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Welcome to Crazy Person on the Bus--
the blog version of that guy talking to himself on the bus. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes scary, sometimes insightful, but mostly it's just sad and disconnected rambling.
It is Tuesday, November 13th. How the hell did that happen? I just got an e-mail from my good friend Bree who produces Adventures in Mating in New York. She mentioned some sort of glitch on my web-site where the page with my blog wouldn't update beyond April. Yeah, technical glitch. Let's run with that.
Over the last seven months I've kissed a bear, had the #1 best-selling show at the MN Fringe Festival, visited my childhood home in Portland, OR, and quit my day job at Mill City Museum. Can you guess which of those events I think about the most? It's like a personality test...
Up next on my plate of busy-ness: producing two Holiday shows. We're roughly two weeks from opening and the prime time show, Fat Man Crying, is actually written. This is a milestone. That frees me up to do things like buy all the props and the costumes, rehearse, continue the advertising push, update this blog, figure out how to build a set, etc. And when I say build a set what I really mean is build a wall with a window in it. At this point in my career, I can force myself to tackle most aspects of creating theater because I've had enough experience to figure out how to do it myself. I have no experience building sets. All I have to do is build a wall. That should be easy, right? People have been building walls for a long time. There are a lot of people in the world who know how to build walls. I've watched people build walls--physically and emotionally. I took "Wood Technology" for two years in high school. I made a bookshelf and a weird candle holder. Sadly, all I remember from that class is the girl who "routed" herself twice. She gave both her thumbs a nice rounded finish. I can still see the blood mixing with the sawdust. And that's really the image that's stuck in my mind when I think about building a wall myself. Wish me luck--insert cutesy emoticon here! Honestly, I wish I could go back to kissing bears. That was really easy in comparison...
Time to get off the bus.
It is Monday, April 9th. Well, I haven't been posting every day like I claimed I would in my last post. However, I did fulfill the part of the last post about drinking whisky and playing my Wii. Seriously, I just put that part in there as a joke, but then it sounded really good so I worked on my BARON lines, sipped whisky and then kicked some AI booty in double tennis. Strangely, this seemed like a good way to retain lines. With great power, comes the possibility of even greater irresponsibility. Today, I will try claiming I will do something else ridiculous and see if it happens: I"m going to get everything on my to do list done:
Write some of the Scrimshaw Brothers' "script" for Five Fifths.
Design a brochure for a theater in Wisconsin.
Drink whisky.
Play with the Wii.
Take a nap.
Do a push up.
And at least contemplate the possibility of eating a fruit.
If I don't have time for everything, I'll just skip the time consuming productive stuff.
Time to get off the bus.
Holy crap, it is Thursday, April 5th, 2007. I think half of the blogging posts on the internet are apologies for not posting. I will not apologize to people who may or may not be reading because I have a life. Instead, I will entertain myself with blatant lies. From now on, I'm going to post EVERY DAY! Yep, right after I exercise every day, I will quickly update my blog. Then I will write for at least a half an hour. Then I will eat at least five portions of fruits or vegetables and find some way to inject cancer fighting anti-oxidants directly into my eyeballs while I call my mother and become more politically active/aware.
What I've actually been doing is launching the new weekly run of Adventures in Mating. At the end of every show, we are collecting audience tales of their own BAD DATE experiences. Apparently, vomiting on your date is not actually rare! Amazing and terrible, terrible and amazing.
I've also been in rehearsals for The Baron at The History Theatre. The show is the life story of the professional wrestler, Jim "The Baron" Von Rashcke. Not surprisingly as the scrawny actor, I get to be menaced by the The Baron multiple times. I've pretended to be menaced by large men a lot in my comedy career. I'm usually menaced by another comedian who happens to be taller than me. It's great fun to be menaced by someone who actually knows at least ten different ways to kill me right on the spot. And I think the two directors might actually ask him to kill me if I don't learn my lines. Soooo, off to learn my line, eat my vegetables, and, oh let's be realistic, drink whisky and play with my Wii in the middle of the afternoon. Time is precious.
