Road Trip

Long road trip today. I got up early to be at the port authority station by 10:30 to catch the 11 a.m. Greyhound to Philadelphia. I had an audition at 4 p.m. at The Arden Theatre for a production of The Pavilion this fall. I believe we've discussed before how much I love long car-trips... the drive to Philadelphia from New York is less than ½ the drive from Philly to Pittsburgh, but it's boring just the same.

I think the audition went well enough. I'm not able to be objective about these things. The call to audition was a great surprise, so I figure, if I feel as though I didn't blow it, the day's a success!

And it was a really nice opportunity to see all my friends at the theater. The audition was chock full of folks I didn't expect! Terry Nolan, the artistic director was there - though I guess I really should have expected him. And Amy Lincoln was there - she's the assistant artistic director. Of course Aaron Posner was there - he's directing, and so was Jesse Bernstein, who I happened to see on the street before the audition. He'd just found out a couple of days before that he'd be assisting Aaron... very cool for him.

I managed to get caught in the rain walking back from the theater to the bus station (sans umbrella!), but the ride back was pretty uneventful, and I managed to get home by nine o'clock.

I guess, all in all, the time was really well invested. The chance to audition for The Pavilion was worth it - and on balance, the time investment was a LOT less than the time investment for the Picasso audition, now that I think about it... that was 12 hours in a car and 1½ hour auditioning.

The Producers

I just got back from seeing what may possibly be the best musical theater show I have ever seen. Mel Brooks is a fucking genius, and his stage version of the classic movie The Producers is utterly and completely amazing. I can't tell you the last time I laughed so hard. And I can tell you point blank that this is the first new American musical in years that I've wanted to see again. I have a feeling I could see this one ten times and not be tired of it.

Mel Brooks' book is just hilarious - and crude, but the music and lyrics are really, really funny. And the production itself! Yeesh! No wonder it costs a small country's GNP to produce a new musical. Talk about extravagant!

There just aren't words to describe the experience. The show is just so shamelessly crude and funny and sentimental that it's impossible to describe. And he's done a wonderful job of staying pretty darn close to the source material. The big shame is that it's just so damn hard to get tickets - and that they've become so expensive. It's going to be years before I can afford to see this sucker again.

Only in New York

Well, the world is just chock full of cool happenings. My dear friend Jeff Berman came into the city today to do some work, and I met him at SoundTrack, the studio where he was working. Jeff was kind enough to introduce me to a couple of his friends there, Roy and John.

Jeff (on the right) and his friend, Roy

And before we could head off to the lost and found at Penn Station (a very long story that I might just share with you some day), John needed a few moments with Jeff... so I cooled my heels in the lobby of the studio. Who do you think passed through the lobby on a break from her looping session? None other than Jessica Lange. I nearly fainted.

And, of course, I was faced with the age old quandry: Do I act like a puling sycophant and grovel at the just-met celebrity's feet, telling her how much I adore her body of work, or do I play it cool? My decision was made for me. She was gone so quickly I didn't have a chance to work up a good suck-up.

It did, however, consitute only my second celebrity sighting for this trip (the first was Yoko Ono in Central Park - not far from Strawberry Fields. She smiled and nodded to me. I was impressed.), which is kinda odd, since my last trip to New York City only lasted, like, three days, and I saw more celebrities than you can shake a stick at.

Anyway, seeing Jessica Lange was a pretty cool treat. It would have made the day one to remember all on it's own.

So Jeff took me out to dinner at the fabulous Cafe Un Deux Trois, on 44th Street. It was amazing. We discovered that there was going to be a twenty minute wait for our table, so we made for the bar and had some cocktails. And who do we see having dinner at Cafe 123, but Treat Williams! Treat, by the way, is holding up pretty darn well for a guy approaching 50!

So all in all, it was a damn fine day. And I still have this Sunday to look forward to!

Respite!

Well, the good news for today is that the construction guys came through again with the high-pressure water hoses, cleaning up the crumbs left by all the jackhammering on the front of the terrace. I'm guessing that that means the jackhammering is done and the (quiet!) re-cementing is nigh!

Oh joy, oh rapture!

I can't believe it's only ten days 'til my birthday. It's just struck me.

