Spam Scam @ Jackson, MI – II – Electric Boogaloo
8:15pm – The venue is a state junior college. Each of us silently take note of the paucity of cars in the parking lot as one of the tech guys meet us at the back door. We scurry in like people late for a performance.
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.
Duncan, Sweet Duncan!
The bride hates this. I can’t really blame her. I’m actually over the moon for the kid… In this video, I exaggerate to clarify.
Havin’ My Babay
duncan @ five minutes
This past August 1, 2009 at 10:45am, my son, Duncan Huxley Cameron was born.
Not only is he quite a bit bigger now than he is in that photo, his ability to melt me with a look, has increased.
We are raising him as rationally as possible. Obviously, he’ll make his own decisions about how to interact with his world, but we’ll tell the truth as we see it and let it go. There’s plenty of woo out there for him to encounter and deal with on his own, so we don’t need to burden him with more at home. It’s going to be intersting as, even before he was born, people I consider rational were saying really weird and irrational things.
It makes sense, I suppose. There’s so much about having a child that is completely out of ones control that, like the rest of life, we tend to look for patterns to apply to random things. Here in the west, where we have an abundance of food and nutrition, once you’re out of the first trimester of pregnancy, if you’re not behaving like an idiot, your kid is probably going to come out just fine.
But… because that stuff is out of our control, people start making up rules to follow. Sure, some of ‘em might make sense and actually keep you healthy, but, again… as long as you’re not being an idiot, that kid is going to come out and, most likely, come out fine.
Childbirth as an Extreme Sport
Extreme Sports came about because of great medicine and the boredom of practice. Back in “ye oldene tymes” no one, except for inventors, had the time or inclination to go hang gliding because a) broken bones meant death or worse, suffering and disfigurement for the rest of one’s life and 2) life already had enough fucking terror, what with everyone dying because of disease and war.
Here in the future, if you survive a hang gliding crash and break your legs and crack your spine, the worst part is your drunken friends driving you to the hospital in the back of the 4-Runner. After that, it’s 6 weeks off of work, Fentanyl Patches and 150,000 hits on YouTube. As far as skill goes, it’s a matter of being able to buy the gear. The wealthier you are, the more three day weekends you can spend hang-gliding and the better gear you can buy. You can’t buy the skill that comes spending 4 hours a day doing boring tennis drills for your entire youth.
So, like extreme sports, unless there is a rare complication, the sheer terror of having a child is gone. Western Infant mortality rates are extremely low and mothers dying in childbirth is almost non-existent so, to shake things up, we make it exciting by having a kid at home or with people beating drums or standing up in the shower or in a hot tub with your family there or in a dumpster behind chuck e. cheese. If something goes wrong, you’re a quick ambulance drive away from the hospital and all is well.
(A side note… We had our son at Cedars Sinai here in L.A. Our hippie friends told us that it’s a bad place to have a child because they have such a high record of emergency births. We aksed (yes, aksed) the doctor about it and she said the emergencies were mainly home deliveries gone haywire and since Cedars has the best Natal Intensive Care Unit, the botched home births are rushed to Cedars.)
“Pitocin is Evil!!!”
Because we wanted to feel like we were “doing something”, the bride and I went to a Lamaze class. I made it through the three hours without having an episode. I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s the extreme sports thing, but we encountered quite a bit of anti-science bias associated with having a baby. The point of the Lamaze method is to have the baby “naturally”. Since we’re living in the future and having the baby at a hospital “natural” really just means “without an epidural”. This is fine, if that’s how you roll, but there was no reason for it. The instructor hinted, quite strongly, that it’s better for the baby if it’s “natural”, but wouldn’t come out and say as much (because it’s not true). She made the claim that medical students today aren’t shown “natural” child births. When I questioned her about this; pressing her for a source for her claim, she said she learned the med student facts from “articles”. The larger subtext was that women who chose to receive epidurals were less woman than those who went without because they weren’t completely experiencing the delivery. Not only that, it is, somehow, better for the child if it’s “natural”.
Yep, after a full term of pregnancy what’s really going to have an affect on junior is that final few hours.
We were told “don’t let them give her any drugs!!!” a couple of times. One of the drugs that the bride was given was Pitocin, a drug that induces labor.
Back in the “good old days” one of the many ways a woman could die in childbirth was bleeding to death after being ripped open by a too large baby.
