Someone actually called me on it. “You’re kicking my puppy, dude.” and he was right. I did own up to it… I was poo-pooing my work before anyone else could so as to protect myself. I guess I’ve been around people who took that stuff for granted and I believed their anti-hype instead of owning the fact that there really are people who don’t give a fuck that I’m not with a big agency like CAA or ICM or William Morris anymore. They were kids when I was in the show bizness.

I mean, I didn’t completely fall on my sword, but I didn’t need to even bring the sword out. They were excited enough to see Rockula, that they went to see it at Midnight in L.A.

I’d met the guy who I did the QyA with in Napa at a SpamScam shoe. He introduced himself as my biggest fan and I’d signed a Ski School poster for him. When Phil, the guy running the New Bev, mentioned that the guy who was going to do the QyA was from up north and was my biggest fan, I knew exactly who it was. Very cool.

It’s weird. They’re a little ironic. He said they’re post ironic. He screens movies in SF that are similar in scope to some of the stuff I’ve done but really loves them. I really hope I’m not a joke. Man, that would suck.

Showbiz seems to have fucked me up. Though, I suppose that happens in any career one is passionate about. I bet doctors get fucked up about being doctors. I know they do.

I suppose I’m lucky that I had a career that I was passionate about for so long that I was recognized for.

Nutty. Rockula.

Could be worse. It could be Marmaduke. Or Avatar. Cynical bullshit that people are making so they can buy shit. Fucking Marmaduke.

What a bunch of assholes. Only a real asshole cuntshit would be proud of Marmaduke.

“Yeah, I’ve always had a vision of dogs and cats doing a synchronized dance in a park.”

Kill yourself you fucking cynical studio executive. And you, Owen Wilson, you should be ashamed of yourself. Lazy bitch.

I know they’re justifying it to themselves. “Hey, I can’t help what people want to see. The studio is making Marmaduke and they’ve offered me all this money. It’s going to be in theaters. I need to be in theaters.”

Asshole. Fucking Marmaduke.

“…and then, see, Marmaduke causes all this mayhem in the park on the day the guy has got to impress his boss…”

“…oh, beautiful!! hilarious… i can see it now… hey, how about some cgi? he talks, right?”

“what? oh, yeah,um, of course!!! he talks… yeah!”

“I just had a meeting with Fergie’s people… how about her as Marmaduke’s love interest? That blue eyed peas can do a rap song at the end. We can get it on phones. kids eat that shit up, like a dog eats its own puke.”

“Fucking genius!! We’re going to have Avatar sucking dog dick!!!”

“Fuck yeah. We’ll take out an ad monday after opening: AVATAR SUCKS BIG FAT DOG COCK!!!”

“HEY. READY? …THE DOGS DANCE IN THE PARK!!! TO A FERGIE SONG OR SOMETHING. NO! SOMETHING UPBEAT AND HOT!!! MAYBE OVER THE CREDITS. OR JUST PUT IT IN THE GOD DAMNED TRAILER!!!”

“…SUCK MY DOG COCK, BUDDY, GREEN LIGHT THAT SHIT, BABY! HEY, JAMES CAMERON, MARMADUKE HAS A LIPSTICK!!!! MARMADUKE HAS A LIPSTICK!!!”

William H. Macy tells himself that it’s a studio picture and that he can take that money and go back to Chicago and do some more theater. Or he has a house payment. Or something. “Hey, they’re gonna fuckin’ make the fuckin’ movie, right? I’m not getting a million bucks doing Mamet, that’s for sure… They’re making it whether I’m in it or not. Fuck it. So I do a talking dog movie. It’ll be fun working with Owen. Well, maybe I’ll see him at the screening. Ah… fuck it, A million bucks is a million bucks. Now that Felicity’s not bringing in… Hell, it’ll be nice to take the kids to see it… A million bucks. What the hell.”

Marmaduke.

Fucking Marmaduke.

