New Focus For Blog

My friend started a blog a couple of weeks ago. He is my next door neighbor. I enjoy reading his blog and I think you will too so I will give you the link at the end of this entry.

In the past, I have only written entries for my blog once every couple of weeks because not much goes on in my life most of the time. One of the things I enjoy about my friends blog is that he updates it several times a week and I find it interesting to read what he does during his life.

So I am making a new pledge to the readers of this blog. I am going to write an entry as frequently as possible. Most of the time it will be kind of boring. But the point of this blog was so people back in Chicago, or in other parts of the country, could keep up with my life should they so desire. I got away from that when I started writing about my experiences as an extra. They are pretty funny and I became paranoid that no one would want to read the blog unless there was something really funny in it.

There will still be funny stuff that goes on in my life. And I will continue to write stories about life as an extra that I haven't written here before and maybe a few new extras.

Here is the link to my friends blog.

www.thelifeandtimesofbck.blogspot.com

Support System

I am very lucky that I have a great support system in my life. Some people I know don’t have that. I have a very supportive family. My parents have always been great in letting me find my own way and in helping me whenever I need it. My sister is probably my biggest supporter. She is always coming to shows, bringing friends, telling people about me, and letting me know the truth about what she sees. She is not afraid to tell me if something I am in is not as good as it could be. That is a rare thing to have in a person’s life. I also have a terrific group of friends that are always interested in what I am up to and supporting me in any way that they can.

Just when I am feeling down about my life, I got a great phone call from my friend I will call Taiwan. I call him that because he lives there. He and I became friends in high school. We went to different colleges, but we kept the friendship up. We also lived together in Chicago for a year. He is the friend I have known the longest, and he also knows me pretty well.

He moved to L.A. for about 3 years until about 2000, when he moved to Taiwan. He called me to give me a little pep talk. He made me really feel good about my talent and myself. He told me not to give up. Never give up. He knows that right now things are not going the way that I want them too, but I have to do what I have to do to survive. At least I am pursuing a noble goal. Something other people do not do. He made me feel a lot better about what I am doing out here. He is also one of the most interesting people that I know. When I have more time I will write some more stories about him. But here is a quick one.

The summer between my junior and senior year, I would go over to Taiwan’s house just about every day. We would play Nintendo, and then we would go to the high school to practice wrestling because we were both on the team. At his house, we would usually eat lunch or snacks. One day I was searching in the pantry for something to eat and I came upon a bag of popcorn. I asked him if I could eat it. He told me to give it to him and he checked the bag. He then told me that I could eat it. I put a handful in my mouth and started chewing. It tasted really gross. I started coughing and spitting out the popcorn. Taiwan yelled at me to not spit the popcorn out, that there was nothing wrong with it. I checked the expiration date on the bag and it had expired 5 years ago. I told Taiwan that and he started laughing and saying, “I know I know”. Then I got pissed at him for letting me eat it if he knew that it was expired. He just laughed and kept saying “I can’t believe you ate it, I can’t believe you ate it”.

Sell Out

Taxes are coming up in a couple of months and I have been going over all of the money that I made last year. I was surprised at how little I made. I mean really surprised. For a thirty-year old college graduate who is reasonably intelligent, I made no money. I would have made as much money if I worked at a fast food joint over the last year.

Taking a look at what I made, what I owed in credit cards and what I would continue to make if I kept temping, I had to bite the bullet and get a decent paying full time job. I found one that will allow me to make enough money to live and enough left over to pay all of my credit card debt that I have racked up over the last 7 months living here.

The job I got is working at a company that is a wholesale distributor of electronics. Their office is right outside downtown L.A. on the top floor of a warehouse. Right across the street is a scrap metal business and all over are trucking companies. Basically it is a shit box.

The owners of the business are 4 brothers from Israel. All of the other people working there are either from China, the Philippines, or the one guy who is Russian. That does not bother me at all. What bothers me is that everyone speaks in their native language except when they are talking to me. The problem is when they are talking in the hall way my name will come up. I think they are talking to me, so I go into the hallway and say “Yes” to which they always tell me they are not talking to me. This happens about 4 times a day.

