The Dangerous Animals Club

by Stephen Tobolowsky

  So here I was in my neck brace, reading a script for a show called Glee. It seemed to be a musical about high school with lots of show tunes and good humor. But there was a difference. A note to young actors out there: the first reading of a script is important. It is pure. It can tell you how you feel about a project. It is a good indicator of how the public will feel about it as well. You should never read a script for the first time in a hurry or with the television on. Read it in silence so you can hear your instincts.

  When I read Glee, I felt heartened. Even though it had all of the familiar high school symbology, it made me feel good about humankind, not an easy task these days. I couldn’t pinpoint the ingredients that made me feel good. To be honest, everything in the show had been seen before: the high school setting, the sincere teacher, the mean teacher, the mean cheerleaders, the cute football player with the heart of gold, the singing pedophile—all familiar characters in high school comedies. But there was a tangible positiveness in its wacky humor and music that made me want to audition.

  They wanted me to read for the role of Sandy Ryerson. I thought that was a good sign. The Ryerson name had served me well in Groundhog Day. I had four scenes to prepare and about five days to work on them, which by Hollywood standards is a lot of time. As I worked on the part, I didn’t feel more confident. I felt greater and greater pressure. It had been so long since I had auditioned, it was like dating again after a breakup. What if I did poorly? What would it say to my agents and my manager? What kind of blow would it deliver to my self-confidence?

  I knew from the Heroes reshoot just a few weeks earlier how diminished my physical condition was post-injury. I didn’t have the strength to hold my head up. I couldn’t walk without the brace or turn my head. The neck doctor told me I would be healed after three months. My audition for Glee was set for three months and ten days after the catastrophe in Iceland. I was terrified to take off my brace.

  My wife, Ann, drove me over the hill for the audition Tuesday afternoon at rush hour. She waited in the car as I made my way through security and found the Nip/Tuck offices where the audition would take place. I walked in and was surprised. The room was empty except for a nice young man minding the phones. He asked if he could help me. I told him I was reading for Glee. He furrowed his brow and said, “Really?”

  I said, “Yes.” I showed him my audition sheet: four p.m. Tuesday. He saw my brace and asked if I was all right. I told him I was thrown from a horse and had a broken neck but in theory I should be fine. He looked concerned and said he didn’t know anything about the audition, but he would look into it.

  Oh dear. Things like this don’t happen often, but when they do, there is almost a 100 percent chance something is wrong. I sat alone in the waiting room. Alone with my script. Instead of running over my lines, I imagined meeting the producers. Like any young man going to pick up a girl for the first time, I started to get clammy.

  I haven’t had to mislead anyone about my résumé for years. I have lots of legitimate credits now, but the pressure I felt over being honest about a different issue surprised me: Should I wear my neck brace on the audition? Should I tell them about my accident? Would it scare them away from hiring me?

  I took the brace off and put it on the floor beside the couch. My neck felt fine, but I felt creepy, like I was on a date and didn’t tell the woman I had two children from a previous marriage. I put the brace back on. The young man returned looking mortified. He told me there had been a terrible mistake. There were no auditions for Glee today. Someone gave me the wrong information. The auditions were tomorrow at the same time—four p.m. He hoped I wasn’t too angry.

  That word got to me. “Angry.” Funny, I felt relieved. Not because I was unprepared, but because I had not resolved the neck brace issue. I smiled. I realized there was a time in my career when I would have been angry. I would have been put out for the waste of time.

  In the true regret of that young man’s face, I understood I had received a gift. A new perspective. I said, “Don’t worry about it. Do you know how lucky I am just to be sitting in this room on the wrong day? There are millions of actors around the country who would love the opportunity to sit on this couch on the wrong day, to have a script of Glee in their hands. I took a nice drive with my wife. She’s lovely and a good companion, and, now, I will get the opportunity to have another nice ride with her tomorrow. I figure I am the luckiest guy on earth.” His furrowed brow vanished. He smiled and walked away.

