American Idle

Being a typical American sheep (is the singular of sheep actually sheep?), I watch American Idol. And like most, I especially enjoy the early episodes, where we can stand by and watch people just suck, even though some of them really think they don't. It's funny and sad and scary and as of tonight, I can totally relate.

Plus, I have a whole new respect for Wil Wheaton.

A few weeks ago, trying to figure out how I'd spend all the extra cash in my wallet that I'm not saving for the day Medicare and Social Security run dry, I was surfing the Web looking at all the local theater goings-on around Ithaca. There's plenty of it year round, but especially in the summer. And lo and behold, I find that the big local place, the Hangar, is having auditions for adult parts. It's a cattle call which they use to cast people in whatever parts comes up over the year.

It was not much of a leap from reading that to my head filling with visions of me on stage at the Tony's, accepting my award from Nathan Lane with what modesty I could muster. Surely a company that hires big-name Equity Actors would surely recognize the local talent in front of them as superior.

Days later, I had swung the pendulum from the superego to the far side of my ego -- I knew I couldn't memorize the required monologue, I wasn't that good a singer even when I did plays in high school, what the hell was I thinking? (Meanwhile my id was saying, "download Internet Porn!")

I've fretted and stewed over trying out right up until this evening, talking myself in and out of it numerous times. Having been cast in a play in the meantime -- did I mention that I'll be playing Pat Robertson as if he were protrayed by Peter Lorre playing Renfield in Dracula? How could I neglect that? -- I let myself again think, damn, maybe I can make it on that main stage.

I'm under no illusions about my part in this play (called Chapel of Love). This is a production of locals, all of whom are friends, some of them work with my wife at the IC campus, so I fell into it and was welcomed, not because of any great aptitude on my part, but because I was a willing, warm body, and they needed people. I'm gratified that they seem to like what I'm doing though. Again, that helped my confidence in going for this audition.

After weeks of hemming and hawing, I called and scheduled myself for an audition for Friday night at 9:30. My first clue at the insurmountability of the task should have been that the location for the test was the IC School of Music building. That's perhaps the most talent-filled structure on the campus, maybe even in town -- unless you count the beer-funneling talents of many a fraternity at Cornell. Those guys can really drink, and fast!

I also learned I couldn't sing a song a cappella (having been brainwashed by American Idol, I figured that was how it was done). They wanted me to be accompanied on the piano. So I went out and spent 14 bucks on a book of music from the musical Godspell. I figured I should sing something I knew by heart, and my friend Mark and I used to sing the tune "All For the Best" to entertain folks and I still liked it.

Then today, I spent the hours between 4 and 7pm beating a monologue from Neil Simon's Prisoner of Second Avenue into my head. It's from the POV of a guy who recently lost his job, so I thought based on past experience, I could relate.

Finally, I popped a NoDoze with hopes of chemical pep, and then, I did the audition.

And it was fine. Okay. Maybe even "good." I dropped a line in the monologue (not that the art director folks knew, they didn't have a copy). When I sang, I think I was pretty flat. I don't know what key I sing in, since I'm no musician. And I did some stupid hand gestures that in retrospect I think made me look like a mime. And despite promises to myself, I was a bit nervous. Also, I can't remember if I shook hands with both the people there, or just one... that bugs me.

The artistic director laughed through my monologue at the right parts though to be honest, I wasn't expecting to get any laughs, as I figured they'd be so damn tired by that hour they'd just want to go home, so the chuckles threw me a little. I'd made a crack when I started to sing saying "I hope this doesn't turn out like American Idol" (got another laugh) and when it was over, they said "That was good. And see, we're much nicer than those guys on American Idol." And they were.

Then silence and smiles.

Then I realized, that was it. It was over. I quickly calculated how long the last person in the room had been auditioning: easily ten times the amount of time I had. So it was all over.

I thanked them all for the opportunity to do this. I left.

