Zero stakes when you do theater over Zoom

One thing I learned about screens and videoconferencing the last year-plus is they lower the stakes for everything. No need to ride a bus four hours to Washington, DC, to go to that grad school reunion (“I think I’ll set my computer by my favorite chair here”), nor put on a suit (“How about I wear that rugged forest-man outfit I wore for my video date the other night? That looked good on camera”), nor worry about my hair (“Baseball cap!”)

I didn’t have to discreetly peer at people’s nametags (“They can’t tell if I’m looking at their names written at the bottom of their video box, can they?”), socially lubricate with alcohol (“This? It’s rooibos”), or break into circles of people mingling (“The Zoom organizer assigned us randomly to ‘rooms’ of four people each. Why can’t they just do that in real life?”), and I reassured myself I could leave anytime I wanted by exiting the call and using the same computer to watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica, only to surprise myself by staying to the very end and being the first to say “Yes!” when the organizers suggested we do it again in six months.

As a teenager I enjoyed acting and wanted to pursue it professionally, but didn’t because I was shy. Never would I have imagined “the year of Covid” would get me into theater again. As we all negotiate our way back into real offices, real dating, real fitness classes, let’s not forget the things we never would have dared to do had we not known all we had to lose was our computer connection. Here’s the story of how video-conferencing helped me rediscover an old hobby (excerpted from my daily journal):

xxxday, May xx, 2020

Facebook says today is Vin’s birthday.

Just went to the grocery store. It’s becoming more uneventful. Less of something to satirize. Unless I want to satirize how purely routine it’s become to buy a week’s worth of groceries rather than two days’ worth, and to do it all in a mask at 7:30 in the morning on a Friday. I showered when I got home, and handwashed the clothes and mask I had been wearing at the supermarket. It’s also “second Friday,” when I change my bed linens. If Friday was also the day I cut my own hair and mustache (mustache is Saturdays; hair, for now, is floating, but I think it will also land on Saturdays) then I really would have been bemoaning the accumulation of household tasks. Yesterday, late afternoon after exercising, I said, “I’m going to do it,” and I dusted. Then I vacuumed straight afterward. I did not at all enjoy these tasks; the dusting I made bearable by doing it while on the phone with Mom.

As I sat down to journal (it’s a quarter after nine in the morning) I thought, “Nothing really happened yesterday.” I hadn’t watched another episode of Looking (the two episodes I had watched the night before are still percolating in me), I hadn’t taken an epic bike ride to a new neighborhood, I hadn’t had a socially distanced visit with anyone, I hadn’t video chatted with anyone. I used to have something I believe I called “recovery days”: days in which I didn’t see anyone or do anything particular. I caught up on life and with myself. Have the last two or three months been a recovery day?

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

I was having lunch on the porch yesterday—it was bright and sunny—when I saw Mateo the landlord on the driveway. I called to him (“Mateo!”) but he didn’t hear me, so I stood up and went to the edge of the porch.

“Hey!!” I say.

He turns around just as he’s going in the door to their apartment.

I told him about the curtain rod. He came in and looked at it, said something about “expansors,” went out (he had his mask on, and I’d put mine on as well when he came in my bedroom, so I was only getting 80 per cent of what he was saying) of the house, then came back from the garage with drill and expansors. He fixed the rod for me right then, in about 20 minutes. He has an interesting builder thing, that he lets things drop on the floor (a metal piece from the curtain rod brace, an old expansor), and drills an extra hole somewhere else in the wall just to test where the beam is. Things that to me about a house would be “Don’t break it!” to him he’s happy to be cavalier about, because he knows it’s just a wall, it’s just plaster, you make a hole in it, later you fill it with plaster again, and if it gets to the point when there are too many plaster-filled holes, well then maybe you tear down the wall and put up a new one. The irony is that he, the builder, is the one who would tell you, “It’s just a house.”

After he finished Justin knocked on my door and said he could fix my chair for me (I had asked him about it the day before). It’s now sitting in the kitchen with braces on it while the glue sets.

“While I have you—” I said to Justin, and asked him how easy it would be to get a piece of wood and put it on my keyboard stand and use as a desk. Justin said he might have some extra wood; he’ll also ask Mateo and there’s a hardware store I can go on Newkirk. Or I could just order a desktop, couldn’t I?

Vin wrote me back; I had wished him happy birthday a few days earlier. I told him that “while the world outside is a mess, I got my landlord to fix my curtain rod and my housemate to fix my chair, both in the same day.” He sent me some cartoons he had done about social distancing and the epidemic (someone in Star Wars storm trooper fancy dress and a pair of old skis they had found in the closet while queueing; a guy wearing an electrified hula hoop and face mask while out for a walk in the woods, explaining to his friend on the phone, “Its just a pair of braces a hoolahoop with a small electric current.”

Vin said “I always loved your perspective” “it’s been some years” but he was glad to hear from me. He said that he had changed, he was practically the reverse of what he had been, “But you keep on going.” I didn’t know what he meant. Was he disparaging me? So I asked him what he meant. He said he felt like he had stopped in place, but I kept on going, trying to be happy, making mistakes, learning. We’re going to talk on the phone or video this week.

