Your Edinburgh Fringe show opens an NYC run later this week, but it’s morning, the windows are still dark, your bed is warm and you have no intention of getting out of it. Putting your feet on the floor will put you back in touch with the stress of the show, and you have so few moments where you can feel relaxed, where you don’t feel quite so vulnerable.
And you can’t stand feeling vulnerable. That’s what your show is about.
But you don’t feel vulnerable now, in these last moments of the early morning before the light comes up, and your stress creeps out of the shadows. What you do feel is the rice and beans you had for dinner. They are ready to re-enter the world any second and you have to determine whether they’re going to do that like a loving whisper or an angry tuba.
Because, even though you just celebrated your nineteenth wedding anniversary, you’re still not comfortable with the idea of farting in bed with your wife there. Like I said, you can’t stand feeling vulnerable. At least not in the real world.
Which gets you thinking about your acting coach. She’s constantly pushing you to reach greater levels of vulnerability on stage. Weird thing is, you don’t have a problem with it there. It’s still scary, but more like roller coaster scary. You look out into all that open space, and your stomach drops just as you start to fall. In a theater, when you let yourself go like that, the audience catches you and that connection is thrilling.
And when you fake that vulnerability, you don’t get that. What you get is a ding from your acting coach’s triangle and her saying, “I’m not believing you.”
When you hear that ding this time, your eyes open and it’s light out. You notice two things. You no longer feel the need to fart. And your wife is no longer in bed with you. Did the need just pass? Did something horrible happen in your sleep and now she’s out on the couch? Something like that happened the other day while you were visiting your parents in Florida. You farted so loudly in your sleep it woke both of you up and your wife lustily proclaimed, “Whoa!”
It was a vulnerable moment and you’re still feeling that vulnerability weeks later.
Not that she cares. She comes from a family of world-class crack flappers. It’s an art form in her family. They practically use spotlights for that stuff.
Like that time in Idaho at the Pioneer, waiting two hours for a table. Her brother has been sick out the backside for several days, with devastating effect on your condo. In an attempt to get a table faster by clearing out the restaurant, he does a long controlled crop dusting of the entire bar area. You watch the heads turn as he walks past and one kid whose face is ass-height starts crying, “Mommy it stinks in here.”
You appreciate the art, admire the execution, respect the mastery, but it will never be your medium. You realize you’re the kind of person who’d rather be naked on stage than fart in bed.
You look at the time. It’s 10am. Your wife has been up for hours now, and you just lost the four you were going to use to push ticket sales and organize the rack cards, programs, and posters you need for your opening. You just slept your way into greater vulnerability. Your day just got more stressful.
“Ding,” goes the triangle. “Too much drama. I’m not believing you,” says your acting coach.…
(Pictured, left to right, my grandfather, Baba, great grandfather, and great aunt, and me, center, the disappointing, lazy three year old who has yet to compose his first opera)
It’s a two-hour long train ride into the city to perform for five minutes, and after you’ve finished your dinner – a much-too-salty bag of cashews from the Rite Aid because it’s the only place open at Grand Central at midnight – you hop the train home and become the guy sleeping across three seats of some stranger’s Instagram, generating outrage from a couple hundred of their followers over all that privilege you have.
It’s probably not the right time to ask them to buy tickets to your show, although at the moment I’ll try anything because I have hundreds of seats to fill, and nobody else knows who I am.
If you know me, I’ve already let you know how each one of those seats is generating another layer of panic, and that’s why a friend texts me: “It’s hard to be a star.”
It just so happens to be my birthday when she does, and the magic of Facebook’s database has me on one of those social-media-induced narcissist spin cycles.
So many people remembering my birthday? I am a star!
That lasts a blissful 15, maybe 20 seconds. Then I start to come down and the voice in my head kicks in, the one I named my show after, the voice of authority: you are in no way a star.
That’s why you’re on the train at 2am, you schmuck.
No social-media ego fix can change that reality. And my friend’s text takes on another layer. It’s hard to be a star. I feel that acutely in this moment. Maybe you know that feeling of being confounded by finding, and keeping, an audience. It’s hardly exclusive to acting, every business has to do the same thing, and it’s fundamental to success. There is no stardom without an audience. And no cash flow either.
Maybe that’s obvious, maybe I’m just thick, but at no point in my life as a developing artist has anyone ever explained this to me. Not in the arts in high school. Not at Columbia. Not in any of the study I’ve done since I graduated.
But my friend, she just got her MFA from Brown. Maybe they taught her something no one taught me. Not even my family. I grew up in a family of artists. No one mentioned this. The only thing they ever talked about was that I should do something else because I didn’t have the work ethic to make it in this business.
I work 14-hour days. Often. Often four of them are on the train.
To my family the development of craft is everything. My Ukrainian grandmother, Baba, for instance, was a concert pianist who studied at the Vienna Conservatory. In my childhood she’s at the piano from the time I wake in the morning until the end of the day. And what she sees in me she calls лінивий, the Ukie word for lazy. Give me a break, Baba, I’m six years old and it’s summer vacation.
