The Scratched Back

My Level 1 teacher would often have us walk around the stage making eye contact with our classmates, tapping each other on the back and saying "I've got your back."  I think that something I've learned to do over the past few weeks is to do that more effectively.  I'm not compensating for other people, I'm trying to lose my expectations of a scene and just take any new information as all good things and incorporate them into the scene.  Not to judge is to embrace the scene for everything it is and not think about what it's not.  It's something that takes a while for someone like me to learn, but hopefully I won't forget it.

 

That didn't seem to be the case at work this week.  As the week moved along, I found out they got rid of one of the temp file clerks in another building to save money and would I please help them out.  I would work mornings there and afternoons where I usually worked.  My co-workers would help pick up the slack for my work while I was gone. 

 

That was the plan.

 

It was not carried through.

 

So each afternoon, I came back to a mountain of work that I somehow managed to make up, or nearly make up, much to my exhaustion.  This was not why I moved out here.  Eventually I negotiated to lessen the burden some and hopefully that'll be the case.

 

In the meantime, I cracked open I, Fatty, the other book I borrowed a couple of weeks ago.

 

What stark contrast this novel was to the autobiography of George Takei.  Though both about people with childhoods in California, about people who entered show business telling the story from their points-of-view, the similarities end there.

 

Where Takei's father was supportive through thick and thin, a kind and wise pair of ears, Roscoe Arbuckle's father was an abusive drunk ashamed of the freak he felt his son was.

 

Roscoe, who stumbled into the life of vaudeville as a child performer, entered a seedy world reminiscent of the first part of Ralph Bakshi's "American Pop."  He travelled alone along the coast eventually being discovered for possible future work and then being found by his abusive father, where he was put to work slinging hash in a greasy spoon.  Eventually he got lost so he could go back to the theatre.

 

When he met Minta Durfee he decided that in order to court her properly, he'd have to make some money on the side, so he swallowed his pride with a mouthful of booze, to dull the pain, and took some work in pictures.

 

How everything fell apart, and his relationship with his first wife, are the things of classic tragedy.  In most such stories, the reader can see things in a sort of present-tense hindsight, not afforded the characters.  They know what will happen and can only cringe when the inevitable horror finally occurs.

 

Why, then, did I like this book?  Jerry Stahl researched this world exhaustively.  He knows it well.  He infused it with the sarcastic turns-of-phrase that are so specific to the time period.  The story is a dark, and downright disgusting bit of noir, but that was the world of the time.

 

Though I knew prejudice was more pervasive at the time, I was startled by just how naked the anti-Semitism was--how they were the scapegoats of perceived declining morality.  What happened to Arbuckle was symptomatic of self-righteous activism, but it was more about studio executives covering their butts by setting up someone who didn't play the political games of some of the other stars on their bill.  He was set up from before the night of the notorious party and his career was nearly destroyed as a result.

 

I don't think his films have aged as well as Buster Keaton's, Harold Lloyd's, Harry Langdon's or Charlie Chaplin's, I don't particularly consider myself a great fan of his work, but I have great respect for his role in film history; he gave Buster his start, was considered one of the nicest people in the business, and had to deal with quite a bit in his life.  He came off even nicer than Buster.  Both had come from Kansas, and the vaudeville stage, both had fathers that were more-or-less abusive (though that fact was much more obvious in Arbuckle's case), but Keaton comes off as a detached observer, Jerry Seinfeld to Arbuckle's George Costanza.

 

There were some concessions in the book.  This was not an actual autobiography, but one that Jerry Stahl imagined might have been written in the time immediately before Arbuckle's death.  I'm not exactly sure what they are, but if you can take it with a grain of salt, then by all means read this book.

 

Friday was pretty typical, it was one of the Friday Night Frankensteins with an edition of "My First Time with Cackie" so that made it special.

 

The next night I was filling in once again, as I've been in the habit of doing for a while.  I had a ravioli craving, so I knew of two places that probably served it, each just over a block from IO West on either side of it.  So I went to the closer one, that I believe to be a little more expensive, on the logic that it came with a salad and had a bathroom.

 

When I got to the theatre I saw that there were three shows that were "TBA."  There was one half of the eight o'clock hour, and the entire eleven o'clock hour.

 

What ended up happening was that each hour had one show, instead of the usual two, except for the ten o'clock hour (and that one almost only had one too, due to half of one of the teams being absent or sick).

 

So, that made my night a bit easier; I didn't have to worry so much about teams going over their time.

 

But the last show was the one that I was worried about for the past few days.  There was a kid in my class who was part of a team I called lights for a few Saturdays ago.  There they arrived minutes before showtime, told me they were doing three songs, and that that last song would be their closer.  They didn't even get to a second song by the time twenty-six minutes had passed, so I had to pull them on the next half-laugh.  This time it would only be the one from class plus a female singer.

 

What I hadn't anticipated was the tech required for the show.  They were to go second in the hour, but normally the shows go immediately after one another.  He asked me, "Hey the other team didn't show did they?"  That phantom other team was the third of the "TBA" teams, and they had not been A'ed.  Luckily for them this team didn't show up, so I was told they'd be going up at 11:15 and that they had a very specific cue for cutting the lights.  They would presumably have about forty-five minutes, so I figured I didn't have much choice and it'd probably be fine.

 

They didn't consult anyone about the tech, so they soon realized they didn't have enough cord to reach the nearest socket, so I told them they could ask the house manager if there were any extension cords available.  If not, there were plenty of times when the accompanist performed off-stage, it would give them more room.

 

Finally, at 11:19 they started.  The show was formatted basically the same as the show that had a lot of tech during the festival in which they'd interview a couple and reenact their relationship milestones.  They brought an immense crowd, and they came in at exactly twenty-seven minutes, so I was relatively happy.  Though the audience, and performers, had a party to go to, they took their time to get out.  I was tired, and wanted to go home, but I tried to remember what I had supposedly learned the previous class and decided not to grouse too much.  Perhaps I could scratch a back once in a while.

 

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