Results

Well, I had to haul ass outta bed early today to get to the Callen-Lourde Clinic and get the results of my HIV screening. As expected, I was negative. I've been in a monogomous relationship for 4½ years. I don't think it should be that big of a surprise.

The earliness of the appointment and the resumption of the jackhammering on my terrace forced me out into the city with not a lot to do, so I finally got around to spending a little time actually inside The Cloisters. Do you believe that I forgot to pack my frickin' camera when I left in the morning?

So I spent most of the morning and early afternoon wandering around the various rooms of the museum, wondering at the collections. Usually my favorite part of a visit to The Cloisters is seeing The Unicorn Tapestries, but the experience this time was marred by the presence of a large group of school children - young ones - who were not exactly as awed by the ancient weavings as I was. Natch.

I got to spend a lot of time sitting in the gardens and doing a lot of thinking. I had my computer with me, and I've been saying forever that I would love to sit there in those gardens and work on the pope play, but I didn't do it! I just took in the serenity of it, and stared dreamily at all the architecture and just the feeling of being in that place. I only wish I'd have had someone to share it with. Marcy and George McDonald would have loved it - maybe Dean might have as well, though I don't think he's as taken by things of that period as M & G & I are.

I finally left the museum after a couple hours and returned home, to sit down and do some work on the play. I managed to slog my way through yet another scene that's been giving me pause, so that's good. I'm slowly but surely getting it into my head that I shouldn't try to edit as I go along - something I've known but have been unable to stop myself from doing. It's a bit of a breakthrough, since the act of editing-in-progress has always been a way for me to unconsciously avoid having to finish whatever I was working on, thus avoiding showing it to anyone and having it be rejected! The mind is a terrible thing, my friends. And fear is at the root of all failure.

Well, I'm not entirely sure that I agree with that sentiment, since I have, over the years, come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as failure. There's only the attempt. I leave failure to critics and A-type personalities. I'm happy with doing the best I can and taking what comes. Although, I have to throw in the caveat that sometimes my own fears (and yes, laziness and an overly-developed sense of entitlement - a sort of "I have to work for this? It's not going to be given to me?" attitude) prevent me from doing my best. There are those of us in the world for whom success is every bit as scary as failure. I'm sure volumes have been written about that. Maybe someday I'll read them and understand myself a little better. After all, an unexamined life, it's said, is not worth living.

But isn't it also true that a life spent in too much self-examination is chock full of a detrimental amount of navel-gazing?

So I sat down to do some writing, and I'm pleased that a little progress is being made. But guess who's returned?

Yes, you guessed it. I had to do my writing in bursts, 'cuz the jackhammering had started again in earnest. They had slacked off a great deal over the last week or so, as I may have mentioned, turning their attention to re-cementing some (apparently) of the big holes they'd made in the terraces. You may remember me remarking that they hadn't done that on the front portion of the terrace, and guess where the jackhammering's happening? The front. Go figure.

So the Saga of the Perpetual Headache continues...

This Song Is About Me, Isn't It?

This really is a very small world. You'll never guess who I ran into on the streets of New York today, as I was making my way through Chelsea to my eye doctor's appointment. None other than young Youssef Kerkour, whom many of you will remember from the Philadelphia entries as the guy who played "The Visitor" in Picasso at the Lapin Agile. How wonderful and weird was that?

Youssef had just picked up his new headshots and was going to meet his friend Luis for lunch. You may also remember Luis from the online journal - I don't think I had posted any pictures of him, but he visited Actor Housing Central while we were in Philadlephia. Here's one from the cast party at Aaron Posner's house that I don't think I posted before... maybe I did.

So that was nice.

The eye appointment went well. I had my first eye exam in something on the order of six or seven years. That's what leaving corporate america and giving up your kick-ass health insurance will get you, my friends. Well, I've had insurance though Actors' Equity now for a while, so I decided to take advantage of the benefits and get myself the pair of glasses to which I'm entitled every two years.

I got the referral through the Davis Vision website, and have to say I was pretty pleased with the result. My new doctor, Dr. Rifat S. Jaffer is the cute little woman who is (frighteningly) pretty young-seeming. She's hip and easy to talk to - an easy rapport with me. I lost my old reading glasses ages ago, so she had nothing to compare to, but I'm suspecting that my prescription hasn't changed significantly in all these years. I don't need glasses for anything but reading, though I tend to think that the need for reading glasses my be stronger than it used to be. I was surprised at how hard I had to work to read some of the stuff on the eye charts.