And I can’t get a fucking agent. What a bunch of fucking assholes. Truly. You people making Marmaduke should kiss a dog’s lipstick.

Asshole.

If you’ve seen me in stuff, then you have seen Patrick in stuff. Before I was fired from show business, we used to be in movies and t.v. shoes together. Patrick, however, was allowed back in to the movie and television business and did a series you never saw, but everyone else in the country watched: JAG.

We also co-wrote “Hollywood Palms” together. The “quick, down and dirty” project that took almost 10 years to get made.

Regardless, check out actinggood.com

You’ll act good. Real good.

All I can say is: muy bueno!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObQkVnERA3g

You should go here and watch it. It is funny stuff, people. Plus, it debuted at a swanky film fest a couple of weeks ago. So there!

The guys at the venue are, thankfully, ON IT and have all of the required cables, stands and screens set up and ready to go. I plug the show iPod in to their video cable and it works the first time. That’s never happened. I check and make sure that I have the right set of slides (there are three versions of slides) and I do.

I head up to the light booth and set up Paul’s computer and iPod for the audio as Victor and he set up the computers and props for the show. Victor irons his shirt. The computers are all set up, I pass Paul, give him a quick primer on how to make sure levels are good for the phone calls. I change shirts stage right as they let people in.

Total pre-show set up time: 2 minutes.

8: 17pm – they let the audience in. All 11 of them. Eleven people are there to see the show. We’ve done a couple of state schools and both times the taxpayers have paid our salary and it looks like this is no different. Good thing Michigan is doing so well.

8:25pm – “Dear sir, may the blessings of allah be upon you and grant you the wisdom and sympathy…”

We perform the show. This is the beauty of having performed a show over 150 times for the past 5 years. It goes great. The 11 people love it. Laugh in all the right places. Scream at the reveals, etc. Were you there? Killed.

9:40pm – instead of going out to the lobby for the crap collection, we just jump off the front of the stage and chat with people. Ellen Sawyer, a person I worked with at iWin.com when this whole thing began has brought her boyfriend and four other people. They have no idea where to go in Jackson and neither do we. We don’t even know the name or location of our hotel. After some conversation with our superstar tech guys, we figure out where we’re staying and where to go for foodstuffs. We are verrrrrry hungry.

9:55pm – We say our goodbyes to the staff and head off to the hotel. Usually, after a show, there is a nice glow… a nice feeling. It’s such a fun show to perform and we LOVE doing it, but we realize that we don’t really remember doing the show tonight. The show was secondary, at least, to everything else that has been going on. It’s not a great feeling. We do realize that the benefit of having spent so little time there was that we didn’t have any opportunity to feel badly that there were going to be 11 people in the audience. That’s the silver lining, apparently.

10:30pm – We find the ho-tel. It’s fine. Basic business traveller chain. Great. The restaurant is next door, we eat, have a nice time with Ellen and her friends. I have a nice hot fudge ice cream treat and we’re back at the ho-tel by midnight.

Our return flight on Spirit doesn’t leave until 7:30pm the next day. We get late checkouts and agree that we can sleep in and then maybe go exploring beautiful Detroit – Rock City.

12:30am – My room. Sleep of the dead.

11:30am – It seems that the housekeeper didn’t get the memo that I had a late check-out and she wakes me up. Ah well. I get up, pack what little i unpacked, check out and walk across the street to have a nice, leisurely breakfast at the Cracker Barrel.

1pm – As I sit down, Victor calls. He decided to double check our flight and learned that if one misses their initial flight on Spirit Airlines, you forfeit your second leg, ass well. We have no return flight home. We are, once again, fuckity fuck fuck fucked.

We get a hold of Paul, and get in the car and begin driving back to Detroit before we have a plan. We know that we probably don’t have time to have breakfast at the Cracker Barrel. Victor checks the web on his iPhone (technology saved us, by the way) and there’s a 2:15 flight on American for $175 each. Knowing the speed of Budget, we’ll never make it. He checks Southwest. Nope.

