It's All In the Playing (6 page)

“This is astonishing to me,” he began. “I was passionately committed, and worked for two years on a miniseries based on the life of Akhenaton. I never understood the depth of my passion until today. I believe Tom when he says we’ve all been together.”

I looked into his eyes. “Really?” I asked.

He pushed in his solar plexus. “I just feel it here.”

“What do you think we’re getting into, Stan?” I asked.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he answered, “we’re already in it.”

Stan walked over to Butler, who shrugged his shoulders at me from across the room. (His deal hadn’t been made yet. I wondered what effect this might have on it.)

Colin sidled up to me.

“So do you think Kevin can play himself?” he asked. “And what about the entities? Tom says he used to act, eh? Do you think he’s Abbey Players quality or just temperamental?”

I laughed. His question was so valid I dared not think of the implications. If the audience didn’t believe the channeling sessions were real, we had no movie. And most people had enough of a problem believing the medium himself wasn’t acting. Now we were going to say, “Yes, he’s
playing
himself but he’s not pretending—it’s real….” I was going to be “acting” myself. And he was going to be “acting” himself. On top of that, the
entities
were going to be “acting” themselves. A person within a play, playing himself in a play. Yes, that was the perspective from which to view this whole multidimensional experience. Pirandello was born too soon.

So the decision of who would play Kevin would probably be made according to who would come off as the most believable. Wasn’t that the way it was in life too? Was art imitating life, life imitating art, or was life actually the art form we were each creating for ourselves?

Mort whispered in my ear between cake bites. “I never really understood what you were into before tonight. Now that I get it, I’m not so sure I like it. I’m glad I have my orchid plants to talk to. Am I to expect they will soon talk back? Should I be their agent?”

I laughed and pummeled him on the shoulder.

“Listen,” he said, “never mind who plays Kevin. Who’s going to play me? Newman isn’t available. How about Clint Eastwood? The character shouldn’t have many lines.”

Mort hugged Sachi, wished her happy birthday, and told her to stay out of miniskirts on Sunset Boulevard. Stan said he was going home to tell his wife he was really an Egyptian pharaoh, while Harold stared into his teacup, probably thinking about Ruth Gordon.

Bob Butler walked around muttering, “I’ll sign anything.”

I went to the window and looked out over the waves below. I took a deep breath and tried to assimilate the implications of what I was doing in making
Out on a Limb
for public scrutiny.

Regardless of how artfully we crafted the story and the shooting, would basic human skeptical prejudice overwhelm the potential of moving an audience? People were touched by what they could identify with. How many could identify with disembodied spiritual entities who helped “Shirley” along her spiritual path? How many even cared about spiritual questions anyway?

For me personally, the existence of disembodied spiritual guides proved that we never die, that we just change form and go into other dimensions; that all souls exist somewhere guiding and helping others. That made sense to me both scientifically and spiritually. I knew many others who felt the same way. But on a mass-consciousness level—to which television speaks? I wasn’t so sure.

I opened the sliding glass door and walked out onto the balcony. And what about the critics? Most people seemed to think television critics didn’t matter much anyway. But how would those arbiters of public taste feel about exposing their own attitudes and beliefs when it came to reviewing a real person’s autobiographical spiritual experience? Sixty-seven percent of the American public—according to recent polls—have had an “otherworldly” experience themselves. If the critics hadn’t, how could they evaluate whether I had crafted it artistically or not? There would be no basis for identification, only a
basis for ridicule. And if a critic
had
had a spiritual experience, would he be afraid of expressing it in his review?

I thought of how I would review a show based on material that I believed was twilight-zone mumbo jumbo. I concluded that I would dismiss it as frivolous and silly if I had never thought about such things. However, if I had my own entrenched religious beliefs relating to spiritual matters, and found metaphysics offensive, I would probably find it impossible to separate being offended from artistic objectivity. And finally, if I was a left-brained, eloquently cynical skeptic who was convinced that God and Cosmic Justice were myths and that man was involved in a spiral of tragically negative proportions, ready to blow himself up out of conflict and despair, I would probably attack a karmically spiritual point of view with violent anger because it would offer an explanation of the human condition that would leave me without an identity—an identity defined by limitations and anger and despair rather than by idealistic hope and positive individual responsibility based on the law of cause and effect (karma).