Alas, while the Davis Vision plan covers pretty much everything involved in the whole eye-exam, including that wacky dialation of the pupils that they do, it requires that you choose your frames from the Davis Vision "collection." Not terribly trendy, friends. Not that I'm a slave to fashion, but I'm a slave to fashion. More than once I've been heard to utter the old "champagne tastes on a beer income" epithet. Unfortunately, were I to choose some of the frames in which I was really interested, ol' Davis Vision would only have provided $30 toward their purchase. And the frames I was looking at were in the $240 - $260 range. Not in the budget, I'm afraid. So I got the faux-designer frames, and I'm HAPPY about it. Did you believe me?

Really, I can't complain too much. The cheapo frames I did get are actually kinda cool, and have a lot of the features the others do. And jeez, I'm only going to be using them for sitting in front of the computer and reading books. Not like I have to impress anyone in those situations.

I'm so vain, I probably think this song is about me.

Mothers' Day

So many of us grew up with that false Harriet Nelson expectationof our mothers (well, actually for me it was Carol Brady and Mom Partridge) that we tend to forget that that kind of mother is a fantasy. Most moms are just human beings - flawed, struggling, sometimes unhappy with their lots in life, unfulfilled - and we forget that most of them are trying to figure the whole thing out as they go along. They make mistakes. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes so many that kids end up feeling scarred from their childhood experiences.

I'm lucky enough to have avoided most of that. My mom had had a chance to get some practice in on my older brothers and sisters, and I suspect, now that I'm an adult, that she was probably all of those things at one time or another. But she managed to keep most of that from me. I'm not saying my mom was a saint, but she lived her life by a set of principles that sorta filtered down, and a lot of the principles that I try to uphold - kindness, tolerance, caring for others, passion for life - are things that I learned from her.

That's why it's so weird to be here in New York on Mothers Day. I mean, I'm sure that I've been away from Pittsburgh before... I just don't ever remember feeling it quite so much. Maybe it has something to do with being new here in the city, and not having my close friends around to distract me, or even more likely, not having work to distract me.

So like a big ol' sissy, I'm missing my mommy! I just called her (they're getting WAY to technologically advanced... they dumped the answering machine for voice-mail and got a computer) and left a message. I suspect that if I give it a try, I can catch her later today at my sister Susie's house, which I'll do.

Probably what's hardest is missing that rare chance I have to get together with my family. Much of our family history is rather contentious, and we don't see each other as much as some families do, but that doesn't mean I don't treasure every chance to get to see them. And seeing them on holidays like Mother's Day is even more special, since I know that we're going to have so few chances to see each other the rest of the year - busy as our lives are.

So I'm here in my New York apartment, and I've just sent off an e-mail with a little picture of me waving "hello" attached, and I'm wishing my mom and two sisters a fabulous day and a joyous gathering. I'll be there in spirit!

Overload

Have you ever noticed that there's a dizzying array of sensory input at any given moment? You already know that I'm a master of stating the blazingly obvious, but this city just brings that observation home in the most amazing ways.

I decided to open the door to the balcony to get a little air moving in the apartment, since I've gone and moved the laptop out of the little cubbyhole/office area and set up shop on the small table by the window, and I've just been amazed at the assault on my senses. It's mostly the noise, but it's also the smells, and the light bleeding in through the curtains at all hours of the day and night, the artificial, forced quality of eternal daylight, eternal bustle. It's the perfect example, I guess, of every coin having two sides. All the things that I find exciting and thrilling about this city are also the things that I find utterly maddening. And in the same spirit of duality, I don't doubt I'm going to miss every fucking single one of those things when I have to leave this place.

I'm starting to get a first-hand knowledge of how hard it is to be poor in New York City. Certainly, I don't have it anywhere nearly so badly as many people, but as I've enjoyed the city in a leisurely way, my money has slowly dwindled. Granted, I knew it would, and at some point I was going to have to go out and get a job; and truth be told, I've managed to put that off longer than I'd thought possible. I've been here nearly a month and I've been free to audition and play all I wanted, without all the worry of bringing in a paycheck. But the bank account, while far from empty, is like a bay at low tide, but this superstitious native isn't quite sure that the moon's gonna swing around again and bring it back up. So it's time for a little human sacrifice. My leisure is about to get its throat cut on the Alter of the High Tide.

