Mister Boddy

I host burlesque shows, and I adore it.  I love the community.  I love the attitudes of people brought together by sexy, sexy fun times.  There’s a perception of debauchery, but really it’s wrought a sense of celebration in All Things Human.

Burlesque is the acceptance of all people.  All body types are represented, all shapes and sizes and ethnicities and attitudes, all definitions of the phrase “sexual identity.”  I have never felt more comfortable being my true self than I feel when I’m with the people of burlesque.

I’ve been overweight most of my life.  This isn’t to say I’m unhealthy by a medical definition, but I’ve typically had more cushion around my middle than I’ve been comfortable with.  I’ve always known what it would take to get into the shape I want, but I’ve rarely been able to exercise the necessary discipline to obtain and maintain success.

But in burlesque, it doesn’t matter.  I’ve learned to accept the fact that as long as you’re comfortable with yourself, there is someone out there who wants exactly what you are.  Several someones, in point of fact.  The more I can feel accepted by others, the more I accept myself as-is.  It’s a lovely, self-sustaining cycle.

In mid-March of this year I was given a present.  I had recently been honored with the task to host the 3^rd annual Windy City Burlesque Festival, and a woman very close to my heart presented me with a gift of celebration; a vest and tie to wear on stage (which I wear shirtless, because sex).  Both items were of high quality to begin with, but they had her added touch of decoration that made them extra special.

And the vest didn’t fit.  I tried to put it on, but as much as I sucked in my belly and stretched the fabric the buttons still had a good four inches of torso to cross before they could reach the buttonholes.  It was awfully embarrassing.

With three months until the festival, I began to cut weight.  I lifted weights, I jogged, I cycled, I cut loose in an African Dance class.  For the first month I exercised an average of two hours a day, six days a week.  When my schedule became too cramped for the gym I switched to an all salad diet, and my torso began to melt like a candle.

I was able to button the vest in time for the festival.  When I’m gaining weight and denying it I keep my belt tighter than it should be, and the notches look like the horrified screams of the melting Nazi faces in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Not so with this vest; I was still a little too big for it, but not grossly so.  Many out-of-town attendees from the previous year’s festival noted I had lost a lot.  The pride I felt in such a personal victory was a delightful antidote to the (unrelated) emotional distress I’d been through about that same time.

But with the festival now two months behind me I find myself way behind in the measured structure of weight loss.  I’m doing well at keeping a maintenance level; I haven’t put any weight back on, but I’m not losing any more either.  I’m pleased with this, but I still have further to go before I get to where I want to be.  Before I look the way I want to look.

But why, with so much acceptance and support from my fellow burlesquers (presently the most important people in my life), do I still feel the need to alter who and what I am?  Two reasons.

First; because I know I can.  I love setting physical goals for myself and achieving them.  The last time I lost a significant amount of weight (three years ago), I was running 7-8 miles per day.  A few months prior I could barely do two.  I love watching myself change.  I love feeling the difference in how much further (and easier) I can run during a 34 minute playlist compared with the previous month.   I revel in the kudos from people I haven’t seen in a while who remark at my success.  It’s a validation of hard work having paid off. 

Second; well, second is more shallow.  I’m finally at the point where once again I’m ready for romance (I think/I hope/who-the-fuck-knows, but I’m gonna try it again anyway and find out).  This inspires me to be the best version of myself I can be.  I want to be wholly worthy of Ms. Right, whomever and wherever she is, and I know physical aesthetics are a part of that.  They’re a part of the initial stages of attraction.  I want to be seen and known and loved for who I am in my heart and mind and soul, but I don’t want those deeper parts of who I am to be overlooked because “he’s cute, but chubby.”

Frankly, I don’t like having these shallow thoughts.  Maybe they’re approaching my goals from the wrong motivational angle, but not liking these thoughts doesn’t make them go away.
So now, while I have the time and the resources to do so, I’m getting back to it.  Cycling.  Running.  Lifting.  Bag-punching. 

All in the vein of holding myself to a higher standard, and hopes of a brighter future all around.

Ally to Activist

A few weeks ago I had an experience I’ve not quite been able to digest fully until now; I helped prevent a man from killing himself.

I was standing on the platform of the Belmont CTA station at the tail of Pride weekend.  Stevie Ray Vaughan was in my ears and I had just buried my nose into a game of Words With Friends when something strange registered out of the corner of my eye.  I looked up to see a man standing so close to the edge of the platform that only his heels were on the concrete; the rest were dangling off.

At first I took him for drunk and stupid.  It was about 2:30 in the morning, and the streets were filled with hundreds of people staggering their ways from one locale to the next.  I took off my headphones and put my phone into my pocket so I could be prepared to catch this man if he started to fall.  Then I noticed a wallet and cell phone on the ground beside him, and it occurred to me I had seen him drop those while the brunt of my attention was checking the latest Facebook updates a moment before.

I approached the man, placed my hand on his chest, and asked him, “Why don’t you take a step back?”  Finally I started to take in what this man looked like.  He was my height, which is a rare thing for me to run across.  Short blond hair, a piercing in the side of his nose, and huge holes in his earlobes that could only have held some huge gauge earrings; big enough to get your finger through.  I noticed a trace of silver glitter by his right eye.  And his eyes were dead.  Cold.  I’d suppose he was, at that moment, virtually incapable of seeing what was in front of him. 

I had to ask him to step back a few times before he did, but it was a grudging step that left him inches from the edge.  He kept pointing ahead of him, I thought to the other platform.  Then I realized he was actually pointing at the rails.  I kept asking, never removing my hand, and finally he stepped back to a safe distance. 

At that moment a woman on his other side, who had been trying to figure out what she should do, also came up to him and tried to hand him back his things.  “Take these,” she kept saying.  He regarded them for an instant and only answered, “Give them to my mom.”