I looked for a long time at the ocean. Did any of my qualms really matter? Was I going to keep who I was in a closet? Did it matter what anybody else thought? Conviction and personal principle weren’t based on public or critical acceptance.

I leaned over the balcony, and as I focused on the foam-capped waves of the rising tide below, I heard myself say: “You’ve lived your life in public. Why stop now?” I walked back inside.

Chapter 4

   T
he following week we did a rehearsal with Kevin and his entities. I had given Kevin the screenplay so he could learn his lines. The entities, Tom and John, would scan Kevin’s subconscious so that they could study their lines also.

Colin and I met Kevin at my apartment in Malibu.

Kevin put Colin and me through a meditation that entailed isolated focusing of the seven chakkras (energy centers along the spine). With each focusing we hummed the corresponding note on the scale. There are seven notes on the scale, seven colors in the color spectrum, and seven chakkras to the human body. Each note on the scale has a vibrational frequency that matches the corresponding color in the spectrum. When one hums “OM” (considered in Hindu scripture to be the first original sound of language) along with visualizing the color that matches each chakkra, the energy in the human body becomes perfectly aligned. Kevin said three people in a meditation were easy to balance because each represents mind, body, and spirit.

After the meditation we prepared for our first informal
rehearsal with Kevin and his entities. Colin and I decided I should go right into the scene when the entities came through, as though we were reenacting our first meeting.

Kevin went into trance. We waited. Pretty soon, John came in as he always does and said, “Hail. Please state the purpose of your gathering.”

Word for word, as Colin and I had written the script, I introduced myself as though we had never met before and we proceeded to rehearse the scene of our first meeting. I had the script in front of me. John was accessing Kevin’s subconscious and was letter-perfect in the scene, with even an added touch of biblical dignity. At exactly the correct point, per script, John said, “Pause. Entity desiring to speak.”

I waited just as the script called for and in a moment Tom McPherson was in.

“Tip of the hat to you. How are you doing out there?” he said perfectly.

I acted a laugh, behaving as I had the first time Tom showed up, and he said—as he had then—“I hadn’t expected a reaction like that quite so soon.”

As the script indicated, I laughed again. Tom began to cough, per script. He asked for a mug, which I fetched for him. I placed it in his hand and he put it to his lips, then said, “There will be something in this to drink when we actually play the scene, will there not?”

I cracked up. He had broken character just like a regular actor.

“Sorry,” he then added quickly. “I don’t mean to pad my part, even though I can see that the instrument [Kevin] has padded his body!” (Kevin had put on fifteen pounds.)

I laughed again. By now I was completely out of character—well, out of phase, anyway. I was in my own present-day character rather than the person I was ten
years ago. It’s really weird passing back and forth between one’s selves, as it were.

“I hope,” said Tom, “that you will play your part more authentically during the screen test. You were nothing like this when we first met.”

“Neither were you,” I countered.

“Quite right,” said Tom.

I waited for him to take his imaginary sip from the mug so I could say my next line referring to it. He didn’t.

“Sip your tea, Tom, so I can say my line.”

“There’s no stage direction,” he said, “that says I should sip my tea here.”

“Yes, there is. Read the script.”

“I couldn’t. I could only scan the instrument’s mind. He’s not much for stage directions or for anybody telling him what to do.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s go on.”

I went on to the next line of dialogue and Tom performed the rest of the scene perfectly. He hit the high points and the low points and even embellished his part a bit. When the scene was over, Colin and I applauded. Tom thanked us and reminded us that he had done a great deal of Shakespearean street theater in his day, in between picking pockets, but these days he much preferred to pick the brains of people than pick their pockets, much better for him karmic-wise, too. After the rehearsal we sat and chatted.