We’re laughing. Every time something’s happened, we just laugh. It got horrible so quickly that we didn’t have time to get bummed, it was just funny the entire time. I mean… yeah… so.

I’m driving really fast. Really. Fucking. Fast. Maybe we’ll try for the 2:15 flight, but Victor finds ANOTHER American flight at 5:30 for the same price. He calls, books the tickets and we are golden.

That’s basically it. We stop at a truck stop for breakfast, which is good, as the coffee at the Cracker Barrel was asstastic.

Once we get to the airport (Returning the fucking car took less than a minute. No fucking lie.) and are all checked in with boarding passes in hand, I see the Spirit counter and I get the idea to go over and fuck with them. Just because I can. The reason I booked the tickets on Spirit was that they were the only ones with a non-stop flight and the tickets were about $150 cheaper than the real airlines. But, they charge for each bag each way and also they charge for picking seats in advance. So, it ended up being about the same as I would’ve paid on a real airline.

We’re out just over a grand for the tickets on Spirit, and we’ve spent about 1200 for the emergency flights. It’s all covered by our booking fee and we’ll still make *some* money, but… one must subtract the cost of the extra flights now…

I head over to Spirit and I figure, instead of harassing them, maybe I’ll just try to get my money back. Once again, I use Aye Jaye’s excellent line. “Hi there… I have a bit of a problem and if you can help me, you can have the rest of the day off…” I explain (or ‘splain, as ricky rickardo would say) what has happened and the woman takes my ID, punches up stuff on her screen. “It says here, you have three seats booked on the 7:30 flight.”

“What?”

“You’re booked on the flight at 7:30 tonight.”

To make a very lonnng story shorter, I’ve kept my cool and haven’t been an asshole traveler to her so she is able to refund five hundred bucks. It’s not the whole shebang, which I’m going to try to get (that’ll happen) but it’s five hundred bucks that we didn’t have a few minutes ago. I’m stunned. I aks her who I need to talk to so I can really try to get her the rest of the day off. She laughs and says “If I can’t go to L.A. where it’s warm, I might as well just stay here…”

The other silver lining is that we didn’t have to find a way to get from LAX to where I was parked at BUR.

Plus, at least the show killed. I think.

Curtain is 8pm Friday, Rocktober 23.

9:30pm Thursday, Rocktober 22 –
Thursday night – arrive at LAX 9:30pm for a 10:30pm flight on Spirit Airlines. Spirit was chosen for their non-stop to Detroit, which saved us from sitting in an airport in Dallas for an hour. Heh.

Spirit Airlines has cancelled a flight to Ft. Lauderdale. The counter looks like the US Embasy during the fall of Saigon. Victor, Paul (the tech guy) and I move to three separate lines. I get close. A woman in front of me begins yelling at me after I tell her that the Ft. Lauderdale flight is cancelled. She doesn’t, apparently, understand the “don’t kill the messenger” concept. Ah well. The two people who are behind the counter are mobbed. We can’t get to them. Finally one guy comes out and yells at everyone who is yelling at him about Ft. Lauderdale. I signal Victor to aks him about Detroit.

“That plane has departed. We made an announcement.” and he leaves. He vanishes.

10:30pm – We are stunned. Shocked. Pissed. We had plenty of time. Okay. We’ll deal with Spirit at another time, they are crushed by the pissed Ft. Lauderdale folks.

We look for departing flights. I call the savior, Colin Summers as we scurry through the airport looking for flights. It’s late. We’ve just missed a flight on United. I’m talking to Colin as we look at the displays. We see a flight to Cleveland. Victor calculates that it’s a three hour drive to Detroit. We could get in at 6am and then drive to Jackson… we wouldn’t get much sleep but we’d be okay.

