I am slower to start today than I ought, but I am full of vim and vigor, as JFK might say, or piss and vinegar, as the “colorful” yet purely evil mother of a chilhood friend might say.

So the shooting finished for the “Bush Focus Group” thang, and it was almost done on time. It went long both days, but not as long as it felt like it might have to at various points on Saturday and Sunday. And, for anyone who doesn’t think “acting” is hard work, fuck you. (I put “acting” in quotes not to cast doubt on any thesbians out there; the quotes are in regard to what I do. And, really, quotes don’t even do justice to the dubiousness of my “work.”)

I was dead dog tired when I went to bed last night. Tired from two days of saying the same words over again and again and again and again for a whole lot of different reasons. And, tired from the sheer boredom of waiting to say the same words over again. I know it’s a rinky dink indie short and all that, I have no illusions of grandeur, but still and all, it was a multi-camera shoot so there were a lot of different angles and whatnot, and the crew was pretty fucking great about trying to keep all the movie magic kind of shit together–same props and costumes and room changes over time, no noise, blocking outside light and sound as much as possible. Mostly, when you watch a flick you don’t think about how papers on a table in different successive shots that physically take hours to shoot have to be relatively the same in the one-minute edited chunk of the final film. Or if you do notice, it’s because it’s so bad it’s distracting or the movie is show shitty you have time to worry. I don’t think that will be the case for this one.

For anyone out there who doesn’t know and cares, in any film you see in order to get all those editing cuts from different angles, closer and further, blah, blah, and in order to milk out the words the way they should be emoted, there is just a fucking shitload of repetitive shooting so the editor and director can pick what they need and trash the rest. So, I was saying stuff one way, and then saying it again with more emphasis or changing the emphasis on different words or yelling more or who the fuck knows what I was doing. And, then, I was doing all of that yelling and emphasizing with my chair moved or a different camera on me or no camera on me but on the guy next to me. Over and fucking over again.

By the end of it, I had repeated everything so many times, the sentences lost a lot of meaning and just seemed more and more absurd, which was pretty fucking absurd, since my character said some of the most absurd shit anyway. By the end of it, I was also pretty convinced that I suck, since you’re redoing stuff so many times for so many different reasons, it’s hard to fucking tell if any of them were right at all.

The only gauge I have that I probably didn’t suck as bad as the voices in my head always imply is that folks all seemed to still want to talk to me afterward and maintained eye contact and stuff. I also got invited to do an improv/stand-up hybrid thing at some to be determined future date. (If you ever hung out at bad comedy shows, you would know the special awkward feeling of people avoiding eye contact and communication post death on stage. Fucking painful to witness.)

Of course, I’m not really bitching. OK, the “of course” there is stupid, because I am ALWAYS bitching, but I had fun and learned a lot. Besides, if I were truly bitching, I would be truly a whining pussy. The one other guy who was in as many shots, actually I think more than me, fell down stairs (at the MBTA no less) last week and fucking creamed his knee. He actually had to take the brace off his torn ligaments for a couple of shots, because last week he was brace free, and behind the camera he was periodically wincing in pain. Another guy has a very sick, sadly young member of his family terminally ill and was, I think, sticking with this project to keep himself a little more occupied.

Among the reasons I wrote all this bullshit down is because of an argument I once had with an arrogant woman who will likely never see this shit at all, but given the roads of gossip may possibly hear of it. Her point of view was everyone should have productive work that benefits other for a life of value. Her definitions of productive and beneficial were unbelievably self-serving for her career choice and disparaging of others’. Specifically about performing arts, while allowing some value to a society of the arts, she dissed acting as the most useless, because it’s just people reading. Per her view, actors don’t create or make anything they do, any more than a parrot speaks. In deference to my stand-up comedy, she allowed that I was writing, which has value.

Whatever, bitch, you’re wrong. It’s really a shame you think you know so much about life and the world, enough to opine about everything and anything, but in truth, you are as myopic and limited as the folks you dismiss in your intellectual elitism.