No Curtain

Last week, when blogging about missed entrances, I mentioned the fact that I once missed a curtain call. That wasn't quite accurate. There was no curtain involved.

In fact, most of the shows I have done in the last seventeen years have not involved a curtain. They have either been fairy tales performed outdoors or interactive murder mysteries performed around tables in a banquet room, dining room—or, in this particular case, on a patio.

It was the final performance of the first production of my first mystery script, The Last Cruise of the S.S. Minnow, at Dakota's Steak House in Simi Valley, California. Our previous performances had been in the second-floor banquet room, but on this particular night the banquet room had been booked for another function, and we had been moved to the patio at the back of the restaurant. This wasn't a problem. The weather was beautiful, as it nearly always is in Southern California. We had to make some minor adjustments for entrances and exits, but everything went just fine, right up to my death scene.

(I always prefer to play the victim. It means fewer lines to memorize.)

I timed it so that when I was shot ("by a .22 caliber revolver—a weapon easily handled by a man or a woman"), I would end up next to the buffet table. Then, when no one was looking, I could discretely roll under the table, crawl out the other side and into the shrubbery, then make my way around to the front entrance of the restaurant and hang out in the bar until curtain call.

At least that was the plan.

I was shot, I fell, and I rolled under the table—just as planned. I crawled a few feet, then, when I thought I could no longer be seen by the audience, I attempted to get to my feet, while still moving forward. In doing so, I learned a valuable lesson:

One should never attempt to move in more than one direction at a time.

I lost my balance, stumbled a few feet, and fell to the ground on my hands and knees. "That could have been worse," I thought, as I began to pick myself up. Dakota's was perched on top of a hill. I counted myself lucky that I didn't roll all the way to the bottom.

Then I looked down and noticed that there was something odd about the little finger of my left hand. It was bent to the side at 90-degree angle, and I could see a little bit of bone peeking out through a hole in the skin.

"That's not right," I thought.

There was hardly any blood and no pain. At the time, my only concern was how this would affect the show. At least I had no other scenes—just the curtain call. I picked myself up and made my way to the front of the restaurant.

One of the restaurant's owners happened to be in the foyer, talking to some of the staff. "Adam," I said to him, holding up my finger, "I'm afraid I've hurt myself."

"That's great!" he said, laughing. "What is it, plastic?"

"No," I said. "It's my finger. I fell on it."

He immediately stopped laughing and arranged for a staff member to drive me to the emergency room.

As it turned out, the finger wasn't broken (only dislocated), and I still felt no pain (only embarrassment). The doctor cleaned the wound, shot some anesthetic into it, popped the bone back into the knuckle, and neatly stitched up the hole. He explained that the reason I felt no pain was that I was in shock, and he gave me some powerful pain killers for later. They came in handy when I was awakened in the middle of the night by my finger screaming obscenities at me.

But for now, I felt fine. I had missed the curtain call, but I was damned if I was going to miss the cast party.

Especially when I had such a good story to tell.

The Invisible Man Award

Most of my nightmares are about theatre, and most of my theatre nightmares are about missing an entrance. In my nightmares, it's never my fault: someone has taken my costume, my makeup, my prop. The one time it actually happened, I had no one to blame but myself—well, myself and one of my fellow actors, who shall remain nameless. (Mainly because I can't remember his name. He was playing the role of an English lord, so I shall refer to him as "His Lordship.")

I was playing the role of Johnny Tarleton, son of underwear tycoon John Tarleton. The play was Misalliance, by George Bernard Shaw—a play that is chiefly remembered as the source of the oft-parodied line delivered by my character, "Anybody on for a game of tennis?" It was the second semester of my freshman year of college, my third show, and my biggest role yet.

During this particular performance, His Lordship and I were chatting in the green room, waiting for our entrance. We were probably talking about the ceramic bowl I was supposed to have smashed in the previous scene. (It worked in rehearsal, but in every single performance, no matter how hard I threw the thing to the floor, it would not break. At the final performance, I hurled it with such force it bounced off the floor, ricocheted off a flat, and rolled off the stage—finally coming to rest against the foot of an audience member in the front row.)