Time to get off the bus.
It is Thursday, February 8th, 2007. At least that's what my computer tells me and I'm choosing to believe it. My calendar tells me I'm supposed to go to work and teach children about wheat, then get a haricut, buy props and finish writing a few extra scenes for Adventures in Mating which opens in less than a week. Unfortunately, my know-it-all calendar has no clever advice for me about when I should learn my lines for the show. Stupid calendar.
Thankfully, some other projects are wrapping up now so I can focus all of my attention on Mating and be guilt free. (For my feelings in regards to sentences like that, see the post below). Last Saturday was my last performance of the Mystery Cafe show, Let's Outsource the Boss. I was part of the touring cast which means a company rents a space for an event, then hires Mystery Cafe to come there. Which means we have little to no control or familiarity with "the venue". Some of the places we had no control over this season were: The Iowan ballroom Buddy Holly last played at before he died, the 50th floor of the IDS tower ( we could almost see every other venue we performed at from there), the brand new Student Center for the University of River Falls, the super-ritzy Minneapolis Club, the super-black Guthrie black box space (I've never been in a dressing room bathroom with a good view), and finally Mystery Cafe's home base these days, The Crowne Plaza North in Brooklyn Center.
The Crowne Plaza generated my favorite anecdote of the season. My calendar is telling me I don't have time to write about it, but I don't always have to do what my calendar tells me. In December, we did a show for a medical group that consisted of about 50 women and one drunk guy who happened to be their boss. The show went very well. Woo-hoo and all that. After the show, I was waiting outside the hotel to get a ride home from my wife. There were a couple of people staying at the hotel hanging out chatting and smoking. Then a woman who had been at the show walked out and said, "Hey, good job." The hotel people looked mildly curious. Two women then came out together and said, "That was great. Thanks for giving us such a good time." The hotel people looked intrigued. A big clump of women came out and said various compliments-- "Thanks for doing that.", "Maybe we'll see you again next year", "That was pretty physical--you must be tired.", "Everybody did a good job, but I liked your part the best", etc. Then, the hotel people put out their cigarettes, gave me a withering stare as if to say, "We don't like gigolos here in Brooklyn Center", and went back inside.
Time to get off the bus.
It is Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 7:52 AM. In the last month, my life had been one long work unit. Interrupted for brief hour long bursts of "healthy" video gaming with my shiny new Wii. Otherwise, I have ate, slept, and drank and drank and drank Adventures in Mating.
I have said lots of absurd words multiple times, but I never thought I would have any call to say the word "mating" this many times in my life, let alone in the last month. Mating. Mating. Mating. Normally, when you repeat a normal word enough it begins to sound strange. Strangely, when you repeat a strange word enough it begins to sound normal. My wonderful wife, Sara, is co-producing the show with me. She's handling the business end of our Mating. See? I say things like that all the time without stopping to think that people might not know what I'm talking about when I say "My wife is handling the business end of our Mating", or "Yesterday, I put a lot of work into our Mating web-site, but today it's time to really concentrate on my Mating performance. There are some kinks I want to work out", "All of the Mating items we ordered on the internet should be here soon", "This is the best picture of Mating we have", etc. I say things like this to my shiny, new parent-in-laws without batting an eye. Not that I want to bat my eyes at my parent-in-laws. The point is I am a man obsessed. I am Ahab. And I have a whale. A MATING whale. And so, I offer this is a re-cap of what my blog would have been had I written one in January. Mating. Mating. Mating. Wii. Mating. Wii. Wii. Wii. Mating. Mating. Wife. Wii. Wii. Wife. Mating. Wife. Wife. Mating. Wii. Mating. Mating. MATING. MATING! MATING! MATING! MATING! Check back for more details as my sanity returns.