Duncan was full term and ready to come out, but the bride’s body wasn’t ready to let him go. Instead of waiting another two weeks and getting a Caesarian, or worse, a drip of Pitocin induced labor and we were on our way. (Before you say “body knows best”, aks yourself if cancer is the body knowing best?)
When you google Pitocin, the very first result is an anti-science web page, childbirth.org. It’s so sad. It looks official, but it’s just some anti-science people picking and choosing their facts and scaring people.
We were told that Pitocin keeps the mother from producing milk. Once the bride had the epidural she was able to calm down, as she didn’t realize how freaked out she was. It was only a matter of minutes after the Pitocin kicked in until she began pushing. Duncan was born within the hour. The bride was breast-feeding almost immediately. So much for the horror stories.
(I know, personal experience is one of the worst ways to come to an understanding of how the world works. I’m just saying that our experience with Pitocin and the epidoodle was aces! )
The bride is a genius. She made the point that people now use bleeding edge science to get pregnant; in vitro pregnancies are so common now, and that is, rightfully, considered a beautiful and excellent thing. BUT, using science for the delivery cheapens the experience. If someone is of the mind that “nature knows best” then why take the shortcut around nature and go in vitro? Hmm?!?!
Genius, I tell you. Genius.
Infants as Unemployment Insurance
Since the turn of the century (I love saying that!) I was fortunate enough to have a nice career doing voice overs for radio and television. I began the century writing front end code at an online games web site. I also helped a friend develop a web service, Tightcircle.com, which he later patented and sold to an “unnamed company in Mountain View, California”. My main income was voice overs and I would, occasionally supplement it by doing web work.
About two years ago, the voice overs began slowing down. Thanks to strikes and technology, fewer people were needed to do voice overs. Finally, the work seems to have dried up almost completely. I had been averaging a couple of gigs a month. At this point, I haven’t had a VO gig since early 2008.
Once we discovered the bride was with child, I began looking for web work in earnest. Thanks to technology, I found myself a bit behind the curve as far as front-end coding goes. I’ve been on all the tech job boards for years so I started scouring those and other resources and by January of this year started sending out at least 2 resumes a day and doing tutorials online on the stuff I’d missed.
Our plan had been that by the time the bride finished her latest editing gig, I would either have some foot back in showbiz or a web coding gig. Unfortunately, that wasn’t happening and it began getting hairy.
I kept hearing “babies bring luck” and it only pissed me off more. What is the method? How does it work? Gravity? Hmm. The week before Duncan was born, I received two job offers. Some poor soul on MyFaceSpaceBook wrote “babies bring luck!!!” and I kinda/sort jumped down her throat. See… by saying that not only are you simply being an idiot, unaware of confirmation bias, you are discounting the work I did to get those jobs. If a baby is born every minute, wouldn’t there be more “luck” in the world? I can’t even begin to start deconstructing this…. The week before he was born, I had to put a new radiator in my car. Lucky? As Linus Van Pelt often said: Aaargh!
Pisces Virgo Rising is a very good siiiiignnnnnn
Racism is just lazy. Instead of investigating cultural differences, racism just lays down blanket statements about large groups of people. The only criteria is how they were born. Not who they are. People are different through their cultures, but it’s more about geography than biology. But, even then, I realllly hate it. It makes me so sad when I hear someone describe themselves based on their race. “I’m Italian, I can’t help being jealous!” Well, you were raised to think that. It has nothing to do with you being Italian, except everyone you know who is Italian has told you that you can’t help but be jealous. There are lots of Italians who aren’t. I bet there are Italians at swingers clubs.
The worst manifestation of racism is astrology. Because of the date and time of your birth, you are endowed with personality traits that are inescapable.
I think this is so maddening to me because I’m a Taurus.
duncan y bride @ one minute
But seriously… This country was created so we can be free. We are free to try to do whatever we want and be whoever we want. We are free to choose our own identity and make our own lives and yet people voluntarily yoke themselves with zodiac signs, shrug and say “I can’t help that I’m clumsy, I’m a gemini”.
Obviously, you are absolutely free to do this in this free country. You’re totally free to hamstring yourself or create excuses based on your deep misunderstanding of the gravitational effects of the planets. Please don’t do it to my son. Please don’t tell him how he is before he can walk. Please don’t make up your mind how he is before he can walk. Let him find out who he is and how he is. It’s going to take a long time and, this is important: it will change. Duncan may start out shy and become an extrovert, but let’s not keep him one way by telling him it’s preordained. It may be. But it’s not because of the moon and jupiter. As William Shakespeare wrote: “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.” (Edmund has a great deconstruction of astrology in King Lear.)