On the way home, my wife bought me a brownie ice cream sundae as a reward for going through with the audition. I could tell she knew as well as I did, before I even said anything, that it had amounted to nothing in the long run.

Later at home, watching Wonderfalls (WATCH IT! Fridays at 9pm on Fox!), I sat there and actually caught myself thinking: They might still get in touch with me for a call back. They might. They really might.

My hubris can still amaze me.

Now its almost 3am, the caffeine pill is still muscling through my blood stream, and I know the truth of it. They won't call. They won't e-mail. And it's fine. It is. I'm really not prepared to make the time/energy commitment to a major play this summer, nor probably ever again -- I already resent the Chapel of Love play for eating into my time sitting around doing nothing.

Besides, I'm no longer 17. "Play practice" is no longer a good way to meet girls (not that I ever mastered that either). And I'm not the top of the heap of talent -- to think I was even close to the top in high school in 1988 only underscores how untalented the entire place must have been. Perhaps if our director back then had actually directed plays instead of just handing out the scripts and essentially saying "have at it"... maybe things would be different. Maybe I'd have stuck with it? Doubtful though-- I never auditioned for plays in college because there were people there studying to do it for a living, how could I compete? It took me three years to even figure out what the hell I wanted out of college besides free meals in the dining hall.

So I shall do my job in Chapel of Love, and maybe even do more such community performances in the future if these same people will have me, which would be nice. And I can safely go back to my usual creative pipe dreams of painting and writing and getting on a reality show, preferably on an island where I can earn a million bucks, or at the very least lose more weight.

RSS Feed Me

With perhaps the exception of plain vanilla HTML, I have always come to cool technology late. Ironic considering my so-called career. I didn't get into Napster until it was pretty much on the way to death. I got an iPod late in the game. I didn't even start blogging very soon when it became a relatively big meme (though in retrospect, I started about the time as a lot of other now big name blogs and had I turned it into something other than a diary of every time I fart and belch, maybe it would be something big today. Though it is important to tell the world of my bodily functions, I suppose.) So it should be no surprise that it only this week embraced RSS feeds as my new way to get news from most blogs.

If you don't know what RSS is and how it can fill your life with info-overload goodness, read this article post haste. It’s the kind of thing I'd likely have written for Access Magazine had it not been put out of its misery low those many years ago.

The article harkens RSS readers to the modern equivalent of PointCast... if you remember that, you'll probably be scared. But had blogs existed in 1996 when PointCast was around, the world would have been a much different place.

(Speaking of coming into things late: everyone who has ridiculed me for having cellular phone that looks like the kind that bad guys used to use on Miami Vice can stop -- as of this week, we're the proud owners of not only a flip phone with a color screen and voice dialing -- its also a camera phone. I hope to figure out how to use it sometime by the end of April.)

Anyway, the point of this is to point out that this site now has, you guessed it, an RSS/XML Feed. If you've got an RSS Reader, grab it and enjoy. Or not. I'd hate for you to miss out on seeing the cool frog graphic.

[[Even dumberer of me... turns out Movable Type was generating an XML page for me for months without my paying attention to it.]]

Magnety Goodness

Please buy these for me. Please?

Welcome to Magnum

After the big deal I made out of his big brother's birth, I feel bad that I don't have a big story to tell or that I'm not even there -- already, his life of being a second-child/second-banana starts -- but born today, sometime this morning, I dunno when, was the newest Griffith, my nephew Joshua Warren (or as we'll pronounce it for the rest of his life, a one syllable "Wahrn").

Paul (my brother, the kid's father) and I have both agreed to only call him "Magnum" tho, as Paul wanted to name him Thomas Sullivan, but was shot down.

He weighs 7 pounds, 1 ounce, so he's already starting out smaller than his big brother John was at the same age of about 10 minutes. (See, I'm already comparing the kid to his older sibling... "why couldn't you weigh as many ounces as your brother?"... I'll give him a complex, just in case his parents don't.)