  I showed up the next day at four p.m. It was a different scene. The waiting room was packed. Now I was nervous for all the regular reasons, and I still hadn’t decided what to do about my brace. After about a twenty-minute wait, they called my name to go in the room. I made a decision. A decision is different from a choice. We make a choice to get through a crisis. We make a decision to indicate a life path we hope to follow. I made a decision to wear my brace into the room.

  All the guys were there—Ryan, Brad, Ian, Dante—a roomful of executive producers. I came in with my brace on and got some raised eyebrows. “Hello,” I said.

  They all smiled and said hello back. Ryan said, “I heard you were the happiest man on earth to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?” Everyone laughed.

  “Yes. You can’t beat it. I’m livin’ the dream.”

  Ryan continued, “I heard you had a problem with a horse?” I said, “Yes, I broke my neck.” The vibe in the room changed. I continued, “No, no, I should be just fine. But yesterday I was debating whether I should come in with the brace or without it. I have to tell you the whole neck brace thing is giving me a lot of stress. So I decided we should do this together.”

  (Cut to a shot of the producers with a look of horror as if I just told them I had genital herpes.)

  “I’m going to take my brace off now and do the scenes. I haven’t auditioned in a while as I’m sure you have figured out, and frankly, I don’t know if I can do this. If I can’t, I’ll just put the brace back on and leave the room—no harm, no foul. But if I can, you and I will both know I’m fine, and I can do this job. I love Glee too much to lie about the neck thing. If I am lucky enough to move forward in the casting process, I want you to have the confidence that I am not damaged goods. So shall we do it?”

  Silence. I took my brace off.

  (Cut to a shot of the producers looking like I was about to show them traffic safety films.)

  I did all four scenes. Ryan directed me. And they laughed. It worked, and I left.

  Three weeks later I found out I got the part. I was thrilled. I was proud. Surprisingly, not so much for getting the role of Sandy, but that I didn’t lie on the first date.

  19.

  THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

  BETH’S TRIUMPH WITH Am I Blue happened in May near the end of the school year. It took about two weeks for the excitement to turn into “So, now what are you going to do with your life?” It was crazy enough to be an acting major in college, but to be a writing major made as much sense as studying to be a rodeo clown. As college students, we knew firsthand that nobody read books anymore. At least we didn’t.

  For many fine arts majors, graduation is a time of celebration, a short celebration—say, about two days tops. Then comes the realization that they may have to turn to Plan B: desperation. A large percentage of the crème de la crème of the SMU drama majors were now applying for jobs selling shoes or installing air conditioning.

  Beth’s friend and director, Jill Peters, got her an interview at Pepe Gonzalez Mexican Restaurant to be a waitress. The advantage Pepe Gonzalez had over its rival, Pedro’s, was that they didn’t serve dog food in the enchiladas. The disadvantage was that it wasn’t a buffet so the waitresses had to carry gigantic trays with huge plates of refried beans, and chips, and mile-high margaritas.

  The fall from your dream into reality is especially hard when you’ve seen that you can fly.

  I appeared to be doing better careerwise than Beth. Emphasis on “appeared.” I was starring as
Jesus in a successful production of Godspell. Teenage girls would surround me at the laundromat asking for my autograph and wondering what it felt like to perform miracles. The only miracle I needed was to get paid.

  Even though Godspell was a hit, the theater had a policy of asking the actors to give most of their salary back to the front office or they wouldn’t get cast in the next show. The only real income I had was from my assorted day jobs. I was doing sketch comedy for a couple of producers who paid me in Chinese food. I also was making twenty dollars an hour reading a dirty book to an eighty-year-old woman. That was bad. What was worse—it was her autobiography. The only time I was upwardly mobile was when I climbed the stairs to our apartment.

