The Actor!

Beauregard Barnaby Pissbark (the First Hound) as Barfu the Hairier Princess, and the Actor as Chog the Unwincible. Photo copyright Charley Freiberg

I live with an actor.

That sentence deserves a paragraph of its own, because, as anyone who has also lived with an actor will tell you, it implies a lot.

Actors are strange beings; they spend lots of time muttering to themselves, and you can be having a perfectly normal conversation with one and suddenly the actor will shout  “By heaven, Ralph, no! Not the gun!", and when you jump up and look around in horror, they mutter, "Yep, that works."

My house is sometimes filled with actors. Actors doing acty things go through cycles, and they do it in packs, because actors need - well, they need an audience. First, Denial: "No, no, I'm not going to try out for that play. I have no interest in it!" Followed by Coyness: “I heard they were short on actors, so I tried out just to help." Then, True Interest: "Hey, I got the part! You did too? Great, let's run lines!"  This lasts for a week or two once rehearsals start, then arrives Anger: "Can you believe how that director wants us to play that? He/she has no idea what this play's actually about. It's going to be a disaster!"  Despair follows: "It's never going to come together. No one will come see it. No one should come see it. It's horrid. Why did I get involved in this play?" Finally,  Opening Night: "Did you see what I did there in Act 2? Huh? Did you see that? Wasn't that great?” followed by weeks of self-congratulations, counter-congratulations, and intricately detailed picking-apart of every single moment of every single performance.

The life of a community-theater actor is full of ups and downs, because typically only two or three shows a year go up. So in-between shows, you have to produce your own high drama. I've been married to the Actor for 35-plus years, and he came into his own acty-ness only about 20 years ago; but, trust me, drama has been part of his life long before the stage was. Actors are born, and he was born to two prize dramatists.

Actually, we don't know that - the Actor's mother was a very dramatic lady, who made her living as a model and even had a bit part in one movie.  When she stopped modeling and trying to make it in the movies, she never lost her flair for the dramatic toss of the head,  the swooping wave with a cigarette-dangling hand, and a deeply intoned, "That, my darling, is classified information!"

That dramatic scene was the predictable response to any question about who the Actor's father really was. He could have been any of four interesting possibilities, including a stage actor, an Italian guitar player, a shell-shocked man the Model met and ran away with during a stay in Bellevue, or a guy named Bob Smith - the Actor has two birth certificates, and one includes an obviously-invented paternal name. ("Oh, that was his stage name," the Model explained.)

Between staged shows, I can expect a few private shows. A headache results in a clearly-expiring body dragging itself painfully down the hall and collapsing onto the floor just feet from a comfortable chair. Or the phone call announcing the electric company had come to bury our lines, and they'd "dug up the entire field and ruined it!" I raced home to give someone a scathing earful of what-for, only to discover the expected narrow trench extending from the telephone pole on the road to the corner of our house, straight across the field. And I've learned over the years that the best cure for an actor with "the vapors" from a bloody but not life-threatening injury is a giant wedgie and a quick goose-step into the emergency room for stitches. 

(The vapors is a malady common to tightly-corseted Victorian ladies and actors of all eras and genders. Proper sitting rooms should have at least one fainting couch and a bottle of smelling salts near to hand.)

Fortunately, the Actor can use his skills to his advantage. Returning from a business trip I discovered every flat surface in the kitchen covered with dirty dishes and the sink full of dirty pots and pans. I shouted, “The well had better have gone dry, or did you break your hands?!" The Actor looked me straight in the eye and without a twitch replied, "I couldn't do the dishes, because the dish drainer was full."

I didn't kill him because I was laughing too hard.

Long ago, when I was a young t'ai chi student, a fellow student and I nagged our teacher until he promised to teach us sword set, but, "You need to go find 'your' sword first, and I want you to carry it everywhere you go – and sleep with it under your pillows!" Off we went to Boston, found “our” swords, and because we really wanted to learn that set, carried them everywhere and sometimes slept with them under our pillows.

One fall night, the Actor and I were tucked up cozily in bed when I realized I'd left my sword out in my truck. The wind was howling, hail was spitting, it was midnight, and I really, really didn't want to get out of bed, but I worried that if I left the sword out in the truck it would start to rust. I nudged the Actor. "Hey, Hon, go get my sword for me, would you? I left it in the truck."

"Go get your own sword. I'm not going to put clothes on and go out into this weather."

"If you were a real man," I said loftily, "you'd jump out of bed and go outside, bollocky-bare-assed nekkid, wangle your dangle and shake your fist at the weather gods and defy them to keep you from fetching my sword!"

"If I were a real man," the Actor didn't miss a beat, "I wouldn't have a woman who has a sword."

Perfect improvisation.  I went after my own sword. 

Drama can also have moments of real sweetness. A few years ago, the Actor and his buds staged a play I'd written, just in time for my dying father to be able to see it. How could you not love that?

Of course, I also live with a musician. But that's another story.

Originally published in the Concord Monitor as "Act of Valor," January 21, 2017.