Colin’s talking about different flights. I mention Cleveland. There’s an American flight to Detroit for 2grand. No. We can’t do that. Colin mentions a flight on some other airline that gets in at 5pm the next day. That gives us time to at least drive to the venue… it’s a bit over an hour from Detroit. The show is a breeze to set up. We’d get in at 5. Get to the venue by 6:30-7pm. We’re golden. Colin books the flight.

“Okay, you’re set on flight such and such arriving in Cleveland at 5pm.”

“CLEVELAND?!?! WHAT?!?!?!”

In the confusion, I’d confused poor colin and… yeah…

Victor finds a flight on Southwest that gets us to Detroit at 5pm the next day. Colin manages to cancel the ticket and tells me he’s going to bed. We’ll be fine. We’ve found a flight.

Victor gets on the phone with Southwest to book the tickets. He’s on hold for 17 minutes. Finally he gets an agent and begins going through the process. He puts the phone against his chest to aks me a question and hangs up the phone.

12am – We’ve gone to Northwest to see if there’s anything.

In Aye Jaye’s schmoozing book, he has the best line to use on someone like a harried ticket agent or some public servant who hates people. I’ve used it in the past and it is a terrific ice breaker that immediately puts them on your side. You have to say it the right way, or you could come off like a condescending (that means “talk down to”) prick.

I’ve used the line “Hi there… I tell you what, if you can help me out, you can take the rest of the day off, deal?” on the Northwest Ticket agent and she had gone through every airline’s schedule for us, trying to find a flight that gets us to Detroit at a reasonable hour.

She wasn’t able to find us anything that we were satisfied with so we thank her profusely, I tell her to let them know that she can go home she laughs and we split.

About 10 minutes later, I realize that I’ve left my backpack at the counter. We head back and it’s gone. One of the “security people” says that the cops came with dogs and they took it away. “You’d better hurry, they usually destroy those.” (she actually said this to Victor who, wisely, didn’t tell me this until much later)

Oddly, she’s not able to get in touch with the police. That makes sense. We go to my buddies at the TSA who, also aren’t able to contact the police but a teenager with a TSA badge sternly akses me about the bag and why I left it. He departs.

The bag is important, by the way, because it has the two iPods that control the show. Yeah.

He comes back and says that it was cleared and is now down at the Northwest lost baggage area.

I head down there. Victor and Paul continue searching for flights on Victor’s iPhone while I wait with three others in line as an old woman tells her sob story about her bag and how important it is to her. The other two have learned to just describe their bags and get on with it. As I approach the counter I see my bag, point to it and it’s returned. Whewwww. I’m an idiot.

1am - Victor’s found a 7:30am flight from Burbank to Detroit. It gets us in at 5:05pm. 5:05pm. At this point, it’s our only shot. If it’s on time and everything goes smoothly, we get to the venue in time to set up and go before curtain time. The problem is, the return flight on Spirit gets takes us back to LAX, so we’ll have to find a way to get from LAX to my car at BUR. Ah well. We just need to get to the DTW.

2am – Back at the house, Victor heads home, Paul sleeps on the couch. The good thing is I get to see Duncan and feed him and then go to sleep.

5:45 am – Victor arrives at the house we head to BUR.

7:00 am – We board the flight to Phoenix to get our 10:10am connecting flight to DTW.

8:45am – Arrive EARLY in Phoenix. Yes, of course, the flight to DTW is delayed by 1/2 hour. It gets us there at 5:30. Okay. Still we have time to get the rental car and drive quickly to Jackson. Sure. Okay…

11am – Wheels up to DTW. The plane has been delayed longer than 1/2 hour. Fine. We can still make an 8pm curtain. We just need to be on the road from Detroit by 6:30pm.

5:30pm – DTW. Victor y Paul go to baggage claim to get the show bag (we haven’t entertained the idea of the show bag getting lost. We can’t fathom it.) I catch the SHUTTLE?!?!?! to Budget Rent-A-Car.