She kept insisting he take back his belongings, and finally emotion crawled into his eyes.  It was a deep, crushing pain.  He turned to her and demanded to know why he should take his things back.  “My mom doesn’t even know me,” he said with a deep anguish.  “Do you even know my name?” he asked accusingly of the woman.  She shook her head.  “Do you know my name?” he asked of me.  Suddenly I became aware I was holding his wallet and phone.  “I only just met you,” I told him.

At that point the fight went out of him and he collapsed to the ground against the barricade beside the escalator.  The woman tried to engage him in conversation, and I made sure she felt confident to stay there with him while I told her I was going to try and find an officer.

Back on the ground level I caught the attention of the CTA worker sitting in the kiosk.  When I told him there was a man trying to fall onto the tracks, he leapt into action.  I led him back to the man, who at this point was standing and looked like he was trying to find his way downstairs.  I tried to hand him back his wallet and phone, but he wouldn’t take them.  Finally I stuffed them into the front pocket of his shorts.

The CTA worker took over from there.  He engaged the man like he was professionally trained to handle a suicide attempt.  Told the man his name, asked for his (I didn’t catch either).  Led him downstairs.  On the way down I heard the would-be jumper confront the worker, “Did you come out to your mom today?  Tell her she was never gonna have grandkids?”  The words stabbed me in the heart, and all I could think was how much worse it was for him.

I decided that was about all I could handle.  It had been a long day, he seemed to be in safe hands, and my train home was finally pulling into the station.  I got on.

Immediately I felt selfish for leaving.  All I did was stop him from immediate danger.  I didn’t convince him to live, I simply stopped him from dying.  Once.  I realized I had no way of knowing where he went, what he did, or what he wanted to do.  All I know of him is that he had been rejected by his mother in the most fundamental way, and that his despair was so great he believed he had no one else in the world to turn to for help.

As a straight man I have always felt out of place when it came to advocating equal rights for gay people.  I’ve never been disenfranchised, mocked, or harassed for my sexuality.  Thus I never felt I had the power or passion fed by those experiences to do justice for the fight.  I’d stop harassment when I came across it, but that was about it.  I suppose I felt I had no place.

But that’s where the “A” in “LGBTQA” comes from – Allies.  That speaks to me there is an acceptance, an understanding that includes all people.  My presence is welcome.  This isn’t a gay issue; hell, just look at that acronym.  It keeps getting longer because human sexuality is such a complex creature.  There keeps being a new way to identify, a more specific way describe one’s identity. (Note - since originally writing this three years ago, I've come to learn that the A more commonly stands for Asexual. I'm still proud to be an ally, however).

This is a human issue.  It affects us all.  It’s not about gay rights, or gay marriage.  It's about rights.  It’s about marriage.  Wherever you stand, however you identify, this is about you as much as it is about anyone and everyone else.  Before we are sexual beings, we are human beings.  I consider myself a person before I consider myself a straight person.  I consider you as a person before I consider your sexuality, your ethnicity, your career, your hobbies, your country of origin, your politics, your favorite movies, your sense of humor…  I firmly believe we should all belong in this frame of mind if we are to continue to progress as a species.

Step one is education.  Educate yourself.  Make material available to others.  No one is a freak, no one is a weirdo.  We’re all just people, and we all have the right to live the way we choose as long as we do not infringe upon the rights of others.

Equally important is to find your own circle of support.  I keep thinking of that poor man on the platform whose name I wish I knew.  In the deepest despair, unable to accept himself because he had placed his entire self-worth upon the opinion of just one person.  That’s too much responsibility to give to anyone, and too many things can go wrong too easily.

Finally, I’ll repeat here the thought I shared in the minutes after my encounter with this man: Be proud of who you are. Be respectful of who you're not. A man like this shouldn't want to die simply because you can't accept the way he lives his life.

Now get out there and do some good.

Failure Is A Gift

I’ve had a couple of opportunities lately to explore and examine the ramifications of a discovery I made a few years ago.

In 2005 I applied to grad school for the first time.  Despondent that my life was a dead end I reached out to a few universities in the hopes that I could begin to transition into something resembling adulthood.  I had rediscovered my passion for performance and needed more than an outlet; I needed someone, or something, to guide me to a better version of myself.

I won’t say I got nowhere, but I didn’t get in anywhere.  I was given instead an exotic and romantic opportunity to study in Moscow, and suffered a real belly drop when the opportunity was taken from me at the last minute.  Frustrated isn’t a strong enough word to convey what I felt after a year and a half on a relationship destroying, personal effects selling, cash wasting (Russian lessons instead of getting out of debt) venture.

So I came to Chicago instead, following a relationship that only survived a few months after the move.  Another relationship bloomed and suffered a long, slow death.  Jobs were won and lost, along with about forty pounds.  I got into graduate school, finally.  I found a fulfilling hobby.  I even loved and lost again (a lifelong thematic element, it seems).

I’ve spent the last couple of Saturday mornings staring at a room full of college graduates and high school seniors, many of them with fear and anxiety in their eyes as they audition for the school from which I’m about to graduate.  I’m of two minds about watching what they’re going through.  Of course it’d be nice for them to succeed, but frankly, if they’re like me… it may be better for them if they didn’t.  Not at first, anyway.

Failure is a gift.

Failure at one opportunity isn’t failure forever.  If you don’t get the job, or the university, or the audition, no one will stamp your hand and force you to choose another life path.  You don’t get this one, but there are other worthwhile paths to take.  The glorious mystery of what could have been may sharpen the pain of loss, but I’ve also secured plenty of opportunities I later regretted taking.  Or going for.  Or wanting in the first place.

