From TORONTO,
May 25th, 2010
Have you ever given blood, Dear Reader? Firstly, if you don’t, and you can, then you should. I’m a regular donor of platelets and blood and my great and powerful fluids have saved thousands of lives, made sickly people more well than they’d been in their entire lives, allowed newborn babies to leap tall buildings in a single bound… But maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, it’s a good thing to do, you get to feel like a hero….and then a lady gives you a cookie!
At every Canadian Blood Services outpost, there are these nice old lady volunteers who are sweet to you and thank you for your help and give you Tang and Chips Ahoy and make sure that you’re okay before sending you back out into the world.
Now have you ever given an audition? It’s very similar to blood donation: you give of yourself, empty out your very essence, as it were, feel somewhat drained and woozy - but nobody gives you a cookie, or even anything, which is my point. You immediately stagger out into the bright light of day after nary a kind word, depleted and stunned and confused. Old ladies don’t offer Tang; they glare at you for talking to yourself and running into them. (Or over them, if you’re one of the unfortunate five Canadian actors who owns a motor vehicle.)
“GODDAMN PESKY ACTORS!”
I’ve decided to start a volunteer brigade, comprised of kind old parents/grandparents of actors, and residents of PAL (Performing Arts Lodge), who will offer tea and sympathy at audition halls across this land. This shall be my legacy. Think of me while you’re crying all over that Oreo, a pair of comforting wrinkled hands smoothing your hair, a honeyed old voice saying, “There, there. There’s always teachers’ college.”
(In lieu of the not-yet-created Old People’s Audition Auxiliary, I will, after a particularly brutal audition, often take away the sting by treating myself to a nice brunch or a dress, spending money I'm not going to make on that job I didn’t just get. Sometimes I do this after a really good audition, too, because I’m just so darn excited!)
I’ll confess I’ve started to have fantasies of having other lucrative skills, like waking up one morning to realize that I have a profound knowledge of, say, biological warfare, or the tango. I’ll suddenly be in demand as a tango-dancing weapons-maker, travelling the world and making piles of dough, setting my own schedule, driving several fancy cars, three boats and a motorcycle simultaneously (a lasso ‘round my helicopter), appearing in the occasional play or movie as my exciting life allows. (I’ll suddenly be wildly in demand as an actor, of course, now that I’m no longer slithering into audition rooms wearing Eau de Desperation, but dashing around trailing tantalizing puffs of the sweet smell of success.)
But let us catalogue my actual other possibilities, in something we will call:
THINGS I MIGHT YET BE (vote now)
Thing #1: A crazy old lady.
Okay, maybe this one doesn’t exactly solve the financial worries or buy me that helicopter, but it’s something I’ve always dreamed of. And I think it could be creatively fulfilling. I’ve always been fascinated by the moment that a person cracks. I imagine mine would be sudden and dramatic. Like, what if I were on stage when it happened? What if, in the middle of act two of an Oscar Wilde play, I stripped down to my panties and ran into the audience, screaming random Gordon Lightfoot lyrics and mooing like a cow (to give the obvious example)? And the ushers had to chase me down. Or if, during some long, pause-y drama, I just paused forever and never spoke again? And refused to leave the stage, and the ASM had to come and lift me.
Of course now if I ever go nuts everyone will accuse me of faking.
#2: A politician.
This is merely so I can have the distinction, when the sex scandal breaks, of being the first elected official to say, "So fucking what. None of your business. Now go away....you idiots. And you can quote me on that." (All things Giambrone shoulda said?)
Thing #3: A Jedi.
Note: I wrote this one down and then got to the part in my pal Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s (or Young BS’s, to regular readers) excellent new novel, Ghosted, where the lead guy confesses that “Jedi” is one of his never-grown-out-of career choices. I AM NOT RIPPING YOU OFF, BS. I want to be a Jedi independent of you. Or rather, we could be Jedis together (fun – like Luke and Obi-Wan!), but I thought of it independent of you. Maybe it’s something everyone born between 1965 and 1980 wants to be.
Another note: when I imagine myself as a Jedi, I never think of myself as tall and cool and me-like in my Jedi gear. I always picture myself all small and wrinkly like Yoda. But I guess the wrinkly bit comes later, once I’ve been a member of the order for like five thousand years. I shall now try to amend my Jedi self-image.
Done. Damn but I look good in Jedi robes.
