Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (9 page)

When a person chooses a flavor of, let’s say, pie, that human is not choosing their preferred filling lightly. Flavor choice is based upon one’s biology, which, in case you’ve forgotten, happens to be SCIENCE. My own body speaks to me very clearly, in no uncertain terms, about blueberry, and also about pecan, and sometimes the conversation will detour into key lime. My orientation toward one flavor over another is not based upon whimsy or caprice. It is instead directed toward the comestible that my tongue and my belly instruct me to consume. The debate over the semantics of “preference” versus “orientation” is utter nonsense, and if you even suggest to me that one might “pray the gay away,” I will kick you soundly in your nuts or your juice box, just like I believe Jesus would have.

Gay people are for real. They are part of our group. That is, “all of the people.” When we discriminate against them for their plumbing, we are in the wrong. Let’s not forget all of the other atrocities we have mistakenly inflicted upon our brothers and sisters in the human race across history, based upon race or gender or hair color, for Christ’s sake. A homosexual has every chance of contributing to our community as a solid citizen just as respectably as a heterosexual, and also of being just as big of an asshole as a straight person. The reason for this is because they are all merely citizens. As long as our purportedly “free” country continues to discriminate against them, in the category of same-sex marriage rights and in general, we will continue to be total dicks. I can spy no distinction between denying two loving people equal marriage rights and refusing to let a black person drink from the same water fountain as white folks. Both are examples of We the People shitting the bed in regards to defending each and every person’s inalienable rights. This wrong stems from centuries of tradition based on fear, and I comprehend that, but I am encouraging us all to take a deep breath and have the guts to give everybody a fair shake.

The flagrant double standard espoused in Leviticus should surely be enough evidence for us to take the Bible’s trustworthiness out of the equation. When I am instructed by the all-knowing Jehovah to profess an ostensibly “equal” brotherly love within the same pages where I am instructed to murder my fellow man or woman for engaging in a love act, I can’t help but look elsewhere for guidance. I am choosing to enlist instead the book of my own common sense.

Enter Dionysus

W
endell Berry talks about some of the detriments the secondary education system holds for our youth in regards to teaching our young people to work at a vocation they love. He asserts that we’ve created a system in which if you want to make a certain salary, you are required to go to college. So our young people think less of working with their hands, which is seldom if ever presented as a viable option. I can’t argue with his call for change, especially in this day and age, when a person could be apprenticed at a trade, like that of cobbler or sawyer, whilst still devouring all the information they might care to consume from the Internet or books.

My generation certainly had the mind-set that in order to get a “good job,” one had to attend college, but what I’ve learned since is that many of these so-called good jobs are just a sentencing to a sort of cubicle soul-death with a paycheck attached. That kind of life sounds like pure hell to me. Fortunately, I make my living primarily as an actor, which is what I went to college to study, so in my case, the theory worked. Utilizing my college instruction in the history and the techniques of the theater, as well as my wits, some gumption, and the seats of several pairs of pants (oh, and also a healthy serving of good luck), I have been able to ride my actor’s training to a healthy life full of bounty, BUT . . .

There were many years in which I earned little more than peanuts as an actor (the Steppenwolf Theatre actually paid us in almonds, with macadamias on two-show days—always a cut above their competition), and in which I earned more of my living with my tools and the labor of my hands. The skills required by the labor that provided me with my food and rent, both during college and for most of the decade to follow, were learned not in a classroom, but in the yard, in the garage, in the shed, and on construction sites.

When your folks tell you to “make sure you have something to fall back on,” don’t take it lightly. There are many modern schools of thought and action by which one can educate oneself to conduct some remunerative activity or other, often without the necessity of a crippling college price tag. Good food for thought.

* * *

A
ll that said, back in 1987, when I was asked by my elders and my high school to begin the process of choosing a college, I never paused to consider that I might not go to college. It was a foregone conclusion, the only questions being “Which college?” and “What major?” My grades were good but my budget limited, so I was looking pretty exclusively at state schools. I hoped to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as it was generally the best of several quality choices. I didn’t even consider a city school. Less than an hour to the northeast, Chicago might as well have been Oz at this point, a terrifying metropolis, which rendered places like New York and LA entirely out of the reality of the moment.

Furthermore, the pursuit of any aspect of the arts was not on the list of possibilities presented me by our school’s guidance counselor, Mr. Juan, whom I would describe in more detail, but as he chain-smoked in his office while one sat with him, marinating together in a thick, poisonous smog, I never did really get a good look at him.

