THE SHOW MUST GO ON!!!

Every time I watch Entourage, I wish I were an actor. One with a mansion. For almost a minute, I consider the possibility of taking acting classes and think that yeah, maybe this would be something I could do. And then, I remember that actors, though often talented, are almost always aggravating.

I'm not talking about Hollywood dickheads who spend twenty bucks to have a pack of cigarettes delivered to them. These people are as far-removed from my reality as the characters they play, and therefore, they hardly exist in three-dimensional space. I will never meet or know them because for all practical purposes, they don't exist outside a writer's imagination. In other words, there is no real Eva Longoria. When I see her on TV, graciously smiling and waving from within the safety of velvet ropes and red carpets, she is no more real to me than Homer Simpson.

Ac-TORS, however, have been flitting in and out of my life since high school. These people don't make it to Hollywood, though some of them move there. They do theater. And I fucking hate theater. It drives me nuts, what with all the over-acting, and the panting, and the rouge, and the delusions, and the drama that bleeds over from the production into real life.

In high school, I had a good friend who said frequently and with grave determination, "I'm going to be an actor." As if by making such definitive statements, one could make it so. "I'm going to acquire the hope diamond." POOF! Cursed blue diamond, right in my pocket. "I'm going to drive a German half-track." POOF! German half-track, right in my pocket. Same thing in college. I was friends with a few theater people, and a couple of them frequently said the same thing, usually with a nonchalance that suggested they were a little surprised that it hadn't happened already. And then one time, my friend Bryan, who WILLFULLY lived with three other theater dudes threw a party, and the TCU theater department showed up, and when I and my roommate arrived, I overheard one girl say to her friend, "who are those guys?" and her friend replied, "I don't know, but they're definitely not THEATER PEOPLE."

Geez, girls, how did you know? Was it because my pockets weren't rattling with bottles of anti-depressants?

So I find theater people universally annoying. Perhaps you are wondering, however, why I would bring this up. Well, this weekend, Darth Vato played in Galveston, which is a city south of Houston on the gulf. We normally have good shows there, but this one was sort of screwed up in that the opening band cancelled, we had to play for an extra hour (which means playing more covers, which I hate), and we had to compete with terrible metal bands in the adjacent room. But it wasn't a big deal for us, because we have electric instruments that can drown out other electric instruments. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the one-act play that went on before us.

You might think that I am using one-act play as a metaphor or a euphamism for a crappy band, but I'm not. Prior to us, two people, in costume, paced around each other spouting unfunny, circuitous dialogue in some play about a woman who thought she was a superhero. It was dumb and it was irritating, but ultimately, I just felt bad for them.

See, they got started around 9:00, shortly before the first metal band started sound checking in the other room, and it was as awkward as getting a boner in church. The situation sort of went like this:

DELUSIONAL ACTOR 1: So you're saying you're NOT Mrs. Barbara Stanwick of 1572 Lakeshore Drive....

DELUSIONAL ACTOR 2: No, I am Superwoman, and I am here to defeat the League of EEE-ville.

TERRIBLE HIGH SCHOOL METALCORE BAND IN ADJACENT ROOM: JUGGAJUNNNNN!!!!!!

DA 1: But our files say that you ARE Mrs. Barbara Stanwick of 1572 Lakeshore Drive, married to Mike, mother of Jack, 7, and Mary, 5, and they say nothing about any "league of evil."

DA 2: Then your files, Doctor, are CLEARLY erroneous, and have probably been fabricated by the League of EEE-ville themselves!

THSMBIAR: JUGGEDAJUGGEDAJUGGAJUNNNNN!!!!! How you guys tonight? We're called A Dying Death of Dying...

And so on. It was uncomfortable, and it pretty much made the night a total gong show. The cellphones rang. The bar's phone rang. Detuned power chords rang. I finally bailed and went to the other room to watch teenagers with hair in their faces growl and chug away on crappy amps. But this was just as uncomfortable as the shitty play, as their crowd was as many moms as it was friends. The friends were politely standing, but the moms were doing the over-the-head-Michael-McDonald-concert-type claps. To tuneless, rhythmless hardcore.

The nice thing was that we still had some people come watch us, and we made more money than we were supposed to. Eric made us get up at eight the next morning and leave shortly thereafter so he could be back in time for the Cowboys/Eagles kickoff. This made me grouchy, but he really, really likes the Cowboys, so it wasn't like I had much of a choice. He says that the Cowboy's performance affects how the rest of the his week goes, and this makes very little sense to me, but whatever.

At least we weren't leaving early so he could make it to a one-act play.

--The Robo-Pirate

p.s.
I saw The Departed. Holy fucking shit. Just go see it, all right?