Blame Canada

I'm in Toronto, Canada, heading into the final four hours of the show my company puts on that I have to help "run." Which is a misnomer, as all the hardwork I did for it was weeks ago, I don't consider the public speaking part to be much work. One of the events guys complimented me on my ability with the people in the audience, noticing that some editors have that ability, while others are withdrawn almost to the point of autism. In this industry (well, my part of it, which is tech journalism), we call what I have "the schmooze gene.")

We drove up here on Monday night, "we" being myself and Joe (don't bother following the link… the bastard hasn't blogged since October of last year!). He flew in from the sunny climate of Florida to the arctic tundra that was spreading across the city of Syracuse. The weather was calling for a few inches to hit the grounds just after we left central NY.

My long suffering wife spared no expense in pointing out that whenever I leave for a business trip, the snow comes in a surge. She neglects to forget the entire months of January and February when she didn't have to move a scrap of snow herself. Oh, how I pity her. Yes.

Highlights of the trip up and throughout the show:

• Expecting a long delay at the border crossing, Joe and I got our driver's licenses ready and prepared for the thorough body cavity search. Instead, a bored guy in a booth holding a magazine asked us where we were from, where we were going, business or pleasure, and waved us through. It took about 20 seconds.

• On the Queen Elizabeth Way, first sign we saw was for "Toronto -- 115" and we both said at the same time, "115 Miles!?!"

  We're not good with the metric thing.

• Hotel's should all have high speed Internet in every room. It's not that expensive, especially with Wi-Fi. I should know, I write about it EVERY DAMN DAY. So to get a room without it was a horrible blow. When asking to switch rooms to get high speed, the woman at the counter said, "We do have dial-up Internet access in each room." As if that would appease us. That's like offering a lollipop to a crack junkie.

• Joe's sick --- he's always sick, but he doesn't think so -- but was ill enough that he ditched me for dinner last night, which I had with two women from the research side of the company. We ended up going to a pub/restaurant to get some more authentic St. Patty's Day vibe and ended up next to a dance floor pushing out million decibel dance music, such as extended versions of "Billie Jean."

• All of Toronto's downtown has a basement that doubles as a mall. It's fascinating, and bizarre and fun to walk around and try not to get lost. I tend to think of myself as having an almost infallible sense of direction (probably because I live with a woman who probably never find our car in most mall parking lots without me), but this Toronto underground is tough. I eventually found my way to the Eaton Centre, the big four story mall in town.

  (Hysterically funny story: My high school girlfriend's family once took a vacation trip up to Canada and her younger sister, who was mentally retarded and a bit overweight) was obsessed with going to the Eaton Centre. Turns out to be a very large disappointment for her, as she thought the place was the "Eatin' Centre" and it did not have a preponderance of places to do said "eatin'". If you can stop laughing after that, you're made of stone, people.)

• When Joe and I finally got switched to new rooms, we each got suites that were over sized, including full living room furniture and a six-seat dining room table. The beds, however, were trundle beds, hidden up in the wall. I was hanging with Joe in his room and on his first try pulling it down, he dropped it square on his foot. (Again… pure comedy gold.)
  

Not much else to report. The show's fine, the people from my company are great, and blah blah blah. But I'm ready to go home.

The Quest for A Life

It's not a secret that when I moved back to Ithaca in 2002, my life was thrown out of whack.

For many, many years, I was the one going to work and coming home to the wife and mutts each night, greeted at the door by the little woman with a cocktail in hand. She cooked like Betty Crocker, and she looked like Donna Reed. And it was good.

After my last job layoff, I spent a year working from home, me in the basement, the wife on the second floor. We would meet in the kitchen at lunch time to make a meal and then watch the Young and the Restless. And it was okay.

We moved to Ithaca and tables were turned a full 180 degrees. Now the Wife leaves for work each day and I sit in the basement at home and toil away, killing the spam and feeding the online beast its steady diet of ordered ASCII.

