I Want to Funny All Over Your Face

While watching the above video of the always-awesome Auto-Tune the News, I was reminded of a very simple fact that often goes overlooked in these troubled times:

Women that make funny faces are hot.

The young lady above is one Sarah Gregory, of The Gregory Brothers. The hotness of her rubber-facedness is only compounded by the fact that she's lip-syncing to the sound of her own voice, which is pretty phenomenal. Mean set of pipes = hot. Funny faces = hotter. Mean set of pipes + funny faces = flip me like a burger, 'cause I'm done.

I'm not sure how universal a reaction this is, mind. It could just be me. I find that hard to believe, though. The sheer sexocity of a woman not only willing, but able, to pull a Jim Carrey in a public forum is a pretty primal thing. I'm sure I am not the only man who, while recognizing the considerable comic talents of Carol Burnett, has always held a secret, smoldering torch for the utter hittability that is Vicki Lawrence.

Aw, damn, baby. You so... damn.

It's no secret that stage presence is hot. If I ever wanted to seal the deal with a woman, really bring things home, all I had to do was have her see a show I was in. As long as she didn't think I was utterly repulsive beforehand, I was in like Flynn. Whose use of the same technique is where the expression originated from in the first place.

Face-pulling is one of the more extreme demonstrations of "look at me, I own the room" you can get from a woman. Not so much from a man -- we make faces all the time, often in totally inappropriate settings. For a woman to do so, especially an attractive one, is an inherently transgressive act. And transgression is one of the quickest routes to the funny and the sexy.

The woman doesn't have to be hot, although it helps. If she's good enough, funny enough, talented enough, I'm all about it.

Fanny Brice. And yes, I would have. Like the fist of an angry god.

To those lovely ladies out there who are in the club (and you know who you are), I just want to say: thank you. And I hope your face freezes like that.

And now, in a trend I hope will become the next dark recess of human sexuality that the internet pulls out into the light of day, mocks, monetizes, and makes mainstream, I present: a small selection of Funny Face Porn.

-- The Prolix Wag
This post is not so much "Mrs. Wag Approved" as "What the hell is wrong with you?"

The Waiting is the Hardest Part... Except for the Unemployment. And the Rejection.

One of the nicest letters I ever got was a rejection letter.

And by "nicest", I don't just mean how it was phrased. I mean it was sincerely one of the most thoughtful, restore-my-faith-in-humanity missives it was ever my pleasure to receive.

So much so that, even after more than a decade, I still think of it fondly.

The letter in question notified me in simple, straightforward terms that despite the fact that I had auditioned for them, the Texas Shakespeare Festival would not be requiring my services as an actor for their upcoming season.

What made the letter so nice was the fact that it's pretty much the only letter like it I can ever remember getting. You know the old phrase "Don't call us, we'll call you?" Well, it's pretty much the way things work after an audition, and for good reason. A producer has very little motivation to let you know that they've cast someone else, because a) they might not work out, and they might want to cast you later on down the line, and b) who wants to tell anyone bad news, much less an emotionally needy bucket of HIREMEHIREMEHIREME desperation like most actors?

I can say, though, that for most of us (emotionally needy and desperate though we may be), we'd love to hear that we didn't get the job. Not nearly as much as that we did, but much more than not hearing anything at all. Certainty may be disappointing, but it's still certainty.

Actors are, by nature, optimistic creatures, at least when it comes to issues of our own talent. If we weren't, we wouldn't be actors; it's very hard to get a human being to step out onstage in front of several hundred people if they don't think it will go well. Surface insecurities and perfectionism aside, we tend to think, deep down, that it will go very well indeed.

"You bitches have no idea how hard I'm about to rock your world."

So, no matter how many times reality tells us otherwise, unless it's the kind of massive screwup where you tripped and spilled scalding tea on the director, forgot your entire monologue, and then peed yourself (and those do happen), actors leave every audition secure in the knowledge that the role is ours.

And then we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

"...but the callback was only eight months ago!"

And then nine times out of ten (if we're lucky!) nobody calls.

Someone I know (who works in a more normative industry) once spent several months without a job. Every job she applied for and didn't get was crushing rejection; a referendum on her very worth as a human being. I understood her frustration, but it stood in marked contrast to the kind of... disassociative attitude I've had to develop about employment.

See, when you're applying for new jobs not every few years, or every few months, or every few days even, but constantly, and you're only booking one in ten or twenty or thirty, you learn to forget you even applied. I have a rule with my parents (who, god bless 'em, are fervently supportive of my artistic and professional success) that they were only allowed to ask me about a given audition once, and that if I said "It went fine," that meant I wasn't going to say a damn thing more on the matter. Because if I did, that meant I would think about it, which would mean I would start to consider my odds, which means I would be mentally sitting by the phone waiting for a call like a girl left home from the prom.