If I’d made it into school the first time I would never have been to Moscow, where I affirmed my talent and passion for performance without the pressure of passing the class.  If I’d stayed in Moscow I would have forsaken an old dream for a new one, and now I live in Chicago – a place I’d wanted to be since I first visited half a lifetime ago.

And I’ve learned the lesson applies on a smaller scale, too.  I regularly host a burlesque show, a task which involves writing and performing comedy.  I’m constantly searching for the best joke and the best delivery, but no matter what I come up with it always ends up better when I fail.  A joke falls flat, or some bit of tech craps out, or a well-timed unexpected audience response throws a speed bump in my delivery.  The way I react to any of these failures grants a better audience response than anything I have ever done intentionally.

Life moves on whether you’re moving with it or not.  Pain will come either way.  But staying put in your pain instead of moving on and taking the next risk will only beget rot and stagnation.  Indeed, I can trace the origins of my every success to the failure that spawned it.  Am I happy because, or in spite of the fact that I never got my first choice?  I’ll never know.  But failure has taught me to appreciate everything I do have, and to take nothing for granted.

Haircut

I shaved my head last Halloween.  Four years prior, in a desperate attempt to win back the heart of a woman, I cut off a reasonably shaggy rag because she’d once told me she liked the shorter hair better.  I lost about eighteen months’ worth of growth in an ultimately futile gesture.

Four months later I was over her and missing what I’d had (on my head).  Six months further on  I quit my job and moved to Chicago, finally free of a haircut requirement.  With lots of gel and patience I finally got what I’d wanted in a hairdo since I was eleven years old; hair long enough to tie back.

Goal achieved.  But now what?  Tying it back was infinitely faster and easier than brushing it every morning, so I kept it.  Over the course of the next four years I got one trim to even things out, then I let it grow and promptly forgot about it.

I was fond of it, sure.  The previous twenty years saw several aborted attempts to grow it out only to give up when I hit a new level of in-between stage I couldn’t tolerate.  It was even great fun to wear it down once it was past my shoulders.

Once I got to grad school it became the dominant topic of most conversations I had.  Most of those conversations revolved around when I was going to cut it off.  Not if; when.  For more than a year I had, daily, people asking me what it would take to get me to cut it.  Would you cut it if I asked you to?  Would you cut it if she asked you to?  When are you cutting it? You know they’re going to make you cut it, right?  Say goodbye to it, it’s going.  It was relentless, and it was annoying.

Finally my irritation began to surface.  More than half the people I interacted with on a daily basis only spoke to me to taunt or goad me about it.  I consider myself an interesting, dynamic, dimensional human being, and I was insulted at how infrequently someone wanted to talk to me about anything else.  To this day there are people I’ve now known for two years with whom I never had a conversation that wasn’t centered around the length of my hair.

I began getting defensive any time the topic was brought up.  My answers about its length changed from considered responses to flippant retorts.  While working a scene at the end of my first year my acting teacher told me I’d have to tie it back so it wouldn’t block my face.  When a classmate blurted out, “Or cut it off!”  I fired back, “You know what?!  YOU FIRST,” and bit my tongue to avoid unleashing a poisonous tirade.

I was embarrassed that I’d lost control, but worse was the perceived confirmation that I was very, very emotionally attached to my hair.  I’d heard rumored the belief that my personality was inextricably linked to its length, and that outburst only served to confirm this.

A few months later I was ready to cut it, yet I was hesitant.  I didn’t want to bend to the pressure of others, but truth be known it was getting in the way.  I’m a fan of periodic large changes, and I felt it was time for another.  But the biggest factor influencing me was, ironically, one of the most considered and rational arguments that came from a classmate.

As an actor I’ve always embraced the philosophy that keeping a longer beard and shaggier hair than I otherwise would was a wise decision.  These things can always be cut down to a preferred size and shape rather than be easily grown to accommodate a role.  Indeed, one of the answers to “When are you going to cut it?” was “When someone asks me to,” meaning that if I wanted a role that required it I’d be happy to do so.  But one of the directors in my class told me my hair had reached such a length that she would specifically not cast me because she wouldn’t dare asking me to get rid of that much length in one go.  Instead of allowing me freedom once I reached the professional world I came to understand that a keeping my hair would have been more detrimental than beneficial.  I decided I needed a cut.

I didn’t need to get rid of it all.  In fact my girlfriend tried to advise me to cut it off in stages to curb the emotional impact I’d have if I lost it all at once, but by that time I was more interested in proving a point.  I wanted to be seen and considered beyond my surface aesthetics.  I wanted to be seen as a person.  I wanted to have different conversations.

But mostly I wanted to prove I didn’t need it.

It took a good two hours using nothing but a pair of scissors and, eventually, a shaving razor, but I took it all the way down to the skin.  We measured the pony tail at 26”, and it was ultimately donated to Locks of Love.  I’d never had a shaved head before, and all the physical sensations that came with it (pillows, hats, scratches) were a joy and a wonder.

I considered leaving it that way.  I had lived a long hair lifestyle for years, and I was curious as to what a bald lifestyle would be.  Three days later I tried shaving it myself in the shower, but it took for-fucking-ever, so I decided the maintenance bit just wouldn’t be worth it.  Besides, I hated the way it looked.

It’s just now reaching the point where it’s a bit in the way, shaggy and unruly, and I’ve decided I like it.  I miss that long hair.  I’m glad to have had the experience of doing something so drastic, but if I had it to do over again I would have kept most of it.  My girlfriend loved my hair and wanted me to keep it long, but her respect for my personal choice kept her from overtly saying so.  She even held the scissors and did most of the cutting and shaving.  She showed me an unmatched level of respect and consideration in this as she did in so many other things, and today I wish I had known the full extent of her feelings so I could have taken them into account more than my own desire to stick it to my colleagues.

