Man, why you gotta be so rude?

I started to write an update of what's happening professionally down here in regards to shows and rehearsals and all of that, but it just made me tired.  I think I need an escape from talking about that with you all, because I'm starting to feel like all you hear about is "casting this" and "casting that."  So this entry is going to be about all the rude run-ins with crazy Floridians I've had over the past couple weeks.  Some funny, some infuriating, and others just sad.  If you can picture the gratuitous passion with which I would most likely tell these stories in person, you should find them interesting at least.

To preface all of this, part of me feels like this trend of rudeness is not entirely these people's faults.  I blame the state of Florida.  For those of you who are familiar with my audition pieces, you'll remember the one monologue I use that is about Florida's environment.  I now understand that piece better than I ever have.  For those of you that have no heard said monologue, it begins, "This is not an easy place to be thoughtful.  Central Florida.  I'm from New Hampshire.  I've thought about this, and I think... I think winter is important.  ...You never see your world shrivel up and die, so you begin to feel immortal."  IT'S TRUE!  I think people who live down here have a totally warped sense of human interaction and communication.  They have a sunny, warm environment every day of their lives, so they grow accustom to living in perfect surroundings, encouraging an egocentric personality.   That is part of my theory.  The other part will come in later.

With that being said, here are some stories:

I'll start with the least infuriating of these tales.  Because my dear father was kind enough to send me a little cash along with my forwarded mail, I decided to treat myself to some chinese take out for dinner.  So I walk over to Ichiban, the restaurant near our theatre, to order some pork fried rice and an egg roll.  I enter the restaurant, walk to the cash register, and order my food from an older woman who seems nice enough despite the apparent tension between her and the young girl working next to her.  As I stand outside the restaurant for my food to be ready, I receive a text from Hallie asking me to grab a spoon for her because she forgot to pack one in her lunch.  Sure.  Fine.  No problem.  Or so I thought.  The peppy younger woman calls out to me that my food is ready.  Just as I turn to reenter the restaurant, the old woman spitefully takes over the transaction and checks me out.  The conversation was as follows:
Woman:     That'll be $5.25.
Me:      Sure. I might even have a quarter!  Here you go.  Oh, could I also have a spoon?
Woman:   *Looks at me like I'm on fire*
Me:      A spoon?  Do you have a spoon I could take with me, please?
Woman:      But you ordered take out.
Me:     Uh huh.  ...Could I have a spoon?
Woman:     We gave you a fork.  You ordered rice.
Me:      Sure.  Could I also have a spoon?
Woman:     *Continues to look at me like I'm on fire.*
Me:    I'm not going to get a spoon out of this conversation, am I?
Woman:     *More fire staring*
Me:     Have a nice day.
The button on the whole thing: she forgot to give me my egg roll.  Now I know what you're all thinking:  "You should have gone back and demanded that egg roll!"  But if that woman was so unprepared to give me a plastic utensil, I can only imagine how unsuccessful the explanation of my missing fried appetizer would be. Now, this may not have been a "rude" conversation, but it was certainly a frustrating one.

Now on to a doosie.  This next little nugget of horrifying adult behavior takes place at none other than... the Dollar Tree.  So right at the start, we shouldn't be expecting much.  Everyone, including myself, is there to buy generic brands of hand soap and defective cleaning supplies.  It's not exactly a place where one should expect the highest quality service from the poorly paid cashiers working the registers.  It is what it is. While I was crouching at the bottom of a shelf, figuring out the best deal for body wash (you know, how many ounces and what brand will I be getting from my dollar), a woman asks me if she can get by.  "Of course!" I say to her as I stand from my catcher's position on the floor.  The roly-poly woman, however, continues to analyze the bars of soap to my right.  "Do you need to get by?" I ask her.  "Oh no, I just wanted to make sure that I could."  What did she think?  That if there was a fire, I would continue to ponder the better deal between the White Rain 16oz. and the generic 24oz. while the Dollar Tree crumbled in a blazing inferno around me?  It's okay.  I let it go.  Maybe she doesn't have entitlement issues, but rather is worried about her ability to maneuver the narrow, junk-filled aisles when the time comes.

