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My Secret Life Upon The Stage

19 Jan

January 19, 2011

Some of you may not have known this. In fact, I’d bet that none of you had an inkling of this. Being the mostly-unknown and lightly-read blogger that I am today was never my career goal. I didn’t set out to turn Mr. Blog’s Tepid Ride into the underwhelming sensation it currently is. No, my secret ambition was to be an actor. Yes, to tread upon the stage.

And some time ago I did just that.

The Time: 1980
The Place: The auditorium of PS 247.
The Production: The Fifth Grade Performance of Peter Pan and Wendy Go Around the World. (One Night Only!)

Yep, I was not even 10 years old when I made my stage debut. Of course, this was not my first job in acting. Two years earlier I had been cast as a jaybird in my third grade play, but that was just staged in the classroom, we didn’t get to stand behind the footlights. It doesn’t really count. Plus some of the other kids teased my by saying “the jaybird is a gaybird” and even though I had no idea what that meant back then, I hated the teasing and told the teacher that I didn’t want to be in the play. Looking back, I may have been the victim of gay bashing. I have a very limited personal experience with homosexuality. I was once hit on by a construction worker when I was 19 but that’s a (true) story for a different time.

Anyway, the fifth grade class of PS 247 was putting on the play Peter Pan and Wendy Go Around the World. It was written by one of the teachers in the school and only much later on did I realize that the title sounds like a 1970’s porno movie.

It was very topical. The premise was that Peter and Wendy went on a tour of the world and saw all the world’s troubles. It was a downer of a play. After flying around the globe and seeing all the wars and poverty and injustice, Peter and Wendy appealed to Tinkerbelle to use her magic to make the world a better place but she turned them down. The end of the play was an appeal to the world, via the audience of around 200 parents, for peace and love and understanding. Turn on the news and see how well that turned out.

This was back during the Carter administration and the Iranian Hostage Crisis. In one scene, Peter and Wendy flew over Iran and dropped in on the American hostages. For whatever reason, not only were Peter and Wendy invisible to the hostages, they were also unable to free them. I am not sure that gaping plot hole was ever explained. Anyway, after the hostages on stage moaned about how awful it was to be held hostage, and Wendy and Peter told the audience how terrible it was to have hostages in the world, it was time for me to hit the stage. My big part, my big line.

I marched on from stage left, strode to center stage, looked out at the audience, and announced “The Ayatollah Khomeini wishes to see the American spies.” Then I marched offstage. Yes, I was an Iranian soldier.

Now today it is cool to embrace the bad guys. Everyone goes to comic cons and dresses up like Darth Vader but at no time were Iranian soldiers ever embraced by society at large. I wasn’t crazy about the part. Plus I only had one stinking line!

But I made the most of it. While I was scripted to say my line and march offstage, I,  like any problem actor, pestered the director, who was my teacher, to make some changes. I argued that being a mean soldier I would never just walk offstage. If the Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to see the hostages I wouldn’t count on the hostages just walking over, I’d march them over at gunpoint. Finally my teacher agreed, or just got tired of me, and that’s how I got to bring my BB rifle and cap pistol to school. (How times have changed.)

We were in charge of making our own costumes. I wore slacks and a blue dress shirt. I took the shoulder braid from my Cub Scout uniform to make it look more military and stuck my silver metal (and very real looking) cap pistol into my belt and slung my (very real) BB rifle across my back. I also wore a blue or black baseball cap.

So I strode onstage, walked to up front and center, paused, looked around to find Mom and Dad, and said my line. I took the rifle off my back and stuck it (hard, I took the role very seriously) into the back of one of the hostages and waved my gun at the other and marched them offstage.

And that was it.

But that wasn’t my last time upon the auditorium stage. I think the acting bug had bitten me. Later, my friend and I tried out for the talent show. We reenacted the Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader battle from The Empire Strikes Back using homemade lightsabers. We took (OK, my Dad took) translucent blue plastic and rolled it into tubes which he then taped atop normal flashlights. In the dark they looked pretty good but the plastic was very chemical-smelling and sniffing it too long made me sick. My friend and I had so much fun fighting with the lightsabers that we never came up with a script. When we auditioned we had the lights lowered and the crowd ohh’d and ahh’d over the cool lightsabers and then laughed as be banged them together while saying, over and over and over, VADER: Luke, I am your father. LUKE: No you’re not! VADER: Yes I am!

We did not make it to the talent show but a few years later my buddy Marc and I proudly joined our junior high school talent show with a production of The Partially Paid For Nightly Network News, which was the two of us sitting behind a desk acting like news anchors and telling bad jokes. We were heckled.

Other acting highlights included the night I got sick and missed my Cub Scout production of an Indian war dance and the time I was at summer camp and I played the father in Bye Bye Birdie. That was my singing debut. (“Kids! I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today!”) Not that I recommend watching it, but if you come across Bye Bye Birdie on cable, I had the Paul Lynde part.

Birdie was played by our 50 year old female director who stepped in at the last moment when the kid playing Birdie threw a tantrum and refused to go on.

Looking back on my acting career, I have no regrets, just a question. Why didn’t those hostages jump off the stage and run out the fire exit when the guard wasn’t around? It was only about 30 feet away.