New York City makes for such an amazing mix of experiences. The infuriating distractions of the noise and the assault on the senses, the unnatural beauty of looking down across this city and it's blinking, hypnotic lights stretching to the horizon when you're looking north, south, or west, the astounding array of talent levels of the people at auditions - swarming around you like bees on a honeycomb, all trying to get in at the nectar.

Seems to me, the best way (and most impractical, unfortunately) to make your way through this city is to go completely unburdened. No bag, no pack to snag on the hundreds of thousands of bodies you have to struggle against to get anywhere in mid-town. Leave the apartment carrying nothing so that you can dodge and slide through the swirl of bodies on every street corner, so you have nothing weighing you down when you need a burst of speed to get around toddering old folks or, worse yet, the unforgivable: Tourists.

So, go forth unburdened, right? Well, it's the nature of this city that that's practically an impossibility. This isn't the kind of place where you run off, go to work, come home, and change for your evening out with friends. Oh no, my friends. It takes too long to get around this town for that kind of a leisurely attitude! You need to leave your aparment in the morning carrying everything you're going to require for the entire day... and for someone like me, who might have a couple auditions to go to, or an agent or two to meet, that can mean mutiple changes of clothes, copies of headshots, copies of voice demos, toiletries so your breath doesn't melt the skin off of someone's face - all sorts of stuff. I'm beginning to feel like my female friends with their big-ass purses.

And the crazy part of it all is that I'm digging it. It's forcing an organization and forethought on my life that I've not had in years. But it's also tiring, which brings me to the best of all the ironies about this city. That noise may be unending and unrelenting, but when I fall into bed at night, I'm so damn tired, it doesn't matter in the least. I suspect when return to my quiet little hometown, it's gonna be too quiet to sleep in.

The Park

The men who planned the urban growth of the island of Manhattan must have been psychics or something. Otherwise, how could they have possibly known how important Central Park would be to the people of the city? It's absolutely remarkable how calm and peaceful that place is, and what a relief it is from the relentless harshness of the city otherwise.

New York City is an incredible, vibrant place to live and work, but it's also unbelievably harsh if you're poor or can't escape it anytime you'd like. Today in the city the temperature got to 87°, and according to newscasts it's going to reach 90° at some point this week. All that heat being reflected and intensified by all that concrete makes it even worse, and the air becomes an almost physical presence, pressing down on you - it moves so sluggishly you can feel it sliding across your skin, almost like standing in the ocean and being not entirely sure what manner of creature just brushed up against you.

So occasionally, those of us who are both cursed and lucky enough not to work in an air-conditioned office have to escape the relentless baking of the city, and if you can't hop in a car and drive to the Jersey shore, or hop a plane to some exotic destination, your best chance for that, I think, is to take refuge in Central Park.

I kinda did it by accident today. I don't know the city well enough to know these things yet, but I decided that I needed a day to myself, so I hiked on over to the park and wandered around for much of the day, only to discover that I wasn't the only one with that idea. There were hundreds of thousands of people escaping the car exhaust and haze of the skyline, just walking through the park, or hanging out by the many ponds.

Which is how I found myself relaxing by The Pond. I somehow managed to stumble on it by having entered the park through the West 108th Street entrance, and was amazed at it's tranquility. Not only is there a lovely pond, around which winds a walking path, but there are benches, and some lawn areas to spread out, but there's also a wonderful waterfall to a stream that runs under the most interesting arch. I had my camera with me, but managed not to take a picture of these things. I'll try to think about taking it with me the next time I go.

What did I take a picture of? Ducks.

I'm sorry, they were just too cute. I also didn't take a picture of the cute guy who was sunbathing near the Pond, or the really cute guy who was writing in his journal near the waterfall. But I digress.

I'm planning on taking another park day later in the week. Might was well go and enjoy myself while I can. I'm gonna be going off to find temp work soon, so I'll likely be stuck in an office all day. Time to get what sun I can, while I can!