The Russian guy is named Igor. Yes, I work with a person named Igor. He sits in the back and fixes equipment. He watches movies or Christian programming on TV while he is working. He tried to get me to attend his church, because I said yes when he asked me if I was a Christian. I am sure that it is going to come up again. Oh, and he looks EXACTLY like a poor man’s Ivan Drago, the bad guy in Rocky 4.

I hate every moment I am there. I hate that they really don’t know what I am doing. The guy that worked in the position before me did a lot of stuff for them. Fixed computers, sold product, invoiced product, talked to clients, talked to customers, answered the phones for technical support, and shipped defective products back to the producer. They really don’t know HOW he did this, but they expect me to do it. I am not trained at all on anything that I am supposed to do. The woman who is “training” me wants to go on vacation in a month, FOR a month. She will be going back to the Philippines. So every time that they ask her how I am doing she keeps telling them that I am doing great, and I am having no problem with any part of the job. I keep telling her that I don’t know what I am doing, but she keeps insisting that I am doing great.

And I also just found out that the only let people take vacation after working there for one year. And then you get 5 days. 5 DAYS. That is unheard of! Also we work 9 hours a day. In California there is a law that you pay people overtime after 8 hours every day. But it does not matter to them because everyone is salaried. So that is the kind of company it is. I hate it. I hate that I have to work there for at least a couple of months, but most of all I hate myself because I have to do this.

Nothing is going on acting wise. Not that it would matter, because these guys would never let me go anywhere during the day anyway. So I will have to get by with just doing my improv classes and hoping that I can perform soon. Or maybe I can get another job that is better and then I won’t dread getting up in the morning every day.

Back In The Saddle

I have been itching to perform lately. I guess I am just tired of waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever does. It is pilot season right now, so agents and managers are busy getting auditions for their current clients and don't have time to look at new people who don't have any L.A. credits to their name. Either that or I am really ugly and every time I send my headshot to them they open it and have the dry heaves until they can throw it into the garbage. If that is the case then I am in some real trouble out here. Nevertheless I keep mailing them out hoping someone takes an interest in me.

Last week I saw an ad in Back Stage West for auditions for a place called the L.A. Connection Comedy Club. Back Stage West is a newspaper that tells you what is going on in the L.A. acting world. It is one of the "trades" as people here refer to that sort of thing.

I go to the theater which is in Sherman Oaks, not to far away from me. I really don't like improv auditions because I have to feel comfortable with a person to really have a good scene with them at an audition. There are only about 7 of us auditioning, including on Armenian kid who is 14 and he is only auditioning for school credit.

Sidenote: I am 30 years old and can barely grow any facial hair. This kid was 14 and had a five o'clock shadow that I could never get if I live to be 100.

The audition consists of a quick silent warm-up, 3 short 2 person scenes, and doing 3 character voices or imitations. I did not think that I had a particularly strong audition, but I was accepted into the theater.

I start out going to classes once a week, and when they think I am ready, they will start putting me into shows. My first class was Monday. It has been raining for a week straight here and everything is beginning to flood. I was driving up the 101 North and traffic was HORRIBLE. I had never been in traffic that bad. I was going to be really late if it kept going this way. A couple of miles up I found out why it was so bad. The 101 had flooded on both the North and South sides. In the direction that I was going, there was only one lane that was shallow enough for cars to get through it. This entire part of the highway was under water. I started to freak out. There way no where I could go. Everything was under water, and if I stopped, I would be holding up the already stalled traffic. I had no choice but to drive forward. I got in behind a mini-van and the water started to get higher and higher. My car is a very small 4 door sedan, and I knew if it got too deep, my car would stall and I would be up a creek. But I kept driving and the water kept getting higher.

I had a friend who went to the University of Illinois. One night around 3 in the morning he couldn't sleep and went driving out in the farmland of central Illinois. It was raining and the road he was on started getting filled with water. He thought it couldn't get much deeper, but it did. When he decided to reverse because it was getting to deep, his car stalled. Then the water got much deeper and his car sunk. Turns out a river had burst it's banks and the excess water all went into the road. His car was ruined.

This was the one thought that went through my mind as I was driving through this lake that was the 101. I kept screaming in the car "Let's go, come on, keep it up", just random words of encouragement for me and my car. When the water got as high as my headlights, I knew I was in deep trouble. But just as soon as my headlights disappeared under the water, they popped back out again and I was going up. I made it! Since there was no traffic after that I made it to class on time.

