Dec. 6: Grins and giggles

The funniest thing ever was the time Mikey peed in the bottle of shampoo.

I didn't see it. I heard about it second hand. Jay and I were riding our bikes back from school. Jay was telling me that Mikey wasn't allowed in his house anymore. I asked him why and he told me that, at the party last weekend, Mikey had went into the upstairs bathroom and urinated in a half empty bottle of Head and Shoulders.

God forgive me, but I found that screamingly funny. I laughed so hard that I fell off my bike and rolled around on the grass in the alley behind Jay's house for a good ten minutes. I laughed so hard that I screamed and cried. Jay did not find it funny which, of course, made it all the more funnier.

-

I like to tell the story about the time in the year 2000 when, as a general assignment reporter with a small community newspaper in Eastern Ontario, I found myself assigned to cover a production of The Parson's Predicament, a musical farce that was being put on by a group of community players operating out of the local United church.

It was a terrible play. The actors mumbled their lines; they couldn't sing; the blocking was horrible and no one had any idea what their motivations were. As I left the church, I overheard a couple of old ladies talking to the actor who portrayed the titular parson. "That was so wonderful," one of them said. "We were surprised to hear you're all local people. We thought for sure they had flown in some professionals from New York."

I left right away.

-

When I got home, I called a professional actor friend of mine in Calgary and related that story. We both howled with laughter.

But who were we laughing at?

Were we laughing at the actors? I hope not. They didn't claim to be professional. They didn't even claim to be competent. Most of them had never acted before and some of them were doing it reluctantly; they had been pressed into service by someone else. They didn't think they were doing anything great; they just wanted to do something nice for the community, have a little fun, and maybe raise some money for their church. That doesn't deserve mockery. It deserves respect.

Were we laughing at the old ladies? I hope not. There's no law saying that you must have an understanding of what constitutes professional theatre if you are to live in this society. I'm glad such a law doesn't exist. Sure, Shteevie knows a little about the theatre but if you put me in an industrial kitchen or a nuclear laboratory or a high school classroom or a lawyer's office or a mechanic's pit or an airplane cockpit, then I will be as naive and as clumsy as those two old ladies whose ignorance allowed them to find joy in a wretched piece of theatre.

So I guess we were laughing at ourselves. We were laughing because we live in a world where talent and success seldom walk hand-in-hand. You can graduate top of your class from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but a professional wrestler will steal top billing from you should you star with him in a movie.

-

In theatre school, our acting teacher said that a comedy doesn't have to make you laugh, but it should make you smile. My dad used to laugh when he watched Cheers. 

I never laugh when I watch comic plays or stand-up comedians. I hate that about myself. I cannot allow myself to get lost in the moment. I watch other people laugh. I analyze the jokes. I am wasting my life.

In Dante's Inferno, it is said that the people in hell must always be moving. If they stop, even for a second, they will remain inert for a hundred years. And the flames will never stop burning. They will be in scorching agony for one century.

I'm not sure why I thought of that. It seems to fit.

-

Don't ask me why, but I've been thinking about a simple pleasure as of late. In it, I am in my parents finished basement in Calgary. I am lounging on the couch and the big screen TV is on, showing a Flames game or a Roughriders game. I'm dressed in a T-shirt and comfy pants and I'm holding a tall glass of Dr. Pepper with crushed ice in it. On the coffee table is a medium double pepperoni pizza (with no cheese) from Pizza Bank. 

And that's it. Me having lazy time after a hard day's work - doing magic shows at a school probably. It makes me grin. I miss that basement.

-

I remember the first time my kid grinned at me. He was maybe two months old and I was feeding him his bottle. I was sitting on the couch and he was sitting beside me, sucking on his bottle, and looking up at me. And he wasn't just looking at me. Kiddo was studying me, like he was trying to figure out if I was a spy. Then, suddenly, he smiled. It was one of those toothless baby smiles - totally genuine - and my heart was so full that I had to announce it to the world.

"He did his first smile!" I yelled. "Kiddo just smiled at me."

And then I was told that it wasn't his first smile, that he'd been smiling for weeks. That was fine. It didn't matter. I still have the memory.

My mom tells me that the first thing I ever smiled at was the moon.

-

My kid made me giggle today. Several times, in fact. The first giggle came early this morning when I took him through the Bourdeau drive-thru for breakfast. I got myself a plate of bacon and eggs and I got him an order of sausages. I parked the car, handed him his sausages, and set my plate in front of me. Instantly, kiddo reaches over and helps himself to my bacon.

Well kiddo is autistic and he doesn't really understand social norms, especially the one about eating bacon that doesn't belong to you. But hey, I surrendered my bacon to him and I contented myself with toast and eggs instead. Later, I conveyed that story to his mom and she laughed, so we both got some grins and giggles out of kiddo.

-

Kiddo smiles a lot because he doesn't ask for a lot. He's happy if you give him an ice cream, some pizza, take him swimming, cuddle him, tickle him, let him watch a train. I'm guessing I can learn something from that.

-

I tend to look at the early 90s as a wasteland. I was in my late teens and early 20s, the handsomest I've ever been (I am no longer handsome) and yet I was so lonely. I was in theatre school and had alienated myself from my teachers and fellow students, I couldn't get a date if my life depended on it, and the person I hung out with the most was a pathological liar, about 10 years older than I was, who, I suspected, had some pastimes that weren't entirely legal. I was haunted by, what Kurt Vonnegut called, "the existential hum," which was the realization that I was wasting my life and the only way to get past it was to let go of some comforting fictions and face reality head-on. I wasn't going to be a movie star or get my own magic special on TV. It's sad that I don't giggle or grin much when I think about those days. I had some happy times - doing public readings at Words Books and Cappuccino Bar, performing magic for teenagers at Lazer Illusions - but for the most part, it was an abyss.

One of my fellow acting students was a guy named Kavan, who always looked like he'd just come from a GQ photo shoot. The teachers at the acting school loved him and, it was rumored, that they set him up with an acting agent in Vancouver after he graduated. Most of us took our acting school diplomas and promptly got jobs in coffee houses, restaurants, and slaughterhouses. One in the latter talked about coming home from work one night, slathered in guts, reeking of dead cows and turning on the TV and seeing a shirtless Kavan wooing some actress in a TV drama.

"I'm wasting my life," he said, and I agreed with him because we were both young enough to think that you're wasting your life if you're not on television.

-

Some words of wisdom from a guy I worked at Domino's Pizza with for a while in December of 1997 (I know the date because I was trying to get a night off work so I could take my girlfriend to see the new James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies.)

Domino's guy, who was about 50, said that it's a good thing that most people's dreams don't come true.

"World couldn't function if they did," he said. "There's millions of kids out there who wanna be movie stars or rock stars or supermodels, but the supply of people like that exceeds the demand. No one dreams of working at Domino's or in a factory or driving a cab their whole life, but the world needs people like that, so a compromise must be set. Y'unnerstand?"

Yeah. I understand.

-

I think that big cities swallow people up, strip them of their identities, turn them into anonymous faces shuffling down the sidewalk. Small town life is better. 

I am writing this in my cruddy little apartment in East Ontario. Kiddo is in bed, snoring peacefully. He will wake up happy. He always wakes up happy. I have errands to run in the morning and early afternoon. After that, I will do something fun with him. There will be grins and giggles.

And I long for the day when Lazer Illusions reopens so I can do magic tricks again.