The Most Embarrassing Thing That Ever Happened To Me / Action (13 min)
I usually start out by saying something like "Happy Friday" but right now it feels like the whole world is falling apart. So I'll just say, "Hey, it's Friday. We made it. Hopefully." Please take care of yourselves.
Thanks to everybody who sent in rec's for the playlist last week! I added them to both the iTunes and Spotify lists. If you sent me a rec and don't see it please let me know. Sometimes I miss the incoming messages.
I also want to say THANK YOU to those of you who have dropped me a line when something here clicks for you, or if you helped spread the word on social media, and thanks for just taking the time to read it.
When I made the decision to start this I decided not to force it, but rather to let it grow organically. An "If you build it, they will come," kind of thing. Thirty-eight weeks later, we're still here. I appreciate you.
Last week I mentioned I was interested in doing a musical at some point and it reminded me that I haven’t told you about The Oklahoma Incident.
My high school only did one big musical a year so competition for lead roles was fierce. Kids would rent the movie of whatever show it was months in advance so they could get an early start on perfectly mimicking the original performances by the time auditions rolled around in December. This was the bulk of my process back then because I didn’t actually have a process for creating a character of my own. Even in the band, Lynx, I would mimic the lead singer of whoever we were covering. It wasn’t until college that I started to understand the concept of “finding my voice.”
You were lucky to get a role if you were a freshman or sophomore but I had done some community theater and was cast as Marryin’ Sam in LI'L ABNER my freshman year. My sophomore year I got lucky again with Will Parker in Oklahoma. He’s a cowboy, the love interest of a girl named Ado Annie, and he leads a big, rousing dance number in the first act called “Kansas City.” Getting this role meant I had to tap dance in front of people.
We did a number of morning matinees during the school week for area schools, shows that could number well over a thousand people in the audience. We would pack kids all the way to the back of the balcony in our ancient theater. I have distinct memories of sitting in the nosebleed section in elementary school, watching NO, NO, NANNETTE and THE WIZARD OF OZ. Friday night we would open to the public for the weekend.
The morning of the first school show I woke up sick to my stomach. I think it had something to do with the Bon Jovi concert I went to the Sunday before in Lexington. Thinking that maybe a snack would make me feel better, I stopped at the convenient store on the way to school, around 7am, and picked up some powdered donuts and chocolate milk for breakfast. I also bought some lemon-lime Gatorade, just in case I needed to rehydrate after sweating it out during the big tap number.
I didn’t feel any better post-donuts and chocolate milk. In fact, I felt worse. I warned our director, Mr. Handley, that I was feeling sick. In addition to being the speech teacher and drama director Mr. Handley was a coach on the football team. He gave me a locker room speech that convinced me I was going to be just fine, I just needed to get out there and do it. To this day I am inspired by the man’s positivity and sheer force of will.
Thinking on the fly, I decided that maybe drinking the Gatorade BEFORE the show would help me feel bette so I downed the whole bottle of unnaturally green liquid. It sank into my stomach and made itself acquainted with the rest of what I'd ingested. It was immediately clear that they were not getting along down there.
When the show started I sat offstage in the wings listening to my friend Joe Reeves (who played Curly) as he sang, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Meanwhile I’m lacing up my tap shoes and coming to terms with the horrifying realization that every time I opened my mouth to even think about singing I triggered my gag reflex. By this point, it was too late to do anything. My cue came and I made my entrance.
Tap…tap…tap..tap…
Picture me at age fifteen. Tap shoes. Heavy stage makeup.
I greeted the character of Aunt Eller by saying, “Howdy!” And… somehow I was fine. We were off and running. I made it through the scene and stepped center stage to begin my big number. In front of me were a thousand students from schools all over the Tri-State. Behind me, were a dozen high school boys also wearing tap shoes.
The music started, “Boom chink, boom chink, boom chink…”
I sang, “I got to Kansas City on a Friday”…and my worst nightmare came true.
I started to gag.
So, what the audience heard was...
Boom chink…boom chink…boom chink…boom chink…
“I got to Kansas City on a Friday…HUUUURGGH!!!”
“By Saturday I learned a thing or HUUUURRGGHHH!!
“Up til then, I…HURRGGHH!!!! HURRGGH!!!!!
Nothing was coming out yet because every time I heaved it forward I would fight to stuff it back down my throat. After about thirty-seconds I stopped singing altogether and froze in panic. Mr. Rath, our musical director and another of my heroes from that era, cut off the orchestra and turned around to look at me with the greatest wtf face of all time. So there I stood, bathed in spotlight, in complete silence, a thousand students staring at me, while I repeatedly threw up into my throat and swallowed it back down.
Finally, in between gags, I managed to say, “Gotta see Ado Annie!” Then I ran off the stage and promptly threw up in a garbage can in the wings, in full view of the rest of the cast who were still on stage. It was deathly quiet so everyone heard me heaving just out of sight. After what seemed like five minutes (but was probably more like twenty seconds) one of the cowboys, Willie Keith, said, “Well, Aunt Eller. I guess we better be going too.” By this time, Mr. Handley had arrived and frantically pulled the curtain closed.
