12/07/2005:
Nine Months
It's been nine months since I've last posted to these pages. Long enough to plant the seed and harvest a baby, and yet I am still in a job I continue to merely "hate." I've applied to one company in the past nine months. I was probably not considered because of my age and the known fact  that you can't teach or tell anyone over forty anything. Ah, little did they know they were dealing with Master Thespian. Master Thespian, who is usually every director's favorite, not because of my acting or memorization ability, but because of my desire to take direction. (That may stem from the fact that I was raised by a Nazi, but we will probably never know for positive the birth of my desire.) As a point in fact, I sometimes distress directors because, other than the concerns of the artificial persona I've become, I really don't have anything to say about directing. I tell them that at this point I have no desire what-so-ever to direct. Besides, I am 90% character and he friggin' don't know he's on stage or in a movie. I don't tell directors that my life sucks so bad, that I look forward to weeks and weeks where I can loose myself in the lines and life of my character. Where I can wander the halls of imagined memories because, let's face it, even bad imagined reminisces are more palatable than the awful road my life has been on since my divorce. I know, "Wa, wa, wa! Get over it." Hey! I'm an actor. I am sensitive, okay? That's something else my ex-wife said: "You're too sensitive." Golly, I think it has been over a year since the courts of Maricopa County granted my wife's divorce request. This is the same court system that did not see fit to mail me the original documents, advising me I was legally divorced. I had to request copies from my ex. No respect! I am certainly a case of 'Do as I say, not as I do' when I write this, but you must stick with what you love, regardless of the pay or the schedule or the location. Why trade countless hours of your life, precious days of your life doing stuff that won't let you feel fulfilled? That will allow you to only scrape up scraps of happiness? You get the money sure, but 50% of its gone even before the direct deposit amount blips up on your internet checking account statement. You buy things, but most are thrown out the first time you relocate. (I know, I KNOW.) So why not improve your skills and build good, maybe even great, memories, and enjoy life along the way ... while at work? As a security officer, the majority of the 'skills' I'm honing are useless in any other profession. And I'm also getting tired of residents, guests and vendors commenting on how good my memory is. Hey! I'm an actor. I'm expected to have a good memory. The other night I had a dream that I was cast in some community theater stage production and I started crying I was so happy. What caused me to suddenly post on this frigid Wednesday of December? I received an e-mail notice from my church (which due to my seven-day a week work schedule I do not attend often ... ever) I was being asked not to audition for a play, but to come see the finished production. A production without me in it. I feel like Charlie Brown.

03/28/2005:
The Passion of the Strupp
As I was consistently auditioning and being cast in plays and (never seen) student movies during my ten year retirement, I did not fully grasp why so many fine actors and actresses I met gave up on acting, when they obviously relished performance and were very good. These days, as an hourly paid employee, booking at least sixty-four hours a week simply to make ends meet, wisdom has roosted on my shoulders . . . And at age fifty-three, I still amaze myself with my own naiveté and unawareness of the ways of the world. If I had clearly realized that I would go from something I loved: stage & mini-screen, to something I detest more than a five day bout of painful constipation, i.e., being a security officer, I would have worked much, much harder to get established somewhere, anywhere paying, in the entertainment industry. Even when I was doing a not so excellent job of memorizing the six hundred lines of dialog needed for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," (just ask Brick) which was a tormenting, teeth-grinding, brow furrowing and Snickers bar binging experience, in my mind, it did not equate to "work". I'll always remember when my then Moon Valley Country Club-dwelling older brother related to me the sad tale of the neighbor-lawyer he golfed with, who confided in him that he detested his job to the point of tears, but could not leave, because nowhere could he ". . . reap so much money so easily." While being an emotional person by nature, I also have been brought to tears, earning one-tenth as much as a barrister, while journeying home from a particularly long and grueling double-shift day. I am not to the place of detesting my job. Yet. I merely hate it. Returning to acting for my church's annual Easter Passion Play (no audition required) after being off of the stage for over a year, has reminded me just how much memorization, blocking, and rehearsals are not work to me. With sixteen hour shifts in two different guard houses separated by a twenty-nine mile drive taking their toll on my energy reserve, concentration and sleep, at first I imagined I would not be capable of memorizing my scant dozen or so lines in the two weeks I had prior to performance. But before I knew it, I had them down and was settling in to make discoveries, construct my character's emotional background and let my Judy Rollings' taught Method take over. One may imagine, since I mentioned it is "my church" that my performances were done in front of familiar friends. However, since my seven day work schedule usually includes Sunday's (and that my prior two visits, due to the devastating distress exhibited over my pending divorce, resulted in bouts of sobbing so vicious that had Job himself, been at church those mornings, he would have leapt from pew to pew to come comfort me!) all my audiences were composed of hundreds of almost total strangers. A friendly crowd to be sure, but still strangers. Having literally blacked-out from fear at my first public performance as a teenager and twenty-four years later, believing I was suffering a stroke as I stepped on stage for the first time as an adult, in "12 Angry Men", I am now amazed that, even with a year break in public performances, I'm no more nervous on a brightly lit and elevated stage, than when shouting at my boss, for the nth time, that I'm going to quit. I realized appearing in the play would cost me income wise, I just did not sit down and calculate the cost. However, giving up overtime assignments in place of rehearsals and performances, I lost over $700 in take home pay. And being my forty-hour weekly net is a sad $360, that seven hundred number is a pretty fair chunk of income to give up to utter the same dozen lines three nights in a row. But, that demonstrates, in dollars and cents how much I enjoy performing. I don't even know if I'm a good actor and in the future I may be cast only because I am so damned good looking <grin> and that will be just fine with me. Sometimes I read on the Net and in magazines or newspapers where the writer is asking, "How do I know if I want to be: a teacher, a doctor, a mechanic, a physician's assistant, an actor?" And all I can think to myself is, "If you've got to ask the question, it's probably not the vocation for you."