There are so many real mysteries and phenomenon, both explained and unexplained, associated with infants. When does he begin recognizing us? Is he thinking abstractly? How does language happen? The nature/nurture question. All of those things. They are fascinating, vexing and beautiful. Why throw crap in there like ass-trology, babies bringing luck and anti-science? I loved him before he was born. Isn’t that enough?
Paracinema
A young writer in the NYC area did a really nice profile piece about me in a magazine so hip they’re not online called “Paracinema”. He interviewed a couple of co-stars and at least one famous old friend of mine and wrote some really insightful, sweet things about me, my work, my past and my future.
In other news…
We are about 3 weeks from D-Day (Duncan-Day) and The Bride is firmly in the “please get this out of me” portion of pregnancy. I’m hoping he waits until after TAM 7 as we’re scheduled to perform the Nigerian Spam Scam Scam show program then.
We just need to get the car seats installed and we’re ready… if you’re not counting the money and jobs part, that is.
My oh my, how fucked we are and it was so promising a few short months ago.
Bring it on, dickheads.
Glenn Beck thing
When I was younger and liked music, specifically when I was a nut about King’s X & Genesis, I used to play a thought experiment with myself. I would listen to a song on the radio and say to myself “Okay, if King’s X were playing that song, would you still think it sucked?” and, suddenly, I’d turn up the volume on a Depeche Mode song.
It works the other way, too. “If this wasn’t on Trick of the Tail, would you turn it off?” It’s why I stopped enjoying Genesis, actually. I can’t dance, indeed.
It’s one of the reasons I think I’m able to keep myself honest with other stuff in my life, too. I think it’s a good tool for a skeptic to have. But it can be a bit alienating.
A friend of mine who used to be a bigshot in politics said “Rush Limbaugh is right 80% of the time. The problem is, no one knows what that 80% is… most importantly: Rush Limbaugh.”
I used to listen to Limbaugh before the 2000 election to balance out the crap I was getting from, well, everywhere else but stopped when he completely went hypocrite after his Vicodin addiction. He could have been really wonderful and used his experience to talk about the folly of the insane war on drugs. Instead, he just spouted bull-poo.
Until I receive my $100,000 stimulus check from the government, I’m not listening to any radio or reading any news about anything. Which isn’t completely true, because I sometimes “test the bruise” and listen to talk radio or CNN.com on XM.
And this brings me to the point of all of this:
Except for the fact that he is a complete religious whackadoo nutjob freak, Glenn Beck sure seems like a good egg. He admits in his most recent book (yes, I listened to it) that he’s a complete religious whackadoo nutjob freak because his wife wouldn’t screw him until he became a mormon. (“M” silent). He’s funny, charming and seems to lean heavily Libertarian.
But, then there’s that disconnect of religion and war. Which is where many people split from the Libertarians.
(I guess part of the reason I like him is that I sit firmly in his demographic. I guess that’s no accident, eh?)
Anyway…. at his website, GlennBeck.com, he has the following message leading off his presentation of the 9 principles.
“Do you watch the direction that America is being taken in and feel powerless to stop it?
Do you believe that your voice isn’t loud enough to be heard above the noise anymore?
Do you read the headlines everyday and feel an empty pit in your stomach as if you’re completely alone?If so, then you’ve fallen for the Wizard of Oz lie. While the voices you hear in the distance may sound intimidating, as if they surround us from all sides the reality is very different. Once you pull the curtain away you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don’t surround us at all.
We surround them.”
You can, as a hippie, believe that michael moore wrote that.
It seems that, unless you are insane, you can read that and completely agree with it.
The problem is who is the “we” that he’s talking about? I think there’s a false dichotomy and it is evident in his 9 principles:
- America is good.
- I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.
- I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
- The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
- If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
- I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
- I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
- It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
- The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.
I would rush (hey!) to include myself in the “we surround them” thing, but I don’t have that imaginary friend at the center of my life and I don’t want to be around people who have an imaginary friend at the center of their lives, either.
And that’s where the false dichotomy enters into things. He seems to be saying that things would be better in government or the media or america or whatever “if more people had the jesus at the center of their lives.” Most of the people in America have some sort of god thing at the center of their lives. There is no shortage of churches or breaks for churches or religious proceedings in America. It seems that we’ve got the god thing covered, my friends.
So, I won’t take part in his nutty thing.