I went immediately to the doctor, and Mr. Handley went on as Will Parker for the rest of the show, reading my lines from the script. The doctor gave me some meds that killed whatever was happening in my stomach and I slept from late that afternoon until early the next morning. I was back at it the next show and I didn’t have any problems through the rest of the weekend. The only changes we had to make were they cut all of the blocking where I kissed Ado Annie, which I thought was fair.
When I look back on that time now I’m surprised it didn’t ruin me for theater for good. I didn’t develop stage fright or massive anxiety about getting up in front of people and possibly making a fool of myself. I used to wonder if maybe it had the opposite effect, that it was so traumatic it inoculated me against ever feeling that in the future. The worst thing that could have possibly happen already happened. I was fearless on stage, all the way though going "the full monty" in THE FULL MONTY in 2006.
The other memory I have from OKLAHOMA is that one of the upper classmen, who was also on the football team, was listening to his Walkman, psyching himself up for the show like he was psyching himself up for a game. I asked him what it was and he handed me his headphones to listen, saying, “This song gets me so pumped.”
Reader, it was “St. Elmo's Fire” by John Parr, also known as "Man In Motion." I'll be honest, I didn't get it. At all. Even now, all these years later, I started to include it because I thought it was endearing.
Just now, as I'm writing this newsletter, I looked up the lyrics and that led me to the discovery that this song was written about a Canadian athlete named Rick Hansen who was paralyzed by the waist down after a car crash when he was 15.
From Songfacts:
"On March 21, 1985 Hansen began his "Man In Motion" tour, traveling about 70 miles a day to raise money for spinal cord research. At first, Hansen had trouble getting media attention and donations, but when this song was released with the movie in June, it became his anthem, and as the song rose up the charts, interest in Hansen's journey grew. By the time the "Man In Motion" tour was completed on May 22, 1987, Hansen had put over 40,000 Kilometers (24,856 miles) on his wheelchair in 34 countries on four continents, raising $26 million. He became a national hero in Canada, where he is closely associated with this song."
How cool is that?
I totally get it now.
I spent the past few minutes trying to come up with something profound or inspirational to close this out. The best I came up with is this: if you happen to find yourself in the front row of a Bon Jovi concert and a shaggy haired man with a cigarette behind his ear hands you a bottle, don’t take a swig.
Action
I binged the entire season of PEACEMAKER in the week leading up to the season finale and it’s one my favorite superhero stories of this new golden age. The thing I loved most about it was that there was very little plot. I could tell you the entire story of The Butterflies in about five sentences and that information was delivered over eight episodes in a clear and simple way, just enough to provide a reason for why these characters were all lumped together and set the stage for some super fun action.
The rest of the run-time, I’d say a good 80%, was solely dedicated to characters and relationships. It’s almost like every episode could have been one sequence in a feature (the sequence where we infiltrate “x”) but because it was spread out over forty-five minutes they had time to spend with the characters en route to the action, in the quiet pre-action moments, and the post-action aftermath. But it also did something that I love which is that it used the action fr character development.
Stuff like, what happens if someone can't "take the shot" at a crucial moment? Why did that happen? How does it affect how the other characters feel about them? How does that complicate the next mission? What happens when the next opportunity arises? Will they do it then?
This is one of my biggest weaknesses. Often when I’m writing an action sequence I’m conscious of telling the “plot” story — the characters need to get from Point A to Point B, they need to extract X or steal Y, but I neglect to add in the emotional or character story. It’s the exact same lesson I had to learn about pitching. It’s easy for me to get carried away with the cool stuff and forget to use action to reveal character. Afterward I go back and realize it’s all pulse and no heart.
This is something I’ve been especially focused on this past couple of weeks because I’m trying to crack an adaptation of source material with heavy action. As much as I love the action scenes they’re missing a depth of emotion. Part of my “take” now is about front-loading personal conflict between the characters so that stuff is always percolating underneath. It’s not enough that each character has their own style of fighting, they have to have a point-of-view about it. Fight scenes, chase scenes, daring escapes, they're all more interesting if characters are falling in or out of love, reconciling, building trust or breaking it, etc, while doing them.
As I’m writing this out, it’s got me thinking about my other weaknesses. I love nerding out about stuff like process and structure and character but I’ve never taken a couple of months to focus on one place where I’m lacking, like action. I tend to jump into the next script and try to improve on the fly. But if I was a professional athlete I would be in the gym or on the field putting in extra time on that one component trying to shore up my weaknesses. I’m going to put some thought into that this week. Come up with a Yoda list for that specific weakness.
Do you have an Achilles Heel in your creative work? Have you made a concentrated effort to improve on that one thing?
Some other stuff I loved this week: THE AFTERPARTY, ABBOTT ELEMENTARY, the book House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, and Duane Tudahl's latest book on Prince, Prince and the Parade and Sign O' the Times Era Studio Sessions, where he goes through all of the studio records and interviews the people who were making music with Prince at the time. It's exhaustive, super nerdy on process, and awe-inspiring.