It’ll be back, soon enough.

Back to it

I used to write.

I used to make narratives about my life for the sole consumption of my friends and my family when I had neither the time nor the tenacity to keep up with everyone via a phone call or a personal chat.  I enjoyed the process, spending many hours crafting an interesting way to frame my thoughts and experiences.  Some people liked it.  Some people probably didn't and didn't bother finding the time to say so.  I don't blame them.  I tend to ignore those things which bother me.  Life is too short.

But in the end I was doing it for me.  I would have written short stories if I could have invented a tale to tell, but I never thought up a story I wanted to get out of me.  Or, if I did, I found the details too ephemeral to grasp, never constant enough to solidify.

I wrote because I was depressed.  Writing is the only activity which utilizes the entirety of my mental abilities sufficient to keep me distracted.  Every Sunday I'd sit with coffee and cigarettes and music and write about whatever kept the darkness away.  I'd write about light topics to keep my skills sharp.  I wrote about heavy topics as a means of purging.  I published as a means of dropping a milestone.  The thought that someone might read these words somehow made them more real.

I stopped writing well over a year ago, and for much of the year previous all I wrote was a bunch of school assignments which I published because I was in the habit of sharing things I'd written.  I was lost for a lot of years, and in those years my writing became a way of trying to find myself.

I'd just about made it to contentment when I met someone who helped me the rest of the way.  Then she found a way of her own, and the rest is . . . not history.  It's happening right now.  And right now I feel a calling back to the keyboard, to dig in my heels and not backslide to the razor's edge.  I made a promise, after all.

Serial Killers – The Perils of Making a Television Novel

Welcome to the Season Finale of Year One - my last school paper for the year.

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America is split in what it desires from television. Often times people simply want to tune in in order to tune out their lives. It’s an escapism designed to allow us to forget credit card bills, oil changes, spousal arguments, delayed trains, traffic jams, and overcharges. Most of us aren’t looking for anything complicated; any distraction will do.

In this regard, episodic television is a comfort. On the same night of every week a viewer can tune in and watch a set of prescribed characters dance through a situation that takes little more than twenty minutes (plus commercials) to encounter, evaluate, and resolve. At the end of every episode all conflicts are settled. Arguments are forgiven and forgotten; threats to safety and well-being are vanquished. Everyone ends up right where they started. Very commedia dell’arte.

This is why television often contributes to the lowest common denominator of entertainment. There is validity to the complaint that scripts are base and that performances are only skin deep. People declare with pride that they never watch television because it harms the overall artistic nature of our culture. It does not challenge. It does not inspire. It merely gives us a way to shut off our consciousness and reset.

Yet television can be a remarkable source for artistic merit. There are people who are trying to build something more, something special. Solid character development. A continuing story. These things and more cannot be achieved with merely a weekly tune-in that can be picked up and dropped anywhere at the points between season one and season ten. I propose that serialized television contains the best opportunity to elevate our collective quality of expectations from this medium.

A failure of episodic television is that it is incompatible with real life. People and their lives change as times goes by. Over the course of five years a human life has the potential to be significantly altered. We get new jobs, or new positions and responsibilities within them. We meet new people, forging new relationships as other ones falter. We undergo trials and discoveries that affect our personalities as well as our dreams. The stagnancy of episodic television is a poor reflection for the long-term nature of the human condition.

One of my first favorite television shows was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Each week the crew of the Starship Enterprise would face a new villain to threaten the safety and security of the principals, and each week the challenge would be met with virtually no long-term consequences. If a character died (which was remarkably rare considering the number of times their lives were threatened) they’d barely be mentioned again, their absence unremarked either subtly or overtly. At times there would occur a seemingly significant role-shift, such as Commander Riker’s battlefield promotion to the rank of Captain in the two part episode The Best of Both Worlds – yet the very next episode showed him reduced back to the rank of Commander. Riker’s return to his previous rank was devoid of either explanation or emotional content; it was as if the trials and perils of the previous week had never happened.

Another example of the unreality of episodic television happened on ABC’s The Commish. The show focused on both the work and family life of Tony Scali, a police commissioner in a small town in upstate New York. In one episode Tony’s teenaged son was kidnapped by a Mafioso. It provided one of the highlights of the series in terms of potential character development as a fearful parent experienced the terror of knowing his child was in mortal danger. By the end of the episode young David was returned unharmed, and the next week there was no follow-through. Tony seemed to have immediately recovered from the threat and fear of loss to his family. Viewers who had missed the episode would never have a notion that just a week ago this parent and child had their lives threatened. It was this unrealistic approach to the exploration of lingering effect that kept at bay substantial emotional investment on the part of the audience.

Episodic television tries to throw in long term elements, but with minimal lingering effect. One such example is in the NBC series Quantum Leap, a show about Sam Beckett, a scientist who travels through time to “put right what once went wrong.” In the episode The Evil Leaper he meets his evil counterpart, a woman who also leaps through time in order to create as much havoc as possible. This antagonist makes more than one appearance in the series, but the interim episodes were so far apart it took a great deal of in-character exposition to explain who she was when she returned.

By contrast, the nature of serialized television operates very much like a novel. Individual episodes function as chapters in a larger overall story. The events of one episode have a direct, lingering effect on the characters and the worlds in which they inhabit. All actions have consequences, be they major or minor. This far-sighted approach to storytelling operates on a far more parallel track to real life, and is therefore better equipped to resonate with an audience in a way that transcends its time slot.