Time to get off the bus
It is Saturday, December 16th, 2006 at 1:38 PM. I have returned from a long blogging hiatus. I have a wonderful excuse for not posting for such a long time: marriage. Getting married takes a lot of time. It's like putting on a show and then feeding the whole audience. In fact, my now-wife, Sara and I struggled to keep the wedding from becoming a show. But, hey, when you come right down to it, we were inviting two hundred people to come watch and hear us do this thing that we thought it was worth other people spending their time and money (in Target gift registry items) to see and hear. Why not make it entertaining? I broke down and typed up "the script" for the ceremony, complete with stage directions in large italic letters:
JEREMY FINISHES PLAYING SONG. CRAIG APPROACHES PODIUM AND BEGINS READING.
Sara and I edited the parts of our vows that we thought dragged--we didn't want to lose the audience's focus by repeating the word "love" again and again. On the morning of the wedding, I made one final tweak to the script. I thought that we might need a reminder of how and when to emote. Before our vows, I put a small stage direction in front of our vows. It read:
FOCUS TURNS TO SARA FOR VOWS.
SARA:
(sincerely)
I, Sara...
I am thrilled to report that we got hitched without a single hitch. The ceremony (performed by our good friend, Tim Uren) was lovely, charming, and sincere. I even got a couple of laughs. People paid us the ambiguous compliment: "It was very you."
I decided to take Sara's maiden name as a second middle name. My name is now Joseph Aaron Stevenson Scrimshaw. Or, as I realized when I was filling out the form to get a new Social Security card: J-ASS. Initials are a dangerous thing.
Time to get off the bus.
It is Friday, October 27th at 8:24 AM. For some strange reason, multiple deadlines have all converged on the day of Halloween or right before. So I'm rushing to meet deadlines and all the while putting off work on the biggest project I have going right now: my wedding on November 17th. There are lots of stories in the preparation for my big fat secular wedding, but I continue to be fascinated by how codified the roles of sexuality are in the marriage world.
For example, there are things that all women seem to know that men do not. I'm sure this is true of many things in life and doesn't come as a shock to any women reading this. The "where are you registered" question has been particularly divisive. When we were designing our invitations, I left a little space to put where we are registered. My lovely fiancee, Sara, then told me I couldn't do that because it was rude. Huh. Since then I have had a stream of man-friends, asking me where I'm registered. The women all seem to know. They have strange women powers to figure it out. Actually, the main power here in the midwest seems to be the simple (and accurate) assumption that when you are born your parents create a wedding registry for you at Target and it is a fait accompli.
My friend, Brian Wood (who is a man) had a simple, obvious and terrible solution to this problem. Why don't you just send separate invitations to the men? As soon as he said this my mind went to work picturing the terror of a man-invitation. I pictured a torn up piece of loose-leaf paper, covered in pizza crumbs and splattered with beer rings from its days being used as a coaster. There would be a dotted line on the bottom where you could tear off the RSVP section--with no postage included. Gone would be the nice design and the quaint flowers replaced with a Ninja wearing a Tux, or maybe a T-Rex trying to put a ring on its stubby finger. In the end, it probably wouldn't even say where the man was registered because after going through all the trouble of making a separate invitation he would probably forget to put it on there anyway.
But actually, I kid. In fact, this kind of "the man is a stupid oaf with no sense of style, grace, etiquette, or sensitivity towards his nuptials" wedding humor has been driving me up the wall. But I guess I see all the men in the world as my brothers--it's okay for me to make fun of them, but if someone else does...
Time to get off the bus.
It is Sunday, October 15 at 10:25 AM. I've made up a new term to describe some of my projects. The term is DITY. Very similar to the popular UK phrase, "Do-It-Yourself" , with the one extra word "to" added.
Yes, I'm up to my ears in "Do It To Yourself" projects.
I have day after day of deadlines and I ask myself why can't I just sleep in? Why can't I play video games, read books, read books about video games or finish unpacking those boxes that haven't moved since June? And the answer is I did it to myself when I said yes to a project. But, if you want to keep busy as any sort of freelance artsy type person, you pretty much have to be willing to do it to yourself. Because who else will?
