Playing Dead

When I was 8 to 10 years old, I used to sneak through the neighborhood around my best friend Ron Cox’s house, tracking my buddies while they stalked me. I think Ron supplied all our toy guns. Each of us hoped to surprise and shoot the others. If someone “got the drop on you” and managed to shoot you (with oral sound effects) before you saw him, you had to play dead until your opponent had had enough time to get away. Then you were up again and hunting prey.

Currently, I’m in a stage production in which I play dead for an entire scene. The show is “City of Angels,” originally a 1989 hit on Broadway with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by David Zippel, and book by Larry Gelbart, famous for everything from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” to “Tootsie,” “Oh God!” and TV’s “M*A*S*H.” One of the characters I play is a quack healer who is sponging off a disabled millionaire but gets shot in the head in the middle of the first act.

He spends the lengthy final scene of the first act as a stone-dead corpse in the morgue while other characters argue, sing, and dance around him. It’s a somewhat long scene: a fair amount of dialogue bracketed by two different musical numbers go by while I lie motionless on a gurney upstage center. It lasts about nine and a half minutes: I timed it one night.

Grimm and Bare It - Getting on to "Grimm," part 2

I was absolutely convinced I would not get this role. The character description read: “rotund but well-built man … reminiscent of the IRA … been through the wars, been in many fights, and should look like it.” But of course, I thought wryly; anybody would think of me when you read that!

As my friends and family know (as well as faithful readers of this blog, assuming there are any), I was laid off from my last day job pretty much without warning on July 17, 2009. That forced me into the long process of becoming a full-time free-lance writer and actor … a process that has been up and down, and continues to be filled with uncertainty, but has been mostly a happy one. I posted a summary of part of that process -- at least with regard to auditions, simplifying our life, and finding an ongoing free-lance writing job that has helped me make ends meet while keeping my daily schedule flexible -- last September.

There were other landmarks along the way. I did my first TV extra work, on the TNT series Leverage, on August 17, 2009, for “The Future Job”; and on August 30-31, 2009 for the final show of the second season, “The Maltese Falcon Job.” I signed with Ryan Artists, a talent agency, on August 27, 2009, although they promoted me initially as a “lifestyle model” (read: older, for Baby Boomer goodies and services). They said they could not be sure whether my stage experience would make the transition to film and video.

On November 25, 2009, I got cast in my first indie feature, which would shoot January-June 2010 and become known as “Coup de Cinema.” It took nearly a year for me to land my first commercial job through my agent: a Web ad for AutoDesk we shot on August 14, 2010, released online about six weeks later. Two more commercial jobs followed within less than a month. I was off and running.

Go On, Try to Wipe This Grimm Off My Face

Obviously, I’ve neglected this site for a while. Less obviously to anyone who’s not a Facebook friend of mine, I’ve been having a wonderfully busy time.

Periodically, since this site became largely mine by default in the spring of 2010, I’ve taken readers on a series of junkets. There was the experiment in collecting recycled bottles and cans for cash redemption (five essays between May 15, 2010 and September 2, 2010), my adventures as an actor in 48-Hour Film Festival projects (which ran August 14, 2010; August 16, 2010; August 20, 2010; August 24, 2010; and September 16, 2010; and never got completed), and a quick three-fer in October 2010 about the use of obscenity in protesting military actions. I also wrote two columns about reading Proust.

My longest series was of course entirely unforeseen and unplanned: a ten-part report on the Occupy Portland camp after it set up 8 blocks from my apartment, with two “pre” columns and three post-eviction commentaries. The final report, “Raking Leaves and Revolution,” on Dec. 17, 2011, has links to all the previous ones, if you want to catch up on them. (Which is not to say Occupy Portland is dead. Far from it! Check out my interview with Jake, an Occupy Portland organizer, on the Pop2Politics show that originally aired Feb. 26, 2012.)