فصل 06

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For some reason I had very old-timey ideas about what show business was like when I was first starting out. Maybe it was all those afternoons I spent watching The 4:30 Movie when I was supposed to be doing my homework. (Sorry, Dad!) Back then, there weren’t many ways to learn about what the life of a working actor was actually like, or even get a glimpse into how to get started. Pre–American Idol, the closest thing we had to a show business competition was Star Search, but the acting portion was oddly stiff and theatrical, and never seemed very authentic. The world of entertainment-related periodicals was different then too: there weren’t fifteen gossip publications like there are today, all of them competing to be the first to tell you where J. Lo had dinner last night or to reveal the name of Kate Hudson’s new bichon frise. The National Enquirer spent some time on the secret world of celebrities, but focused equally on alien babies and Loch Ness monster sightings. There was no Real Housewives of anywhere, and no Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat, where people could constantly update you on their every move. People—even famous people—had not yet begun to focus on their “brands,” and there was really only one daily show about Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, which was pretty fluffy back then, and fairly tame. Magazines were not yet going after every detail of what went on behind the scenes. No one was asking the important questions of today, like “Whose cellulite is this?”

The 4:30 Movie featured mostly old films and was categorized around a weekly theme: Elvis week, Westerns week, horror week, etc. That’s where I fell in love with movie musicals starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. That’s where I decided Katharine Hepburn was my favorite actress of all time. That’s where I learned that an actor’s highest calling was The Theatah and the ultimate goal for a true thespian was BroadWAY, emphasis on the WAY. I was inspired by the black-and-white movies of the 1930s and 1940s, like Stage Door, in which young hopefuls lived together in a sorority-type house, sleeping with their hair in old-fashioned curlers that looked more like rags, practicing dance steps in their tiny galley kitchen while wearing silk tap pants and dreaming of BroadWAY. I loved their vivid vernacular and tried to incorporate it into my life. “Say, fella, this gal’s got sore gams,” I was in the habit of saying. “My dogs are barking—got a dime for a cup of joe?” This being the mid-eighties, no one had any idea what I was talking about.

I was determined to make it to BroadWAY, and that meant I somehow had to become a member of Actors’ Equity, the theatrical union. The union conundrum: you can’t get a union card without getting a union job, and you can’t get a union job unless you’re in the union. My plan, although the path was long, was to earn enough hours as an Equity apprentice to become eligible, which could take years. The only faster way would be to somehow get cast in an Equity role. Apparently this happened once in a while, when a part called for something unique that none of the members of the Equity company were able to do. As a young actor, I remember focusing obsessively on the “special skills” section of my résumé, peppering it with abilities, even ones I only sort of had, in case one of them might lead to my big break. Included on my résumé at the time were “skills” such as driving (not a given in New York City), roller skating (the musical Starlight Express was big at the time), dialects (although this claim was vague and pretty much untrue, I felt it made me seem sophisticated and Shakespearean), and Rhonda Weiss impressions (Rhonda Weiss was one of my favorite characters from Gilda Radner’s Live at Carnegie Hall show, a VHS tape I watched obsessively). Why I thought anyone would be more impressed by my Rhonda Weiss than by Gilda Radner’s is still an embarrassing mystery to me today. But back then, especially when coupled with dialects and driving, I thought it made me seem quirky and well-rounded. Probably despite these skills rather than because of them, I landed a spot in the Equity apprentice program at the Barn Theater in Augusta, Michigan.

The Barn was (and is) a well-respected summer theater that had a resident Equity company and even occasionally drew some Broadway stars. In the lobby of the theater hung framed headshots of “Barnies” of note—actors who’d once been apprentices here, just like I was, and had gone on to bigger things. I didn’t recognize any of their faces, but I was still impressed. It was beyond my wildest hope that my headshot would one day hang in this lobby too, prompting scores of theatergoers to remark, “Who?” I could only dream of such obscurity!