And it worked.  The top of the 5 stayed straight and true. The problem (only for me, and nobody else) was that the two-by-four now rested on my head. And the costume weighed in excess of twenty pounds. And I wore that costume for ten-plus hours. I still have a groove in my head, in the shape of a two-by-four.

     I wasn’t the guy who got the worst of it that day. The dude who played Number 0 was asked by the director if he’d be willing to try a cartwheel across the stage – because what’s funnier than a cartwheeling 0? As we all wanted to make the director happy (because a happy director might remember you for his next commercial shoot), our intrepid number 0 said yes, he could absolutely do a cartwheel across the stage. So the camera begins to roll, and 0 takes a couple of halting steps (range of motion in these costumes was a joke), and begins a cartwheel, realizing too late that his arms are forced forward because of the costume, and he cannot get them over his head, and so what hits the stage is not his hands but the top of his skull. For one awful second he was frozen in that upside down position, before collapsing in on himself like a jelly donut with its filling suddenly, violently sucked out of it. Many hands rushed to the stage, to see if 0 was still alive, which would determine whether they gave him medical treatment, or whisked his corpse away to a rock quarry somewhere far out of town.

     0 survived the incident, and I think the first half of his failed attempt at a cartwheel actually made it into the final spot. I lost five pounds (mostly water), and required an IV drip to rehydrate, two numbers went down with heat exhaustion, and 0 sustained a mild concussion. All in the name of a lottery commercial.

     See? This shit is as glamorous as you think it is.

     Notice that I did not say, “All in the name of art.”  To me, making commercials isn’t art. Me saying that might piss some people off, but I don’t care. It’s my opinion, which is just like my asshole, in that I have one, just like you, and I am entitled to it. (My opinion, I mean. Not my asshole. Which is to say that I feel philosophically entitled to my opinion, given the whole free-will argument, and the First Amendment. I feel no similar sense of entitlement about my asshole, though I am grateful for it, and try not to take it for granted. And I realize I have now spent way too much time talking about my opinion. And my asshole.) My point is, to me making commercials is craft. I would go so far as to say that the best commercials are examples of good storytelling. But not art. Predator 2 is more art than any commercial I ever made.

     Which is not to say that I do commercials because I can’t act. When I first started in this business, I had the grandest of plans. I’d moved to Dallas to do commercials for a year or two, build up my resume, and then head out West to do sit-coms, and movies. But I don’t think I ever considered myself an “artist,” even then. Acting to me has always been a job – a craft, like I said. And it’s a job I’ve done for over twenty years. If I sucked at it, I probably wouldn’t have been at it so long. That would be like a chef running the same restaurant for twenty years, even though he was regularly poisoning the guests with his shitty food.

     The truth is, I like doing commercials. I LOVED doing a television series, and if the right one came along I’d jump all over it again, but I’m not disappointed that what I’ve mostly made is thirty and sixty-second little stories. It’s a different kind of acting challenge to have to create a believable character in the space of a minute or less. (Whether you like, despise, or pity the character is beside the point. The point is, are they believable?) That kind of thing requires good acting, and if you don’t believe me, take a look at the tidal wave of shitty commercials in the ether. I’m an actor, but please never call me an artist. Too many people I know who use that term for themselves don’t know how to wash clothes, or change a fucking tire.

     So, why haven’t you done more television shows and movies? A fair question, and one that I’ve only recently assigned any brain power to. My conclusions will probably disappoint you terribly, as they don’t involve drug addiction, murder, or living a double life as a Jason Bourne-like black ops agent (because that would be the most kick-ass excuse for not doing more in my career, ever). The truth is, I get bored easily. That’s why, if I ever do finish this book, let alone get it published, it’ll be a fucking miracle. I. Get. Bored. I can never do one thing for very long before I’m looking for something shiny. No, I don’t have ADD, or ADHD, or AIDS, or anything else. I simply believe that there is a lot of interesting shit in the world to see and do and experience, and I’m always afraid if I do one thing too long I’m going to miss it.

     The hardest working year of my life was the first season of Wishbone. We had 50 weeks to shoot 40 episodes of a show that was, from a production standpoint, like shooting a new movie every damn week. We averaged 60-65 hours a week when we were shooting, and that’s not counting the 8 to 10 hours I would spend in the studio on Saturdays. And it wasn’t the long hours, the weather challenges of working in Texas at any time of the year, the re-writes, the myriad of things that can and do go wrong on a film set.

      It was the fucking “normalcy” of going to the same job, every day. Doesn’t that sound stupid?

     I lived inside this one character for a whole year. Maybe Daniel Day-Lewis can do that shit standing on his head, but it almost drove me over the falls. By the end of that first year, I was giving serious consideration to strapping on a back-pack and doing the old Bruce Banner hitch hiking scene out of town. (If you never watched Bill Bixby in the TV series The Hulk, you don’t get that reference. Stop reading and go watch it right now. I can’t believe you’ve never seen that shit.) When the producers told me we might not shoot a second season, I wasn’t all that disappointed. I was exhausted. And I had no clue how to operate in polite society (I’d never had much of a clue, but being out of social circles for a year made it worse). I wanted – needed – to do something different.

     We did do a second season, far shorter than the first, and then it was over. I went from making a lot of money every week to making nothing at all, and believe you me, I would have given anything to get that “normalcy” back. The immortal 80s hair band Cinderella sums it up best: “Don’t know what you got ‘till it’s gone.” We did a year in New York, I befriended a mobster and learned some ju-jitsu, then we moved back and I started doing commercials in earnest. I suppose Wishbone was – and still is – art, of a sort. But I’m still no artist. I’m just a guy with a skill that made a small contribution to a larger idea. As legacies go, I guess that doesn’t suck.

     Next week, Chapter Twenty-One: Fuckin' Around With Fame

     Make a contribution to the book by clicking HERE.