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Vin and Alana (who’s doing well, has a job, is doing photography, will be buying a house in London) are in an Am Dram group that meets online. Next sketch show they’re doing is Dynasty. He said maybe I can join. I told him that sounds cool.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Supermarket this morning. Was in and out pretty quickly. Some guy—young, blond, buying only like a single-size portion of Yoo-hoo and another of orange juice (he was probably on a meth food run) coughed through his mask, then looked at me holding up his two items and asked if he could get ahead of me at the register while I was already loading the conveyor belt. I looked at him without any particular expression; my mask must have made me look stone-faced, for the guy said, “I guess not.” Then he was pulling down his mask and poking around the other soft drinks.

I got home, and Vin’s “Am Dram” group had responded to a message I had sent earlier, in which I thanked them for inviting me to the group, said Dynasty was one of my favorite shows (it’s the next performance, then said, “I hope I don’t end up as Claudia and burn to death.” Susan in the group sent a “Which Claudia are you today?” GIF with nine images of Claudia, numbered, in various situations. Claudia really never could catch a break, could she? I was going to pick the one of her shooting a gun, but then picked the one of her running away with a child in swaddling clothes, and wrote “Just back from the supermarket and feel like a 7.” Someone else in the group wrote that when he goes to the supermarket he feels like a 4, which is the Claudia with a gun. Well, I felt that way too!

Saturday, June 20, 2020

Am Dram with Vin, Alana, and their mates was brilliant. Earlier in the day, before it started, I was feeling like, “Do I really want to do this?” “It’s going to take time from my writing” “Where is this leading?” Susan had purchased an actual Dynasty script, complete with plastic script cover with the title of the show. Of course, now that I think about it, someone could have illegally come on a copy of the script, then just reprinted them with plastic overs and sold them for ten quid apiece. Even easier: someone could have watched an episode, transcribed it line for line, then sold scripts with a fancy plastic cover. Now that I think about it, that might explain the weird script directions (“Krystal regards Blake” “Kirby regards Jeff” “Krystal, with timbre”). When we got on the Zoom call I asked Susan: did you write this or is it an actual script? Because when I read it, I recalled many of the plot events (Jeff having been poisoned by paint, a conversation with Krystal and Steven in which she says to him, “You were my first friend here”).

“It’s an actual script,” Susan said.

“Because the stage directions were a little unusual. I thought maybe you just talked like that,” I said.

I was cast as Adam, and also did the intro describing what happened in the previous week’s episode. But then we got to a scene with Jeff and Kirby, and Susan had forgotten to cast anyone as Jeff, so I played him as well. My Jeff was amazing: like a jolly businessman, full of optimism about all his deals, including his latest, marrying Kirby, but with a possessive, dominating undertone and a fast temper. There was a line in there:

Jeff: sweetheart, I’m sorry about no honeymoon, for now. But I hope you understand that I have to get back. (on her silence) come on, where’s that Kirby smile?

Kirby; most of its somewhere inside me, I guess. I mean, I’m so happy. These last few days have been like a dream. Flying away to marry the man I’ve been in love with since I was ten years old… being separated form reality. But that parts over now.

Jeff; why? You’re still Mrs Colby. Like the man said: in sickness and in health—in Reno and in Denver. I’m really sticking out today. Still no smile.

Dynasty, “The Downstairs Bride,” episode aired Mar 16, 1983, full credits at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0567502/fullcredits

I was saying his lines with that American businessman spirit (like the American protagonist in Piccadilly Jim)—“in sickness AND in health”—and looking ahead I saw that line “in Reno and in Denver,” and thinking, “What a ridiculous line.” The line was there waiting for me, and I started bubbling over with laughter. As it became an internal feat for myself, whether I could say the line over my own laughter or not, my laughter only got more out of control (to the point I wasn’t even making any more laughing noise, I just had my face seized up and bobbing at the screen), and everyone else started laughing too, which made it even harder for me to say the line over the laughter. Finally I did though.

My eyes were tearing and my nose was running with the laughter; I needed something to wipe them and grabbed the heather gray American apparent short shorts I had been sleeping in, and kept grabbing the shorts again and again. Then after the call Alana wanted me to “show us New York. Take us somewhere,” so I got changed (I had been wearing a white dress shirt with my blue checked blazer, for Adam [and Jeff]; lower body I had my cutoff denim shorts I later showed everyone [“I’m Sammy Jo from the legs down”]) and put on my blue T-shirt. After I got off the call, and I was texting with Vin, my shirt felt funny and I noticed I had been in such an absent-minded rush to get dressed and take my Am Dram partners outside that I had put on my T-shirt backwards.

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Notes from my session with Mary yesterday:

Nobody likes bland.

Be authentic with people.

It’s good to disagree. Most people can take it.

Am Dram can just be for fun. It doesn’t have to be virtuous, or “lead” somewhere.

Friday, July 10, 2020

The Life of Brian in Am Dram.

We all had towels or cloths wrapped around our head for yesterday’s performance. I wrapped my heather gray long underwear around my head, and wore my San Francisco sleeveless flannel shirt, left open. Vin said after the performance, “I’m wondering if we should take this to the next level,” and we talked about original scripts, possible performances before audiences, integration of Zoom and in-person aspects. I had said to Mary after the first performance how, “it could be just fun, or it could go somewhere,” and she pointed out that it’s fine if it’s just fun, it doesn’t have to “go” anywhere: “You don’t have to be virtuous. It’s OK to just have fun.”

And then yesterday I was thinking, “Yeah, Mary, but you don’t know Vin. It always goes somewhere.”

So let’s see.