One DITY project was just completed this Friday. It was a great project. A labor of love. A stressful, deadline panic inspiring labor of love. But all turned out wonderfully. Mill City Museum threw an event called "Party Where It All Began" to celebrate the premiere of our new exhibit space and Kevin Kling's new film Minneapolis in 19 Minutes. My pal, Tim Uren and I were commissioned to write some "Minneapolis Inspired Sketch Comedy"--which was fun to write and well-received.
We were also tapped to play some obnoxious jerks who heckled Kevin Kling during his opening remarks. It's scary enough to heckle Kevin as he is about the nicest person I've ever met--which is saying a lot since he's an actor. The other speakers were our bosses (Tim and I are also employees of the Mill) and The Mayor. As it turned out, Kevin gave an eloquent and funny speech about the nature of Minneapolis as a city. He also happened to give the best set-up possible to hecklers. He got the crowd excited about Minneapolis being a town that is not afraid to laugh at itself, not afraid to be something of an adolescent. Perfect! Now if the crowd gets uptight about our funny heckler routine they'll feel like they're not being true Minneapolitans! Our hearts beat with adolescent joy and we launched into a screaming tirade of mock criticism of Kevin's film. Kevin played along perfectly. We ended by declaring that we were moving to St. Paul and saying Mayor R.T. Rybak should come with us. Which he did. What a cool mayor. After the bit was over, the Mayor paid us this high compliment, "You guys were actually pretty funny". Later, a man who was either tipsy on martinis or history said, "You guys would kill them in Waconia." Huh. he must be from St. Paul.
Time to get off the bus. In honor of Kevin, today I am imagining the bus is the 21A.
It is Saturday, September 30 at 7:55 AM. In a few minutes I will be driving out to Wisconsin with kiddie show co-horts, Tim Uren and Jen Scott.
We will be performing in The Legend of Johnny Appleseed or as I have described it in the past A Collection of Apple Based Lies. The show is an annual tradition at Old Gem Theater, and this is the fifth year I've been in Johnny. The script (and the tradition for that matter) was inherited by the current owners when they bought the theater in 2002. The old script was painful to say the least, so this year Kathy the artistic director was gracious enough to let me write a new script. In the process of researching the show I realized a better sarcastic description of the show might be A Collection of Apple Based Omissions and Half Truths.
Johnny Appleseed did go out west with no shoes, raggity clothes and a pot on his head to give appleseeds to settlers for free. That part is in the show. Turns out, he could afford to give the appleseeds for free because they were given to him by cider mill owners who would get the apples back anyway when the settlers brought their apples to the mills to be turned into alcoholic cider. That part isn't in the show. The settlers were very happy about all this, and thanks to Johnny they could enjoy a tasty delicious apple anytime they wanted. In the show. They only enjoyed the apples after they were fermented into cider because the apples were otherwise inedible. Not in the show. Johnny was a religious missionary who was often quoted as saying he didn't need a wife on earth, because if he was a good Christian Swedeborgian, God would reward him with two sexy wives in Heaven. Not in the show--well, maybe there's some sub-text, but probably not.
Johnny Appleseed is also a good show for generating that internal question most actors ask themselves at one point or another--"how did I get here?". Now matter how logically you trace the steps of--well, I'm just acting, I'm telling a pretend story, in this pretend story I must convey this idea, etc.--at some point you simply can't ignore the absurdity of what you're doing.
My "how did I get here?" moment comes during the scene in which Johnny walks through the wilderness talking to his animal friends. I'm crouched behind a big fake bush. I'm wearing a big red jumpsuit with a flap in the back, overalls, and a hood with furry bear ears. We don't have a normal wolf puppet so I have my hand up a big wolf slipper. For some reason at some point I decided the wolf should talk like a combination of Peter Lorre and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Johnny's conversation with the wolf is an ad for one of the theater's next shows--Little Red Riding Hood.