“Listen, Tom,” said Colin, “will you stick to the script even if you get bored doing it over and over?”

“Yes,” said Tom. “Besides, I have my new accent to keep my interest. How did you like it?” Colin and I looked at each other and winked. Tom was behaving like any actor eager to do his best, yet conscious that he was laying himself on the line, risking public humiliation if he bombed.

“I used this accent,” Tom went on, “when I was twenty-five years of age. It has a more joyful frequency to
it. I would prefer to be joyful in this show of yours rather than the thirty-five-year-old attitude which I usually use when we speak. Would that be all right?”

“That’s okay,” said Colin. “Just don’t make it too Abbey Players. Okay?”

“Quite right,” said Tom. “They came much later.”

“Any more ideas?” I asked. “We don’t want you to feel restricted.”

“Well,” said Tom, “would you like me to get up out of the chair and use the instrument’s body? I could perform a slight Irish jig for ya. Ya know. As a matter of fact, you and I used to perform our jigs together on shipboard during my pickpocket incarnation. You wouldn’t be remembering it, but we had some rather wild and woolly times together.”

“I was a friend of yours then?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“You never asked,” said Tom.

“Oh, yes. That’s right,” I remembered. “You only answer what we ask.”

“Quite right,” said Tom. I smiled mischievously at him, wishing I could “see” him through Kevin’s body.

“Okay,” I said. “Can you use Kevin’s body all right to do a jig?”

“Oh, yes,” said Tom.

Then he leaned down and looked at my carpet.

“However,” he added, “a hard deck is much easier than this carpet. I’ll miss some of the footwork. Would that be all right?”

“Yes. That’s all right. Let’s see what you have in mind.”

Tom moved his head from side to side. Then slowly he rose from the chair. “Allow me,” he said, “to adjust my vibrational frequencies to that of the instrument a bit more closely.”

He walked away from the chair.

“Would you have a blindfold about, please? The sunlight in here is interfering with my capacity to see the light frequency of the floor.”

Tom stood still. I ran to get a scarf. I returned with it and tied it around Kevin’s eyes.

“Oh,” said Tom happily, “this is infinitely better.”

Tom then proceeded to take Kevin’s body across the floor of my living room. He put his hands on his hips and jumped up and down, crossing his feet and performing an impeccable Irish jig. And all the while he was dancing, he told stories about incarnations that Sachi and I had had with him. He described how we were pirates, how he had taken Sachi in one incarnation as a ward of his, how I had saved his life in another, and so on. He jigged and jagged and laughed and dramatized until he ended the whole display with the final line in my new book
Dancing in the Light
(which Kevin had
not
read!).

“Oh,
yes,”
he exclaimed. “The dance and the dancer are one!”

Tom really tickled me. When the jig and the drama were over, he went back to his chair and sat down.

“Well, now,” he said quite breathlessly, “what did ya think? Could ya use a bit of any of that?”

Colin and I applauded.

“Well,” I said, “I guess a lot of that will be up to Bob Butler.” (In fact, when the scene was filmed, it was shot as it had originally happened—without Tom’s shenanigans.)

“Oh, of course,” said Tom. “You know your Mr. Butler is certain he’s the only sane one on the project. He was an English magistrate when I was a pickpocket. By the by,” he added, “did I effectively point out the Akhenaton influence with your Stan man? I thought that might make him pay attention. Did it?”

I laughed ironically. “Of course it did, Tom, and you know it. Why are you even asking?”

“Quite right,” he answered. “I like compliments. Will there be any inquiries before I take my leave?”

“No, thank you,” I answered.

Then something did occur to me that had been bothering me for weeks. It had to do with a feeling that I was being guided to include a certain scene in the screenplay because the “guide” (whoever it was) felt the screenplay needed more suspense. I explained that to Tom and asked if I really was feeling a guide or was it all just coming from me.

“Well,” said Tom, “if you really want to know, what you were feeling was your old friend Alfred Hitchcock.”