But then I think about the Libertarians. Often people are resistant to identifying as Libertarian because of one thing that turns them off about Libertarian principles. Maybe it’s the drug thing, the tax thing, the anti-war thing… it may just be one thing, but it keeps them from voting for or supporting Libertarians. We like to remind them that they don’t agree with everything about the party they’re in now. They don’t agree with the candidate they like about everything, and, when compared, they often have fewer disagreements with Libertarian principles than their current party.
So, I disagree with one simple thing (hey, The Stabilizers… if King’s X had done that song, I would love it!!!) that Glenn Beck has on his list and won’t join.
Well… see… If you read it with an eye skewing religious, then it’s all religious. It’s one of the frustrating things about the Libertarian party. Many Libertarians are super duper religious and use the “get the government off my back” principle to fight for getting their kids in schools that teach creationism and other hogwash. And, you know, I’m fine with people ruining their kids futures by having them learn bullshit, but I’m not fine with my club being overrun by those same people. “Glad you’re happy. Now away with you, please.”
So, I read something like: 5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it. and know that a christard uses that argument to support the death penalty. Or 8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion. is used to perpetuate the “christians are a minority under attack and we need to make our voices heard” myth. If they’re not answering to the government, does that mean they’re answering to their god? Then, they’re going to expect me to answer to their god, ass well… Right?
And there’s the breaking the law (JUDAS PRIEST!!!) thing. Does that mean we support all laws as they are? What about the TSA?
Aaarrggghhhhh….
There are also 12 values, borrowed from the boy scouts it seems, which he believes are paramount to solving our challenges. Honesty, Reverence, Hope, Thrift, Humility, Charity, Sincerity, Moderation, Hard Work, Courage, Personal Responsibility, and Friendship.
When I was in Boy Scouts we were supposed to be “Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean & Reverent.”
I guess I’m just A LONE WOLF!!!!
Butt, enough about me… how about that nutjob who had 8 kids? yowza!
I think I have a problem with groups. Because all of those things can mean such different things to us all.
Should a charity be supported by the government? Is a church a charity? Is a *family* only a man, woman & child? I don’t think so. I know that many disagree.
Maybe I’m paranoid, but I get scared that christians want to replace the structure of government with their own structure, instead of letting it go. Or, maybe I’m just desperate to hear Libertarian ideas on the radio.
knock, knock, knock…
This is some info we’ve been sitting on for a bit:
We figured that there is no better time to have a child than at the beginning of an international financial crisis. Barring severe taxation, the little human will arrive two weeks either side of July 30th.
We don’t know the sex, we will find out within the next couple of weeks, but wonder why you would want to sexualize something even before it’s born. Take a look inside yourself for the answer. Thank you.
We do have a name for either occurrence. We are not famous enough to name it something that will call that much attention to us, but some people will find the names annoying.
We know there is nothing worse than looking at someone else’s foetus pictures and foetus movies. But it does the cutest little thing right around the 9:10 minute mark. Absolutely adorable.
Because we’re cute and clever like that, we’re sending these out, ass well:
Stewart Lee
A million years ago when I was performing Spam Scam in other countries, I was introduced to Stewart Lee by Paul Provenza.
He helped create “Jerry Springer: The Opera”, which was destined for hugeness over here until christians IN THE UK got upset. Ultimately, Stewart Lee was brought up on charges of BLASPHEMY.
Yes, blasphemy. He has a great joke about that, but I will let you discover it for yourself.
Needless to say, if christians in the UK were upset, imagine what would happen to them here, so it pretty much destroyed any chances for big productions in the U.S.
That is all beside the point of the show. It’s just a bit of background…
When I returned from Montreal, I was raving to everyone who would listen (the bride, really) about Stewart Lee and his show, 90’s Comedian. When you see it, you see what stand-up can be and why someone like Dane Cook gets so much shit. It’s an arena where important and beautiful ideas can be conveyed. I am of the mind that stand ups are the philosophers of our society.
On the other hand, watching his show throws me in to the same sort of sadness that happens while watching a perfect movie like Eternal Sunshine… or Being John Malkovitch. I realize that I’ll never do something that great. (I aspire to that sort of thing… which is why I never get anything done… whole other story.)
I mentioned this to Stewart Lee and, instead of poo-pooing it, he owned it and said that it was the culmination of over 20 years of work. So… without further ado.
The final performance, ever, has been documented on DVD. Get it. At the very least, it’s funny. I mean, there’s that. On the other side of that you’ll see a perfect hour of theater.
http://www.gofasterstripe.com/cgi-bin/website.cgi?page=videofull&id=6
Cameron’s Travels
1st off: The bride has started an awesome blog called “Rational Moms” (no, but we’re trying) and you can read all the rational awesomeness at rationalmoms.com.