The green room was separated from the stage by some distance; a speaker on the wall allowed actors awaiting their entrance to listen for cues. At some point in our conversation, His Lordship and I simultaneously noticed that there was no dialogue coming from the speaker. After making sure the speaker was functioning properly, we simultaneously came to the realization that the reason there was no dialogue was that the actors who were supposed to be speaking were not on stage, and that those actors were us. We dashed down the long, dark corridor to the wings and made our breathless entrance, much to the relief of the actors onstage, who were desperately trying to improvise in the style of George Bernard Shaw.

At the theatre department award ceremony at the end of the school year, His Lordship and I were dubiously honored with "The Invisible Man Award."

* * * * *

Anyone who has been on the stage will agree that, as embarrassing as it is to be the Invisible Man, it is much worse being onstage when someone else misses an entrance. Karma dictated that sooner or later it must happen to me—as it did just a few years later, during a community theatre production of Chekov's Three Sisters.

There were four of us on stage that evening, waiting for the Invisible Man. Fortunately, all of us were reasonably seasoned actors with the good sense to keep calm and remain in character. The man and woman playing clandestine lovers flirted shamelessly. I, seated between them and playing a shy, awkward military officer, acted shy and awkward—an easy task when you are sitting between two people who are flirting shamelessly. The fourth member of our quartet, who was playing a broody, dangerous military officer, sat in the corner and brooded dangerously. We were all, if I may say so myself, brilliant. I doubt if Anton Chekov himself would have realized that anything was wrong. I'm fairly certain the audience didn't. (Unless they happened to be "theatre people." Theatre people usually notice when something goes wrong during a performance because they expect something to go wrong during a performance. They know that something goes wrong during every performance. It's one of the cardinal rules of theatre.)

Finally, after what seemed an eternity but was probably only a minute or two, our Invisible Man entered and the play continued.

* * * * *

I am proud to say that, since receiving my one and only Invisible Man Award, I have never missed another entrance—although I did, due to a spectacular display of clumsiness, once miss a curtain call.

But that's another story.

iVomit

Nearly everyone has experienced the literally gut-wrenching horror of the norovirus, otherwise known as the "stomach flu." It doesn't last long—usually less than twenty-four hours—but while you are experiencing it, you feel like you are dying. Dying, in fact, seems like a preferable alternative.

The norovirus is highly infectious. You hear countless horror stories of it decimating schools, retirement homes, and—worst of all—cruise ships. (The plumbing in cruise ships is notoriously sensitive. Imagine the strain put on it when everyone on board suddenly begins spouting from both ends. Talk about horror stories.)

I have personally encountered the norovirus a number of times over the years, and, while my memory is not the best, I remember each encounter in vivid detail: fever, chills, aching joints, and miserable hours spent in the bathroom.

There was, for instance, that time when I was about thirteen. Our family was living in a big, old, two-story house in Goshen, Indiana. Behind the house was a detached, two-story garage that had once been a stable. My Aunt Vonna was visiting from Fort Wayne, and she had taken us kids to Olympia Candy Kitchen—an old-fashioned, family-owned diner/soda shop/candy store on Main Street—and allowed us each to pick out a bag of our favorite homemade candy. I chose chunks of white chocolate, which I immediately devoured. It tasted delicious going down. It was nowhere near as good when it came back up a couple of hours later.

We were just sitting down to dinner when it hit me. I asked to be excused and raced to the bathroom. I did not receive much sympathy at first—the general opinion was that I had simply eaten too much candy—but when it became apparent that I was really sick, my mother put me straight to bed. I spent a feverish, hallucinatory night filled with strange noises—loud voices, banging doors, the wail of sirens. When I arose from my sick bed in the morning, weak and shaky, I discovered that our garage had burned down during the night. The fire department had been called; everyone had gone outside to watch; the entire neighborhood had turned out. It was positively, hands-down, the single most exciting thing that had ever happened to our family.

And I missed the whole thing.

Not only that—to this day, I cannot stand the taste of white chocolate.

