1.  The Twitter Stripper.  

A week or two ago I was walking to the bus stop from work, when I passed a young, attractive punk-ish looking girl walking a tiny dog and getting stuff out of her van.  She wore black tights and leopard-skin bike shorts, and a big leather jacket and a “fuck you” sneer on her face.  Needless to say, I was in love.  As I passed by I wondered if she lived at the house next to us — an older looking brown house with Halloween decorations  (tombstones, spiderwebs, etc) still affixed to the front lawn.  It seemed like a perfect fit.  But, alas, my poor social skills forbade me to talk to her.  Besides, she might punch me in the face or something.  She probably has a Billy Idol shrine in her closet.

So I passed her by.

The next day, on Twitter, I see this tweet from PDXPipeline:

Just saw Portland’s favorite exotic dancer, Malice,walking her mini Dobermans outside Creme. New hair color http://twitpic.com/1bge0

I, being a fan of pretty ladies, clicked the link.  And guess who it is?  It’s the punk lady from the other day!  Crazy hair and leather jacket and all.  I knew there was more to her than meets the eye (or less, I suppose, once she gets on stage…).

This led me to the following thought: What would I say to this woman if she was giving me a lapdance?  I’ve always been the Embarrassed Guy at the strip club (and I’ve only been to a strip club once, so we’re talking 100% success rate¹), and all I could imagine was how I’d try to work in that I knew she was a stripper from Twitter.  Something like this:

SCENE: Strip club.  JOSH, sitting in a chair in a private booth.  MALICE enters, fully nude.  She clutches a twenty dollar bill in her teeth.

MALICE.  One of your friends bought you a lapdance, huh?
JOSH. It appears so.
MALICE.  Gotcha.

She plops down on JOSH’S lap, begins to grind slowly.

A beat.

JOSH.  So, how are you?
MALICE.  I’m good, baby.  How are you feeling?
JOSH.  I’m fine.
MALICE.  Are you ready for me?
JOSH.  Uh … yes?
MALICE.  Good.

Beat.  MALICE is lapdancing, JOSH is looking awkward.  He feels he must initiate some form of conversation, so that he can rise above the “average” lapdance receiver: the grimy dude with his front teeth missing or the fat trucker with the wicked mustache.  So:

JOSH.  You know, it’s funny…
MALICE.  What?
JOSH.  You live across the street from where I work.
MALICE.  Oh yeah?
JOSH.  Yeah.
MALICE.  That’s not very funny.
JOSH.  I didn’t mean funny “ha ha,” I meant funny strange.  But not strange strange, I mean–
MALICE (puts a finger to his lips).  Shhhhh..

She continues to writhe on JOSH’S body, making all kinds of noises that would turn a regular man on.  But JOSH is no regular man — he is a socially awkward nerd.

JOSH.  I saw you on Twitter.
MALICE (sighs).  What?
JOSH.  I mean, I saw you at my work, right, but then later on I saw you on Twitter.  That’s how I knew you were a stripper.
MALICE.  What’s Twitter?
JOSH.  It’s a social networking site.  Like blogging, but only 140 character.  Microblogging, they call it.

Beat.

MALICE.  Your time is up. 

The end.

And that’s how I assume that would go.

2. The Introvert’s Penmanship

All of these stories, by the way, are linked by Twitter.

And this isn’t really a story, it’s just a theory I had while working today.  Basically, my theory is that introverted people have bad handwriting, and extroverted people have good handwriting.  Why?  Because introverts don’t need attention from others.  The most typical introvert characteristic is that they (we, I should say, I’m pretty introverted) feel drained after being around people for an extended period of time, while extroverts feel energized.  Penmanship, I believe, is something that reflects this introvert/extrovert characteristic, because writing is ultimately viewed by other people.  Introverts can’t be bothered to write well, I guess, is my ultimate point.  Extroverts WANT to write well so that it (and they) look good to others, but introverts don’t care, because interaction with people isn’t important to them.

Something like that.  The idea makes sense in my head, but the English language is lacking the words I need to express myself, heh.

3. The Pale-Faced Play Review

Perfection, the play I am currently in, has been featured in the Oregonian twice:  once as a story about the meaning of the show itself, and now as a review.  I can’t really tell if the reviewer enjoyed the play or not — he says it ventures too close to “melodrama” and is “emotionally overwrought,” both of which aren’t untrue, necessarily (the play deals with a heavy subject), but he doesn’t specifically say that those detract from the show itself.  He insinuates it, of course, and insinuation is the reviewer’s best friend — the ability to say you hate something without saying outright that you hate it.