5:45pm - Budget Rent-A-Car – There are 10 people in line in front of me. 10. I’ve now looked up the distance on my phone and it’s 65 miles. We are right by the freeway and the venue is right off the freeway, so there’s not *that much* surface street time. But. These fuckers in front of me need to hurry or die. They don’t. There are four rental agents. Well, until one goes on her break.

The night before, I’d emailed our contact at the venue about our situation and assured her that we’d be there and all would be fine.

Paul y Victor arrive with the bag and Paul gets on the phone with his tech contact and they go through the lighting set up. He sort of techs the show over the phone. Nice.

6:15pm - Apparently, the two sistas in front of me who have never rented a car before today, had reserved a Ford Expedition and weren’t getting one. Instead Budget was renting them a mid-sized SUV (like we were getting), but they had their hearts set on that Expedition. Okay.. at least the other agent is finished… wait what? That agent is now helping the guy get them their fucking Expedition. She saunters away and the sistas chat with the agent about the weather. I am muttering. I have begun muttering and am very close to being “that crazy guy who went nuts” so I begin deep breathing and trying to relax. We are now going to miss our 8pm curtain. It is obvious.

Victor calls our contact to tell her. It looks like we’ll be rolling in about 7:45 at the earliest, 8pm at the latest. We’ll only need 10 minutes to check levels and plug everything in. Victor says “So I guess we’ll need to hold the curtain.” She says “Yeah, you think so?!” in a strangely snide way.

The Expedition sistas are now aksing about EVERY option on the rental car contract and the Budget guy is doing his best to Upsell them on said options. The sistas have actual discussions about the pros and cons of getting the GPS upsell, the gas upsell, the insurance upsell. Then, they have that “argument” about who is going to pay for the Expedition.

I’m hugging myself and rocking back and forth. Really.

The sistas finally get their car. I am conscious of not being “that fucking asshole” so I wait until the agent calls me. I don’t want to rush him. He is quiet and seems skittish and I can tell that if I get at all aggressive with him, he cares so little that he will make my life much worse than it is at this moment, so I get calm and direct and smiley.

I gently convey that we are having a really hard time and if we can get this over with faster than slower, it’s fine with me. He doesn’t really seem to hear me. Okay. That’s fine. Strap in. Stay the course.

I get all the shit done, the good news is that since we didn’t pick it up at 5am like we were supposed to, we won’t be charged for the day, so I apply that money to the foolish upsell insurance because I am suddenly superstitious that something is going to happen to the car.

6:50pm - We are on the road. The dark, windy and rainy road. Victor brought his GPS and has it set. He relays the conversation with the woman and how she seemed strangely pissed. “I wonder if curtain was actually at 8pm…” He checks that web site. Curtain is at 7:30pm. Ah. Okay. That makes sense now. Of *course* we have to hold the curtain. Double doi.

My two friends, Colin y Kramer, who both drive like drunken teenagers late for their SATs would be proud of my driving from DTW to Jackson. Oddly, we didn’t get in a crash, have a blowout or get pulled over by the fuzz and we arrive at the venue at 8pm.

… to be continued…

Comedy from the Golf Movie:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1qg_bmA9Yo

I owe a write-up of “TAM7 – The Luckiest Tam” and will get right on that.

This is a trailer for the movie I acted in last year: “Par-Fection”.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEWMmOhdVUY

I thought the role called for some extra girth, so I worked with a nutritionist and gained about 15 pounds for the role.

• keywords — number of visits — percentage of visitors
• old fat gay — 12 — 2.39%
• dean cameron actor — 9 — 1.79%

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there are hundreds of visitors looking for “dean cameron”.

Whew.

I’m not even that fat anymore… What gives, people?

Initially, I was going for a still headshot type thing to create a sort of time-lapse. I tired of that rather quickly and began mugging like a freak, instead. Why couldn’t I have done both, I do not know.

I can see the 3 month rock bottom depression. It’s pretty cool. I can also see when I got out of that. Pretty weird.

The weight fluctuations are cool, too. Crazy!