Which kinda... wears on you, after a while.

So you learn to toss every audition out the window after it's done. You learn not to want it one second after you've stepped out the door. It's a kind of nasty little mindfuck, in some ways, but it saves your ego, and your sanity, and ultimately is a more realistic approach to things, because it's very seldom ever personal. Once you reach a certain level of talent and skill -- once you "clear the bar", as it were -- casting comes down to a whole lot of things beyond your control. You can kinda pick your reason, because most of the time you'll never know why you weren't cast.

My favorite is I look a little too much like the director's devastatingly handsome ex-boyfriend who broke their heart forever, and subconsciously they just couldn't deal with it.

Every once in a while, though, one of those auditions comes along that you can't help falling in love with, a little. That you can't help wanting. God, do I hate them.

Professionally, it's been a tough stretch for me, as it has for many people. It's been a year since I set foot on a stage. I had two of those kind of "I can't help falling in love" opportunities on my plate recently (one as an actor, one as a playwright) , and the sound of the phone not ringing became thuddingly obvious this past week on both of them. It's at times like these I wonder why I chose a career which came with periodic existential crises instead of a 401K.

As Mike Rowe said in his recent TED Talk, "'Follow your passion' is probably the worst advice I ever got." I love it, but god do I hate it sometimes. Mommas, don't let your babies grow up to be actors. No matter how much they idolize that glorious bastard Edmund Kean.

Famed classical actor Edmund Kean (1787-1833) in a portrait painted shortly before his untimely death from complications from a hangnail that went untreated when his Equity health insurance ran out.

-- The Prolix Wag
Putting the "money" in "regional theatre actor"-- oh, right. There is no money in that.

First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All The English Majors

I am writing today to speak out against a grave injustice that has been done to the memory and works of the greatest English dramatist who ever lived, William Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare: Masturbating? Quite possibly. Angry? Definitely.

Why is Shakespeare so pissed off? What has he got to complain about? His plays are performed more often than anybody else's, his (admittedly genius-level) skills as a playwright are constantly being exaggerated, and kids are forced to read his plays in school pretty much constantly from the seventh grade on. What's the problem?

The problem is that kids are forced to read his plays, at all. We teach Shakespeare, at least in this country, primarily as "dramatic literature". His plays are things to be read in book form, perhaps out loud if you're lucky, in an English class (or, god love 'em, a "Language Arts" class), taught by an English teacher, as fine examples of English literature.

At this point, I'd like to warn any English Teachers, Performance Studies Majors, and/or weak-constitutioned Dramaturgs that I'm going to officially let the cat out of the bag:

Shakespeare isn't literature.

"What can you mean?" they gasp. "His words are written! In English! In such a way as they can be read! That makes it literature! And thus part of our departmental budget!"

Here's the thing: his plays are most emphatically NOT written in English, or in any other language. His scripts are. And his scripts are but a means to an end. Scripts are technical tools used to make theatre. They are blueprints, not the buildings themselves.

Walking in to an English class and being handed a script to analyze (any script, really) is a lot like walking in to a class about how to sit in a chair and being handed a sheet of Ikea instructions.

The famous "Lost Page" from the First Folio. Note that the first four illustrations all picture men having sex with furniture, showing that Shakespeare's use of bawdy humor was not limited to puns. Or living things.

Some of Handel's finer works are written down on paper, with English words on them. Do we study those in English classes? Hell, no. If you tried, the music department would riot in the halls. Crack teams of Madrigal Singers would rappel into the English Teachers' Lounge, chucking antipersonnel grenades and diminished sevenths as they went. Or perhaps not... although it would be totally awesome if they did. In any case, you'd have an uproar on your hands, because guess what? Music is not meant to be read from the page. Music doesn't exist on the page.

So why do we let English teachers teach Shakespeare? Don't get me wrong, I love English teachers. I've known some damn good ones in my time, many of whom made herculean efforts to make Shakespeare "come alive" for their students. But they have a fundamentally different worldview and skill set from Drama teachers. Give Shakespeare to those Drama teachers, and they wouldn't have to make herculean efforts to make it "come alive", because it would already be alive.

Artist's rendering of what an English Teacher would look like if liberated from having to teach Drama.

Look, I'm a professional classical actor and playwright. The play I'm writing right now is in blank verse. I love verse on stage. But I hate reading verse plays, including Shakespeare's, unless it's in the course of putting one of those plays on stage. Because blank verse is on the page. It works on stage... I don't quite know why, but it does. But on the page? zzzzzzzZZZ...

Quick side note to those of you who are frothing at your keyboard, ready to chime in about how you "LOVE to read Shakespeare". One of the following applies:

a) You're lying.
b) You're a pretentious twit.
c) You're actually enjoying the performance you're making up in your head.
d) You're only reading the dirty parts.
e) All of the above.