The other night I had a dream that I was a contestant on some actor reality show. Like that Sound-of-Music-Problem-Like-Maria thingy but without all the annoying songs. My friend Jeff Irving was on it, too. At one point they call us all into a room for a “talk” and when we get there it turns out to be full of important directors and all our friends and family, and we’re meant to give an impromptu audition, using material we’ve never read before. And we have to wear costumes, comprised of bits we pull from a tickle trunk at the back of the room. I’m given a monologue from Joan of Arc, and, grumbling along with the other actors about why we consented to be on this stupid show in the first place, manage to cobble together a costume out of odd bits of armour and scraps of clothing. I top it all off by putting a very large, red pointy shoe on my head as a hat, and I’m looking in a mirror, pleased at how surprisingly cool I look with a shoe on my head, when I realize I haven’t even looked at the monologue and it’s my turn.
Thing #4: One of those “professional eaters” who travels around competing to eat the most burgers or chili or blueberry pie (yes, I’m remembering Stand by Me) at state and county fairs. It would seem I’m infinitely qualified for this one – not only do I like to eat, I also have plenty of experience in making a spectacle of myself, and tend to enjoy the sensation of food dribbling down my chin. Multiple chins would be even better.
BUT THEN…I read this stupid article about the World Poutine Eating Competition, held just the other day here in Toronto.
Apparently it’s really hard, and now I’m not so sure I’ve got the right stuff.
However, whether or not I ever win the Golden Corndog, I trust I have got what it takes to metamorphose into…
Thing #5: A very large woman. Not a profession, per se, this is along the lines of “crazy old lady” in terms of not being the most obviously practical choice, but truly fascinating. When I was a kid I always looked forward to the day that my metabolism would slow down and I would start to grow. I imagined a great power in taking up as much space as possible, rumbling down the street as everybody stared at me in awe and admired my latest African print muumuu. I think in my big fat woman fantasies I’m also black. I’m not sure how I’d pull off that part. Of course the myth here may be far more romantic than reality, considering that now, in my MID THIRTIES (gulp), I spend more and more time sharply turning on strangers and asking, “Were you looking at my thigh? The left one? It's big isn't it? Bigger than the right. Oh God, stop looking at it! I'm hideous!”
I’m rushed backstage at the Shaw Festival mainstage theatre, where I’m suddenly being thrown into understudy overdrive to IMMEDIATELY go on in Laurie Paton’s role in Candida. Time is tight, it’s all a jumble of corsets and wigs and people shouting blocking at me. The moment I set foot onstage, my wig gets caught in the doorframe and flies from my head. The audience roars with laughter. No going back to get and reattach the wig now, or rescue my cloak which has gotten snagged as well, so I wriggle out of the cloak and soldier on. Only when my fellow actor, the amazing Bernard “Bunny” Behrens, speaks to me, do I realize that in all the panic I didn’t take a moment to look at the script and I don’t remember a thing. The upstage part of this set, however, consists of a giant wall of bookcases and surely, I think, there must be a copy of Candida in there somewhere. As Bunny goes on talking to himself, I turn away from him and the audience, searching frantically….and there it is! A paperback “Plays Pleasant” by George Bernard Shaw! I sit down at the desk, open the book and start to read my lines aloud. By now, I’ve so thrown Bunny off that he’s forgotten what he’s supposed to say, and so he sits across from me, facing upstage, so he can use the book as well. We spend the rest of the show like that, passing the script across to one another, hunched over, reading the play in barely audible voices.
When I wake up, I think, Holy fuck! That was awful! I’d better brush up on my lines for Candida just in case. It takes me five full minutes to remember that I’m not an understudy for that show, and have only seen it once.
Alternate Career #6: A parody songwriter. Like Weird Al, but hot and girly. Funny, too.
I have a bone to pick with Weird Al. My own burgeoning songwriting career was sidetracked by a clear case of plagiarism on his part. It was grade four at Grey Owl Junior Public School, and my writing partner Hansa Prasad and I had just finished our final draft of “Eat It”, a comic refashioning of Michael Jackson’s song “Beat It”….when WE HEARD WEIRD AL YANKOVIC’S VERSION on the radio. It wasn’t near as funny as ours, which would now clearly never see the light of day.
We were so disillusioned and embittered by the experience that, there and then, newly angry, burnt-out nine-year-olds, we stopped working altogether. Which is a shame, really, because “Eat It” wasn’t even Norton & Prasad’s best work. It was less impressive than our master opus, “Get Away From George”, but had more of a chance at commercial success as “Beat It” was a much more ubiquitous hit than was “Get Into the Groove” by Madonna.