My main interests of the day were playing the saxophone and performing in plays. Neither of those choices came up on the ballot of potential college majors. In fact, nobody in my entire sphere, nor my parents’ spheres, had ever attempted a career in the arts by any stretch of the imagination. One local man had studied music in college and gone on to become a high school band teacher, so that was the clear extent of the realm of possibility in the eyes of my adult guides. These were people who had enjoyed responsible lives by playing it safe. They had no idea what to do with a teenager hell-bent on making what seemed to be an entirely jackass move, and I was absolutely stymied by the lack of options. I was beginning to consider agricultural law, as I liked farming, and as my dad put it, I had a good line of bullshit.

As she has many times in my forty-two years, Fate swept in to save my newly hairy caboose. I was visiting the U of I down in Champaign with Lynette, who was auditioning for their dance department. Loitering in the hallway while she pirouetted in a classroom, I happened to meet two students in the acting conservatory program there. THE MOTHERFUCKING WHAT, NOW?!!!

“Yes, we study acting in plays.”

“And then what?”

“Well, we hope to work professionally in Chicago, in live theater.”

“Excuse me. You’re telling me that a person can get paid to perform in plays in Chicago? Like it was London or some shit?”

“Yes. I mean, it’s not easy. You don’t get rich doing it, but you can make a living. By the way, you’re not supposed to be hanging out in here.”

“Oh, okay. Sorry. Thank you!”

Their names were David Coronado and Jennifer McCarthy, and if I see them again, I will buy them a pony, and if they like, I will gently kill and clean the pony and serve it to them in a lavish feast, with a potato dish of their choosing. Or, alternatively, we can ride the pony to a nice restaurant, where I will fete them with a hardy repast, including beverage service, dessert, coat check, and valet charge.

What I mean to say is that I’m in their debt. That momentary chat in the hallway of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, which was to become the foundry in which this young performer would forge his inconsistent and unwieldy steel and then begin to test its mettle, was possibly the biggest turning point in all my tender years.

It took some pretty sincere cajoling on my part, convincing Mom and Dad to let me audition for the program at the U of I. They had been incredibly supportive of my outlandish ideas up to this point in time, but this was truly frightening to them. It was as though I had come home and informed them that I wanted to study wizardry so that I might travel into alternate dimensions and commune with Lord Morpheus in his studies of the alchemy of sleep and, more importantly, of dreaming. Sweet dreaming.

Ultimately, my father told me that I always seemed to find a way to prosper at whatever it was I chose to pursue, so they would get behind this nonsense as well, BUT THAT I SHOULD MAKE SURE THAT I HAD SOMETHING TO FALL BACK ON.

* * *

H
aving never prepared a proper audition, I turned to my school librarian, Mrs. Kinsella, for help. She was a fan of plays and readily provided me with the two requisite “contrasting” monologues for which the audition called. I later learned a few key errors that we made in our preparations: that the term
monologue
, specifically the “mono” portion, refers to
one
person speaking a paragraph or more of text, and also that
contrasting
means, say, a comedy piece, like Neil Simon or Christopher Durang, paired with maybe a dramatic speech, like Ibsen or Chekhov. Shepard and Shakespeare. Molière and Mamet. Contrasting. If it was furniture it might be a Nakashima coffee table and a Queen Anne highboy. Nailed it! (Only figuratively—neither piece of furniture requires nails.)

What we
did
prepare was a speech from
The Elephant Man
, in truth an actual monologue, delivered by Dr. Treves to his colleagues, describing in some medical detail the deformities with which John Merrick was afflicted. Gripping stuff, eh? I have no idea why we thought that was a good idea, but it actually was nothing short of brilliant when held up to my other choice.

My second selection was a SCENE OF DIALOGUE between two characters from the 1970 Bruce Jay Friedman play
Steambath
, which opened in New York on June 30, just four days after my birth. The play depicts the afterlife as a steambath in which the attendant is God. The scene I chose was between God and an old-timer (played by Hector Elizondo and TV’s Conrad Bain, respectively), and I simply turned my head from side to side to denote which character was speaking. Accompanied, of course, by some undoubtedly spot-on dialect work and physicality. Christ. I imagine it was one of the more interesting choices for a monologue they had witnessed, although I am equally certain that I was far from the only ignorant jackass plying his troth to the assembled theater faculty.

I also wrote an essay and underwent an interview, during which I described my self-admitted ignorance in the field, my work ethic, and my burning desire to become as effective a performer as really anyone on
The Dukes of Hazzard
. They could tell, I’m sure, that I had a hard time finding my ass with both hands theatrically, but also that I was very athletic and could use tools. Now, I don’t know if you get to the theater much—chances are, you don’t (you really should, it’s worth it)—but a couple of times in every theater’s yearly season, there will fall a couple of larger productions requiring a bigger cast of players and no small amount of pageantry of one sort or another. For example, directors love to see their leading ladies carried onto the stage lounging upon a sedan chair or palanquin borne by a couple of scantily clad brutes.

