In this Imaginary Relationship, you can actually have memories about this girl and you can think back to that time when she first admitted, shyly, that she loved you. She never did that, but you have the memory of it and no one can take that away from you. As long as you know this girl, your actual relationship with her—if you have one—will run whatever course it’s meant to. But your Imaginary Relationship runs in its own Space Time continuum. You may have only known her—oh, let’s give her a name. She’s Kim. You may only have known Kim for six months, but in your Imaginary Relationship, you are already through college—you both went to the Sorbonne because she got in first and you couldn’t stand the idea of long-distance relationships so you went too.
So in your real relationship, there the two of you are—you and Kim—in the cafeteria or the library. Kim’s talking about whatever and in your Imaginary Relationship, you and Imaginary Kim are apartment hunting on the Left Bank because you both decided to stay in Paris rather than return to Detroit. Neither of your families are very happy about your decision, but it’s not up to them, it’s up to you. Everything goes beautifully for a while. You’re writing a novel and have mastered the art of French cooking. She speaks perfect French and translated for a while at the IHO but she’s really good with numbers so she’s got a job in finance, or whatever. The sex is ridiculous. Suddenly, out of the blue, the two of you are sitting one night by the Seine and she breaks the news. You didn’t see it coming. She dumps you. She moves to Holland with her lesbian lover. You keep the stray cat the two of you took in, which will probably outlive you. End of story.
Which is the problem with having Imaginary Girlfriends. With a fantasy girlfriend, it’s simple. Suddenly the girl is naked in your bed. Everything leading up to that moment is unimportant. From there on, it’s just the two of you with as much as you can remember from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to keep you going. It’s the same every time. Never fails. But you can’t control an Imaginary Girlfriend. It’s a lot more complicated and a lot of the time it ends badly.
Fortunately, you and Real Kim are still friends, and Imaginary Kim’s dumping you has loosened you up for an Imaginary Relationship with Michelle, who is another friend of yours who’s having trouble with her boyfriend. There’s a better than even chance that this Imaginary Relationship is doomed, too.
So what’s the point in having an Imaginary Girfriend? In lieu of actual experience, it was excellent practice.
HIGH SCHOOL
DETROIT 1969–1972
My unexpected and determined commitment to a life onstage could easily have been undermined once I reached high school if it weren’t for the embarrassment of riches that the Berkley school system possessed in their drama department at the time.
Will Young had done what he could for me at that point and passed me on to the high school with a firm injunction to try to get into Duane Thompson’s drama class. And lo and behold, here I discovered yet another professional actor who, due to the exigencies of a family to support, had left the stage and taken to teaching drama. It’s hard to imagine two such people teaching in the same district today. The high school also boasted a speech teacher, Peggy Metzger, who along with Thompson embraced and encouraged me for the next three years. Though my parents didn’t realize it at this stage, the hope they had entertained that this acting thing was a passing fancy died the day I walked into the Little Theatre.
There were two theaters at the high school then, but to me only one counted. There was the big stage in the gymnasium, which was mainly used for the big spring musicals, which were directed by yet another drama teacher, Margaret McQuaid. Musicals didn’t interest me for some reason. Maybe there was a deeply suppressed bitterness from that whole Music Man fiasco from my childhood, with Yvette refusing to kiss me. Who knows? Mrs. McOuaid directed me in the first full-length play I had ever done, called Auntie Mame.
In the bowels of the Berkley High School, however, was a tiny space that was Duane Thompson’s domain. He was in charge not only of acting classes but also of the Technical Theatre Workshop, where the real theater nerds held sway. Thompson always directed the fall production, which was usually some form of supernatural story. Each production was introduced by Thompson himself, in Rod Serling mode, standing in a spotlight, preparing the audience for the creeps to come. It was his production of The Innocents, based on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, that gave me my first lead, as Miles, in a full-length play. My sister Kristin played my character’s sister Flora, and revealed for the first time her own talent as a budding stage actor, which was considerable. The once and future Imaginary Girlfriend Jan Puffer played the haunted governess, Miss Giddens.
Like Young before him, Thompson had an eye for those of us who showed even a glimmer of talent and determination. But we were children and very few, if any, were seriously thinking of becoming actors some day. But people like Jim Richards (a year ahead of me) and Jan in my year were exceptions to the rule. We were in it for the long haul. Within a couple of years, we would find ourselves at Oakland University’s Academy of Dramatic Art together.
In the meantime, I was busy burying “Jockless” Armstrong and the Swedish Faggot—and burying them four fathoms deep. What Cyrano had started, the constant working on plays, scene work and monologues had finished. I spent all of my time in the Little Theatre working with kids who loved it all as much as I did. When working on final scenes and monologues, my selections were as eccentric as ever. For one monologue I picked the Creature’s final speech over the body of his creator from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the ultimate outcast character. I chose a scene from Woody Allen’s play Play It Again, Sam, in which I both played the ghost of Humphrey Bogart and directed. My Orson Welles passion coming into full flower, I became a triple-threat: directing and adapting a scene from James Goldman’s screenplay of They Might Be Giants, as well as starring as Justin Playfair, the famed jurist who has a mental breakdown and believes he is Sherlock Holmes.