I don’t generally pay attention to play reviews.  I know actors say this a lot, and while I will admit that I think it kicks ass when I get a good review, I don’t get all distraught if I get a bad one.  I can tell if I’m in a bad show, and I’ve been in a couple².

But in this review the guy said I was “intriguing” but looked “ghoulish” with my stage makeup and the stage lighting.  I guess this must’ve distracted him from my acting ability.  All I can think is that he added the “stage lighting” part because he must’ve realized, at some point in writing the review, that I can’t not be pale, and so he blamed it on something else.  My makeup can’t save my paleness; it has to be the same shade as my face or else it looks like I got a terrible fake tan.

Anyway, it just bugged me because this is my first show and the review for the show is that my makeup/the lighting sucks.  All the other castmates (save for Alex and Brian, who didn’t even get mentioned — what gives?!) got glowing reviews, but Josh is a pasty ghoul.  Le sigh.  I’m not planning on tanning any time soon, dude.

Helen, the playwright, is worried that the review will lower ticket sales, so we’re not sure if we’ll be playing past this Sunday.  Honestly, the reviewer’s stance on the play itself is merited — it is a little melodramatic, but I don’t know what else it could be.  It’s about sterilization of people, for Chrissakes!  That’s a tragic thing, and this is a tragic play.

I guess we’ll see what happens this weekend.  If you’re in Portland, you should come see the show!  Here’s the website for more details.

And now to work on Test Comic comics and FAWM songs!

Which, I think, by default, makes me perfect.

Finally, someone said it!

More details to come. The show opens in February. I’m so excited I think I peed myself a little.

So today was a bit of a productive day. I challenge my fear of the Portland mass-transit system and managed to make it quite easily around town.

My first task was to get myself all prettified, which meant wearing nice slacks and the only nice white dress shirt I own (if you’ve known me for more than six months, you have seen this shirt). I looked good. I looked damn good. I grabbed my man bag, stuffed with The Glass Menagerie (“Pleurosis! I thought you said blue roses!“), some resume/headshots, and a notepad in case creativity struck me (it didn’t), and headed off into the wild Portland yonder.

My first trip was to a casting call for a commercial about people playing a Wii game. That’s the extent of what I know. I left my house at 1:30; the casting call was at 3:00. I, being completely naive about the transit system, thought it would take approximately a million hours to get from point A to point B. My brain did not register the perfectly logical argument that the transit system should not take approximately a million hours, because it is a transit system and, by nature, should not be leisurely. Still, I figured, give it an extra hour at least, which frightened me into an hour and a half. I mean, what if the bus breaks down? What if I get on the wrong bus? What if a bear somehow gets on the bus and I have to wrestle it to the ground with my bare hands? I was merely adding an extra half hour for potential bear-wrestling variables.

I got there at 2:10. And felt very sheepish. It was okay, though, because I had no idea where the place was, or where I was, really, and so it afforded me a lot of time to walk around and survey the scene. After a while I realized I was roughly in the same place that I had gotten lost in three years ago when I went with my girlfriend at the time to see my first Decemberists concert. It’s an industrial district, which is why having an ad agency right in the middle of it was kind of odd. But I found it, at like 2:20. And had forty minutes to waste. But what to do?

Obviously, the answer to that is eat. But, alas, I am (notoriously) poor, and had to settle on the value menu at a nearby Burger King. I still can’t get over the lack of sales tax here. My spicy chicken crisp was exactly a dollar! Not a dollar six, a dollar even! It was nice to pocket that extra six cents.

I ate in the BK in my nice threads while reading the Forward of this particular copy of The Glass Menagerie (written by Mr. Williams himself), fully aware of how weird it was to be doing this in a Burger King. But hey, I had nothing else to do. I finished my meal and checked my watch. 2:35. Guh.

I ended up going up to the agency at 2:40, stopping to pick up a Willamette Week and Portland Mercury on my way, and when I got up to the third floor I noticed I wasn’t the only one to arrive twenty minutes early, which was nice. I was handed something to sign and then hung out, waiting for 3:00. But then the guy doing the casting (or at least taking the pictures) came out and started taking us at around 2:45. So I got in (fourth in line), got my Polaroid and some info (am I available Oct 3rd? [hell yes] Have I done extra work before? [yes!]), and was out by 2:55. Not half bad. Oh, and apparently the look for the commercial is preppy private school, and he asked me if I had anything like that, and I said, “Uh, I think so…” and he said, “Well, what you’re wearing would be fine,” and I was like, “Yessssss.” I said that in my head, though, not out loud.