BUT THEN, this woman, Roly-Poly, I'll call her for clarity's sake, gets in line behind a person whose items are being rung out.  In the line next to that, an awkward teenage boy opens his register.  Another woman and I enter that line.  Back at the ranch, the person whose items are being rung out is having problems with the debit machine.  Roly-Poly then decides it is her right to be served in any line the Dollar Tree has to offer.  "I'm next," we hear from the next line over.  Roly-Poly starts accosting the awkward teen running my check-out line, attempting to convince him that she should be next on his register because of the inconvenience she is experiencing behind the misbehaving debit machine.  The gangly kid looks awkwardly at my few things, so completely thrown off by the abrupt assumption that this woman should be allowed to jump line on his register simply because of what ended up being a 90 second delay in her purchasing.  He putters a few times, not sure how to handle this overbearing, round woman, and manages to squeak out, "This lady (me) only has a few items, if you can wait until she's done."  A valid solution to the debit machine crash of 2011.  Roly-Poly, however, was not pleased.  "Exactly," the globular woman exclaimed, "if she only has a few items, then she can wait.  I'm next."  This does it.  "Ma'am," I interject, "with all due respect, there is no reason I should not be allowed to check out with my couple items."  After she accuses me of disrespecting my elders, I am forced to counter-attack.  "My mother always taught me to respect my elders, and I do.  But at the end of the day, how many years you've been alive has nothing to do with where you stand in line at the Dollar Tree."  By the end of my sentence, my items had been scanned and the debit machine at fault had been fixed.  Roly-Poly makes it to the register in the same amount of time it would have taken to stand behind me.  This woman was old enough to know better than to give a young guy such a hard time about buying some brillo pads and box of pancake mix.

Speaking of old enough to know better, I was walking down the sidewalk the other day when I saw a man attempting to park, illegally I might add, in front of my car on the street.  I watched him hit my car three times through the duration of the horrendous, and ILLEGAL, park job.  While he turns his car off after finally deciding he has his car in perfect ILLEGAL position, I walk to my car and begin to inspect the potential damage to the front of it.  He and his wife get out of the car, look at me, and proceed to walk away.  Better not be late for your dinner reservations, right, sir?
Me:  Sir, you hit my car.
Man:  Oh, sorry.  *Continues to walk away.*
Me:  Actually, sir, if you could wait just a minute while I finish looking over the front of my car.  If something is damaged I'd like to take care of it.
Man:  What? Oh.. *Slowly attempts to back away, following his wife's lead.*
Me:   Well, there is a small dent in the bumper, but I won't take up your time with exchanging insurance information.  But just so you know, you're parked illegally anyway.
Wife:  How do you know that?
Me:  Well, the parking spaces are painted onto the road.  Where your car is, there aren't any painted spaces which is why you didn't have enough room to park your car and why you hit me. 
Man and Wife:  *walk away murmuring unhappily*
Now, I believe I handled that in the most polite way I could, seeing as I cannot handle actual confrontation or inconvenience with another human being.  Why I was the one being treated like the offender, I'm still not sure.

The longer I am here, the more I am starting to lose faith in older generations.  I respect them and have much admiration for many individuals within this group, so I do not want to speak with broad, overarching generalizations, but the blatant disregard many people have for anyone under the age of 40 is a disgusting trend among what is often thought to be the greatest generation to have ever lived.  I know they have been through a lot of experiences and have witnessed a lot of horrible historic events, but it isn't our fault that we weren't alive back then.  There was, in fact, a time when the generation I speak about was 20 years old and had experienced the same things we have.  Some people had to grow up with a rough economy in a wartime environment. And it wasn't easy.  Sounds pretty familiar to me.  I don't mean to trivialize anyone's past by comparing cultures, but at the end of the day, it is incredibly frustrating as a hard-working, morally-centered person to be cast aside by my elders time after time, merely because of a birth date.  Even adults I know and trust will post things online about how the youth of this country "hates America" and doesn't know the meaning of hard work and is attempting to overturn everything this country is built on.  The list goes on.  The more I think about it, though, if this kind of dismissive attitude is what is making up our present culture, I'm glad my generation is different from all that.

Sorry about the random political/social rant at the end there.  It's just something that's truly been irking me for a long time, especially the more I see that kind of behavior.  Let it be known, though, that the woman at the restaurant had nothing to do with this analysis.  I think she was just out of spoons.

"I'm just quoting Mama..."