And here lies my personal quandary. My residents believe I am, and I quote, "a gem of a security officer" for their gated communities. But in reality, I'm more of a well-read doorman-slash-concierge, than a provider of true security. I think God has a wonderful sense of humor and I imagine, from His unique perspective, He's chuckling at my situation. My predicament. Understand that the entire reason I am in the security business is because the aforementioned actor, who played my son Brick in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", advised me that being a security guard provided the best employment opportunity for actors. "That is because," he knowingly explained, "The third shift, which begins an hour after most theaters close, provides a perfect slot for thespian's because the work load is so light that you can spend the entire eight hours memorizing your lines and blocking and stuff like that . . . and still get paid." Alas, soon after pinning on badge #22, my wife's company was bought out and she forfeited her high paying position (and three years later, after being serenaded by a mere billionaire, divorced me) and we needed the meager income my new job supplied. At the same time my company discovered I had an extremely high IQ for guards (over 80) and they moved me into a position of "responsibility" to face the continuous tumult of traffic, fumes and angry feedback of the daylight hours. I gained responsibility, but continued to be rewarded with pay so minuscule that I was forced to work over a thousand overtime hours each year (of which 80 comprised of my never-taken vacations) to garnish the sorely needed income. Income, that, in turn, shoved me right off the stage into the dark orchestra pit of unfulfilled and grievously unhappy actors. Currently, in year 2005, one of my wealthy resident-patrons and  the inspiring book, Dan Miller's: 48 Days to the Work You Love - And Leaving the Job You Hate, insist that I must change my shift hours back to the afternoon and evenings. This is not so I can leap back into the limelight, but so that I can apply for employment in the mornings when the personnel department people (who probably hate their  jobs) are the most congenial. Employment that I might enjoy. Employment that would realistically compensate my superior abilities and attitudes. And finally and most importantly, employment that would provide a codified schedule so that I can re-kindle my love affair with stage and screen. And what does the "48 Days" book say my interviewer will be looking for? 1) Do I like Robert? 2) Will Robert fit in well with the team? 3) Is Robert honest? 4) Is Robert fun to be around? Yes, it will be an extreme test of my acting skills <grin> let's hope I'm up to it, eh?

02/04/2005: Oscar Party on the Horizon Crossroads Entertainment's 2005 Oscar Party is coming. If you are a party animal type, here's hoping you are invited. Your Master Thespian has viewed dozens of productions over the last twelve months. However, since my last day off in August of 2004, my sequential seven day work weeks, in a job in which I daily absorb more abuse than a Texas beef rancher would at a Vegan convention, I have seen none of the Oscar contenders. During my scant, sometimes only six hour breaks between shifts, I was confined to my compact, ground floor Scottsdale apartment, enjoying DVD-formatted movies chosen by my teen son I love so much. Which is about as far from being a bad thing as my job being a good thing . . . other than having a job. Just the other night, having seen my Christmas present copy of Dance with the Devil, I know things could be worse. Now, if only we could find a decently priced copy of that other "upbeat" movie: Thursday.