Class was pretty fun. I am not used to doing short form games, but I got into it and had a good time. I can tell you right now that I could perform tomorrow and be fine. I just need to learn the games that they perform on stage and then I will be ready. I felt good after class, like I was accomplishing something.

They finally shut down the part of the 101 where the water had collected. They also shut down parts of the 5, the 405, and the 710 due to flooding or mud slides. We have received more rain in the past couple of weeks than we did all of last year. I don't mind the rain, but it really makes things difficult to get around when they shut down highways.

But at least I have something positive to look forward to.

Buck Rogers Lets Me Down

One of my favorite shows when I was a kid was “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”. I loved it. I was so excited when they came out with a DVD box set late last year of the entire series. I was surprised to see that it only lasted one and a half seasons because I remember watching it for years when I was a kid. If you don’t know the show it takes place in 2491. Captain William “Buck” Rogers is an astronaut from 1987 who is piloting a shuttle mission when his life support freezes and his orbit takes him back to earth 500 years later. He lives in New Chicago and he works for the earth defense directorate.

It aired from 1980-1981. The first season is fantastic. It is real campy with bad special effects and real cool 70’s funk disco music for all of the action/fight scenes. They also had really bad stunt men and women who looked nothing like the actors, and all of the women in the 25th century are super hot and wear really tight revealing outfits. So it is a lot of fun to watch. In the second season they re-vamped the show. 2 of the characters from the first season, Buck and Wilma Dearing, are now on a space ship called the Searcher and they are looking for other earthlings who fled the earth after WWIII. There is no action, no hot women, it is not funny and the music is gone. To put it bluntly, it sucks. It was cancelled half way through the second season.

One of the things that loved about the show was that in the first season, before Buck would go on his missions, he would always say good-bye to Wilma and other people. He would walk out of the office and they would tell him to be careful. He would always turn and smile and give a thumbs-up. But the way that I remembered it was that he gave the thumbs-up in a special way. Usually when people do it, they have their hand in a fist and their thumb is extended completely up. But I remember Buck would cock his thumb at the first knuckle so that the top part of thumb was horizontal. I remembered it so clearly that I would tell people the story of Buck Rodgers every time they gave me the thumbs up or I gave them the thumbs up. I am sure that I bored everyone with the story. I told my friends whenever we were on the set of projects.

Since the box set is about $75, I have been renting them a disc at a time through Net Flix. When I got the first disc, I eagerly anticipated the show. I watched the first disc and sure enough in one of the first episodes he leaves for a mission and he gives the thumbs up. But he did it like everyone else does it. There was no cocking of the top part of his thumb. I thought that maybe it would come up in a future episode. So I watched the entire first season and no “cocked” thumbs-up. I was devastated. Something that I had believed in for 20 years was just all in my head. I also feel bad because I have been talking about it for so long that I know people might check out the show just because of it. That is the power I have over people.

So another fond memory from when I was a kid is now nothing more than a made up memory.

In For A Penny

I have been temping for the last couple of weeks so I can pay my bills. Since I am union and not able to get much extra work, I have had to go back to working in an office, which is not what I want to do. But, you gotta do what you gotta do.

The first job I had was working for a company that ships pallets of stuff all over the L.A. area. They were going to be audited and they needed someone to go through ALL of their files for the past 6 months. Invoices, shipping receipts, employee files, ALL of it. So I spent most of my time looking through files to make sure they had signatures, dates, insurance forms, shipping receipts, and employee tax forms. Needless to say I was bored out of my mind and had to drink a LOT of coffee to stay awake.

The office I worked in was small, only 5 women were in it, and they were the Accounts Receivable department. The only good factor of this job was a woman named Penny. Penny is a Chinese woman. She came over from China when she was a little girl and had a very stereotypical accent. I don’t think she was too bright either, because she had a difficult time figuring out things in certain situations. Here is one of those incidents that I had with her. Because part of what is funny about it is her accent, I will type it as it sounded to me. You should read it out loud to fully get the idea.

I needed a notebook to keep track of problems that I came across. I was told to ask Penny for a notebook.

B: Hey Penny, do you have a notebook?

