Monthly Archives: March 2017

If you are squinting at this split-screen, poster image of a man with a weapon bearing expressions from quizzical to surprise to menacing and wondering “could that be?” then let me confirm either your weak eyesight or questioning mind or both. It is I, a gun in my black-gloved hand. And so let the Jimi Hendrix tune “Hey Joe” play in your mind, “Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?”

Now I do not find myself wielding a weapon very often. We live on the property that has been in Kay’s family for over one hundred years. After living in a condominium in Los Angeles for several years with a postage stamp for a back yard, it was great to have acres and acres of farm land out our back door. And part of the fun of having access to such open territory is the opportunity to have target practice with a variety of weaponry. When the mood strikes, we will gather up a collection of empty cans of Kay’s Big Sexy Hair or TRESemme spray or my Barbasol shaving cream or a box of clay pigeons and the skeet launcher, go back on the farm, and commence to shooting.

When our daughters went off to college in Philadelphia they would bring their northern friends home and expose them to the pleasures of country life. It did not take long for word to spread on campus before caravans of cars packed with the girl’s friends would arrive for a Thanksgiving holiday or a spring break. The Florida beaches had fewer revelers during those years; hard to compete with bonfires and cookouts, four-wheel drive trucks and dirt bikes, a well-stocked pond with a dock, our makeshift firing range for target shooting, two racks from which to choose a pipe for smoking a variety of tobaccos (all participates of age and all substances legal), and lots of love.

I am a fair shot although not as good as Kay, who even as a young girl, upstaged an older neighbor and his friend who kept firing and missing a rascally rabbit romping through our back field. She requested to take a shot, which was met with disdain by the males until she fired the .22 rifle. Her status as a one-shot wonder became legend, and she replaced Mr. McGregor as Peter Rabbit’s worst nightmare.

Last summer we were hosting a large, all-day gathering at the house. We even splurged and rented an inflatable water-slide. We set up the fifteen-foot beast next to our garden house so we could power the electric generator which ran nonstop keeping the air pumping into the slippery monster so our guests, ranging in age from 3 to 70, could wear themselves out climbing and sliding…repeat ad infinitum.

For weeks leading up to this day I had noticed a groundhog coming from beneath the garden house. He would raid my garden or forage the pears that had fallen to the ground from a nearby tree. I crawled around the garden house and saw mounds of dirt where he had burrowed numerous holes beneath the structure. He was not just paying us a visit. He had taken residence. This would not stand, and I told Kay that the groundhog’s days were numbered. She was fine with me putting out a “hit” on the groundhog, but as the time drew nearer to our event, she repeatedly said, “Don’t shoot that thing this close to the party.” You can see where this is going.

Just days before the party Kay was at work and I was home writing. I would take periodic breaks and pass by the picture window in the living room, not to enjoy the view, but in hopes of catching a glimpse of the varmint. I would see him dash across the yard or stand on his hind legs looking in my direction, snout in the air, chattering away, which sounded to me like groundhog for “I have diplomatic immunity, sucker” before he gleefully dove under the garden house. I shook my fist and cursed him…aloud, but kept our .22 bolt-action in the case until the taunting and the temptation became too much.

At first, I thought I had missed him because after firing the single round he dashed under the garden house, and since he did not show his head again, I thought I had at least put the fear of God in him…until the day before the party when I was straightening up the garden house in preparation for the festivities. I caught a whiff of something foul, and my first thought was not that I had achieved the “great white hunter” status, but that I was in deep trouble. How was I going to spin this? If only I were a politician and could blame someone else. Talk about your “smoking gun.” I did choose to let Kay discover the olfactory truth as opposed to me just announcing it, and because it was the middle of August, I did not have to wait long to be found out.

“What did you do?” “You didn’t did you?” “Didn’t I tell you not to?” came the flurry of stern questions that required no answer. But I ask you, how many hit men do you know who give their wives the details of their workday? However, I made the effort, taking full responsibility with the “I cannot tell a lie” approach.  The entrance of the garden house extends out onto a large patio with a pergola overhead and beyond that is the garden with a fountain in the center, so the majority of our eating and drinking, visiting, and playing on the water-slide would be confined to this area…the area where the invisible fog of decomposition would settle and remain not for hours, but days, with the aromatic peak hitting, you guessed it, on the day of the event. Our daughters, their husbands, and the grand kids had come for an extended weekend, and after the hugs and welcomes, their faces soon grimaced and the question arose, “What’s that awful smell?”