Johnny asks the wolf what role the wolf will be playing, and there I am squatting behind a bush with my hand in a slipper rambling up how fascinating my dual role as both Wolf and Wolf as Granny will be. The children have no idea what I'm talking about, but every once in a while I hear an adult titter quietly. Stupid kids, let them squat behind a bush at 9:30 in the morning and make an ounce of sense.
Time to get off the bus.
It is Tuesday, September 19 at 8:12 AM. I am currently in the midst of a WORK UNIT. When I get particularly busy, I find it helpful to not simply count the days before a deadline on a calendar as mere days, but rather divide them into WORK UNITS.
Take today for example: I have a brief pre-work at Mill City Museum WORK UNIT. During my workday, I will have a half hour lunch, fifteen minutes of which will be spent doing the whole eating thing, the other fifteen minutes--WORK UNIT. Then, I go home and chat with my fiancee about our slowly developing wedding registry. This is a very special and rare NON-SHOW RELATED WORK UNIT. Then, we'll probably eat dinner, have a drink, and squeeze in one more WORK UNIT before retiring to bed.
So, as you can see, this isn't a day where I have to go to work and take care of other non-show related responsibilities in the evening, this is a beautiful day brimming with four WORK UNITS! Who knew time was so malleable?
Sadly, this past weekend saw little to no WORK UNITS. I spent the entire weekend with freezing cold ankles being a male model. I should specify I was hired to be an absurd comedic male model. Come to think of it, I think most male models are absurdly comedic, others are just better-looking.
To celebrate the first weekend of their new season, The MN Orchestra had a fashion show of 18th century attire out in Peavey Plaza hosted by Beethoven himself and attended by kindly senior citizens and homeless drunks. To be fair, not all the senior citizens were kindly and not all the drunks were homeless. After the fashion show we mingled with the crowd. The senior citizens said kindly things like "you were so silly--you must be an actor" and "do you know what a fop is? Because you are one...". The drunks said things like "Hey buddy, hey...come over...I got...hey...nice costume...hey...". They meant well--both the seniors and the drunks.
In between fashion shows and handing out little custom chocolates with Beethoven's face on them, the models reclined in the MN Orchestra's Cargill Room. I specify the Orchestra's Cargill Room, because I think there's a Cargill Room and/or Theater in every cultural institution in Minneapolis. Nothing says great art like grain-trading. Anyway, there were three "real" models--talented and comely ladies who were also very kindly. Then, there were three of us absurd comedic male models. At one point, the organizer of the event asked the real models, "So what do you think, ladies? Could these guys make it as real models?" The Cargill Room was filled with polite tittering and one of the models said--and she intended it kindly--"It's not like any of them are really ugly." The more I think about it--it is a very safe comment. It's true none of us are Quasimodo, but we're not exactly going to take the run-way by storm. Unless, this whole no skinny models allowed in Spain thing creates a demand for something called "pudgy-chic". But then, we'd have lots of competition.
WORK UNIT number one is over. Time to get off the bus.
It is Friday, September 8th at 9:30 AM. I am taking a massively irresponsible break in preparing for my travelogue show, Mind the Culture gap, which opens tonight in, about, oh...seven hours. All I have left to do is make one more movie and memorize all my lines. If there are any typos in this entry you can attribute them to my desperate rush or the fact that my fiancee, Sara, is pounding the hell out of our apartment floor in the process of rehearsing a traditional Irish dance...that involves liberal amounts of Guinness.
I am particularly annoyed about being behind--because, dammit, this time it's not my fault. I had all my show ducks lined up waiting to be shot (why else would one line up ducks?) when my computer broke last Friday.
Let me interrupt myself to make a promise to the world. From now on, I will not say the sentence, "I can't complain." I will try instead to say, "I shouldn't complain." Because, I'm a whiny spoiled soft little Gen-Xer and everything makes me complain.
