rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2003-08-07 (22:46)
In which our plucky young hero goes five for five.

Spread the meme, kids!

I decided to meet the challenge. Ripe Tomato asked me five questions. Here are five answers.

1) Out of desperation you decide to see a prostitute. The two of you are in a hotel room and she's giving you the best blowjob of your life. Just as you're about to, um .. release, you look down at her and see an adam's apple. Do you finish up anyway? How do you handle this?

As I said: here are four answers.

What?

Okay, fine. It seems that I've decided that I'm so hard up for sweet lovin' that I've decided to not just pay a complete stranger for sex but also to rent a sleazy hotel room for it. But. Just because I do something doesn't mean I'll do something. I've got a practically Catholic ability to feel guilty over doing anything that has even the remotest connection to pleasure (pretty amazing, considering I'm a lapsed Anglican), and an impractical amount of orthodox heterosexuality. My subconscious would latch onto the latter as the perfect reason to justify the former, and I'd flee the scene like a burning phoenix.

(With my pants and wallet, thanks. There's guilt-crazed straight-boy last-minute panic and then there's just stupid.)

2) What is the single cruelest thing you have ever deliberately done to another human being, out of spite, malice, or just for kicks? Do you regret it?

The single cruelest thing has got to be an exercise in my improv class a few weeks ago. The last session one of the folks in the group was this fellow who was easily the most uncooperative person I've ever encountered in my life. Silent, sullen, prone to suddenly deciding that he's just tired of being in the same reality as his fellow actors. Our attitudes toward him ranged from contempt to pity, but not a single one of us liked working with him. He was a bonding experience, kind of like how having a grenade thrown into your foxhole is a bonding experience.

Anyway, the class that week was on character work. The exercise in question was about accepting other people's ideas about your character: a person onstage would pretend to be an interviewer and, as you entered, inform you who you are. ("And... yes... it's the world's oldest yo-yo grandmaster! Let's see if he'll answer a few questions.") Then there'd be a little bit of character back-and-forth, and as they leave you grab the mic and become the interviewer for the next person.

This exercise is about accepting your fellow actors' ideas and adapting to their sense of the reality of the scene.

[(Oh, like the way you accepted that transsexual hooker from the previous question?) Shut up.]

This exercise is absolute agony for someone who refuses to accept ideas and doesn't like to acknowledge the other actors.

I started with "The senator seems to be a little flustered, but who wouldn't be when they're on trial for accepting bribes from the Chinese government?" And at that moment the 60 Minutes asshole interviewer persona, which is absolute death in improv (the other actors will kill you afterward for asking so many damn questions), just flooded into my soul and took over.

Everyone else's interview bits during this exercise went for about thirty seconds.

I took three minutes.

"You shouldn't ask so many questions... you'll be sorry," my victim finally stammered, and I turned to the camera with an absolutely evil grin before saying "Senator... did you really just issue a death threat in front of the millions of people watching us on television?"

It will be very tough for me to surpass the cruelty of those three minutes. I could kick puppies for a year and steal from church poor boxes for a decade, and I still wouldn't pass the sheer malevolent glee I felt at those three minutes. And though I'll never do it again, well, it was definitely worth doing just once.

3) Biggest fashion faux-pas you've ever made? (My uncle said that in the 70s he had a lime green pants suit that faded from dark to light green the further down it went. Can you top that?) Oh, and yes, bad hairstyles and nasty makeup count.

My old KISS cover band, The Army Reserve, had very strict rules. Technically the bad hairstyle and nasty makeup were a job requirement.

4) Here's a nice cliché. Describe your most embarrassing moment.

My old KISS cover band, The Army Reserve, had very strict rules. Technically the bad hairstyle and nasty makeup were a job requirement.

5) Tell me something interesting/odd/quirky/funny about yourself that I don't already know.

My old KISS cover band--

Fine, fine.

My second year at university, I ran for student council treasurer, and lost by less than 1% of the vote. (This turns out to be lucky for the university's student population, because I decided to not go back for my third year.) The campaign was not exactly a Carvilleian marvel of organization: my poster was the lamest one imaginable, and I'm surprised that only 75% of the flyers I put up got vandalized. Two nights before the vote I accidentally sent a campaign email to everyone on campus, including the print server, which shut down printing for four hours. And I didn't bother taking any notes to speech night.

Speech night seemed like it was doomed to be my biggest failure ever. Everyone else, with their fancy practice and notes, had speeches beginning something like "We all know what Winston Churchill once remarked during the Blitz, hearkening back to the ancient rhetorician Cato the Elder." Mine was much more "I'll work hard for you! So much hard work. Totally going to work. For you." I stammered a little but plowed through to the end, and didn't have any clever turns of phrase, and was sure that, as far as vote-garnering was concerned, I might as well have just promised that if elected I would poison the water supply and murder everyone in their sleep.

But later on, I learned that everyone who had voted for me had done so on the basis of my speech. I was apparently the most sincere of the four candidates, and that impressed them.

Since then, whenever I have to do any public speaking, I make sure that even if I do have notes, I totally work off book.

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