The Cameraman Adventures

I didn't feel great about my performance in the improv class last week, I was too in-my-head and I wasn't listening, and I was even a bit contrary for the sake of jokes.  I wasn't very "Yes and."

 

I was also due for a haircut.  I don't often get haircuts, in part because they make me a bit nervous.  It's a bit silly, but true.  Growing up I almost always went to the same place in East Longmeadow, so any time I move somewhere I put off looking for a new barber.  But I'd put it off long enough, so I decided to look for one on a Sunday I was going grocery shopping.  I saw a barber shop who's phone number had 525 as the prefix, that's East Longmeadow's prefix, so I thought, "What could go wrong?"

 

I guess I'm a bit nervous about haircuts because I usually have instructions now, if with a new barber: in the front, short enough not to cover the eyes; covering just the top of the ears; and basically short enough in the back not to be a mullet.  The only problem was a language barrier, but I took photos and they're online, so I think it's okay.

 

And so I took some more photos this week.  The busride to work is now on the unreliable 305 bus which goes down San Vicente before switching to Sunset Boulevard and then heading to UCLA.  So, on the way, at the corner of Sunset and San Vicente, is Whisky-a-Go-Go, the legendary rock club where bands like The Doors used to play.  At Sunset and Beverly Boulevard is the famous Beverly Hills Hotel.  So I took pictures of both and posted them online.  The famous side of the hotel was hard to shoot from a bus, so I had to settle for a sign.

 

But I had more important things going on.  My friend, and former castmate in Erin Judge Presents..., Andrea Henry from back home, was taping a set for the second episode of Nick-at-Nite's Funniest Mom in America 3 at the Beverly Hills Friar's on Tuesday night.  This was the friend that first suggested I move out here and was going to be on national television so I wanted to go.  But it was on Tuesday night, the night of the week I intern at Improv Olympic West.

 

Very early on Sunday morning I emailed every intern trained in what I do to see if I could get someone to fill in for me and had no luck.  So, on Monday I called everyone on the list who didn't respond to the email to see who was available.  The closest lead was the lighting person who trained me on the job in the first place, a former classmate from Emerson College.  But he didn't know what he was doing on Tuesday night, he thought he might have some other responsibilities at the theatre, so he said not to count on him.

 

So, I brought my contact list to work and continued emailing people from there.  Since this job has me working in a basement, I took lunch upstairs so I could call my fellow Emersonian back, and others in hopes of finding coverage.

 

I found I had a voicemail, so I checked it immediately hoping it would be someone letting me know they could cover for me.  It was not.

 

The message I got was a call from a casting company to send them my headshots and resume for a pilot they're casting.  They referred to me by name and gave me a number at which to call them back.  Lately, I've had more ear wax than usual, so I had some trouble hearing the message.  But I had more important things in the very immediate future.

 

So, I left a voice mail inquiring if my fellow IO Wester was available that night.  I ate lunch and on my way back I got a call responding to the affirmative.

 

I felt really good about that.  I instantly emailed my friend saying I could make it to the taping and was swiftly placed in charge of taking pictures.

 

I got let go early as usual.  But it seemed that each day I'd get let out of work earlier and earlier.  It was annoying, but I crunched some numbers and realized that even at 30 hours a week I'd still make considerably more than I made at the Museum of Science in Boston.

 

So, I left work at 3:15 and called the casting company back.  They claimed they didn't know what I was talking about and that the role they were casting was a female role anyway.  I may be a little girly, but not enough for them, I expected, so I said "Oh well" to myself and thought that I had a mysterious little story to tell.

 

As I said earlier Beverly Hills is on the way to UCLA, so it was not far for me.  I'd simply have plenty of time to kill, so I went back to my favorite restaurant in Westwood, Mongol King, where heaping dishes of noodles and meat and vegetables that one picks out themselves are prepared in the open for a flat rate.  It was plenty of food, so I expected I wouldn't be too hungry later for quite a while.

 

When I got there I saw not only Andrea, but another friend from Boston, this one who'd moved out here three-and-a-half years ago.  She was in the show as well.  She brought more Boston transplants on her guest list so I caught up with them and also saw Jim McCue, who runs the Boston Comedy Festival. 

 

New England also represented in the actual showcase.  Besides the two I mentioned, there was a woman from Amherst, which is a college town in Western Mass., near where I grew up, the aforementioned East Longmeadow.  There was a wild-card performer voted into the contest via the Internet and she was from Haverhill.  All four were definitely among the stronger acts among the thirteen shown. The warmup comic was even from Colorado by way of Salem, NH.

 

The show was hosted by Roseanne Barr and featured two other panelists: Hal Sparks and Kim Coles.  I actually thought that Hal Sparks had some pretty insightful constructive criticism.  I had first seen him on the show Talk Soup as a freshman in college and drew a caricature of him for a poster for my first radio show since I thought his jokes fell kind of flat and I was comparing myself to him in a self-deprecating way.  I imagine it's actually very tough to deliver jokes when there's no audience and only crew members are laughing.

