Actors are silly people.
Wait!
I’m not qualified to make such a sweeping generalization. Yes, I have acted on stage, but as painfully pointed out to me by attendees and reviewers of my efforts as Dracula, and the butler in Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear”……sigh.
However, having had a gaggle of theater folks in the house this weekend (my friend Eric Johnson would modify that to “theater-ish folks”) for Halloween deco, chili-pots, and charades, I can vouch with confidence of the silliness of those actors.
Actors are sensitive…to everything. I know I am. If someone walks by me with a limp, I will pass them by with a pronounced and sometimes accurate lurch to my gait. If you sneeze around me, chances are I will reach for two tissues; one for you and one for me. If you drawl around me I will vocally lurch southwards, again, sometimes accurately. I just watched an interview with the Prime Minister of Jamaica bemoaning the category-five hurricane about to assault his island. I then strolled to back door of our house in Central Kentucky, picked up the remote, and closed our garage door.
Sensitive.
Whence cometh this?
Today it arrived in the mailbox in the form of a battered and tattered 65-year-old book of no immense value, but a treasure none the less.
Elizabeth K. Cooper’s 1958 Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club edition of SCIENCE IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD was an eye-opener to me at the age of nine.
I’ve written before about my mom’s complete devotion to the usefulness of reading. We weren’t rich, but the public library, the bookmobile, Mr. Dennis’s bookstore on North Lime, and the Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club filled a yawning abyss of hunger.
Every month, I devoured every part of every selection; text, introductions, forewords, table of contents, dust wrapper notes… I was saddened by any lack of indices.
The first line of the dust wrapper note for SCIENCE IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD was a question; “Would you like to be an explorer—without leaving your own neighborhood?”
Yes!
Yes!!!
The roster of the first astronauts had just been announced.
I did not see my name on the list.
My neighborhood was all I had.
The title of the first chapter was “Exploring the Yard on Your Stomach.” I did just that. I flopped myself down and asked the questions prompted by Ms. Cooper;
What do you see?
What do you hear?
What do you feel?
What do you smell?
What do you taste?
I filled up my senses.
Chapter Two; Exploring the Yard on Your Back.
What do you see?
What do you hear?
What do you feel?
What do you smell?
What do you taste?
I filled up my senses.
I “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” in daylight, before midnight when the TV stations signed off for the evening. I named clouds. I reached sub-orbital in my mind before Alan Shepard.
I learned to act.
I still run through those questions when rehearsing for a stage production;
What do you see?
What do you hear?
What do you feel?
What do you smell?
What do you taste?
Those ingredients enhanced by the memories they trigger make me as human as I can be in the crucible of pretend.
So yeah…
…the book is of no immense value………except to me.
And by the way, should you wander into the wild kingdom that is our back yard and you see me flopped on the ground;
- Check for a pulse.
- If I’m on my stomach, it’s OK, I’m still exploring.
- If I’m on my back, it’s real OK, I’m still looking at the stars.
- Or, I might just be acting.
The power of books, that’s why they want to control them.
June's Boy 