“I told your father. I told him,” were the first words from Kay’s mouth, and she regaled the children with the story of multiple warnings and of the smelly result of warnings unheeded. When our girls were the ages of our grand kids, they would often ask me to tell them stories. “Daddy, tell us a story about when you were bad.” I never disappointed them, and with one fateful round from my .22 bolt-action, I added to my literary opus of tales when I was bad. What with three grand children, I figured new narratives were needed for the next generation.

Over the course of the arrival of our family and friends, Kay had numerous opportunities retelling the source and cause for the unpleasant odor. She soon grew weary of the frequency of her story, and having reached the point of exhaustion with the last few arrivals, she just pointed to me when the face of a guest began to contort as they made their inquiry regarding the befouled atmosphere. I now had the freedom to tell my perspective as long as I was faithful to include Kay’s stern warning not to do what I eventually did. It was too good an opportunity for me to pass up, was my best argument, and in spite of the odor, I remember us having a grand time with no one turning on their heels and heading home after catching a whiff or the loss of their appetite when the meal was served.

If you happen to believe in reincarnation and find yourself coming back as groundhog, unless you come back as the pampered Punxsutawney Phil, you will engage in destructive groundhog behaviors – you can’t help it, the groundhog DNA demands it. And if you find that you have taken residence beneath our garden house, building a tunnel system through the soil and feasting on the bounty of my garden and fruit trees, then prepare for your present re-embodiment to be short-lived. You will be dispatched back to Buddha Central to embrace yet another life in the cyclical search for Nirvana.

If you have read this far and a few more minutes to “kill” (5:40 to be exact), then bounce back to the Home Page of my website and click the “Killing Time” poster on the “Featured Projects” slider. The film will pop up, and you can watch this delightful short of a bumbling hit man not quite ready for prime time written and directed by Adam Rosenbaum.

In the days of my youth I had numerous unpleasant experiences of being part of a large group only to have it split like an amoeba in order to engage in a competitive activity. I so desperately wanted to fit in; and please dear God, don’t let me be picked last as the teams are chosen because it would only confirm that my talent (usually an athletic competition), is considered well below average by my peers. Consumed by anxiety in those days, I dreaded the athletic events where high achievers in the sport—dodge ball, basketball, flag football, etc.—were designated leaders of a team, and the Darwinian process of selection was used to determine the competitive sides. As names were called out, the chosen would stand behind their leader and whisper advice in his ear as to who might be his next best choice. I was never the last man standing.

I usually ranked between mid-to-penultimate choice, and I don’t ever remember hearing groans from my fellow teammates when my name was called. Still the whole process was an exercise in humiliation. One year in high school I did make the basketball team but kept the bench well heated with three other boys. The four of us were allowed to play only if the score favored or disfavored us by twenty points and with less than two minutes on the game clock. With so little time left to play, what harm could we do?

Once I became an actor I found myself, on occasion, with other professional artists engaged in art-related workshops and seminars. We would often be asked by the seminar leaders to form a small group to do an exercise. While the expectation to perform or compete was nil, I still felt the anxiety of being chosen. I sought out those folks of similar disposition and felt the gravitational pull of like-kind. The profession I chose is competitive and the selection process to find the right person for the job is daunting. As Martin Scorsese says “more than 90% of directing a good picture is the right casting.” Early in my career, I got an object lesson in knowing my limitations and the objectivity of being chosen to fit a role. What I experienced cannot be taught in any scholastic environment or workshop or professional seminar or program.

Now when it comes to creative talent my father and sister had/have it in multiples: Dad could act, sing, teach, direct, play an instrument…a quintic threat; then my sister, Nan Gurley, is a quadruple threat: act, sing, dance, and play an instrument (now she is an established painter, so after this I’m going to crawl into a hole and die). By the harmonic confluence of genetic design, I consider myself fortunate to have one of those talents.