So I took the bus home and played with a dog for a while and waited until five (a proper hour, not hour and a half) to make my way uptown for my play audition. Boarded the 72 bus, which was supposed to take me north to Killingsworth, then west to 7th Ave. It did not do that.

It happened quite suddenly. At Cully, the driver shouted, “END OF THE LINE!” then turned the bus off. And the lights. And we (about ten of us) sat there in silence before she said, “Okay! Get off the bus!”

We shuffled off, very confused. I saw another bus across a parking lot that also said Killingsworth on it and asked the driver if he was going to 7th Ave. He said no, he’s going south. I asked if there was a bus going to 7th Ave. He shrugged his shoulders. Nice.

I dialed the Trimet number to see if another 72 was coming by. It said there was, which meant that I had just gotten on the wrong bus, apparently. So the rest of the exiled bus passengers and I waited for that bus to arrive. And when it did, the world was good again. Until the lady said, halfway down the line, that it was Last Thursday and she would not be turning on Alberta. I had no idea what this meant, so I was just fine with that.

Then I remembered that I had to get off at 7th and Alberta. But we were still on Killingsworth. So, uh … what the hell do I do? And what the F was Last Thursday? (Answer: it’s like First Thursday in Boise, except they block of a part of the street for the celebration.) Fortunately, the bus driver was letting people off wherever they wanted, since there were no bus routes on Killingsworth at this point, and people were Generally Discombobulated. So I asked her nicely if I could get off at 7th, and she said Yes, and I did.

So now I was at 7th and Killingsworth, and needed to be at 6th and Alberta. I was slightly disoriented, still trying desperately to negotiate the compass system that is so crucial here. I decided to walk in a direction I thought was south. And then I remembered that I had Verizon Navigator on my phone, so I whipped it out and after a bit of tinkering, I found out that I was, in fact, traveling south, and that I wasn’t far from Alberta, and yada yada I made it to King Elementary, where the audition was happening.

I was going to write about the audition process but I think my specific opinions should not be shouted out to everyone to hear (I have learned to keep my mouth shut after certain blog posts…), but in general it went very well. I left all my playbooks and monologue books in Boise, so I only had my Tom monologue from Menagerie (After the fiasco at Rubicam’s business college … yeah, that one), which I did very well, if I say so myself. The director seemed to enjoy it, at least. And she asked if I could stick around and read sides and I said Oh Yes and so I did.

I got a little intimidated because the other people auditioning had agents and nice color headshots and connections and other shows they were doing, but from the little amount of partner work I did tonight, I can safely say that I held my own. Also, the saddest thing was when I realized that this would be the first time I had ever acted opposite a black person. Oh Idaho, must you be so white and Mormon? The two guys I did scenes with were great, though, and it made me a little disappointed at the lack of color in the BSU theatre program. We had a bunch of white kids and a couple of Asians and that’s about it. Oh, and Dominique. She was, er, is black. And I guess I did do La Mancha with her. So I append my statement: first time acting with a black male.

I don’t want to bring it up as a race thing, but I think what a lot of people fail to see is that in Idaho, it’s not so much racism as lack of race. It just doesn’t exist. So it’s not like we’re racist at all, we just don’t see a lot of black people, which is sad, because they are awesome.

Anyway, off my race soapbox. I held my own in the audition, I thought, and took the 6 bus to the MAX to get home (no way was I going to try the 72 again, not tonight…). And now I’m home and I jus
t ate a bunch of Tic-Tacs! I think I’m addicted!

God, that show is just really well put together. I’d delve into it more specifically but I don’t want to ruin any plot points for those of you who haven’t seen it. Get it on Netflix or buy it or whatever. It’s good. Even the voiceover is good, and I hate voiceovers. The only time voiceover works is when the character says one thing while the opposite is happening on screen, and thankfully that happens a lot on Dexter. It’s very good. Plus the second season has Jaime Murray in it (she plays Lila) and she is a hot, hot English woman and she’s naked or almost naked most of the season. It’s great.

The third season starts in like two weeks! I’m excited.