Aside from an afternoon soap opera, the first time I witnessed a television show with a serialized nature was the science fiction epic Babylon 5. The show took place on a space station constructed ten years after a cataclysmic war that nearly resulted in the extinction of the human race. The purpose of the station was to provide a neutral place to encourage diplomatic solutions to stop another devastating war before it could occur. As time went by the audience was subjected to a plot that carried over from one episode to the next. A decision in one episode often held serious repercussions in subsequent episodes all the way to the end of the series.

In this regard watching Babylon 5 was like watching a novel unfold. In the five years it took to tell the tale each of the characters underwent a transformation. People fell in love and got married. People left or died, and their absence was felt by their friends and colleagues. It was refreshing to watch a show in which actions had consequences.

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski created a story bible for the series detailing every major plot point across a period of five years. While this is a laudable goal to attempt, it is not without risk. During its fourth year he show was slated to be cancelled forcing several plot points to be wrapped up prematurely. It was than granted an unexpected reprieve for a fifth year, but there wasn’t enough remaining plot to fill a season. Several new elements had to be created to fill in the gaps, and the resulting season was relatively shallow.

The creation of a five year plan is commendable, but the inability to carry it out can greatly hinder the overall product. Moreover, many authors feel that creating a plot in advance of the storyline and forcing the characters through it is as unrealistic as imagining every story finishes where it begins. In his book On Writing, novelist Stephen King said

In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.

You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course).

Playwright Brett C. Leonard, author of The Long Red Road, gave us a writing workshop in which he explained a piece of his writing process. A story, he told us, consists of creating the characters and what they want, then to follow them along and see what happens to them. If it is natural that a man on a journey to the Grand Canyon stops along the way, he should stop. He may meet a woman. He’ll have feelings about her, and the two of them may fall in love. Thus the realistic approach to storytelling is dictated by the characters’ desires, by their wants and by their dreams. The story follows them; they do not follow the story.

Author Neil Gaiman expressed a similar notion:

It's like hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles. You know more or less where you're going to be when, and you have a fair idea of where you're going to hit on the way, but you don't know everything that's going to happen. You don't know that the car may break down at some point and leave you stranded in St. Louis for a week, or whatever.

Other television series have learned and followed this lesson. HBO’s The Wire is a show about police officers in Baltimore, Maryland. Each season was constructed with an organic build based on actual events and experiences of the show’s creator, David Simon. It was this draw from reality, both in terms of character and story, which allowed for a more naturalistic quality of storytelling to emerge. Instead of attempting to develop a plotline across the show’s five year run, each season placed the characters in a new situation that would run its course by season’s end. As the characters moved through the story they were affected by the world in which they inhabited as much as their actions had lasting influence in the community at large. Furthermore, each season was not wholly independent of those previous or subsequent. Characters not directly involved in that season’s primary plot thrust would nonetheless regularly resurface with the full force of their histories behind them.

The worst mistake a serialized television show can make is to retroactively alter the plot of a series. In the pilot episode of NBC’s Heroes a pair of brothers, Peter and Nathan Petrelli, are told of their father’s death. This event does a great deal to inform the nature of the two men and their relationship with one another. It helps to guide and shape them as they struggle with the dangers they regularly face.

Two years later, in season three, it is revealed that the men’s father is alive. What’s more, Arthur Petrelli is directly responsible for every major plot point over the previous two seasons. To validate the charge, several scenes were filmed with the show’s previous chief villain, Daniel Linderman, loathly taking orders from Arthur in a way that completely contradicted two seasons of his character’s development. This was an example of such blatant revisionist plot history to rival the “Greedo shot first” controversy that spawned so much ire in the world of Star Wars fandom.

This is another lesson that can be learned from the novelists such as Neil Gaiman discovered while writing his graphic novel series Sandman. In some respects, Sandman was very much like a serialized television show in that each issue was published independently before he’d finished writing the whole story.

[I was] writing it with no room for change—I couldn't go back to change things that had already come out. In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published. If you need a gun in a desk drawer, and you realize that in Chapter 11, you can go back and put it in that desk drawer when you opened it in Chapter 2. So if I'm going to need the gun, I'm going to have to do it in some other way that's satisfying, or I don't have a gun.

A significant achievement in the writing of a series comes when the writers reinvent some of the shows history without blatantly making it obvious. In the season three episode Rapture from the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, a woman named Deanna discovers the secret identity of one of her predecessors. The audience is not given the information; Deanna sees the face of a hooded figure leaving us only with the cryptic statement, “You? Forgive me, I . . . I had no idea.” Seventeen episodes later, in season four, the character’s identity was finally revealed. Executive producer Ronald D. Moore openly admitted being unaware of the identity of this mysterious person at the time the former episode was aired, but the subsequent episodes were written with that in mind. The reveal was done in such a way that never contradicted the shows prior plot points, storylines, or character motivations.

Other shows have a good blend of plotting vs. following. In Fox’s 24, each season has one major threat which must be vanquished. A fair amount of background is detailed before the season begins both in terms of character and story, and the facts are slowly revealed over the course of a season. In this case plotting has the effect of providing discoveries of who the bad guys are and their motivations, and then more significant reveals of who the bad guys really are and why the whole story is more dynamic than was originally presented can (and always do) occur. Multiple layers of complexity are possible, leaving the main character a changed man from one season to the next along with his colleagues.

Subsequent seasons of 24 take previous character development stories into account. Jack Bauer grows with each passing event that happens to him. Threats to his family, his intimate relationships, and his failures or success all have an impact on how he deals with the next situation he encounters. Sometimes a lover or colleague dies (and they die a lot). Sometimes Jack fails to stop the bad guy. Sometimes he can only carry out his mission by swallowing his fear, his pride, or his self-respect. And we feel for Jack because the affect can always be felt within the words the writers give him to speak, the actions they give him to undertake, and Kiefer Sutherland’s portrayal of the character.