So, in relation to my computer breaking and being behind on the show, I shouldn't complain. And yet, I'm going to right now. The hard drive died, and my friend who has a start up company fixing broken Macs, put in a new one in right away for a reasonable price! Alas, he could get no data off the dead drive. Translate "data" to all the movies and slides that comprise that show I'm doing tonight. At one point, early this week, I was contemplating going to Target and buying a dry erase board so I could draw pictures of me drinking Gin & Tonic in front of Big Ben live for the audience. Then I found a company that does reasonably priced data recovery!
This is currently being typed in a recovered file! Yeah, a kind of recovery that I can finally embrace!
I raise my Squirrel Mug of Scottish Tea (with a little whisky in it), to my computer's two step recovery program! Last week, the computer had hit rock bottom--tonight, it will be the star of a show at The Bryant Lake Bowl!
I shouldn't complain. But I will. Probably during the show.
Time to get off the bus.
It is Saturday, August 26th at 5 PM. The second half of August is always that strange time of year that I forget exists. That time after the Fringe Festival when everything should be nice and relaxing, but it never actually is because other projects have piled up while the Festival is dominating my life. I'm lucky to have lots of different projects in the works. I've been to several social events and had the same asinine conversation:
Somebody who's not me: "So are you relaxing after Fringe?"
Me: "No, I got all sorts of work to do. Lots of different projects."
Somebody who's not me: "Oh yeah, like what?"
Me: "Uh...I can't remember...Something with writing shows, and, um...uh...planning my wedding...and writing that other show..."
Nothing makes you sound more like a busy, important man than not remembering what you're supposed to be doing. Today--according to the list I found on my computer--I'm writing an outline for a new version of the kids' show Johnny Appleseed, designing wedding invitations, talking to my brother about finishing writing the September Scrimshaw Show (not actually writing it mind you--just talking about it), and updating this web site.
So, the Fringe is over--on to the future. However, like most crazy people on the bus I'm obsessed with the past, so I will take a moment to comment on the 2006 Fringe Festival. Particularly, on the critics. I have the same relationship that all artists have with critics. When they like me, I like them. When they don't like me, I don't like them. When they ignore me, I complain about it. This year, some of the critics thought Die, Clowns, Die was not my best work. And so, I don't think this year's batch of reviews was their best work.
The issue of originality in particular has been sticking in my head--from both the mainstream reviews and the audience reviews. One day I read a string of reviews that commented on the lack of spark, quality, and just plain comedic value of jokes found in various Fringe shows. Now, critics are not theatrical artists but they are writers. Writers who are also capable of lacking spark, quality, and just plain comedic value in their writing. It was very annoying and yet very cathartic to come across this string of reviews which lambasted poor writing with poor writing. I propose that no one should ever take a review seriously if the critic uses tired, meaningless phrases like "half baked" or great zingers like "pick up the clue phone--it's for you." This is not even the pot calling the kettle black. This is the pot trying to come up with a witty retort to hurl at the kettle (such as "you're black") and resorting to mumbling something about the kettle being "a big stupid-head". In fact, I would be happy to read the phrase "big stupid-head" in a review. At least, it would be original.
This is my stop for the day, time to get off the bus.
VIDEO FUNNIES
A new film from Joseph's honeymoon entitled Thoughts on Marriage!
The American Drunk Series:
An American Drunk in London
An American Drunk in Cardiff
An American Drunk in Dublin
An American Drunk in Paris
AUDIO FUNNIES
NEW! Two audio bits from the 2004 project Small Kindnesses, Weather Permitting. Short bits of audio and video entertainment were installed in stops along the Hiawatha Lightrail Line. They were all about the weather and the concept of "Minnesota Nice". Ironically, I think all of the playback devices were broken by vandals or the extreme weather. Regardless, here are two winning submissions by myself and Marc Doty.
Let's Really Talk About the Weather
The Emotional Forecast
Click the link for Joseph's 2004 Fringe Festival commentary on Minnesota Public Radio's State of the Arts hosted by Dominic Papatola.
Click the link and scroll to the bottom of the page for a RealTime chat of News of the Weird from 2005 with Mary Lucia on The Current.
Click the link above for the archived blog countdown to the opening night of Die, Clowns, Die!