Month: April 2024

Forget About Me…No, Wait…

Recently, I’ve been dealing with my actor past, trying to figure out why my face isn’t on billboards, and why I get notes from my bank that begin with “ahem…”

And then I remembered, like waking up from some dream all of a sudden, that I’m NOT AN ACTOR!

The memory reminded that, once upon a time I was cast in the stage version of It’s a Wonderful Life. It was community theater, which is why you can’t quite find it on Netflix.

Oh, it was a glorious role, filled with all the stuff that makes an actor want to be an actor. Got to kiss a pretty girl night after night. Packed the house playing a role pioneered by Jimmy Stewart. OMG, that was a blast.

Except on opening night. It’s a community theater, the house is absolutely packed to the rafters. It’s Christmastime, rain pattering on the roof.

If you know the story, you know it’s about George Bailey, a talented architect who gives up on his future to help his home town by standing by the tiny, family-owned savings and loan against the evil tyrant Potter, who wants to take it over.

Things go awry and it looks like he’s going to lose the savings and loan, and he wishes he was dead. Enter a heavenly angel who shows George what the world would be like if he wasn’t in it.

It’s such a horrifying vision, that, at the end of it, George drops on his knees and pleads with the angel to make things different.

“Forget about me, just save my wife and children,” he wails.

Except for my opening night.

The house is packed. The rain is pattering. The scene is so moving, so well directed, all you can hear is the rain. The audience is emotionally overwhelmed, completely caught up in the moment.

I drop to my knees in supplication.

“Please, Clarence, please forget about my wife and kids…”

Wait. What?

The audience shifts uncomfortably. We’re now all in uncharted territory. I just totally, totally got it waaaaay wrong. There’s no way out it. I seriously got it wrong.

“Is that what you really want?” the genius actor playing the angel asks with a surprised look on his face.

“No! No,” I recover, thanking the theater gods that this man has thought of a way out. “No! No! Forget about me… save my wife and kids! Yeah, that’s it!”

You could feel the whole house breathe this big sigh of relief. The emotional scenes that followed were certainly a lot more emotional for me!

That’s live theater, and it came much later in my life, when I’d learned how to act. When acting was a potential career choice, I knew how to act like an actor, but not how to act. Trying to make a career out of it back then would have been brutal.

So, there’s a writer’s story for all of us in there, isn’t there?

How many of us are acting like writers, writing what we think a writer would write? Telling ourselves that we’re being authentic, but knowing down inside that we’re just faking it until we make it?

What is real writing? What is real acting?

Here’s what I do know: I ain’t no actor!

Waiting for Permission

My wife and I have sorta gotten hooked on reality TV shows – not Desperate Housewives, but…

So, it started with 100 Foot Wave, on HBO. We were totally stressed out over some now-tiny-but-in-the-moment-seemingly-huge crisis, and just wanted to watch the pretty pictures of the ocean.

If you haven’t seen that show, be prepared to be blown away. These tiny little humans throw themselves off the top of these 60-, 70-, eventually even 100-foot waves. Oh, they prepare, of course, and they work out, you know, and they’re all, like buff and stuff.

But, still 100 feet is way, like WAY up there!

The surfers all have sponsors, of course, and that’s who pays for the show. Garrett McNamara, kind of the focal point of the show, is never on camera unless he’s surfing, or he’s wearing his hat with the Mercedes Benz logo on it.

But he does it – he and a small team of die-hard big-wave tow-surfing fanatics go at the huuuuuuge waves at Nazare, Portugal, year after year. It’s pretty awesome to watch.

So, there’s another show on HBO called Edge of the Earth. There are only four episodes, and each features a different extreme sports fanatic doing something crazy, like skiing down a granite spire in Kazakhstan, or rafting the headwaters of a river in South America that’s never been rafted.

The last episode features these two guys who set off to surf their own 100-foot wave.

They drive their Land Rover up the west coast of South Africa and find themselves a beach with epic waves. And they set up camp, and they surf these waves.

Sounds like a snorefest, but the photography is heart-stoppingly beautiful.

And one of the guys casually says he didn’t know you could quit your career to do something like that. He always thought you need, like, permission or something.

For me, that was a huge revelation.

OMG, what have we missed because nobody told us it was okay to go do something? What adventurous roads did we not travel because we didn’t have permission?

Now that my hair is less brown (and his band renown) than it used to be, I find myself more addicted to security and financial safety, so my adventure roads tend to lead to places from which I can rapidly retreat.

But you? You’re younger, right?

If you want to quit the daily grind and go surf mondo huge waves, it’s totally and perfectly up to you!

It turns out NO ONE GIVES YOU PERMISSION to go on an adventure.

Because you don’t need it.

Ditching the 9-to-5 and throwing yourself off cliffs of water is not safe, of course, and your insurance agent might have a word or two about that. But, it it’s what you wanna do, splish-splash, amigo!

The revelation for me was that, although no one tells you can’t do these things, no one tells you that you can, either. Nobody says “yes, if you would like to do that, please go right ahead.”

For what it’s worth, here’s what I’m telling you: if you would like to do that, please go right ahead!

There, now you have permission to go be wild.

For my adventure, my wife and I visited the Santa Maria Museum of Flight. Yes, it’s off the beaten path, and we got caught in the rain and mud and dark.

But, hey, it was an adventure, and we didn’t have to ask anyone if we should do it.

Wow. Big adventure…