Baba may have been intense, but I miss her every day.
She comes to see me in a play in NYC when I’m 20. Afterwards she takes me aside and says: “Everything else that you’re doing is the wrong thing. This is what you’re meant to do.”
As an influential member of the Ukrainian diaspora, Baba had a ready-made audience. If she did something, the Ukrainian community showed up. In droves.
I never really thought about it, but I suppose Baba built that audience. She contributed to that community enormously. She taught lessons, organized a festival that just passed its 50th year, fought to preserve the Ukrainian culture and language, and helped create an 11-volume encyclopedia on Ukrainian music defined by region. She gave, and they gave back.
I’ve never found a community like that for myself. Maybe my grandmother is right, maybe I don’t work hard enough. Or rather, I haven’t worked hard enough at some things because I’ve never understood until now how important they are.
When you look at people who succeed today, who build these massive social media followings, it’s easy to dismiss what they do. You can call it dumb, or shallow, or pandering to the masses, but then you’re selling them short for how hard it is to be star. Each one of those people has found and kept an audience. They’ve learned how to communicate in a way that makes people feel like they are a part of something, like my grandmother’s Ukrainian community. And they do the work required to sustain that on a daily basis.
That’s really hard. Now that I’m struggling to learn that myself, I’m awed by how hard it is. But I can find solace in my friend’s text, because I can hear in it how much she believes in me. And I can hear my grandmother’s voice through her, pushing me to work harder because this is what I was meant to do.
Dean Temple’s comedy solo show Voice of Authority, a true story
about getting sued by the US Dept of Justice for $19 million and saved
by the choreographer of the Metropolitan Opera, will be at the Kraine
Theater in NYC Feb 21-Mar 9 (Tickets»), at 59E59 Theaters in NYC Jul 17-21, and at Surgeon’s Hall at Edinburgh Fringe Aug 2-24. Follow him on Twitter @deantemple and follow the show on facebook.com/deantemplevoa…
Dean dressed like a bum and Little Dog* in her stylish down jacket, walking across the pond. Image credit Alex Tuller.
I’m looking for ways to avoid the things I don’t want to do. There’s this long list of practical, business-side things looming over my show, Voice of Authority, before it opens in NYC in February, and then goes to Edinburgh Fringe in August. PR and publicity. Promotion. Audience development.
Just having those things on my to do list stresses me out and my ADD kicks in. The deadlines approach and pass by unmet, and it feels like failure. It feels like empty seats, and the show doesn’t open for a month. Every performer wants there to be someone that handles this for them. But so few of us are at a point in our careers where we can afford that.
This is where I am the moment a friend texts me: “I booked a job in Boston, can you dog sit for me?”
“Sure,” I text back. Dogs are good for stress. I have my own dog, but this other dog is what I need for my stress.
Then I text her, “Hold on one second,” and I text my wife to tell her a friend is asking if we could dog sit over the weekend.
“Okay,” came the response. I read that with the “OK” inflection and not the “okaaaaaay?” inflection she might have intended.
“No problem,” I text back to my friend.
Then my wife texts, “Is it house trained?”
I didn’t ask. Can you imagine having a dog in the city that’s not house trained? What a nightmare.
Also, my wife should text faster.
“It’ll be fine” I text back. “I’ll take care of it.”
I meet my friend and collect her five-month-old, three-pound-max Little Dog*, who shows up sporting a miniature t-shirt and down jacket. Her mom hands me a stack of wee pads. Okay great, I’m all set.
Although Little Dog* is a little disoriented and she misses that wee pad entirely the first night at 1am. I clean up discretely. Puppies make mistakes. No need for the wife to know about it.
And at 4am, Little Dog* misses the wee pad again. Apparently Little Dog* has no idea what a wee pad is. And she has a digestive system the size of peanut.
Have you ever been around a dog that relieves itself every two-and-a-half hours? Because I have not. Not until now.
My dog, Odi, a 40-pound Icelandic Sheepdog, can hold it in forever. We drive to Atlanta from New York with him one time and he was freaked out by the drive and the highway. He doesn’t go once until we get there. Fourteen hours. To me, that’s a dog.
But no worries, Little Dog*. We’ll walk it off.
Me avoiding my work like….
The first two days we spend hours walking, hours I don’t have to think about PR or audience development, and Little Dog* takes care of business outside. So far, so good.
“There’s an ice storm coming,” my wife says, which sounds like nonsense to me because the sky is crystal clear.
But five hours later, we are covered in a rock hard layer of ice three inches deep, and I’ve learned something new about Little Dog*. Three pound dogs can’t walk on ice or they turn into three pound popsicles pretty quickly.
And you remember what I said about Little Dog* going to the bathroom every two-and-a-half hours? I was so naive back then.
The first crap hits the floor at 4am. The second, while I’m making breakfast for the dogs because I’m up now and I might as well.