  Burnet Hobgood, a.k.a. Hob, the head of the SMU Theater Department, announced one day that he was leaving. He was starting a brand-new masters program at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He asked if Beth and I wanted to come with him and enroll as students, sort of like test pilots. I reminded him I had barely survived my undergraduate career. Beth and I had planned on going to New York to be Babes on Broadway like in the Busby Berkeley movies. The idea of doing more class scenes, more essays on eighteenth-century drama, more potential run-ins with difficult teachers made me ill. Hob laughed and said he understood, but this time we would be the teachers. Beth and I would be paid to teach Beginning Acting and Voice, and the university would cover our tuition. I told him thanks, but no thanks. I was done with school for this lifetime.

  Back at the apartment, Beth was trying on her Mexican waitress outfit. It was one of those green and red and white striped skirt-vest combos with the white, scoop-necked blouse and the big puffy sleeves. It was ghastly. She had trained for two hours. Tomorrow would be her first day. She looked at me with sad eyes. She had a casual despair you only see in Diane Arbus photographs. I told her she looked cute. She almost burst into tears, murmuring that she looked like a vomitorium.

  The next day, Saturday, Beth started work at eleven a.m. I had two shows. I was nervous. It wasn’t the matinee of Godspell that had my stomach churning. I wondered how Beth would fare on the weekend lunch shift.

  When she left, I gave her a kiss. I headed for the theater. As I put on my Jesus costume, which was a pair of denim overalls, I looked at the clock. It was noon. Beth was working. I decided that she’d be fine. She was smart and resourceful. She would triumph.

  I was wrong.

  An hour later Beth came running through the back door of the theater in her waitress outfit. She was crying so hard her body shook. She ran into my arms, and I held her. We slid to the floor backstage. I rocked her behind the curtains until she could talk. “It was horrible, horrible. The people were mean. I can’t take it. I can’t take it anymore,” she said.

  I shushed her. “There, there, now. It’ll be okay. Just catch your breath.” I could hear the audience entering the theater on the other side of the curtain. “Hang out here until you get a second wind and things will go better tonight,” I told her.

  Beth’s head almost spun around like the little girl in The Exorcist. “Tonight? Are you out of your mind? I quit. I was fired. I dropped a tray. I can’t do this.” She burst into tears again. “I’m never going back. Never, never, never, never going back.”

  “Okay. Okay. You don’t have to go back.”

  We sat rocking for a few minutes. The stage manager called out, “Fifteen minutes,” on the backstage PA. The band started tuning up.

  “It’ll be all right,” I whispered.

  Beth sniffled and looked at me as if the pit of hell had opened up in front of her. In a small, plaintive voice, she asked, “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?”

  I scanned my universe of no options and said, “What do you think about going to Illinois?”

  I ARRIVED IN Champaign-Urbana in August before the school year started so I could find a place for us to stay. There weren’t a lot of options on our budget. I ended up renting a couple of rooms in a pre–Civil War house within walking distance of the drama school. That was good. The rent would be only $150 a month. That was great. The only problem was that the two rooms weren’t connected. They weren’t even related. That’s not entirely true. They both were on the second floor. We had a living room and kitchen on one side of the public hallway—and a bedroom and bathroom a few paces down on the other side. Every time you wanted a beer or needed to go to the bathroom, you had to cross the hall.

  This is how I met Helen.

  Helen lived in the apartment at the end of the second floor. One morning she ran into me crossing in my bathrobe. She laughed and said, “I guess they finally unloaded the split apartment.” I grinned like the chump I was. “Yeah. I guess they did,” I replied. She said they offered it to her but she thought it was unsafe. “You could be sound asleep in the bedroom while I was being robbed in the living room or you could have people over for dinner in the living room while I was being raped in the bedroom. No one would ever know,” she said.

  I said that I hadn’t thought of that, but that was a definite downside.

  Helen was a foreign-language major, specializing in Asiatic languages. She had mastered seven so far. Impressed, I mentioned that Beth and I were new to the university and were in the masters program in acting. She found that exciting. She invited us over for dinner when Beth came into town. I accepted.