For awhile, it was not so good. Not so good at all. Last winter, for example, I was in the throes of depression so bad, I felt like I was mushed in one of Gojira's foot prints. We haven't reconnected with friends like I'd thought would be possible, probably because, lets face it, no one is who they were 10 or 15 years ago. The community seemed so far away, both physically and otherwise -- how does some chump who used to be a student here become a townie after years away?

And now, suddenly, there's a plethora of choices for things I can do and I can't do them all.

It all started when I stumbled upon the fact that a very popular local theater is having auditions in a couple of weeks to fill out the casts for their summer season. My god, could this be what I was looking for? Back in the footlights? It had been so many years, and I'd considered doing this before (aborted attempts all)... but now that I was here, could I make a go?

(My head is filled with delusions of grandeur still, as I can't contemplate trying out and not getting in. I live in a valley filled with many a professionally trained starving actor, but I still figure I'm golden. Idiot.)

I'm still a fortnight away from that audition, but in the meantime found myself in another -- at a get together last weekend with some folks the Wife works with, a woman there spoke of a rehearsal she needed to attend, and I asked what. It was slipped that I might try out for the aforementioned group and the woman said she and some others are doing a short play soon and would have some auditions for it that very week!

Long story turned mercifully short: I have been cast to play the part of Pat Roberson -- yes, the guy from the 700 Club -- in a play snarkily confronting the rise of the Religious Right in politics, and the GOP in particular. God is also a character in the play, and will be portrayed as a drag queen. And it makes fun of just about every other idiot currently in charge, from Delay to Ashcroft to Santorum .

It's not Avenue Q, but maybe I can talk them into using puppets.

Being in a play is great, and I'm looking forward to it, but of course, as I go into this other things crop up that could very interestingly occupy my time. For instance, the Ithaca Police are starting a second ever (though first I'd heard of it) Community Police Academy, basically a weekly class where they get cops to come in and tell people what they do. Its ten weeks, requires a 4-hour ride along with the cops -- and its totally free. But I can't do it, because I'll miss the first two classes due to my business trip and the play. Figures. Next, I figure I'll get invited to have a long engrossing dinner with Kurt Vonnegut and Barenaked Ladies and I'll have to beg off.

Meanwhile, I'm worried I might stretch myself two thin, and I probably will for a couple of weeks. Now, I've got to go write some stuff and start memorizing a monologue for an audition (its from a Neil Simon play, from a pissed-off guy who just got laid off... been there, done that) and learn my lines as Pat Robertson. Praise the lord and pass the biscuits.

So Long, Spalding

It was confirmed yesterday that Spalding Gray killed himself in January when he went missing. I wish it came as a surprise.

When I was young, I remember thinking of suicide as the ultimate in cowardice, the last step of a person without the guts to face even the most trivial of problems. It was very black and white to me then. In my high school there was a point where a lot of people were thinking about the effects of suicide, when a city judge killed himself by driving into a bridge abuttment after being caught doing something dirty, and his son (one of 8 or 12 or 14 kids or something, one of whom was in my class) reacted to the news by swallowing a shot gun.

Obviously it's a lot more gray (no pun intended) now. I think I realized this when I was visiting my maternal grandfather once in the hospital in 1992 a short time before he died. I was there alone with him and someone came in and asked him in front of me about a DNR. I think I just about came out of my chair, saying something like "he doesn't want that!" and at the same time thinking, "What the hell am I talking about?" The man was degenerating before us and why would he want to keep going if he had a peaceful (or at least natural) way out? Who was I to say?

Still, after having my dad in the hospital last week, I can't imagine I'd react much differently in the same spot today, which bugs me no end.

A Time for Every Illness

It has been a strange week.

Though not so strange as to pull me much out of my normal routine: wake, shower (sometimes), dress (mostly), spend three hours checking e-mail and reading about Wi-Fi, eat lunch while watching Curb Your Enthusiasm (Mondays) or The Daily Show (Tues-Friday), spend another four or five hours writing about and editing stories about Wi-Fi, send e-mails, and wait for the wife to come home.

