Who among us, given the chance to go back knowing all we’ve
learned, wouldn’t do something very different in high school? One of the main
things I’d do is try out for the annual school play, as I discovered later in
life that acting’s big fun, and that I’m good at it. But it wasn’t until I was
35 that I realized how much fun acting is, and that I’m good at it.
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| Socks Without Mates. 1983 |
The woman who would become my first wife and I had just
spent two months wandering back and forth across Italy. When we returned to Los
Angeles, I had to face the music and admit that no one was very interested in
my writing for them anymore, and that I needed to get a soul-killing ordinary
job. I got one, typing address labels at UCLA Extension. The two perks of the
job was that my coworker looked a lot like Beyonce would look decades later,
but much prettier, and that I got to take an extension class free. On a whim, I
chose Dialects for Actors, and just loved it. Simultaneously, I read the
Playboy interview with Robin Williams in which he said that making a roomful of
people laugh was better than sex. Sounded good to Johnny! I dashed off a few
wordplay-heavy sketches, much influenced by Monty Python, and recruited two of
my Dialects for Actors classmates to perform them with me as Socks Without Mates. We performed minutes
after the doors were opened at a couple of Famous Comedy Venues, and at my and
First Wife’s wedding. The audience seemed to like us very much more at the
latter, presumably because they sensed it might seem churlish not to feign
enormous amusement.
I began to relax a little bit. You can’t act if you’re
afraid of appearing foolish. It dawned on me that if I were doing the job
properly, it wasn’t I up on stage, but my character(s), which ranged from a
Russian patriarch who’s just discovered that his prospective son-in-law — that
is, the fiancé of his daughter Anesthesia — is a coke dealer (he loves the
idea), and half of a Cute Young Couple whose cat is pretty goddamned sick of
being addressed as Mr. Whiskers. When I came off stage at the Comedy Store one
evening, my first wife marveled, “You were really
good!” with genuine wonder in her eyes. It was one of the nicest
things she (or anyone else) had ever said to me.
The original other guy in the trio had come to loathe me, so
we replaced him with a small, bearded
opera lover who worked in a hardware store and loathed me slightly less, at
least for a short while. I decided that I couldn’t in good conscience raise my
daughter in the air pollution of Los Angeles, and moved with her and First Wife
to the northern California wine country, where I didn’t venture onto a stage
again until my marriage collapsed, I moved down to San Francisco, and recruited
a waiter from the Fog City Diner and a young mother of three from the East Bay
suburban wastelands to form an updated version of my LA trio. I called it the
Spandex Amazons this time, prompting a phone message from a gay spandex
fetishist who wondered if we should meet for coffee. Young Mom was ever so
pretty, and I lusted after her in my heart, but the fact of Hubby being an SFPD
Swat Team member helped me keep it in my trousers.
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