In 1973, I was home from Pepperdine University for Christmas break. Nan was also home from Abilene University, and we learned of auditions for singers, dancers, and actors for the Opryland theme park that would open in late spring the next year for its second season. Nan and Dad helped me prepare my sixteen bars of “I Got Plenty of Nothin’” (a number I have used for many an audition but it has only landed me one role…the character of John Dickinson in Nashville Repertory Theatre’s production of “1776,” my first and last musical with that company). The Opryland audition committee had not requested a three-minute classical/contemporary monologue, something I could have pulled out of my back pocket. No, they wanted song and dance. So I warbled my sixteen bars followed by the dreaded dancing audition. My religious upbringing had no tolerance for dancing in its list of “absolutely not,” so I was at a distinct disadvantage. The choreographer called a group of auditionees to the stage and demonstrated a series of combinations we were to perform. After a hasty review of the dance moves, the piano player started playing and we were off to the races. I positioned myself in the back of the pack and tried not to fall on my face and bloody my nose. A half-dozen or more of the artistic staff, including Paul Crabtree, the artistic director for Opryland, sat behind long tables watching our moves, nodding their heads, whispering to each other, and in my case, trying not to laugh. Once we were dismissed, I knew theme parks were not in my professional future.

After Christmas I returned to Pepperdine for my next semester. I thought I might stay in L.A. over the summer and pursue the beginnings of a film career. Then late one afternoon I got a phone call. It was one of the casting people from Opryland asking if I could come for a callback. Trying to conceal my surprise that I was being considered, I politely said “no” for two reasons: 1) I’m in school in L.A. and have no money to fly home to humiliate myself a second time; and 2) there has been no improvement in my song and dance skills since Christmas. I thanked him for the call and we parted as friends.

To my greater surprise a few weeks later, I got a second call from the Opryland casting person saying I had been cast in a show called “The Showboat Show” written and directed by Paul Crabtree. They had either reached the bottom of the barrel or my playing hard to get had worked in my favor. When Nan called and said that she had also been cast in the show, I thought, the film career could wait. I would work at Opryland for the summer, make enough money to pay the balance of tuition after scholarships, and go back to Pepperdine in the fall for my last semester.

Leap ahead to the beginning of rehearsals for “Showboat.” If my memory is correct, there were seventeen cast members. The show Paul Crabtree wrote incorporated a mixture of old standards like “Old Man River,” with contemporary numbers like “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and an instrumental version of “Shaft” for a big dance number. The set was the façade of the bow of a steamboat and the outdoor setting overlooked the Cumberland River. Crabtree had also written narration tying the songs and story together.

During rehearsals all the cast members auditioned for musical solos and featured dance numbers. I croaked through “Old Man River” and “Leroy Brown,” before being put through our dancing paces. The choreographer gave the cast a more complicated routine than what we were given at the first audition. I was that guy in the opening credits of the Bob Fosse film, “All That Jazz,” where the stage is packed with dancers doing a routine and that one guy who is a beat behind and bumping into other dancers. My ultimate mortification came when the Opryland choreographer had each cast member dance across the rehearsal hall in a diagonal line like the floor routine of a gymnast while dancing a combination she had designed. Since I could not hide behind anyone, I tried to make it across as fast as possible without twisting an ankle or breaking a bone.

The cast gathered in the middle of the rehearsal hall while Crabtree, the choreographer, and the music director confabbed and decided which of us would dance or sing what numbers. The triumvirate began to point to specific cast members informing them that they had been chosen for this song or would be featured in that dance number and then instructed them to go to their respective corner of the room.  In a matter of a few minutes, singers and dancers were peeling away and standing to the right or left of the triumvirate leaving me in the middle of the rehearsal hall by myself feeling like the Elephant Man.

The choreographer huddled with to her dancers and the musical director did the same with his singers all of whom were giggly with excitement at being chosen for their featured moment in the show, which left Paul Crabtree to ponder what to do with the odd-man-out. All the youthful memories came flooding back with accompanying anxieties, and I now knew what it felt like to be the last one standing. I had been found out. There was no hiding in the background during the dance routines or just mouthing the lyrics in the choral numbers. It was a miracle I had gotten this far. I reviewed my options in my mind: wait tables, every actor’s default career, work construction, or Opryland might hire me as a character to walk around the park in an over-sized costume of a guitar or banjo or upright bass…not that there is anything wrong with that.

Crabtree approached. I’m not sure the squint in his eyes was one of pity or perturbation, but he stopped before me and said, “And you, my son, shall talk.” And thus the role of “Captain Jerry” was born. I would speak all the narration he had written. Crabtree had handed me the gift of knowledge. He recognized my one talent and gave me the opportunity to exploit it. I will always be grateful, and I’ve been doing my best to exploit it ever since. So far no one seems to have found me out.