Painting A Brighter Image of Life

I make it a habit never to walk out of a bad movie. I paid for my movie so I intend to sit there and see it through to the very end. However, I reserve the right to throw things at the screen. My shoe. My phone case. A flaming lighter. Knives. And, at least on occasion, my little brother. Battlefield Earth probably ranks as the very worst movie I’ve ever seen. The prospect of John Travolta playing a giant alien despot with fangs and living dreadlocks should have been enough to scare me off, but my friend and I made a bet of who would last through an actual screening of that film. It amazes me this is the science fiction opus of L. Ron Hubbard. I like to think that people can believe whatever they choose to, but couldn’t scientologists have chosen a good scifi writer to worship? And Travolta has the gall to play the character straight and not ham it up at all. I suppose to him the screenplay was the word of Ron and absolutely incorruptible and had to be taken 100 percent seriously or the thetans would overwhelm him and Pope Tom Cruise would ex-communicate him.

When I was growing up, I took a lot of art classes. Instead of wanting to be an astronaut or a baseball player, the dreams of most little boys, I wanted to be a cartoonist. When I was in fifth grade I won a D.A.R.E. poster drawing contest. I even ended up being second in the whole state. I even started college as an art major, though I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought maybe I would consider graphic design. The supplies were so expensive. I had to buy cut tools, pencils, pens, all sorts of different kinds of paper, canvases, paints, brushes and all sorts of random things. It really added up, as did the amount of work hours required of each project. Add that to several three-hour studio art classes, and I had enough. I ended up in journalism, because I could still go the graphic design route through there if I decided. I had also always enjoyed writing, so it seemed like an obvious choice. It turned out that journalism was the perfect fit for me. I have poor study habits, so being able to write articles instead of taking tests suited me.

I almost gave up on trying to be an actor not to long ago. A couple of months ago, I met a lot of people in the business and went on quite a few auditions and I just kept hearing nothing. At one point I put so much money into it I was almost driven to filing Daytona Chapter 13. The headshots and resumes and traveling everywhere were beginning to take a toll on me physically and my wallet. I took a step back for about a month and just focused on work and getting some money together. I finally bought a decent printer that could print headshots and resumes with out needing new ink every third picture or tenth page. Then I took the time to send out as many as I could. I must have mailed out…I do not know how many but I did not get an answer from anyone. I was almost at the point of saying is this for me, am I good enough. I got a call from a pretty big, well known theatre last week though. I guess everything finally paid off because they asked me in for an audition. Unfortunately I am more nervous about wanting to get the part than actually auditioning. I have to try to not have that mess me up because I do not know when I will get another chance at this.

For a while, my girlfriend was yammering on and on about Jersey Boys, some Broadway play she really wanted to see. At first, I was confused since I thought she was talking about the Jerky Boys. Do you remember the Jerky Boys? They were really big when I was younger. Basically, they were the masters of the crank call. They’d make up characters to play and put on false voices and keep people talking on the other end of the line for sometimes up to an hour about the most ridiculous thing. They even made a movie about them. They used to record their crank calls and release them on CDs like music albums. I had no idea what the Jerky Boys looked like before the movie. For one thing, I was never sure how many of them they were. There were only two and both were out-of-shape guys who wore old clothing that looked like they got it from out of a thrift shop’s garbage. But soon after the movie came out, I stopped hearing about them. I don’t think the movie made a lot of money so I’m thinking that hurt their fame. Or maybe they just had their 15 minutes and then it was over. I’d love to know what they’re doing now. What kind of careers could they have picked up after all that?

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