Between Monday and Tuesday I made five different trips up to the Ithaca College campus, mostly to drop Bon at work since we had our mini-van in the shop getting a new bumper but on after a little fender bender in a friend's driveway. On my second trip up, walking around Bon's office, I saw a poster for a speech being given by a former FBI profiler, himself a former graduate of the IC school of music. Further proof that no one ever gets a job in their major. Bon hadn't told me about this free lecture -- she likes to mention when sopranos will be on campus singing opera or ballet recitals, but neglects to mention anything about guys tracking serial killers, one of my favorite things.

I made the trip home to drop her off and barely made it into the lecture as seats were at a premium. The Ithaca chief of police was there, and over 200 students. I asked him a lot of questions, thought I was making a slight nuisance of myself actually. It was fun. Too bad he spent all his time talking about a case I already knew a lot about.

On Thursday, my brother called me, as he does all the time. He didn't sound any different on the phone -- he always greets me by saying "Hey, douchebag," or "hey, scumbag," which would be offensive in any other family I guess, but not in mine -- however he was calling to tell me not to worry, but that Dad was in the hospital.

Dad and Mom had just come out to Ithaca the night before and had dinner with us. I think it might be the first time they had Thai food. I knew Dad had a cold but he seemed well on the mend. I figured red curry chicken would certainly cure what ails him. It made my nose run, that's for sure.

He made a trip to the doctor Thursday and the doc sent him direct via ambulance to the St. James Mercy emergency room with a temperature of 104 and a preliminary diagnosis of pneumonia. Chest x-rays didn't confirm that (its mostly likely just a chest infection of some sort I've since been told), but they wanted him admitted anyway.

He's been there since, and I've talked to him several times. His temp is down, they're pumping him with IV fluids and antibiotics, and he gets to pee while in bed, so I think he's almost enjoying himself. Maybe it's the sponge baths.

This is his second trip to the hospital in the last few months, as he had a kidney stone attack not long ago either. Stones in the kidneys are something all Griffith men have had... my first and so far last one was Groundhog's Day in 1998. We blame Grandma's gout.

It took Dad a few hours to get checked in, as they waited to get him a private room. Being the family member of a hospital employee -- my mom runs the hospital's LifeLine program, which I always explain to the unknowing as an "I've fallen -- and I can't get up!" program -- is getting a private room. Such are the perks. That and all the Jell-o you can eat.

Dad told me the other day he thinks he exacerbated his cold/flu/infection by taking a hot shower in the afternoon before his doctor's appointment, which probably shot his body temperature up a couple degrees. This from the man who put me through one of my most torturous moments of childhood: he placed me in a bathtub filled with ice water once when I had a fever. The only greater agony I had before I was 10 years old was zipping myself into the fly of my jeans, if you know what I mean. Or maybe the time in second grade when I was playing Duck-Duck-Goose and hit my head on the gym floor trying to sit down too fast...

I thought about driving out to Hornell last night to see him, but when I talked to him on the phone yesterday afternoon he said not to bother. He figured he'd be out soon, Sunday at the latest. I feel guilty for listening to him and staying home.

I just got off the phone with Dad and he's going to stay another day. They took out one of his IVs though and he's actually considering walking up and down the hallway. I would make a joke, but this is a man who my family still counts on for lifting heavy items. I guess those days are over. His emphysemic wheezing should have been our likely first clue though.

Sickness is going round the family this week. Bon has felt like her head was stuffed with sweaty socks all week. My usually angelic nephew's a screaming bag of sniffles, so I'm told. And my mother, god bless her, went into a dentist appointment and they yanked out a abscessed wisdom tooth way in the back of her mouth. Big fun for everyone.

But me, I'm healthy. I have made it through the winter sans a head cold. I guess I'm just looking forward to another week of the ol' routine. Much as I hate it sometimes... okay, a lot of the time... it beats the alternative of hacking, sniffling, wheezing and bleeding that the rest of my family seems to have adopted.