Right now I’m listening to the new Calexico album and I really enjoy it. It’s called Carried to Dust and it’s a lot more Latin feeling than their last album. I wasn’t a huge Calexico fan before but I think this album will be listened to a lot.

ummm, that’s about it right now, really. I’m still job hunting. Oh, I have an audition for a play in a week or so! It’s a new play by local Portland playwright Helen Hill. She was kind enough to send me a copy of the play to read before the audition and I have to say it’s pretty good. I think it could use a polish or two with regards to dialogue and scene stuff, but that might get fixed in rehearsal. And even if it doesn’t it’ll still be a good production, hopefully. It pays well enough. Assuming I rock the audition. It’s about eugenics in the 1920s through the 60s. The play primarily takes place in 1934 and is about a doctor who sterilizes poor, “feeble-minded” people so they won’t reproduce. It raises some interesting questions, primarily about the morality of eugenics and a somewhat elitist take on “survival of the fittest”; namely, the question of what it means to be the “fittest.” The script right now to me seems a bit too dry and presentational but it can be limbered up in rehearsal. I think it’s a solid premise though, and none of the characters are too obtuse or two-dimensional, with the slight exception of the doctor, who doesn’t really offer any good human explanation for why he cuts out poor women’s ovaries other than that they’re a blight on society (poor women, not ovaries). Again, if given the opportunity to discuss the play in a development session, I will bring this up, but other than that I just want to act and get paid for it, honestly. I think it’s a good show and I think people will like it.

My only problem is that I left all my playbooks in Boise. The only play I have here is The Glass Menagerie. Why I have it, I don’t know, but it looks like I’ll be pulling out a Tom monologue with some Shakespeare backups. Boy oh boy.

(Seriously though, it would rock if I got cast in this show, so send some good vibes if you got ‘em)

The job hunting still sucks. I have sent resumes to tutors and people who want someone to teach guitar to middle school kids for a couple of weeks, and receptionists, and etc etc etc. I really don’t want a shitty job and I feel like I’m in a good place to pace myself a little bit (not a lot, though, but at least my brother and his wife aren’t really living paycheck to paycheck…). Hopefully something good and achieveable will come up soon. Again, more good vibes!

That’s all for now!

Most people, for example, don’t know the sheer amount of business knowledge that a theatre major receives during our collegiate career. By the time I graduated I basically knew how to run a theatre company, and I sort of know the odds and ends in getting money from sponsors and grants. Technical theatre is about learning carpentry, electrics, and sound engineering. Playwriting is about English skills, proof-reading and creative writing. Directing is about management. In a way, the only truly useless person in a theatre company is the actor, because all they do is utilize their bodies for the show. They don’t build, they don’t manage. They are fodder for the audience. It’s surprising that they get so much attention.

The problem is that while theatre students learn all these different aspects, we don’t learn enough. We go into the job market with okay skills in everything. Our only boon is that we work well under pressure, since that’s what a rehearsal schedule is — two to four weeks of rehearsal, and we open, no matter what. But employers don’t see that. Employers see an actor who doesn’t have any job skills whatsoever. A bunch of roles in various plays doesn’t mean you have what it takes in the real world. In fact, it suggests the exact opposite — that you like playing in a fantasy world, and thus couldn’t handle real problems.

This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. Theatre students are fully capable of handling any problem thrown at them, because they usually are at some point in the production process. We work well with others, and form bonds easily because that’s what we do. Some actors are prima donnas, yes, but those ones are shunned by the theatre community as well.

I graduated Boise State with a Theatre Arts degree, and my work resume is a hapless mishmash of three or four jobs I’ve worked since 2001. It looks like the resume of a 16-year-old. What it doesn’t take into account is that I spent most of my days in school, for twelve or thirteen hours, going to class and then going to rehearsal. Or that point a couple of years ago when I had to work to live in Boise, so I would go in at Hastings at 7:00am, leave at noon to go to class until 4:30, and then rehearse from 6:00 to 10:00. Most people who are business majors don’t do this. I don’t think anyone works as hard as people in the arts. I don’t think they even understand the amount of work we put in, on top of our jobs and extra-curricular activities. I’m not complaining. I’m actually happy about all of it. It’s tough but the end result is fantastic: opening night of a show you worked your ass off for, and now people get to see it. It’s great.

I just wish that employers knew what we did, so that they could understand what we can do for them.

And on that note, I should go and look for a job.