  When Beth arrived I showed her our new digs. She liked the look of the old house but was perturbed about the split arrangement of the rooms. “You could be in the living room reading and you would never know someone was attacking me in the bedroom,” she said. I nodded in recognition of my error. “We’ll just have to lock the doors,” I said. She unpacked and we set out to explore our new world.

  We walked across campus. It had two defining elements. It was huge. Whereas SMU only had around five thousand students, the University of Illinois had thirty-five thousand. I also noticed the entire campus smelled like doo-doo. As Beth and I walked, taking in the enormity of the place, she looked at me, squinched up her face, and said, “This place stinks.”

  “I know, I know.” We both stopped and looked at the bottom of our shoes. Nothing. We walked over to the brand-new Krannert Center for the Performing Arts where we would be teaching and hopefully acting in plays. It was amazing. It was a palace. There were beautiful theaters, an outdoor amphitheater, and gigantic dance studios.

  We met John Ahart, the tall, sweet, affable head of the directing curriculum. He shook my hand and then Beth’s. “So, here are Hob’s Chosen Ones. Nice to meet you two. I think you’ll be happy here. We’re certainly happy to have you.”

  I nodded. “Yes, it’s all a little overwhelming.”

  John laughed. “The new building? Or the smell?”

  “Well—”

  “Yeah, this time of year the university smells like shit. It’s pretty interesting. It’s the trees. The entire campus was planted with ginkgo trees. They’re prehistoric. They predate the evolution of pollination by bees. They use flies. So the smell is an ingenious biological mechanism of attraction. Amazing, huh?”

  “Yeah. In a way it’s proof there’s a God. How long does this smell last?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Well, they sure don’t mention that in the brochure.”

  We ran into Hob walking down the hall with his beret at a fetching angle, smoking a pipe. He threw up his arms, ran over, and gave us a hug. He asked if we had settled in. I started to go into enormous detail about our split-room apartment. He nodded, not hearing a word, and told us secretly that as graduate student teachers, we were invited to a special party for the faculty.

  That evening we followed Hob’s directions to a building on the edge of campus. The party was held in what looked like some kind of basement. A Peter Frampton album played in the background. There was a table with pretzel sticks, salami, and a cheese log. The only difference between this and our graduation party in sixth grade was the tin washtub filled with beer.

  I looked for a place
to gravitate toward. Not knowing anyone, I made up my own zones of safety. I avoided men with beards. I avoided men wearing ties and corduroy jackets. I avoided women eating salami. I saw a man in his early thirties standing alone looking uncomfortable. He was wearing faded blue jeans and drinking a Coors. Coors was the international symbol of approachability. I walked over and introduced myself and Beth. I asked him what he taught. He said his specialty was physics and math. I was impressed. I told him I liked science a lot. I asked if there was a facet that interested him in particular. “Yes, the behavior of subatomic particles,” he said. “I was part of the team that just won the Nobel Prize.”

  Pause.

  “Really?” I asked.

  He grinned shyly and said, “Yeah. It was a surprise, but it was pretty cool.”

  “I’ll say. I guess you’re done padding your résumé. If I may ask, what did you win for?”

  “We won for developing a mathematical theorem proving the Uncertainty Principle.”

  I confessed I didn’t know what that was.

  My ignorance excited him. He launched into an explanation. “The Uncertainty Principle states that nothing can really be known. We came up with a constant that proved that the closer you get to the truth, the more incorrect your findings will be. And when you are standing right on top of the truth itself, the fact that you are standing there will make your observations one hundred percent wrong.”

  In that one moment, he made me feel both foolish for having read Voltaire, and insightful for watching cartoons. He said the theorem originated from a study of subatomic particles. The electronic equipment used to study mesons and pi-mesons affected their behavior. The closer you observed the particles, the more they diverged from their normal behavior. His team developed a universal constant that the truth is proportionately hidden from close observation.