Perhaps the most frequent goal of any American television series is syndication. Once a show accomplishes this it can live forever in reruns. It takes 100 episodes to get there, and the average number of episodes each season means it takes at least five years. This means five years’ worth of stories, five years’ worth of characters, five years’ worth of challenges and love affairs and antagonists. Some shows try to sneak their way to syndication within the original concept, such as the original Star Trek’s “five year mission” to explore new life and new civilizations. Another trick (attempted by more than one production company) was 1993’s Time Trax, in which a policeman from the future must travel back in time to recapture 100 escaped convicts resulting in a formulaic freak-of-the-week plot structure.

Some shows are successful beyond their original measure. Chris Carter’s The X-Files¬ was plotted for about two seasons, but the success of the show meant he had to scramble for story ideas once he discovered the show could run into three seasons and beyond (it ultimately ran for nine). Sometimes the popularity of a show brings an unprecedented measure of attention to a particular actor as it did with ER’s George Clooney, who left the show after five seasons to pursue a successful film career; yet the show was able to carry on another ten seasons without him. David Duchovny left The X-Files with a similar (though less successful) goal, and the show only lasted two seasons beyond his involvement.

Both serialized and episodic television can run into trouble when its success outweighs its ability to maintain its own weight of viewership and fandom. Shows that run long enough eventually begin to run thin on new ideas that fit within the original concept, and the show runs the risk of “jumping the shark.”

In the 1970’s Happy Days ran for a number of years before the episode Hollywood in which charismatic tough-guy Fonzie straps on a pair of water skis and executes the daredevil feat of jumping over a shark. Since then, “jumping the shark” has become an idiom to describe

…a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it "Jumping the Shark." From that moment on, the program will simply never be the same.

No matter how well-intentioned, superbly written or excellently performed, sooner or later a show must change, or it must die. The fact that there was once an entire website (and more than a few books) devoted to heralding the death of a series before the body grows cold denotes there is a limit to how much change an audience will accept. The basic concept of Roseanne was that of a working class family, relatable to a broad swipe of American demographics. The sudden change of the Connor family winning the lottery altered the landscape of the show too drastically to maintain the ratings, and the show faded away.

Another Great Moment in Shark Jump History was in the 1980’s comedy/detective show Moonlighting. The show was a relatively rare combination of serialization on the part of the principal characters and episodic structure in the cases they worked on. Bruce Willis as David Addison and Cybil Shepherd as Maddie Hayes brought a mutual charisma and sexual tension that viewers found inescapable for the show’s run – until season three, when the pair finally consummated their relationship. Afterwards the pregnancy of Cybil Shepherd resulted in a profound absence of her character. The show’s success was so centered on the potential romantic involvement of its two main characters that when that aspect was removed the show no longer had legs to stand on.

In order for a show to maintain integrity throughout its entire run, a development team could do worse than to follow the adage “quit while you’re ahead.” Find a story and follow it, but don’t push it farther than it’s willing to go. The popularity of DVD sales takes some of the strength out of the power of syndication; no matter how unsuccessful a series may be during its original aring, devoted fans can still rent or purchase the series to keep its memory (and royalty checks) alive. The short-lived Fox show Firefly is one such poignant example of this.

Much like comic books, television may never be universally considered to be high art. But just because things don’t happen doesn’t mean they can’t. Give consideration to the possibility, and anything becomes possible.

Reflections On Year One - Acting Thesis

Yes, this is another class assignment. Deal with it.

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When I began my undergraduate education at the University of North Texas in 1996 the first text I was given to read was Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting; the second was Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. I came into college without having embraced acting as an art form; much less one that had such a wide variety of techniques to accomplish what was to my perception the same end result. Acting was, to me, a series of technical exercises that was only as varied as the genres listed in the video store. Action. Drama. Comedy.

So the notions of Boleslavsky and Shurtleff were more than merely foreign concepts – they were essentially in a different language. How could I possibly expect to apply their concepts to fit within my preconceived notion of what acting was? My first digestion of these texts did as much for my acting as eating them would have done. They struck the surface, but didn’t penetrate. I heard the words, but didn’t know how to allow them to inform my art. By the time I graduated in 2001 I had barely advanced beyond my first day.

The intervening years and my first three quarters of graduate school gave me the perspective I needed to let the ideas permeate. An idea heard once can be remembered and regurgitated, but my comparatively short time at Depaul has allowed me to explore, interpret and embrace everything I first heard fourteen years ago, to make sense of it and apply it to my craft.

I committed to acting as a career path three days before I began college. I was as fresh to the idea as Boleslavsky’s character of The Creature to whom acting was a matter of surface technique – how to make it look like she was doing what the text said she was supposed to do. Her first lesson in actual human suffering was my own:

I must tell you that this very moment you did more for the theatre, or rather for yourself in the theatre, than you did in playing all your parts. You suffered just now; you felt deeply. Those are two things without which you cannot do in any art and especially in the art of the theatre. Only by paying this price can you attain the happiness of creation, the happiness of the birth of a new artistic value.

It was only through my two quarters of studying Meisner this year that I began to comprehend the value of that statement. Acting isn’t about presentation or duplication of the human condition. It is about a genuine creation of a human being believing in and behaving within a set of given circumstances. From Boleslavsky, “To imitate is wrong. To create is right.”

My original trepidation was based on my fear that suffering was the only characteristic necessary to embrace acting as an art. Of course suffering is necessary, but so is joy, fear, pride, or any of the wide range of emotional experiences. “If you are a sensitive and normal human being, all life is open and familiar to you.”

