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.)

There were also series that were not particularly intentional, but whose subjects (Tiger Woods, Sarah Palin, and our country’s military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan neither quite over, yet, and the latter newly hot in news again with the killing of 16 civilians by a U.S. Army Staff Sergeant last week) kept popping up in the headlines for one reason or another. Nearly 2 years later, the Kyron Horman case remains unsolved. And on Jan. 29 of this year, “Pop2Politics,” my political talk show which was the brainchild of Jeff Weiss, the founder of American Currents, launched online. We’ve discussed the ongoing Republican primaries, the crash-and-burn of the Komen Foundation, the Catholic Church’s objection to Obama’s health reform regulations, the rise of Rick Santorum, and many other topics.

All of which serves as a preamble to the biggest news of my acting career: I was cast as a character on the hit NBC fantasy series, “Grimm.” I shot my episode in mid March, and it aired on Friday, April 27. It was not a huge or necessarily recurring role: it turned out to be two brief scenes in episode 19, titled “Leave It to Beavers,” that amounted to barely more than 90 seconds altogether. But they were fairly memorable -- even, I daresay, striking -- and they constituted my first-ever appearance on a national TV series. Also, according to Wikipedia, the show rebroadcasts to about 40 other countries worldwide, from Ireland, Norway, and the U.K. to Australia, Brazil, Singapore, and the Philippines.

The creators of “Grimm” also received the news, at the end of the week my episode was shot, that the show had been renewed by NBC for a second season of 22 additional episodes. Since there’s a chance that my character will make another appearance in the future, I’m pretty excited about all this . . . and I suspect the amazing experience of landing a speaking role in a hit network series and shooting my scenes for it is going to take several columns to share with you.

So here begins a series of commentaries for “American Currents” about my “Grimm” experience.