This week, I got a passion from Alix Elias, a professional actress and comedian I know through the Greenwich House Comedy Workshop I teach. It was so good, it’s going at THE TOP of the email. How about that?
I have a sort of a passion, and an anti-passion. As in it’s good and it’s also bad. For mostly the same reasons!
As I have lived a long time, it turns out that people I sort of knew, sometimes not very well (sometimes TOO well), turned into celebrities. Or anyway sort of famous. And people started writing books about them. And in what I can define as "the-footnote-to-history/handmaiden-to-the-stars” syndrome, I am IN these books. In one case, and the author even sent me an autographed copy of it, I couldn’t find my name anywhere in the text, but there IS a photo of me, appropriately I.D.ed, standing next to the “real” celeb.
So, you know, I don’t FEEL like a handmaiden-etc., but am uncomfortably reminded of those roles in Shakespeare where someone named Iris or something like that, stands next to the Queen and spouts a few words so the Queen doesn’t have to be all alone blabbing solely to the audience. Or Iris sneaks in some useful plot information like “where is the King today?”. Iris’s are useful, no question. And, no, I have never played an Iris role in my life as an actress, but these books seem to indicate that maybe I have been an Iris in my “real” life. Such as it is.
So these authors contact me, you know, which is flattering, and ask me questions about Paul Bartel, John Guare, John Fahey, etc., and I try to answer without getting myself in trouble or open to gettin sued for libel, and at the time this seems like a good thing. And then the book comes out, and I am more or less a sentence, or less, out of a whole huge book, which makes me feel kind of small. And wishing I had given the authors some of the filthy gossip I held back out of decency (and let’s face it, we’re all victims of filthy gossip, whether true and not).
But it seems to go along with my life. I’ve been a working actor my entire life, I’ve never done anything else (this is an accomplishment to point out to the non-actors out there), and I’ve made it this far (it’s starting to seem) completely under the radar. In one book, the biography of John Fahey, a brilliant and idiosyncratic musician who was actually a friend of my brother’s, it turned out John had a mad crush on me (I was a teen) which I never knew about! So I didn’t have a whole lot of anecdotes to offer the author since I was unaware of having inspired this admiration, or lust. All I could tell him was years later going to see Fahey in a concert in L.A. after which he invited me home to view his collection of Nazi memorabilia. Yes, I was shocked.
And in the book about the iconic film “Rock and Roll High School”, in which, yes, I do play the part of Ms. Steroid, the gym teacher, I was actually a replacement when another actress (having found a better job) quit, and so my part doesn’t make a lot of sense, because they jettisoned the beginning scenes played by the other actress, and I wasn’t in any of the scenes with the Ramones, whom the book is REALLY about. So in that one I admit I was kind of a handmaiden. My agents didn’t want me taking the job, and the second day I arrived on set to see an ambulance taking the director to the hospital—under all the stress they thought he was having a heart attack. Turned out it was anxiety. I think. So I wasn’t 100% sure what was going on, didn’t get any direction, and let’s face it, not one of my A-plus performances. Of course the damn thing turned out to be a beloved cult film success. They write books about.
So that’s my story. I have intimately known super exciting people books should be written about (mainly boyfriends), but they haven't evolved into the type of celebrities the reading public wants to know. Maybe the right obsessed author hasn’t come along. Maybe it should be me! Or maybe someone will write MY biography!
Passions this week include: watching Mamma Mia clips on youtube, slow driving, and room temp tater tots.
I’ve been watching Mamma Mia clips again. The movies are great, but sometimes you just want a bite. Both the original and the sequel both vehemently convey the sentiment of “WE ARE NOT NORMAL. WE WILL NEVER BE NORMAL.” I just watched the clip of Meryl Streep singing the titular song on a roof with a dozen townspeople while three ex-lovers stand still in the house beneath her. Very good.
They say you need to be an aggressive driver in LA. And I said what if I’m aggressive…ly slow at driving? And LA has said Ok. It turns out my car can’t go above 60 mph anyway, so this works out. People go around me, they honk, and I say Ok. Go ahead. Sometimes I see other slow drivers on the road, and we do what’s called a turtle tap (We both blink slowly in the other’s direction).
Room temp tater tots are not better than hot tater tots. I’m not an idiot. But is there another fried food that still tastes pretty good at room temp? No. Only tater tots pass the test. Try this: Leave tater tots out on the table. Pop one into your mouth three hours later. You’re not as disappointed as you think you’ll be.
And now some from the readers…
Laura: “My latest passion is taking my strong prescription glasses off in low-stakes settings. If I'm sitting in a boring meeting I'll take them off and everyone becomes a blob and my surroundings are instantly fuzzy. It it's kind of fun!”
Ben: “It brings me a bit of joy to overhear small talk at my neighborhood grocery store. Today I heard a nice exchange between a grocer and a customer that made me feel like, 'oh, nice, people here care about each other, even if they're basically strangers'.”
Tara: “My current small passion is buying a half dozen day-old bagels for $2 from my local café. I then immediately freeze them and enjoy them one-by-one throughout the week. So delicious and cheap!”
If you’d like to submit a passion, just reply to this email with 1-2 sentences about why you like it.
-Jo