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The American Restroom Association

5 Jan

January 5, 2012

A brilliant philosopher once said to me “heated toilet seats are like a gift from the gods. I really wish that they were the norm in all places of poop.”  Frankly I have no idea why she said that. We were standing together by a quiet lake, moonlight glittering on the water, my arms around her, when all of a sudden she came out with that. Totally ruined the mood.

But she has a point. My love life aside, (and what better metaphor for anyone’s love life than a toilet?), when you stop and think about it, what relationship is more important than a man and his toilet? And a woman and her toilet? Doubly so. Let’s be honest. Put a guy in the middle of a forest, in the back of a military cargo plane, or in the audience of his daughter’s third-grade recital, if he has to go, he’s going, toilet be damned. Women are a bit fussier. Hence the wish for heated poop seats by my romantic philosopher friend.

And lest you think I made that quote up, I did not. How did I ever let a woman like that get away?

What sparked my decidedly non-romantic and slightly gross reverie was this little nugget from News of the Weird. Lately the more I watch the network news the more I think I prefer NotW.

In poker, a full house beats a flush, but on a crowded airplane with a broken toilet, a flush beats a full house every time.

We’ve all been there. Broken toilets, no toilets, toilets that look like a burly mountain man eviscerated a grizzly bear in the bowl. We’ve hated it, we’ve complained, we’ve yelled, we’ve thrown things, we’ve resisted arrest, we’ve- what? Sorry, strike that last part. Broken toilets and a big crowd? It’s Lord of the Flies time. But of all the ways of dealing with a lack of toilets, I daresay that none of us gotten involved with a toilet advocacy group. However, I did just that and dove into the cesspool of the internet to do so.

Who would speak for the toilet-less? Who would be the voice of the incontinent? Who would have really funny business cards?

These guys.

Yep, that basic Power Point cell belongs to the American Restroom Association, and if you want to see more basic and simplistic Power Point, hop on over and see for yourself. (And if you happen to be web developer, they can use you.) I checked out their site and expected to find links to bulk toilet paper warehouses or debates on the merits of hard vs. soft toilet seats but I was doomed to be disappointed. This is a very serious organization. They have a mission statement. All serious organizations have mission statements. The Boy Scouts have a mission statement. China has a mission statement. Even Vice President Joe Biden has a mission statement, but he just copied it from some Senator who used to sit next to him a few years back. Check it out the ARA mission statement:

Wow, they’ve really got it going on. They used bullet points and everything. This is a real-deal bunch. One of their goals is to “communicate with other similar associations around the world.” I have no idea if there are any (though I bet France has one) but the site does have a message board so I surfed over to their discussion thread (there is only one) and did some heavy reading. The forum was very surprising.

Frankly, I was surprised that anyone used it at all.

But the site does feature some important information. For instance, do you know what a restroom is? Or what a pay toilet is? Oh, I am sure most of you think you do, heck; many of you may be sitting on one as you read this, but I for one felt just a little ignorant after reading their definitions.

Not only do I finally know the official definition of a public restroom (I always wanted to know!) but I also know that a pay toilet requires a fee and that the US government has its collective head stuck in a toilet for coming up with a code for that. Seriously, our tax dollars, flushed away.

The site is full of important and vital information, I suspect, though I seem to have missed all of it. Maybe there was another Power Point?
And why couldn’t they use a bigger font? I hope whoever designed this thing knows his toilets better than his html.

All evidence to the contrary aside, the ARA is robust organization. Look at their upcoming events:

I am really bummed that I missed World Toilet Day 2011, but in my house every day is Toilet Day. Honestly, can you imagine a day without a toilet? My mind shudders with the horror. And I want to find out more about the World Toilet Summit. It sounds like the perfect place to host the first annual Mr. Blog’s Tepid Con. Let’s book a hotel now! But where to hold it? Flushing Queens comes to mind.

However, I do not want you think that I am making fun of this issue. “Places of poop” is a serious matter. Check out this piece of “poop culture:”

I’ve heard of manna from heaven, but manure?

Who doesn’t dream of turning his own feces into gold? For centuries, alchemists sought ways of turning lead into gold, why not shit? Face it, none of us has any lead just lying around, but nobody runs out of human waste. All that waste just flushed into the cesspool, septic tank, the ocean, or some kid’s wading pool depending on what municipal regulation you are flouting. Why let some stranger turn your crap into gold when you can do it yourself?

Is it just me, or does it often seem that the stupider people are, the more ingenious they try to be? Sure, this fool could have stayed home, mystified by the bright lights on his television set, but his animal cunning, and likely animal-level IQ, led him to save his poop and dry it on a space heater. Is it really so stupid? Even if he never made a single ingot of gold, he had a really cool composting program going on. Too bad he lived in a fifth floor apartment.

I attempted to contact the American Restroom Association for their opinion on turning poop into gold but unbelievably they never got back to me. They must be very busy gearing up for January 17th, International Quilted Toilet Paper Day. The highlight of the festivities will be the unveiling of the world’s largest roll of toilet paper in Czechoslovakia. The first sheet will be ceremonially pulled off the roll by none other than Honorary ARA International Ambassador Regis Philbin, schedule permitting.

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