Hello friends

Well, the show is open!  It was exhausting, but it's open.  We had a great week of previews with pretty raucous audiences that laughed at every word.  Opening night was certainly a thing.  The house was great and full of people from the company, so that was nice.  There was a big opening night party at our Artistic Director's house.  This opening night party was one like I have never seen before.  I've been to openings at City Theatre and at the Public, but things are run so differently here.  The event wasn't held at the theatre, but instead, the patrons, donors, board members, cast, crew, staff, etc. were all invited to Bob's house.  There were easily about a hundred people there.  Probably more.  It seems like a totally different world in which Bob can announce to the audience, "opening night party at my house, be there."  The thing about it, though.... it was impressive.  The food was unreal, free wine and beer for days; shrimp rings, expensive Italian meats, French cheeses, homemade pasta dishes.. the list goes on.  Unfortunately, the weather was atrocious that night with heavy downpours.  So instead of spreading out on his back patio areas (yes, "areas" plural), everyone was crammed in his house and on a tiny lip on his back porch.  Now, his house is not a small house by any means, but for someone like me who easily gets overwhelmed by crowds, it was too much to handle.  Needless to say, I left pretty early.  It was a fairly nice time nonetheless.

After all the tech rehearsals and opening weekend performances, I have really started to ask myself a lot of questions about why the hell I'm even in this career.  Some of them are questions that I can easily answer, but others have been pretty eye opening.  The preliminary question is obviously, do I like to act?  The answer is easily yes.  In a perfect world, that would be all I needed to know.  Alas.  As I walked around that opening night party, I asked myself, do I like these kinds of events?  Do I give a damn about schmoozing with artists and rich people?  The answer is kinda... no.  I know this is obviously just a small, small part of it all, but in a way, it's not. Now, these events are not what makes me second guess what I'm doing, but rather it got me thinking about the bigger aspects of my career.

The cast I'm working with is full of fascinating, great people, who have worked hard to make a decent living as actors.  But at the same time, I do not envy them.  Some of them are married or in relationships, but go months and months without seeing their partners every year.  Others have very little outside of their careers:  no permanent home, a suitcase of the same few things; but they have story after story of productions they've done or of people they know.  While that is all very romantic and, I imagine, quite fulfilling in its own way, I can't imagine that being my life.

Not to sound too much like Dave Peterson, but I was listening to the music from Sunday in the Park with George the other day, when a few lyrics actually made me want to stop my car.  Bernadette Peters is singing about what her mother used to tell her, and she sings, "It isn't so much that you do what you like than it is that you like what you do."   This, to me, is exactly right.  I began to think about how that translates into my life.  I like to act.  I do what I like.  What I do, however, is not just act.  My life could wind up being endless traveling with a lack of home base, a plethora of schmoozing, and some acting in between.  Is that what I want?  I want what I do to include acting (because I like it) but with a much different lifestyle.  I don't even know if that's possible, but I figure if I start with laying out all the things I would want in a perfect world, I can sacrifice and compromise as I go.  I have never been a person to say, "this is what my dream ____ is."  It's not what I do.  Because I realize that I may not even know that I want something until it happens.  With that being said, I want to figure out a way to do what I like in an environment that I control.  I decide where I live; I decide when I move; I decide with whom I spend my time.  To me, liking what I do on a daily basis is more important than making sure I am an actor every blessed minute of my life.  If I could plan life any way I wanted to, I would want to be surrounded by the people I love, doing what I like if I am lucky enough for the opportunity.  I'm certainly not saying that traveling for gigs every once in a while is out of the question, but I have to ask myself what I'm willing to sacrifice.  I look at these actors who miss so much in the lives of the people they love so they can say they played x, y and z roles, and I'm just not sure if that is worth it for me.

First of all, I apologize for the stream-of-consciousness style of this blog entry, but these are things I needed to work out for my own brain.  Most of it probably makes no sense unless you are sitting in my scattered little brain anyway.  Maybe it is the secluded feeling of southwest Florida that is provoking these thoughts.  I know that in other places, I can, in fact, act while having a stable life, even if it means having a few jobs on the side.  But at the end of the day, the real people in my life mean more to me than the characters.

If you've made it through this blog, you deserve a medal of some sort:  a jumbled, philosophical medal.

Who knows.  Maybe I'll wake up and feel differently...