One of the more influential training experiences was with the professors of the Moscow Art Theatre in 2005. One man, Yuri Yeremin, posed the question, “What makes an actor unique among artists? What is it that an actor does that no other artist does?” The first part of the answer was “The ability to believe in a set of given circumstances.”

Meisner would have us understand the difference between belief and acceptance. One may not ever believe he is his character, or that he is living within the world described for within the script. Indeed, complete belief would have us inquiring about the crowd of strangers staring at us from beyond the lights. The actor should rather acknowledge, understand, and accept that the given circumstances are indeed true, and behave truthfully within them.

“The Creature: But I am speaking to my mother in the part.
I: Is she really your mother?
The Creature: No.
I: Then what difference does it make?”

Boleslavsky’s first chapter on Concentration is about the acceptance, as Meisner would have it, that you are living within those given circumstances. It is necessary to use one’s own five senses to inform the quality of that world. See the place you’re in. Feel its temperatures, its textures. Hear the sounds that belong in that place. If you’re doing something, really DO it, don’t simply show the audience what it would look like if you were. Are you sewing? Then sew, don’t merely pass a needle back and forth to yourself. Chopping garlic? Keep hacking away until it’s done. Allow that a standard of perfection must be met. One cannot expect an audience to accept your given circumstances if you, as the actor, cannot accept them yourself.

Meisner deepens the concept of concentration by bringing in a partner to create an additional set of effects. The influences on the five senses are compounded and informed by the emotional response to another human being in the room. This is someone who has just as much influence on your emotional state as the room itself and the activity you’re doing has on your physical senses. Take in what you’re given, let it affect to you, and respond to it truthfully.

“The Creature: So one must choose his actions in accordance with the character of the part that opposes him.
I: Always. Not only the character of the part, but also the individuality of the actor who plays the part.”

It was this additional element that was the most difficult for me to embrace. I had always considered myself as someone who is willing and able to accept a variety of variables in my life as well as my performances. One of the first things I learned about myself while studying Meisner is that I only felt this way due to the sheer amount of analysis and mental preparation in which I regularly engaged. Every possibility and contingency was considered, and every reaction I could possibly have was mapped out.

This idea has served me reasonably well in life, but I needed to let go of that need to control in order to progress as an actor. There is no scene, not even a monologue, that doesn’t have an intended target. I want something from someone, and I cannot know what to do next if I’m not paying attention to how my actions are being received and interpreted. Every action must therefore be a reaction to the other person in the scene.

The text of a script is rich with information about a pair of characters in a scene, but it is the job of the actor to add dimension and importance to the lines and what they might mean. I began my scenework at DePaul by reacting only to the lines I heard, but not to the person who was saying them to me. In this manner I was able to perform an entire scene by myself. My scene partner became irrelevant. By pre-coding my thoughts, statements and responses, I was neglecting myself the opportunity to be surprised and make discoveries throughout my scenework. I would react to the lines, but not to my partner’s wants or emotional states. As Trudie told me from my first scene showing with Emma Kate, “It was good acting, but it wasn’t the truth.” From Shurtleff,

One can employ any extravagance of feeling or expression, as long as there is relationship in it. What we term overacting is done by people who are acting by themselves, narcissistically setting up a storm in which no one else exists. Of course, this is unreal. Add relationship, the awareness and need of another, to these very same extravagant choices, and they will be real, lifelike.

Later in Meisner came the work of emotional preparation. I had never tried this before, preferring to enter each scene as I begin anything in life – with cool detachment from a centered, mind-cleared state. That worked as I began to spar in my martial arts practice or concentrated on a homework assignment. But theatre is not life. It is far more interesting than life. The boldest choices borne of the strongest possible set of actions in order to achieve the most passionate of dreams are what good theatre is all about. Emotional preparation in its most extreme is what makes a scene interesting.

My struggle to adequately prepare emotionally is a consequence of my active fantasy life. Since I was a child I have been a fan of the most wild science-fiction and fantasy enabling me to imagine myself in the most fantastic scenarios (as the hero, of course). As someone who was regularly bullied I discovered long ago I could carry out quite extravagant revenge fantasies in my mind. In my attempts to always be prepared for the worst case, I have regularly imagined – and planned for – what I would do and how I would react in the event of the death of a loved one. Because I knew it was always a fantasy I trained myself not to dwell too long or hard on these extreme circumstances. Because I did this so often I began to grow immune to the effects of letting these emotions reside within me.

It was here that instead of using Meisner to understand Boleslavsky, I discovered that the opposite was in fact true:

How do you learn a tune you want to remember? How do you learn the outline of muscles you want to draw? How do you learn the mixture of colors you want to use in painting? Through constant repetition and perfection. … your actual work is done in solitude—entirely inside of yourself. You know how, now, through concentration. Think over the process of approach toward the actual moment of that real double feeling. You will know when you get it. You will feel the warmth of it and the satisfaction.

Here Boleslavsky gives a fine rehearsal technique, but my biggest success in emotional preparation came from unearthing the memories from a quite painful set of circumstances throughout my life. My physicality has always been something of which I am proud (insofar as one can be proud of an accident of birth), but there have been times I’ve come dangerously close to accidentally bringing physical harm to another. Far more often I’ve been chastised and made to feel ashamed by how close others have perceived I came to hurting a person through my ineptitude, true or not.

One of the reasons for success in drawing upon this set of emotions is how many times I’ve felt and hidden from them. By exploring the long-standing aspects of myself of which I am deeply ashamed, and therefore hide, I was able to hit a previously unmet level of discovery.

The other reason I believe this worked so well for me is that is relied on a circumstance that was created by something I had done, not something that had happened to me. This is always the more interesting choice.

“I: All right. What is the action?
The Creature: To be insulted.
I: Wrong. To preserve your dignity.”