“Really? You just went,” I say to Little Dog*. She stares me down and squats. Two feet from the wee pad.
The third time I walk into the bathroom and there she is with another crap. Honestly, I admire the thinking, I come here for this too.
And now she’s eating it.
We find the fourth at noon on the bottom of my wife’s shoe, and she’s starting to suspect that Little Dog* might not be all that house trained. And the 12 paper towels distributed all over the floor, soaking up pee, are reinforcing this idea.
But I’m taking care of it. I have actively chosen to play chamber maid to a three-pound shitting machine who keeps me up all night instead of working on PR and audience development for my show. And now, I have to figure out how to clean the treads of my wife’s shoe while everything outside is frozen solid.
At least I’m not working on PR, right?
In Voice of Authority one of the principle questions is: Are you willing to suffer for something you want? Just as a big a question is: Why are we so often willing to suffer for something we don’t want?
I don’t know how to do PR. Or promotion. Or audience development. So they’re scary. You don’t know where to begin. You don’t know if you sound or look like an idiot. That doesn’t just make those things daunting. It makes me question whether I can even do this show.
If you try and fail, the seats are empty.
If you don’t try, the seats are empty, and you’ve failed.
It’s so incredibly easy to get distracted from the task at hand by the shit in your life, literally in my case. But who wouldn’t rather fail the first way than the second?
If you’re going to have the privilege of being on stage and sharing that experience with an audience, then I suppose there’s a price you’re going to have to pay for that. You can tell yourself it would be more meaningful if you could focus on the performance and someone else would handle the business, but it probably wouldn’t be. At least not until you’d earned it.
And with that in mind, I pull out my computer and start contacting the press about my show, stopping only when I hear my wife scream that, once again, Little Dog* is doing what she does best.
*The dog’s name has been changed at her mom’s request, although true story, I called her Little Dog for her entire visit. That, or LD! It just fit her.
Dean Temple’s comedy solo show Voice of Authority, a true story about getting sued by the US Dept of Justice for $19 million and saved by the choreographer of the Metropolitan Opera, will be at the Kraine Theater in NYC Feb 21-Mar 9 (Tickets»), at 59E59 Theaters in NYC Jul 17-21, and at Surgeon’s Hall at Edinburgh Fringe Aug 2-24. Follow him on Twitter @deantemple and follow the show on facebook.com/deantemplevoa…
(Pictured above, my mom, my baby sister, mom’s ’68 Mustang, and me with the mop of black hair.)
You have this ambitious project that you need to take on, the kind of project that most of the world around you sees as utterly impractical. And while you can’t imagine how you could survive without this, the rest of your world can’t imagine how you’re going to pay your bills and do this at the same time.
For me that’s the moment I decide to write Voice of Authority and take it to Edinburgh Fringe.
So my question to you is, how do you know if you can trust your mom enough to tell her about it?
If you’re an artist, or even just a human being, I suspect you understand my thinking here. Moms can get acutely curious about what their kids are doing, particularly when they’ve become accustomed over time to questioning your judgment, as mine has.
My show is a true story about landing in a $19 million lawsuit with the Department of Justice. There’s no track record of good judgment my part. For all she knows, this is one more thing I’m doing that’s going to cost her money.
And she’s right, it is.
But that’s not the point. No one’s judgment strikes you as hard or as deep as Mom’s. Sorry Dad, that’s just how the world works. And if you’re going to tell her about it, you’re going to have to accept a couple of things:
If you don’t follow through and take the show to Edinburgh, you’re gonna have to answer the question “Whatever happened to taking your show to Edinburgh?” More than once. Possibly over a holiday dinner in front of a table full of people.
If you make a shambles of it by not preparing, you’re going to prove her more subtle and passive aggressive judgments of you correct. You might also find yourself answering questions about that during the holidays. Along with the one about how you could have put that money towards law school (it’s a little late at this point, Mom).
You’re going to have to know why you’re taking a show there.
The first two are brutal, yes, but that last one is the killer. That’s the divide between the amateur and the professional, the trophy hunter and the provider. And dammit, sometimes as much as I hate to admit it, Mom is pretty insightful.
I’m going because I want to get better as a performer and a writer, and 21 days of performing on the road in front of strangers will do that. I’m going to meet the sort of people I want to work with in the future. I’m going to develop this story into a bigger show or another medium altogether. And I’m going because it puts me in a spot where I have to prove myself, and I seem to have reached a point in my life where that matters.
But that’s enough about me. Back to the question. How do you know if you can trust your mom enough to tell her about this project? That might depend on whether you know why you’re doing what you’re doing. And she might surprise you, because no one gets as excited to see you driven and focused as your mom does.
Dean’s comedy solo show Voice of Authority runs at FRIGID New York Feb 21, 28, and March 5, 8, and 9 (Tickets»). He takes it to Surgeon’s Hall at Edinburgh Fringe from Aug 2-24.…