2nd off: Though nothing is ever certain, I’m told that the song I co-wrote with Russ Parrish has made the Steel (Metal Skool, Metal Shop Danger Kitty) Panther record. I’m sure they’re just telling me this to be nice and will let me know later that the record company changed their mind and it’s not going to be on the record but sorry dude we really wanted it on there but you know how it goes. For this pessimistic reason, I remain cautious. That will be the 4th song I’ve ever had on a record. Pretty nifty.
So that’s that…
For the past three weeks, I’ve been acting in a movie called Par-Fection: The Golf Movie aka Dean sure hopes they change the fucking title. An old friend, Drew Rosenberg, was hoping to get Eric Stoltz and me to play a pair of evil plastic surgeons who… well the plot is quite convoluted and byzantine, but for various reasons, we end up putting a young guy under to give him breast implants against his will.
Yep.
Well, Eric passed on it and drew was in for a penny, so she got stuck with me. I think it worked out quite well, though. I tried to get Rod Maclachlan, Lorenzo Poindexter or Stuart Fratkin the gig as the other guy, but she found a guy named Christopher Showerman. We had a splendid time and I think that Chris and I had a nice thing going. We attempted to add an enormous level of homo-erotic subtext to the parts and, well, I’m pretty sure it’s inescapable.
Happily, there were a few truly wonderful things about the experience…
One of the things that has bummed me out so much about having almost had a really successful career in showbiz was the realization that the parts I *do* get are small and I’m destined for nothing but double digits on the call sheet… i’ll never get another lead role in anything. They’ll all be “cameos” which is simply a nice way of saying shitty little bone of a part. As #3 on the Golf Movie call sheet, I was happily proven wrong. As a skeptic, I love being proven wrong and this was no exception at all!!
More importantly, much of the cast and crew were literally children way back when I was on the map and they’d all grown up watching my youth on cable. It made them happy. I had a very nice Sullivan’s Travels experience learning that even though I’m probably going to be, as the The Movie Channel promo was so nice to point out, a footnote in the history of showbiz, there are people who have been affected & effected (but not impacted, damn it!!!) by the stuff I had done. I’ve always been aware of it, but for some reason, it sunk in during this experience. One of the leads told me one of the reasons he’s an actor is because of Summer School.
I’ve always enjoyed working with female directors, too. The lack of on set dick waving is really nice and allows one to do work instead of see who is smarter, cooler, richer or whatever. Director as mother is better than director as general. Working, even if it’s a stupid fucking golf movie about a guy who gets tits against his will, is already an internal battle. It’s nice to not have one going on externally, ass well.
I also got to go out of town for an extended period of time to a beautiful place called Borrego Springs. Yes, it was almost as hot as the surface of the sun, but the room sure was nice and the desert is so lovely during the late summer. Shooting was at the resort where we were staying, so I’d finish my day, walk to my room, change and be standing in the pool within 10 minutes of wrap.
The bride was able to come out and hang so that kept me from missing her and getting depressed.
Mainly, I didn’t beat the shit out of myself. I was rusty on my first day and encountered some memorization issues, but after that nightmare, it clicked in and I was able to do stuff I wanted to do. I kept feeling a hammy/mugging urge and was able to resist it for the most part, though some hacky shit managed to shit its way out of me, I’m sure. Perhaps the stuff that I’m hoping is “good” is boring. Dunno. I was attempting to simply let my inner conniving prick ooze out. We’ll see.
It was a good time. I was #3 on the call sheet. How cool is that?
Hello Dere!
Marty Allen y Betty Ford Center out of their minds on blow. I think that’s Harvey Korman over Marty Allen’s shoulder. It’s as if Korman is saying “hello dere”.
I was having dinner by myself at the Old World restaurant in Beverly Hills back before you were born and Marty Allen was at the table next to me.
The bride and I saw him perform with his new wife doing all of the Rossi bits 7 or 8 years ago. It was truly awesome and I don’t mean that in the ironic sense. He was funny and cool and knew what was up. Really cool.
I think I might be the next Marty Allen. That bums me out, but I think that’s my slot.
Hello dere!
Cancer is more organic than a banana
I miss regular religion.
It was so simple then. There is a magical, all knowing entity with a magical offspring who does magical things and if you believe the story to be real (wink, wink) there is no doubt what happens to you when you die.
