You Know What Burns My Ass?

I had a disturbing experience at Tuscany yesterday. I was just hanging out before rehearsal, getting a bite to eat and playing a little Neverwinter Nights, and there was this really obnoxious couple hanging out at the bar. Total white trash... the guy looked like he'd just gotten off his shift with the paint crew, and the woman was this short-and-badly-cut-haired, two sleeveless tee-shirt wearing yinzer who was sloppy drunk and wandering all over the bar. The two of them were constantly bumming cigarettes and lighters from everyone around them, and then returning to their place to huddle and make fun of the homos around them; then just to prove that they themselves were vigorously heterosexual, they were making out right there at the bar. Somehow, I don't think it would have bothered me as much if it were 1:30 a.m. at some pick-up dance bar, but this was Tuscany, ferchrissakes, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

The most disturbing part, to me, was that they were so effortlessly chummy with the guys they would turn around and be all snide about, after having gotten what they wanted. That and the fact that I found their obnoxious in-your-face hetero-ness so annoying. Let's be honest... if a couple of homos hung out in a predominantly straight bar and did that, they'd soon find themselves kicked shitless.

The injustice and poor taste of it all just really burns my ass.

I finally get a day off, and I ended up spending most of it working for Gordon, getting his materials prepped for his trip to Philadelphia tomorrow. Alas, the extra money is always helpful, so I'll gladly give up the extra couple of hours of sleep. Besides, I can make it up tomorrow. I do have to say, though, that the lack of sleep over the last couple of weeks - whether it's from my brain being unable to stop buzzing or from the weirdness of sleeping in a place not really my own - really caught up with me today. By the time I finished at Gordon's and ejected myself into what was a perfect day for just wandering the city and shooting images, I was just plain too beat. My brain just crashed like a program that had run too long on a Windows machine.

So I came home and sorta crashed 'til Toni got off work, and we went out to dinner at House of Lee - the Chinese restaurant of choice when staying in Bellevue. House of Lee is great, but going there always makes me more keenly aware of the loss of The Bellevue Tea Garden, which was my favorite Chinese restaurant ever - and was in it's heyday back when Denise and I roomed together over on Woodlawn Avenue.

Bellevue Tea Garden was one of the few places I've found who made their General Tso's Chicken with peanuts and a brown sauce, as opposed to the popular orange glaze and broccoli. It's those little things in life get you through, you know?

Jay O'Berski said an interesting thing to me yesterday as we were sneaking off during a break to get some ice cream at the Dairy Queen around the corner. I was nattering on, as is my wont, about often being envious of the parts other actors get to play, and his response was that he felt very lucky to be able to play the character he's playing, and then he said how much he was learning from everyone around him (the phrase that struck me, and really got me to thinking about it, was something along the lines of, "...and I'm really going to school watching you do your part..." or something like that). In addition to being flattering, his comment really brought home to me the real payoff for doing this kind of thing - and why actors are so often willing to work for so little money. The chance to work with people who are genuinely talented is a schooling of its own sort, and as craftsmen (with props to all the feminists out there, I mean that in the generic, not the specifically-masculine sense) actors are no different in that they want the result of their craft - their own performance - to continually improve. Those are the actors I admire.

And maybe that's a better way of explaining why I'm so happy to be working with this group of actors. It's not that they're such nice people, though they are. It's that they're all talented, and even more importantly, dedicated to improving what they bring to the table.

Very often you'll hear me complain about how much I dislike actors, and I don't think I'm being painfully Gemini-like when I say that I mean that as vehemently as I do when I say I love them too. I think actors can display the best and the worst of human attributes - not terribly unlike any segment of humanity you might choose. They're just better at taking their triumphs and foibles and using them to illuminate something about more universal conditions, I think.

Then again, there are those who often suggest that I stop thinking and just shut up. Hee hee hee.