There is no cure for the norovirus, and there is no vaccine against it. You simply have to ride it out. However, there is some good news. Some extremely clever scientists have devised a robot to help them study the way the norovirus is spread. The video below shows the robot in action. They call it "Vomiting Larry."

Much as I admire scientists, I will never understand them. Here they have the genius and imagination to build something as marvelous as a vomiting robot, and the best name they can come up for it is "Larry."

Did none of them think to call it "Ralph?"

Holding Back the Darkness

This is the weekend we take down the Christmas lights and decorations. I can't think of another chore that's as depressing, unless it's unpacking after a vacation. Every year, I'm tempted to leave at least the lights up until spring. After all, the whole point of Christmas lights is to bring a little light and cheer to the darkest days of the year. (And yes, I realize that we are past the solstice and the days are getting longer, but we still have quite a bit of darkness to go.)

The only thing preventing me from leaving the lights up (aside, probably, from the homeowners association), is the fear that I will be labeled "eccentric."

Every year when it comes time to take down the Christmas lights, I think of Seth Ward. He was once a prominent attorney in Kosciusko County, Indiana, which is how my father knew him. I tried to find information about him on the Internet, but the only thing I could find was an old newspaper clipping with a picture of his house on Lake Wawasee. The article mentions some of the unique features of the house, and that Mr. and Mrs. Ward enjoyed entertaining friends there. The article is undated, but judging by the car parked in front of the house, the picture was taken a decade or two before my time.

The house certainly didn't look like this in the 1960s, when my father pointed it out to us on a visit to the lake. By then, it was almost completely hidden by overgrown trees and undergrowth. Anyone would think it was deserted—and possibly haunted—were it not for the many Christmas lights and decorations that adorned the place year round. I was fascinated by the contrast between the dark, dreary house and the cheerful (though somewhat faded) lights and decorations. I was also fascinated by the story my father told of how Mr. Ward had wanted to bury his deceased wife in the front yard.

My father said he was "eccentric." I thought he was just plain crazy.

Now, however, I feel sorry for him him. The poor man must have been devastated by his wife's death. Her absence took all of the light from his life. The Christmas lights and decorations were a feeble attempt to hold back the darkness. Sometimes, during the darkest part of winter, I can imagine how he felt.

But spring will be here soon.

Anniversary Cat

When discussing marriage, nearly as important as the question of children is the question of pets. Suppose one of you is a "cat person" and the other a "dog person"—worse yet, suppose one of you is an animal lover and the other can't stand the thought of having any sort of creature in the house. Fortunately, Loretta and I were in complete agreement on the subject. Dogs and cats had been an important part of both our lives. We both knew we wanted at least one pet. The only question was, would it be a cat or a dog?

Both of us work, and we both like to travel. Most cats have no problem with being left alone for hours or even a day or two. But dogs, the moment you are out of their sight, become convinced that they will never, ever see you again. At least, this was how it seemed with Christie, the Scottish terrier we pet sat shortly after we were married. She was sweet-tempered, intelligent, and seemingly well behaved. However, one evening while we were out, she apparently became filled with angst at the idea that we would never return—or possibly she just became bored. At any rate, she completely destroyed her dog bed and, when she was finished with that, proceeded to tear up the kitchen linoleum.

We decided to get a cat.

He was our "anniversary cat"—about a year old when he came into our lives, about a year after we were married.  He'd been rescued from beneath a porch in Buffalo, where some cruel children had driven him into hiding by pelting him with rocks. We were afraid the experience might have toughened him or made him mean, but at our first meeting we found him to be perfectly docile, if somewhat reserved. He was a beautiful cat, with golden eyes and thick, white fur, just like "the neighbor's polar cat" in Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales or Cleveland Amory's Cat Who Came for Christmas. I suggested a literary name: "Mycroft," the brother of Sherlock Holmes. It seemed well-suited to such a dignified and regal animal.

Here's a picture of him a day or two after we brought him home to our Niagara Falls apartment:

As you can see, once he made himself at home he was anything but dignified and regal. He turned out to be quite sociable and—though not particularly affectionate himself—happy to sit on anyone's lap and accept affection from them. At times he could be mischievous. At times, as we discovered years later when we acquired a second cat, he could be downright ornery. And so the dignified and regal "Mycroft" became just plain "Mike" (or, occasionally, "The Little Bastard").