(Penny WHIPPED her head around like I had snuck up on her)

P: Wha? Oh, ya shoo. Ahhh, dis is the fi cabinet and you take da fies and you jus take da fies and you put dem in aphabetica orda and den you take dem and you, well afta you put the fies in dem you jus, ahh, well you jus take the otha fies and you, you know, you keep dem in orda, but be sure to jus make sure dat the fies are in orda when you put dem in da cabinet.

B: Uhh, okay. Well I have to do something first, so can I have a notebook?

P: Oh, a notebook. Ya shoo. Here, ahhh, take dis and den ahhh, jus keep track of what you want to in it, jus wri on each page, den when you aah dun, jus rip da page and put in trash. Okay?

B: Sure.

The other thing about Penny is that she will give me jobs to do and then a couple of days after I do it, she will come back and tell me one CRUCIAL instruction that she forgot to tell me that would have changed the way I did the job. I usually had to go back and do it again or just tell her that I did it the way she wanted so I wouldn’t have more work to do. She was also unable to get the printer to work almost every day, and would tell other people that they broke it, even though it was usually a paper jam.

So Penny kept me entertained almost every day as I waded through miles of paper work.

I hope I did a good job, because if I didn’t and they have a bad audit, I could be working with Penny again.

Will and Grace and Bryan

Upscale is not a word that people usually apply to me, or the way I dress. Most of the time I am usually wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Nevertheless, I was booked on Will and Grace as an Upscale Classy Bar Patron. I was excited to work on W&G, because my friends who worked on it said that it is fun and everyone is really nice to you.

I get to the studio and report at my assigned time, 11:00am. I notice that there are only 15 or so extras and that this is the only scene that we appear in. I was hoping that we might only work a couple of hours and then go home. Usually, sitcoms tape on Fridays, but what I didn’t know is that W&G tape on Tuesdays, and that our scene was the last one. So I settled in for a long day.

The biggest excitement came when a small fire started on a curtain in the back of a set. A light was sitting too close to it. They cleared out most of the people from the sound stage and let us take a break, which turned into a 5-hour break because we never went back in to rehearse. We stayed in a room in a production building across that street from the soundstage.

They fed us a FANTASTIC dinner! I guess being one of the higher rated shows on television allows them to pull out all of the stops for their cast and crew. Then they started taping the show around 5pm.

What was really cool about that show was that they would shoot a scene, and then they would take a ten-minute break. During the break, a group of about 10 people that composed the writing team would stand around and come up with about 3 new jokes for the scene. Then they would shoot the scene again with the new jokes in. I was really impressed that these people could just come up with a bunch of funny stuff that quickly. It also seemed really cool that their job is to write funny television shows, which is something that I would love to do.

There is a person who “warms-up” the audience before the show and during the breaks in taping. They play games with the audience, talk about the show, and have people sing to the band that was playing at the top of the audience section. One of the things he told the audience was that the usual price to produce one episode of a prime time sitcom was usually 1 million dollars. The price tag for an episode of W&G is 4.5 million an episode, with most of that money being spent on the 4 principle actors.

The only thing of note that happened to me during the taping happened right before we filmed our scene for the second time. The writers had put their heads together and come up with some new jokes. One of the jokes was for Karen to say,

“I told her everything, except for the fact that I think Robin Williams shines in dramatic parts”

Then the last line of the scene they had for her was,

“I haven’t been this teary-eyed since Bicentennial man”
Debra Messing and Megan Mullally were discussing the last line with the director Jim Burrows. They both thought they could come up with a different Robin Williams movie that was funnier than Bicentennial man. They were standing right next to me and I heard them coming up with different movies. My first thought was Jacob the Liar, but I don’t think anyone saw that movie. So I thought Moscow on the Hudson was such and old movie and a funny title that it would be a good replacement, but of course I didn’t say anything. Debra and Megan kept trying to come up with another movie and Jim had moved on to get ready to shoot. They were discussing the movie where Robin was the teacher at a prep school and one of his students was Robert Sean Leonard but they couldn’t come up with the title.

I never talk to the actors on set, but for some reason I leaned over and said,

“It’s Dead Poets Society”

“That’s it” Debra said. “Jim, what about Dead Poets Society?”

“No,” he replied, “we’ll come up with something else.

Then they shot the scene and the last line was,

“I haven’t been this teary-eyed since Moscow on the Hudson”

I should stick to writing I guess.