 

Now, when I arrived, I wasn't sure if it would be okay to take pictures, at the very least I wasn't going to use the flash.  So, with that restriction, the lighting was horrible.  The only thing I could see through the viewfinder was the logo for the Friar's.  Looking above the camera I saw a camera facing me so I didn't think I could do it stealthily and also find good lighting.  I blame the place I chose to sat.

 

While there I realized that the people in the audience were actually largely people doing extra work.  The show was taped more like a three-camera sitcom than a live show.  There were a few points in which they stopped the show to change tapes or retake mangled lines by the host or panelists.  In fact my friend who had already moved out here had to follow one such intermission.

 

I won't tell you the results of the show and who moved on, for that you'll have to watch the show on Tuesday April 3, at 9:30 ET on Nick-at-Nite.  But I will say that I hung out with my friends after the show and didn't care how late I was out, except I started to get hungry again.  I told them my story from earlier that day, about the mysterious phone call, and also got a tip for who to go to for new headshots.  I suppose I am overdue, and I can afford it now, so I'll get on that and maybe look for some kind of representation.  I went home at 2am and heated up some leftover pasta.

 

The next day, on the way home from work, I got another voicemail from the same place as the previous day.  It was an apology and another request for a headshot and resume, this time with a fax number and an email address.  So, since I usually take the number 2 bus down Sunset to Vine and switch to the 210 or 710 back to the apartment, I stopped off at FedEx Kinko's.  There I downloaded, edited, then uploaded my resume and headshot.

 

Speaking of things that were overdue, one of them was laundry.  I took my large load of laundry to the basement door and saw that it was closed until further notice.  I suppose I've been spoiled all this time.  I've always had laundry in the building, so I took it down the block to where I heard there was a laundromat.  It had a Tekken 3 game and sticker vending machines and lots of other things where quarters go.  There was also a TV and I was basically alone, so I called MB.  Is this what people do?  Do they just hang out for an hour-and-a-half at the laundromat?  That's a real time-killer.  I'm so used to throwing my laundry in the machine, going back to my room, throwing it into the dryer a half-hour later, going back to my room for an hour and then retrieving the clothes.  Oh well.

 

On Friday I forgot my lunch, so I had to venture back upstairs to buy some food and when I did I got another voicemail to schedule an audition for that show.  So I called back and scheduled it as late as possible.  I work in Westwood and the audition would be in Burbank, so 4:45 was what I settled on.  I'd simply have to request to leave before 3pm on Monday.  This was an ironic prospect, as until now I'd been annoyed at the lack of hours, but now I'd settled into a cheerful apathy about this job.  It seemed that there would be a certain flexibility as long as I had this particular job, even if I didn't really like the actual work, to get out an do other things that were oriented towards my long-term goals.  At the end of my shift I downloaded the sides for Monday's appointment ("Sides" are a term for the script they want you to learn for an audition.  I would later download the sides for the rest of the characters to try to establish more context).

 

And class this week was a considerable improvement on last week's.  I worked on my eye contact considerably.  Where last week we concentrated on characters, this week we worked on emotions.  At first I wasn't fond of the prospect because the first exercise was simply to act an emotion and that seems really untrue to me.  But as the emotions progressed in that exercise, I gave the character an arc and made each emotion a reaction to the last one, a reaction to fictional events that inspired that emotion.

 

Then there was an exercise in which everyone in class was supposed to be in a hospital waiting to hear if their kids were still alive after a bus accident.  I made this character less likable, I made him pick a fight out of frustration.  As we got more news, the guy I picked a fight with was one of the characters to lose a daughter.  So, I let that be reason to try to comfort him and apologize.  Then when one of their kids was labeled the cause of the accident, and I still didn't know if my kid was alive I attacked that father.  I paced and explored some darker, selfish territory and found it a refreshing change of pace.

 

There were also plenty of two-person scene exercises in class.  In the first I was to pick an emotion and switch to another one during the scene.  Then there was one in which one character spoke gibberish, so I was glad I got picked to do that.  It was fun, and funny, and I talk with my hands a lot anyway.  As I usually try to do, I went up a second time since there were an odd number of students this week.  I had a harder time figuring out what the other person was saying in gibberish speak.

 

We did scenes that took place immediately after something big happened.  I noticed that for the first few scenes both partners played basically the same emotion, so I think there was a barely sub-conscious decision to play a contrary emotion.  The event was, interestingly enough in the context of this week's events, both of us getting cast in a big buddy movie action picture.  So, at first I was hesitant to emote at first and then based my emotional response on my partner's.  He spoke of fame and fortune so I tried to calm him down and talk about the artistic freedom that money and exposure might bring.  As he grew more and more crazed I started to pace and realize that I'd be making a movie with this maniac.  The only problem with playing it this way was the only solution I saw was to run out of the scene to talk to the casting director and come back with the news that we wouldn't be working together.  It broke the connection, but I was still on the right track.

 

The final exercise was one in which both parties spoke gibberish.

 

I spoke with my teacher about Monday, chatted with some students from class and went home.  I'm going to study today, and as I said, I was really behind on my laundry, so I'm going to go wash my sheets too.

 

Thank you, I'm Eric Cheung.  I'm on MySpace and Live Journal.

 

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