The text of Michael Shurtleff’s Audition is replete with cyclical information. That is to say that there is no one aspect of his Twelve Guideposts that does not contain some scrap of each of the others, and multiple passes of the material are required to understand fully the complexities of his guidance.

He nonetheless begins with the most important foundation of scenework – that of relationship. Who is your partner, and what does this person mean to you? It is only when this groundwork is laid that the rest of the importance of the work can follow. Shurtleff’s notion that “every scene is a love scene” is paramount in making the sort of active, important choices that make a scene the most it can be.

My first scenework of the year, Pinter’s Betrayal with Emma Kate, wouldn’t have been nearly so dimensional had I not done the necessary exploration of relationship. The characters of Jerry and Emma have a deeply rich and complex association. They are long time (though not lately) lovers who played house in the afternoon in spite of their spouses, yet they never meant so much to one another that making the dream into a reality was important enough to carry out. The text of the scene is filled with reminiscence, and it would be a sharply neglectful reading if the actors failed to embody the relationship in its entirety.

An actor cannot act without creating a relationship with that other person who’s onstage with him. Some actors do it instinctively; they are the lucky ones. But when the instincts don’t work the way they should, the first thing an actor must do then is ask questions about the relationship and insist upon full emotional answers that can lead him to commit himself fully.

Equally important is the concept of Fighting For. I’ve heard this in every acting class and read it in every acting text, but it’s usually described as a want, a goal, or an objective. But wanting something and having a goal is passive, not active, and as previously described, it is the active choices that make the best scenework.

I believe my most important work of the year was with John in The Lonesome West. He and I wanted a scene in which we could play around, say snide things and vulgar things, and basically behave as a couple of shocking and immature boys. We found a scene with that particular set of traps, and fell right into them. I don’t doubt the scene has been played with the dynamics that drew he and I to it, but we learned this was neither the more interesting choice, nor the best use of our tuition.

We began our viewpoint of the scene as two men (brothers) who despised one another, tried to one-up the other man. We wanted nothing from one another; instead we wanted to do something to each other. We eventually (through direction) began to incorporate and embrace the “love scene” idea, and this significantly changed our attitude from fighting against into fighting for.

I respect and appreciate Shurtleff’s ideas of opposites. He explains that for everything a character wants and feels, he should also want and feel the exact opposite. I love you, but I also hate you. I respect you, but you also disgust me. It is this internal conflict within a character that can make it so much more interesting than it would otherwise be, and it is true to life as well. While this is an excellent quality to use to inform scenework, it holds a danger for me. My safety zone is within my own head, and if I regress into myself it can be difficult to come back out. Instead I should know that my internal conflict should be based on a problem with my scene partner, and needs to be brought forth in order to be dealt with and solved.

Opposites are inherent in Shurtleff’s guidepost of Humor. Humor is such a subjective quality, varied drastically from one person’s opinion to the next. But he explains that humor is necessary to scenework, especially the most dramatic of scenes. Predictability and uniformity is scenically uninteresting. No matter how dramatic and dire a situation may be, a lack of variation will kill it. Variation not merely in tempo and tactics, but in attitude as well. Humor adds perspective to a scene – it’s so much more funny when juxtaposed against tragedy (or just plain seriousness) and vice versa. If you heat a glass it will only get so hot, but subject it to the extremes of hot and cold and the glass will shatter.

My goal as an artist is to shatter my audience. As Shurtleff said to one of his students, “The way you shifted from one role to another as she revealed her new tactics to get at you was very effective. We never knew for sure what you might do next. I think that makes acting most interesting.”

Earlier I discussed the cool detachment with which I’d begin a scene – this is against Shurtleff’s advice as well. In the guidepost to which he refers as The Moment Before, he explains that something always happened before the moment that starts a scene. Coming into things with from a mindless, emotionless state is far less theatrically interesting than having a strong driving force for my first action.

Buried within The Moment Before is a concept introduced to us in class known as what is Beneath the action of the scene. Sometimes The Moment Before is literally just that, but there are scenes that are influenced by the long-term history of the characters involved.

The biggest Moment Before I had all year was in The Lonesome West; we had just come from the funeral of our priest who had committed suicide. He had left us a note that put us in charge of his immortal soul. Father Welsh had explained that he was betting his soul could be washed clean of the sin of suicide if it brought some greater good. The good, he’d explained, would be that it stopped us from fighting one another as we’d done all our lives. This Moment Before and this Beneath had the most power over transforming the quality of our work into something more than the cheap interpretation we had originally picked.

Finally, everything I learned all year came home in working my final scene with Pamela from Orange Flower Water. Once again we played two people in love, with spouses and children to acknowledge, but the inherent question was much larger from us both. Instead of should we cheat on our marriages, the question was should be abandon our marriages and start a new life with one another. I wanted this, but our philosophical disagreement stood between us. I had to change her mind about the nature of her faith and keep her on my side at the same time.

I’m proud to say I was able to employ everything I learned this year into this scene. I felt my biggest struggles with staying in Solo Performance Mode were gone. I didn’t say anything to her I didn’t feel came out of a reaction to her behavior. I was engaged and invested in affecting her, listened sharply and was affected by her attitude. I didn’t pre-code or pre-plan a response, and allowed each rehearsal to refresh with a new understanding of who she was, what she wanted, and how I felt about that, and how that feeling informed my next extension into her to get what I wanted. What I knew we both wanted.

I believe the most important lesson for me to learn is that I’m not done learning. Education, like art, is never truly finished. There’s always a greater understanding to be had, a deeper richness and complexity that can be gained from further exploration. Luckily for me there are two more years of graduate school, dozens of texts on acting, and a lifetime full of opportunities for me to expand upon what I’ve learned.