I shut him out of our bedroom his first night with us—or tried to. He scratched at the door until I was forced to let him in. He jumped up on the bed, went to Loretta to have his head rubbed (he loved having his head rubbed), then quietly settled down at our feet. From then on, this was his nightly routine.

Life on the mean streets of Buffalo had made him an excellent hunter, as we discovered when we moved into our first house. He quickly dispatched the few mice inside the house then moved on to the garage, where he caught them as quickly as they came in under the door. Usually he would leave the bodies—not a mark on them—neatly lined up in front of the kitchen door for us to find (or, if we weren't careful, step on). Once, however, he came in from a garage expedition with a small tail hanging from the corner of his mouth.

"MIKE!" I screamed. He dashed past me and dropped the mouse in the living room, where it quickly disappeared behind a bookshelf. He wanted to go back to the garage to find another one, but I grabbed him and thrust him behind the bookshelf, insisting that he take care of this one first. He soon emerged, the mouse's tail once more dangling from his mouth. He trotted into the kitchen and again deposited his little playmate on the floor. By now, the mouse was furious. It stood on its hind legs and waved its front paws in the air, as if challenging Mike to fisticuffs. I put a bucket over it, slid a piece of cardboard underneath, carried it out the front door, and dumped it in the yard.

Mike was six years old when we moved to California, and still a formidable hunter. Unfortunately, the mice were few and far between. He only encountered one, shortly after we moved into our townhouse, and it escaped. However, he soon found other small game in our tiny, walled-in garden. He preferred hummingbirds. He probably thought they were flying mice—they were roughly the same size. He also occasionally caught a lizard. Once, he came into the house proudly carrying something in his mouth—an alive something—just as he had carried the mouse in years before. This time, instead of a tail, a tiny webbed foot protruded from his mouth.

"WHAT the HELL is THAT?" I yelled. I gingerly pried it from his mouth—a small, pale-green tree frog. It immediately sprang out of my hand, hit the wall with a splat, and stuck there like a frog-shaped wad of snot. I quickly peeled it off the wall and threw it outside. I assume it escaped, because Mike never caught it—or any other frog—again.

Most of the time, we were able to rescue his prey or scare it away before he caught it. The one or two times I was unable to prevent him from killing a hummingbird, I was furious with him. He, of course, could not understand why. "I'm a cat," he seemed to say. "What do you expect?"

When we moved into our current house with its huge (by California standards) back yard, Mike was in heaven. By that time, he was fifteen and beginning to show his age. The day we moved in, he took off after a small flock of birds under the citrus trees. He didn't catch any of them; in fact, he never caught anything again. But he still enjoyed watching—and stalking—the wildlife in our yard. At his age, we didn't need to worry about him getting over the fence; we installed a cat door so that he could come and go as he pleased. I believe those were the happiest days of his life. It's the way I like to remember him—the fierce jungle cat slinking through the undergrowth, stalking its prey.

I often think of him this time of year. It was just after the holidays eight years ago that we took him to the veterinarian for the very last time. Later, we bought a small memorial stone for the garden. On it, there was only room for his name and lifespan, plus one or two additional words. After much deliberation, we settled on "Lovable Bastard."

It seemed appropriate.

Mycroft
1988-2005
Lovable Bastard

Christmas, 1961

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."—Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

Like Dylan Thomas, I find the Christmases of my childhood tend to blend together. I can't recall how old I was when my new Vac-U-Form burst into flames on Christmas morning, or what year I got the chemistry set that allowed me to create gelatinous pink goo that exploded out of the test tube and stuck to the ceiling. However, the Christmas of 1961 stands apart from the others. It was the only Christmas without my father.

1961 was the year the Berlin Wall went up. Things were getting very tense with the Communists, and my father, along with many other reservists, was deployed to Europe. My mother, my sister, and I spent that Christmas with my grandmother and aunts in Fort Wayne.