Replies from Performance Studies majors will be deleted as a matter of course, as is proper in the eyes of the Lord. Unclean! Uncleeeeeen!!!

-- The Prolix Wag
Because I'm RIGHT. What's your excuse?

The Tao of Zangief

Street Fighter II came out in 1991, when I was 16 years old. It was a profound, formative influence on my gaming tastes, in much the way that Phoebe Cates getting out of the pool in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was to my sexuality.

You could play one of a number of different characters, each with their own unique fighting style, from the Sumo wrestler to the little Chinese girl with thighs of steel to the green-skinned Brazilian mutant with the electric skin.

Because, you know, the long tradition of green-skinned mutants with electric skin in Brazilian literature. And all.

My favorite quickly became apparent: Zangief, the hirsuite Russian wrestler pictured above. I picked him almost every time. And lost. And lost. And lost.

Why? Because if you wanted to win, you couldn't pick Zangief. You couldn't pick the fire-breathing yoga guy with the rubber limbs either. You *definitely* couldn't pick the Sumo guy, because he sucked.

No. If you wanted to win, you had to pick Ken or Ryu. Ken and Ryu were karate-fightin', fireball-throwin', dragon-punchin' douchebags who also happened to be cheesy as all hell. They could trap you in the corner with fireballs and dragon punches and hurricane kicks and cheese you to death no matter what you did. To top it all off, there was no discernible difference between the two, except that Ken was blonde and American, whereas Ryu was Japanese and straight.

Ken/Ryu was the only thing to play if you were serious about staying on that machine for more than a minute and a half. They were the cool characters, because they won.

And this is why, despite the fact that Zangief's conspicuously sculpted body hair did nothing to inspire confidence, I never, ever picked them.


Ken and Ryu were the easy choice. The popular choice. The choice of plebes. There was no possibility in them.

With Zangief, every once in a while, spinning my joystick with a mad and frenzied intensity, I would grab my opponent, do a ludicrously impossible spinning piledriver, and kill my opponent by knocking half of his health in one shot.

It almost never happened. But when it did, it was glorious.

In every game I have played since then, I always pick the Zangief. The hard to play, hinky, one-arm-tied-behind-your-back character/race/mana color/member of the Battlestar Galactica crew. If the faction/Pokemon/color of wooden blocks becomes the obviously superior choice over time, say because I have uncovered some new unbeatable strategy, I abandon them immediately, and find a new Zangief. Because I don't play games to win. I win to show how smart I am. And you can't do that with Ken or Ryu.

It bleeds over into my acting as well. Is everyone else standing? Then I, by god, shall hunker. Is looking deeply into my scene partners eyes the only choice that makes any sense in hell? Then I shall examine the samovar in great detail. Because anyone can act. It takes someone totally smart and pretty to act while making, not just interesting or creative, but totally counterintuitive choices.

In life, you will be offered many a Ken/Ryu. My advise is? Go for the Zangief, every time. Not because no one else is doing it. Not because it's a morally better choice. Because every once in a while, you will beat face, and they will know, deep in their hearts, how much better you are than them.

-- The Prolix Wag

You say “pretentious, condescending prick” like it’s some kind of bad thing.

Color Me Jealous

...and not just because she looks great in a BSG costume. Watch this:



Okay, now register the fact that this young woman is fifteen years old. FIFTEEN. Now watch it again.

I mean, Jesus.

How the hell are you supposed to maintain any kind of the-world-doesn't-deserve-me cockiness as a performer in the face of that?

It's not that I'm jealous of her talent, or her comic timing, or her writing skill, or any of that... they're substantial, but I can match or better her. With close to twenty years on her I damn well better be able to.

But her sense of self-possession is incredible. "If you think I make you feel weird now, wait until you're sixteen?" Who the hell comes up with something that full of genius at that age?

She knows who she is, and she owns it, completely. I've probably came to know the geography of who I was at her age, or thereabouts, and have thoroughly loathed vast tracts of it ever since. It took me years (decades, really) to get around to writing a play; not because I didn't know I had something to say, or that I didn't know it would be good, but because I was afraid other people wouldn't like it.

Same story with this blog, really. I should have started this thing years ago. I know I have a unique way of looking at the world, and that I'm inCREDibly smart and funny and, let's face it, sexy, but I still (at the tender age of thirty-four) can't quite convince myself that other people will agree with my assessment, or be interested in what I have to say.

Fortunately, she's not a guy, so I can be jealous without totally wanting to de-throat her. The ecology of overlapping types, and all that.

-- The Prolix Wag
Putting the “sense” in “sense of entitlement”.

UPDATE: She's 22. Topless Robot lied to me. I'm still jealous.