Our classmate George Karismanis wasn’t even a fat kid; he just wore lumpy sweaters and maybe five extra pounds around his waist. Maybe he ate a lot, I don’t remember. More importantly, he was a nine-year-old named George.
Some highlights? Why, I happen to remember a few:
Get away from George, ‘cause he likes to gorge
and he might eat you (yea-ah)…
He gets to know you in a special way,
And then he eats you for breakfast the next day-a-ay,
Only when he’s eating does he feel this free-ee,
At night I lock the doors so he won’t eat me-ee!
Get away from George (et cetera)…
I can assure you, we never sang this to, or even around, George Karismanis. (If it gets back to him now, I do apologize.) It was, in fact, our sensitivity to George’s feelings that made us not want to release it, instead pinning all hopes on “Eat It” as our first big single.
Until you, Weird Al.
P.S. UHF sucked ass.
SOMEONE KILL THIS MAN. (OH, LIKE YOU DIDN’T WANT TO ALREADY.)
#7: A Paralympic curler. This involves volunteers hacking off my legs or poking both my eyes out....and teaching me how to curl.
#8: A pool shark. Or a card shark. Some type of shark. (And YES, BS, I thought of this one, too, before I read your book. Wait a minute…Are you me?)
#9: A pinball wizard? Yeah, that’s the one.
Then I’ll feel real tough and cool.
I’m acting in a play on a stage that looks oddly like the one at my old high school. At some point, I realize that the imaginary “fourth wall” separating the actors from the audience is, in this case, very real. A construction crew is working on it as we speak, banging drywall up on a wooden frame, covering the few gaps through which the play can still be seen. I try to perform in the gaps, and then resort to clawing at the wall and trying madly to get to the other side. Everybody else has given up. The spectators talk amongst themselves.
#10: A software engineer.
My latest brilliant invention-in-my-head is interactive software that intuits your reaction to whatever application you’re using at the time and adjusts your computer accordingly. For instance, on opening an aggravating email from someone at work, you simply wave your hand dismissively at the screen while rolling your eyes – and your browser immediately opens some porn! To cheer you up! Just got a nasty online reminder that tax time is coming, or over, or exists in general? Give your computer the finger - and your browser immediately…opens some porn! (Other options pending.)
Recently my friend Ross Manson, after laughing uproariously for about an hour over some little joke I’d burped up, managed to calm down and said, “Norton, If you didn't exist, someone would have to invent you”.
Well, actually, I thought, someone did. All at once I realized with an absolute clarity that this whole “theory of evolution” I’ve always bought into is just so much bullshit. Because if I'm not the best argument for Intelligent Design out there, I don't know what is. Trees and, I don't know, diamonds, could have been merely randomly generated - but The Skeptical Tourist? Clearly the work of an awesome, benevolent God. (Who can also be cruel in that He won't let you have me.) All this to say that I obviously must become:
Thing #11: A left-wing Creationism lecturer.
Or there’s #12: A prostitute. (Image available…in your brain.)
It often seems a waste of my considerable carnal talents that I’m not having sex with as many people as possible. (And doing it for money would solve those oft-mentioned intermittent fiscal woes.) There’s usually a stigma attached to this kind of thing....but when you're the best there is at something, that oughtn’t to apply. In that case, I believe there's a actually a responsibility to share.... My being celibate right now is as if Gretzky had decided to hang up his skates in 1986. Tragic. Inconceivable. A blight on the human race, in the following sense of the word:
Blight (blaIt), noun
(3.) Something that impairs growth, withers hopes and ambitions, or impedes progress and prosperity.
See? That’s terrible! (Somebody fuck me, for God’s sake.)
Maybe what I need to do, Erect Young Reader, is let my hair go grey (as a grand symbol of, ahem, GROWING UP) and see what becomes of me. I keep wanting to, but then I have to audition to play some twelve-year-old so I pluck the silver hairs away and bid them fond adieus. (I must admit there's some fear & vanity involved here as well... Are you looking at my grey-haired thigh? The left one?)
If only I weren’t so fucking good at acting.
Yours, on the cusp of everything,
The Tourist
P.S. I've added a poll on the sidebar where you can help me to decide which of the eminently practical careers listed above is the one for me. So go ahead and vote now. And then I can get on with life.