If someone was religious, you automatically knew quite a bit about them. You knew that, if you only used it a couple of hours, you could “borrow” their car Sunday mornings.
The good part of people figuring out that belief in a fairy tale is silly is, well, fewer people living as if a fairy tale is real.
The bad part is that there is stuff taking its place that is more difficult to define as religion.
I give you: political extremism, homeopathy, acupuncture, environmentalism, vegetarianism, veganism, animal rights and…
With fatherhood looming (no, but we’re trying), knowing other people with kids, being a part of the “skeptic movement” and being a fan of the Skeptics Guide To The Universe podcast, I’ve become all too aware of the new anti-vaccination religion.
As Michael Goudeau says, “Everybody gots their gris-gris”, and I certainly have my share of it (hi, global warming climate change doubts!) but the anti-vaccine position is one of those complete and utterly ignorant positions that is embraced by people who think they are being smart.
Last night the bride and I were talking about the possible psychology of what may drive the show-biz anti-vaccine movement and this is what we came up with. It is very broad stroke generalization (hey, that’s redundant redundancy!) but maybe it will make sense.
We’re all guilty of wanting to be special. I don’t know that guilty is a pejorative… wanting to be special is good. Special people do special things that sometimes help other people. (Special people even have their own olympics!) But, because of the desire to be special, we are susceptible to one of the ways people sell stuff: flattery… appeal to the ego. “Oh, you’re much too discerning for a regular t.v., you need this special Gizmotron 9000!”
I give you the following monologue:
“We have beaten the odds: It is impossible to succeed in showbiz and yet, here we are… we are special. We are different. Because of this, we have access to special, inside information. We have a very exclusive doctor. He costs more. It’s difficult to get in and see him. Other doctors hate him. People told us that we were crazy to try to be in movies and t.v. But who’s crazy now? We have special diets. We know that our organic, natural, gluten-free, prius driving lifestyle makes us better. We buy only “organic” foods. Only the best for us. We are different from everyone else.
Since we have all of this exclusivity, pure food and information, it follows that our child must be exclusive and special as well. There is no way that something that comes from our special purity could manifest disease naturally. On the contrary, if we do the things that everyone else does; if we use the things that everyone else uses, it will actually contaminate our child. Doesn’t it make sense that if we only have pure things that the thing we make will be pure?”
The answer to the final straw man question is, obviously, no. Nature wants us dead. I don’t mean “wants” as if there is a design or nature has a soul. Death and disease are nature. Cancer is more organic than a banana from the health food store. Even the special health food stores no one knows about. Disease, tumors, predators, violence… Never get out of the boat. If you or someone you know has ever been to the hospital, it’s quite probable that 100 years ago, they would be dead.
The ironic thing about the anti-vaccine people being “rebels” is the same thing I find funny about rebellious teenagers (I used to be one, so I know)… they’re all listening to the same music, wearing the same clothes and reading the same stuff. There was a review of a Rage Against The Machine concert where the critic mentioned how the entire crowd at the Forum was being led by the singer to chant “FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TOLD ME!!!”
There’s a similarity with the Creationists. They both throw science out with the bathwater. There’s one thing that doesn’t add up, so it all must be false. And yet, I find the pseudo-science crowd to be more dangerous than creationists. Pseudo-science cuts across party and economic lines more easily and faster than creationism. Generally, there must be some other specific stuff prior to embracing creationism like christianity. Creationists are following a small group of people who are getting rich off of them. But, celebrities and sports heroes go to chiropractors and acupuncturists. They talk about homeopathy on talk shows. Jim Carrey and Milfy McCarthy aren’t speaking at creationist rallies, y’know? Mainly, Big Pharma is a much sexier villian than Big Science.
And yeah, since I’m a SAG member and don’t know science so much, my only real ability is to question the thought process and motivation.
What I do know is this: Measles rates have gone up. It correlates with fewer measles vaccinations. It seems like a very solid correlation.
We hope to have a little munchkin next year (I want to name it “Tourette”.) We’ll vaccinate. I don’t like being part of the crowd, though. I’d rather know some special thing that makes little Tourette stand out (besides the screaming obscenities, of course).
Yes, I understand that the skeptics can be thought of as a religion (man, that’s funny) except…
Religion doesn’t change with new information. Science does. I’m happy to change my mind when presented with new and better information. It’s fun but annoying. It means I was wrong… which I hate because I’m perfect. But yeah, it’s fun.