I am 100 percent sure that the theater faculty at the U of I weighed my “monologues,” my essay, and my interview and thought, “Well, he looks like he could carry some shit.” There is an operatic term for what we in the film biz call “extras” or “background players,” or we in the theater call the “chorus,” and that term is:
supernumeraries
. Those professors saw before them a prime cut of corn-fed supernumerary, and so they accepted me into the program for the fall of 1988! My gratitude continues to this day, because they were absolutely right in their assessment. When I began acting school, I was just plain terrible at acting.

Each yearly class held sixteen students, of which five to eight traditionally made it through the four intense years to graduation. So we began, sixteen hopeful young Anthony Hopkinses and Jessica Tandys and Gene Hackmans and Kate Hepburns (What’s that you say? All white, yes) seated in a circle, getting to know one another on our first day. We went around the room, stating names and fun facts and counties of origin (there was even a girl from Kentucky!), and maybe a favorite role from high school. A lot of territory was quickly mapped in that first session.

I learned that, unlike yours truly, several of my classmates had a) heard of Shakespeare, and b) PERFORMED IT in the Chicagoland area. I clearly had some major catching up to do. I also was fascinated by Jeffrey Goodman, who was apparently Jewish. I had heard of these people but had never to my knowledge laid eyes on one before. Jeff was nice, but by the time he had explained the fraternity hazing he was undergoing, which included wearing lox in his underwear all day, I knew all I wanted to about this beleaguered group. I asked him what lox was, and he looked at me in disbelief.

“Salmon,” he said.

“Oh, okay,” I replied. “Like the fish?”

“Yeah. It comes on bagels?”

“Bagels?”

Another look of disbelief. “Yeah. It’s like a donut, but made of bread. For breakfast?”

I still could not discern whether Jeff Goodman was having me on. He was very charming, and perhaps the fact that he was being made to wear what he claimed was breakfast fish in his Fruit of the Looms put me on my guard.

“Breakfast bread, eh? I believe they have that product already. It’s called toast.”

“No, no, bagels are amazing. With cream cheese. I’ll get you some.”

Before I could learn the truth of this Jew’s less-than-credible claims, another chilling power overcame the room. We called her the Yellow Peril.

“Hi, my name is Monica, but everybody calls me Nika [
nee-ka
].”

The inward eyes of fifteen students involuntarily rolled. Monica was cute as shit with blond hair, but perhaps too cute by half. She immediately established herself as a person who had not been told no enough in her childhood. She was “from the suburbs” and she couldn’t decide if her favorite role to date had been Ophelia or Juliet. Fifteen students swallowed groans and gnashed their inner teeth. The Yellow Peril had made her stinky mark.

Then we came around to Joe Foust, destined to become my bosom friend, but we hadn’t learned that yet. Joe hailed from Monmouth, Illinois, a town so far west that it might as well have been IOWA, for fuck’s sake, but for all that, it had a college. As I have learned again and again from our nation’s finest towns, like Madison and Austin and Boone and Bellingham, a college lends a town excellent personality and panache. It brings David Lynch to an otherwise contentless channel. An established, funded center of learning lends an inquisitive air to the surroundings, attracting sources of imaginative wealth, like the art house movie theater, the craft-beer pub, and the art gallery. Touring music and comedy acts of worth will detour for hours to attend to the pool of thirsty minds in your college town.

Hence, Joe Foust knew shit. He also had a cool older sister and her friends supplying him with items of taste, from punk bands to Zappa and from Jim Jarmusch films to an interest in theater and even art. He knew so much cool shit! That first day he had on the well-distressed uniform of the 1988 punk rock enthusiast, including shredded jeans held together with dozens of safety pins, combat boots, a torn Monmouth College sweatshirt, and a Mohawk. “Who’s the junkie?” I thought.

When he began speaking, it became quite clear that he was Sid Vicious in attire only and otherwise meant serious student-ly business. I was soon to learn that Joe had transferred over from the chemistry department, which he had gravitated toward after taking third place in an international high school science fair in Puerto Rico. Impressive, Joe. Most impressive. He was well-spoken, with a gentle nature that belied his intimidating appearance. “Hmm,” I thought. “The junkie’s all right.”

Finally, it was my turn, at the end of the circle. As Joe later described, my (Sun-In) dappled hair and tan football player’s physique filled him with loathing even before he learned that I was a born-again Christian. “Who’s the square-ass corn-boy jock?” he thought. I introduced myself and leaned upon my aptitude for farmer politics by informing the group that we were all on the same page when it came to our feelings about the Yellow Peril.