Loading...Enough with the goofy hat shtick.
By which, I mean: I have a couple rad ones cooked up, but I couldn’t be bothered to write them in a timely fashion. There’s literally too much Parks and Rec for one day off. Instead, I’m going to walk you through the mental yoga of priority management. This is the most elusive skill a professional theatre artist technician dude may not choose to exercise.
With the musical on which I am currently working drawing swiftly to a close, I found it telling to reflect upon my crazy show-biz lifestyle. In bitter spite of the reek of social, familial and professional commitment drawing me astray, I have stayed the course to show up thirty minutes early to my show run commitment and the fifteen minutes of real work it usually entails.
I joke; I sell the commitment short. For tech week, you can expect ten-to-sixteen-hour-days, sometimes even longer. For previews, you have roughly the same schedule, but whatever weird last-minute kludge fix you enacted in the heat of the moment has to last for the duration of an actual show for paying patrons. For the actual show run, you mostly just sit around and pray that nothing has broken, right up until it has, then you cancel everything and come in early to fix it. Even that is a broad stroke rough pass. Let me leap ahead to what you can expect to miss.
Over the course of this one job, I missed:
2 memorials; one for a beloved professor who – perhaps ironically – taught me to enjoy musicals.
1 funeral, but those are generally a bummer and the snacks are a let-down.
2 wedding receptions, one of which I may not actually have been specifically invited to in the socially responsible classical sense.
5 job offers from better paying short-run gigs
3 design opportunities, shirking my higher calling to pathologically work harder than my pay grade to provide an invisible service to an ephemeral craft whose labor’s fruits are tacitly ignored.
Your social life, with a few more lizards.
3 Vegas Trips with gorgeous and flirtatious nubile women, and I guess also some dudes who know how to have a good time. Which I have never developed in regards to Vegas. Usually I crash in a cheap hotel room somewhere, smoke inside and drink beer on the strip because America.
176 hours of Cat Buddy Time®, tabulated by cross-referencing passive-aggressive stress pee and the loving hamburgering of my extremities. Such majestic creatures. The grace. What dignity.
1 naked calendar shoot. This one really chaps my grits, because the twenty pounds I lost in the process of tech for what I lovingly refer to as this aluminium monstrosity fits me better than the Fashion-District-cheap suits I slap on to look like a presentable person.
1 sketch shoot, the audition for which I inadvertently nailed at a surprisingly effective read-through. Pro tip: if you don’t absolutely want the gig, refrain from being awesome during the generative process. Sometimes that shit sticks. In fact, stay home. Don’t make friends and avoid associating with anyone who has “projects.” These people are sick, and you must fear them.
15 shows good friends had been in/worked on/somehow wanted me to see. This feels like a combination of a tithe, social commitment and, occasionally, low-caliber bullet dodged. There are undocumented benefits to being busy.
3 movies I thought it would be rad to check out, but, whoops, I guess. I’ll watch it on my phone in six months. I’m sure Gravity wasn’t as spectacular as nearly everybody cannot agree it may have been.
3 band gigs and/or cabaret performances by friends. This may have some overlap with the freewheeling Vegas ladies, so the collateral damage may compound on this particular metric.
1 night of Culver City’s mayor honoring the cast of a show I worked on. I want to believe he had a stovepipe top-’em hat, one of those british bling-ass mayoral necklaces and perhaps a staff. Also, in the City Hall of my mind palace, he was seven-foot-four and barrel-chested. I base the entirety of this image completely divorced from reality, having met the Mayor at various sundry events in the past. He’s a nice enough fella though.
4 birthday parties. Again, potential Vegas overlap. Perhaps I know a lot of showgirls? My priorities are beginning to leak here.
6 friends who were in town but I was too wiped-out, busy or asleep to see them. Sometimes all three.
9 friends making guest appearances on TV shows which I completely neglected to TIVO, because I don’t really have that. How I Met Your Mother, Parks and Recreation and Community may as well be the Jury Duty of Los Angeles comedians. You know, like those CIS: Law and General Procedural things were for all those intensely weird, whispery dudes that take classes in Hollywood. You know, before they stopped making those shows because, you know, who has time.
28 gradual expirations of pre-packaged vegetable or salad mixes I completely neglected even to open. Parenthetical note, that did not deter them in any way from contributing to the general funk of my disarrayed Van Nuys apartment. Clever readers that may recall earlier inferences to the cat in residence may find reward in my acknowledgement of his ready contribution to the olfactory disaster I barely sleep in each day.
As many as five (perhaps? who can count?) assignations, trysts, lusty noontimes, clandestine paramores or other assorted calls-of-booty.
3 farewell shindigs, but fuck them anyway.
You used to have a family, right? They’re somewhere. Maybe Facebook?
48 coffee dates, but people don’t actually go on those anymore, right? I mean, that literally does not happen. It’s like asking someone “how’s it going” while mutually understanding either party lacks the fundamental interest in another person’s human condition. This is Los Angeles, and I am not your therapist. Unless I am, in which case, thank you for your candor in not yet reporting me to the pertinent mental health authority.
8 holiday themed parties comprising four holidays of significance. Ghosting the Columbus Day Fancy Dress and Ugly Sweater Cat Fashion Parade and Luau was perhaps the bitterest pill.
Almost every episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I take this as a personal kindness; sorry Joss.
Untold multitudes of karaoke scheduling fails, because I was either A. At the wrong place, B. Working late or C. Already deep in another karaoke adventure working late in entirely the wrong place.
2 family members visiting from out of town that I would otherwise totally bail to see, but they never see my shows, so screw them.
250 necessary hours of restful sleep, offset by borderline illegal stimulants and stress adrenaline. I’m comfortable with my identity as a cortisol junkie and recalcitrant chemical insomniac. You can’t fix me with your science. Not until they build robots that can solve my problems for me. Please don’t tell me if we have those; daddy needs his go-go party fun-time fix.
All of this. This litany of miserable human wages. ONLY ONE SHOW. Corwin, you had ONE JOB.
That’s how hard I work, folks. That’s just the stuff I can even remember. And usually I’m working on at least five damn shows at once. It’s not a glamorous life, but the parties are great. Well, they’re okay. Sometimes we get Taco Bell.