I wasn't really expecting a call from him. We got regular letters on thin, translucent airmail paper, and once or twice we received a spool of audio tape, but never a phone call. Back then, it was unheard of to get a telephone call from Europe; it was much too expensive.

But Christmas was special, and on Christmas morning when the telephone rang at my grandmother's house, I knew it had to be him, and I raced to be the first to answer it.

"Merry Christmas!" I said, breathlessly.

"Merry Christmas!" said a man's voice. "Do you know who this is?"

"Dad!"

"No, it's not your dad. It's your uncle."

"Oh... Hi."

I'm sure my uncle could hear the disappointment in my voice, and years later I felt badly about that, but at the time, all I could feel was the disappointment. I missed my father so much; I needed so much to hear the sound of his voice.

A few months later, he came home. Since then, there hasn't been a Christmas that I haven't heard his voice—until this year.

This will be the first Christmas since 1961 without my father. It will be the first Christmas ever without my mother.

But they will always live on in my memories—especially during the holidays, when so many of those memories come flooding back.

Like the memory of my mother sitting at the old piano at my grandmother's house, playing and singing Sleigh Ride while the rest of us try to keep up—all of us breaking down in laughter when we stumble over the nearly impossible phrase, "These wonderful things are the things we'll remember all through our lives."

So true.

Pictures that Pop

I must have been only four or five years old when my grandparents gave me my first View-Master viewer, an old Bakelite "Model E." With it came a packet of picture reels from "Beautiful Rock City Gardens" in Tennessee—a souvenir from one of their vacations. Unfortunately, the viewer broke long ago (Bakelite is brittle and easily shattered), but I still have two of the picture reels, with photos of scenic mountain views, people with 1950's clothing and hairstyles, and weird statues of gnomes and fairytale characters. Nothing special.

Except that they're 3D.

I acquired more picture reels—most of them Easter or Christmas gifts from my parents—and, eventually, a lighted Model H viewer to replace my old broken Model E. Back then we didn't have DVDs or VCRs. The only way to re-experience a favorite movie or TV show was to purchase the paperback, comic book, or View-Master version. My chosen medium was View-Master, of course.

Because it was 3D.

Model H and Some Favorite Picture Reels

I loved 3D pictures. It didn't matter what the subject of the picture was. Some of my picture reels were pretty lame (Why do I even have a packet of pictures from Greece?), but I still loved to look at them, simply because they were 3D.

It never occurred to me that I could create my own 3D photos. I thought it must require special (not to mention incredibly expensive) equipment. Then, several years ago, we took a cruise to Alaska with Garrison Keillor and the cast and crew of A Prairie Home Companion. Aside from the many sightseeing excursions on land, there were plenty of activities to keep us entertained on board the ship: daily performances by the musicians and cast, lectures by naturalists, choir practice and story-telling sessions with Garrison, radio acting lessons from actors Sue Scott and Tim Russell—

And a class in 3D photography taught by Fred Newman, the show's "touring SFX guy."

It turns out that Fred, aside from being a master of funny voices and sound effects, is also a very good amateur 3D photographer. And he taught me that anyone can be a 3D photographer. No special equipment is needed. All you need is a digital camera. Take a picture, take a step to the left (or right), and take another picture.

I took my first 3D photos when we got to Glacier Bay. I didn't need to take a step to the left or right—I simply let the motion of the ship move my point of view. The great thing about digital cameras is that you don't have to worry about wasting film. With a high capacity memory card, you can afford to take lots of pictures, and I did.

When we got back from the trip, I found a company on the Internet (PokeScope) that sells software that makes it easy to line up pairs of 3D photos, as well as a viewer to make it easier to view them. (It's possible to "free view" them without a viewer; if you're good at those "Magic Eye" pictures, you may be able to do it.)

Of course, many of my experiments in 3D photography didn't turn out well at all. I found that anything moving—birds, waves, falling chunks of ice, etc.—ruins the 3D effect. I posted some of the best ones in a set on Flickr, and I've added several more since then. If you'd like to take a look at them, here's the link.

Now if I could just figure out how to get them into View-Master reels...