01/25/2005:
Lip Bacon
The cap on my number thirteen cracked. That was after the cap on its partner, number fourteen, had slipped off and I could not immediately visit my dentist, the renowned Dr. Christian Szell. Tooth 13 was quickly weakened by my continual grinding and cracked during a bout with Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch ice cream. Being a detail-minded kind of guy, your Master Thespian smiled as the dentist corrected his technician by telling her that indeed thirteen was cracked as I had claimed, not fourteen, as she had insisted. While the doctor whittled on the stub of tooth thirteen with a #2 wood file, I was talked into another visit involving a 100% dental insurance covered cleaning. A cleaning which I had purposely postponed for half a decade. The hard-bodied female tech (and Jennifer Lopez aficionado) who dances 'Go-Go' in local upscale bars when she's not in the office, easily convinced me <go figure> to an out-of-pocket $375 teeth-whitening procedure. Of course, being an undiscovered, yet famous actor, I will expense the almost four hundred dollar cost from my 2005 tax bill. Driving to work afterwards, as the empty knot in my stomach screamed out, with my teeth and lips silenced by two shots of NovocaineTM, I purchased a gut-filling, soft, warm and delicious Jack-in-the-Box Supreme Crescent. Moments later, behind the wheel of my silver Sonata speeding west on Shea Boulevard, as I slid my front teeth sideways, back and forth attempting to cut through a very stubborn slice of bacon, I gave up and was surprised that the piece of sandwich dropped away cleanly into my mouth. A gulp later, I noticed the metallic taste of blood on my tongue. My bacon-biting attempt had actually been a thankfully unsuccessful exercise to bite through a nickel-sized piece of the inside of my numbed upper lip. I lived with a huge and painful herpes-like mouth sore for the next ten days. Two weeks after my first visit, as a different tech was cleaning my teeth using the latest vibrating warm water spraying torture device and with bright red arterial blood spurting out of my mouth splattering the wall mounted, plastic protected, framed pictures of fuzzy yellow ducklings and puffy white clouds, she asked why I didn't come in for scheduled six month teeth cleanings? With tears flowing down my cheeks and her hands and utensils in my aching open mouth, I gurgled, "Aye Doch Knoh." After receiving an "excellent" rating on my teeth-brushing technique, enduring enough xrays to make me glow for the next six days and finding no cavities, other than my empty tear ducts, I was ushered into the teeth-whitening room. There the "Go-Go" dancing dental diva was waiting for me. She explained that she would be applying a very strong 20% peroxide paste to my front teeth and that if this goo should touch my gums it would burn through to my brain and I would only be able to audition for non-speaking parts. To prevent that probability from happening, she spent the next fifteen minutes stuffing so many specially formed cotton wads into my mouth that, in comparison, a Tokyo subway car during rush hour would appear as empty as a "Kerry/Edwards for President" headquarters. And if that wasn't enough, she then, using a device much like a toy-sized putty gun, very carefully applied waterproof sealing between the Egyptian cotton guarding my throbbing gums and the very bottom of my front twelve teeth. That left me merely uncomfortable, but not really in pain, so then she inserted a Hussein-designed device that looked like the mold that they would use to make those red and white joke plastic teeth out of. This insane mechanism forced my lips back from my ivories on both the top and the bottom while also forcing my mouth open so that I looked like a snarling, mouth-breathing, two hundred and thirty-two pound pit bull. But here is the pièce de résistance of pain. This S&M mouth-prying-open-device, featured a blunt tab that stuck out forward into the soft tissue below where the roots to my front teeth ended. Try this little experiment: Take your tongue and keeping it in your mouth, stick it straight forward behind your lower teeth. Now drag it lower until it meets the soft tissue below your teeth. You might feel the seam in the bottom of your mouth. Next, picture someone jamming the handle end of a fork just as hard as they can in that very location, without breaking the skin. Now, visualize that exact pressure continuing for sixty l-o-n-g minutes. It felt as if someone were stabbing a sharpened chopstick into the base of my tongue root. In the dentist's office, like in outer space "No one can hear you scream." Frankly, you cannot even scream, for I was lucky to be able to gulp my own spit between jagged gasps of air. The agony was so great that I was forced to dust-off my personal and proven pain distracting techniques that I developed during ten, sometimes excruciating, Rolfing® sessions I endured during the 1980s. The session over, with my teeth sparking from pin-prick pains, you can bet I listened intently as my tormenter explained how to keep my teeth in their now almost baby white condition.

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