Nothing New To Say

It's a sad thing.

I'm sitting here at Café Netto, killing as much time as I possibly can before our 10pm tech rehearsal in Schnooklyn. And as the clock ticks down on my purchased internet time (thanx, Mom!!1!), I find that I have absolutely nothing to blog about today.

Well, that's not entirely true. I could always say a thing or two about the Off-Off Gawdway show I'm doing. I haven't said a thing about that.

We're currently running 12:43. That's twelve minutes, forty-three seconds. Sometimes if the main actors feel like emoting a little more (or forgetting their lines) we can go as long as 12:52, but really, there's not much variation.

It's a really off-beat piece. Kooky. It doesn't make much sense. All of the sudden, I show up as Abraham Lincoln.

And what does our leading lady ask our director?

"How does my character know he's Abraham Lincoln? Have I seen his picture somewhere before? Where did he get my address?"

Yeah. It's a nutty, cartoonish seven page one act. The kind that you just have to give yourself over to the madness of or it won't work. And she wants to know how Abraham Lincoln got her address.

I KNOW! It's enough to make you pull out your hair, strand by strand!

Not that I'd do that. Not after all the trouble I've gone through to grow mine out.

Yes, I have a confession to make.

I really like having long hair.

I know! Isn't that weird? Nice, normal, nothing-going-on-upstairs Forky likes the hippie look.

I never gave much thought to conditioners or blow dryers or rinsing my dead protein strands ONLY in cold water, but dag-yo. I do now!

The thing is, folks, in the words of Mama Rose, you've gotta get a gimmick. Every actor in this un-Fair City looks exactly the same. So what if I did something a little different? What if I came into an audition looking vaguely like Prince Valiant? That'd turn some heads for SURE. Or at least raise some eyebrows. And in a town where million-dollar dreams are made and broken in fifteen minutes flat, that's about all you can hope for.

And then I got this nutty idea...what if I grew a goatee?! After all, one of the many characters I play in our 12 minute production is Abraham in the Desert. Even though he talks about My Fair Lady and fingerpainting, it couldn't hurt things to grow a little scruff. Help the audience out a little, right? At least LOOK the part, right?

Actors do this sort of thing all the time. Want to change your look? Just do it and tell everybody, "It's for a show."

"Forky, are you sure you should be eating that? What about your abs?"

"Oh, it's okay. The director wants me fat. It's for a show."

"Wow! How glamorous! What dedication!"

So I walk down the street, my conditioned hair billowing in the breeze, my facial scruff looking all scruffy. Then I start thinking, "Y'know, Noo Yuck is a scary place. I don't want to get mugged. Maybe I should do something a little crazy like mutter to myself."

So I walk down the street, my shaggy 'do billowing in the breeze and getting snagged on my facial scruff, muttering to myself as I walk along down the poop-strewn thoroughfares.

I haven't been mugged yet.

But I do have a little problem.

Everyone thinks I'm a bleeding heart hippie!! I'm not! I mean, I'm all about recycling, but this global warming stuff? I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is distressed by how the news is reporting the global warming junk from Paris.

According to him (I wouldn't know--I'm the most uninformed person I know), while the global warming report said that, yes, global warming is occurring, they actually scaled back the severity of their predictions from the first global warming report. So instead of the world's average temperature being 10 degrees hotter by 2100, they dropped it down to 3. But because it's a political issue now, they news media is making it out to be the apocalypse and firing weathermen who don't agree with the "facts" of global warming.

It's like the Spanish Inquisition, only with Science. What the crap?

What the crap indeed.

But I digress.

Thanks to my ample mane, people think I'm going to vote for Hillary. I want to send those folks a powerful message.

Would somebody PLEASE help me track down one of those "Dubya" buttons? You know, the black ones with the big white "W" that all the kids were wearing when the Prez was running for his second term?