Peggy Metzger, the speech teacher, eventually turned me completely loose. With another boy in class, Dave Stroud, I embarked on a series of comedy pieces that had nothing to do with speech and everything to do with amusing ourselves. The series became known as “Dummy and Stroud.” I would draw two lines on my chin on either side of my mouth and sit on Dave’s knee (Dave was about 6'3" in his socks) and be the dummy. It was really just a parody of a bad ventriloquist act, during which Dave would drink a glass of water while I would sing, but it amused the class and gave Peggy a break from time to time. While the rest of the students had to give assigned speeches, I was basically allowed free range. At one point, she discovered there was a radio station at another high school that was looking for people to create their own shows. To create The Baker Street Theatre, in which I adapted the original Conan Doyle stories, broken up into fifteen-minute weekly episodes, all characters played (naturally) by me, was the work of moments. It ran for months.
If there’s one thing these choices showed it was my insistence on having my acting work reflect all my nerd obsessions of that period. They are pretty much all there and accounted for: Sherlock Holmes, Woody Allen, Humphrey Bogart and classic horror: all of which, save Woody Allen, remain obsessions to this day. Truly, the nerd is father of the man.
By this time, I was a long way from the Spazz Table. I had a circle: Cindy Van Loon, Cheryl Waskin, Cathy Frederik, Jan Cutlip, David Weinberg, Jay Schwartz, Val Kinunen—many others, but all of us jetsam from different ships, keeping each other afloat until finally washing up on the same beach.
But the last piece of my nerd jigsaw puzzle fell into place the day I met Elliott Milstein. It was a Pan edition of Ian Fleming’s Dr. No that brought us together. I was still carrying around books bought in Europe and Elliott was bibliophile enough to recognize that my edition of the Bond book was unavailable in the U.S. This started a relationship that was cemented when we discovered a shared love of tea, chess and the great P. G. Wodehouse.
I was a Jeeves/Wooster devotee and he
a Blandings Castle aficionado, and neither of us had much patience for the other’s saga, but we patiently guided each other, Anglophiles both, through Wodehouse’s entire ouvre. We both joined the International P. G. Wodehouse Society, Elliott eventually becoming the president and making him, at least in the Wodehouse department, an even bigger nerd than I was. (But he lost a lot of points for having lost his virginity before we graduated, so I still win.) We have remained friends, traveled, quaffed, dined, listened to music, gone to films and plays and read our way through our lives, even when the road was bumpy, and all of it was made possible by a dog-eared Pan paperback, which I still own, by the way. In this case as in many before, books have proved a sustaining force.
COLLEGE
My parents were the first generation in my family to make it past high school, if that far, so naturally, it was a forgone conclusion that I would go to college. The logic escaped me, especially since I already had my future completely planned out: I was to be a great stage actor like John Sterling Arnold or my new hero, George C. Scott.
No one else seemed to see it that way. My family seemed to have nothing better to do than to throw up roadblocks to my dream. It was dangerous, they said. It was unpredictable. I’d never make a living. I’d be consorting with communists, alcoholics and pederasts. Any reader who has expressed a similar goal to their families may have gotten a similar response, even in these more accepting times, but in those days you could pretty much expect nothing else. Their opposition to my career choice was at that point rigid and inflexible.
My family was being transferred back to Europe at that point, this time to London. My immediate future was a matter of some moment. What made it all the more fraught was my growing obsession with the Academy of Dramatic Art. The year before, the previous golden boy of Mr. Thompson’s Little Theatre company had been accepted. In our last year of high school, Jan Puffer had also been accepted. Negotiations, arguments and desperate deal making went on for months, so long that I missed the auditions for the following autumn semester. On the eve of my parents’ departure it was agreed that I would attend regular college for one year. If I was still committed to this mad idea at the end of that time, I could audition for the Academy.
Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, drew the short straw and I started my single year of higher education in August of 1972, my curriculum heavily weighted with literature and theater classes. Two theater professors, Drs. Flieshacker and Grandstaff, became my mentors, featuring me in productions of Sheridan’s School for Scandal and John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves.
There was a black box theater, too, where I did a trilogy of avant-garde pieces written by graduate students. And it was this production that led to an important change in my fortunes. My parents had come back to the States from London on a brief visit, which coincided with this production. In one of the plays, The Prometheus Riddle, I played a young Nazi, of all things, who addresses the audience in long, intimate monologues. It was, my parents said later, the first time that they thought I had what it took to be an actor. My mother was convinced, though my father remained reluctant. “We will lose him,” my mother warned him. He finally acceded. Their resistance to the Academy faded and they gave me their permission to audition for the following year.
That finally settled, I really buckled down to make the most of what remained of my freshman year: binge drinking and learning to play pool. I continued to write, bad plays and short stories primarily. In short, my first year at college was remarkably similar to a lot of people’s. Right down to finally losing my virginity to a lovely young woman who admitted afterward that she had slept with me because she really liked my Malcolm MacDowell impression. Decades later I worked with MacDowell and told him that his performance in A Clockwork Orange was responsible for me losing my virginity.
“Well,” he said modestly, “you probably would’ve lost it sooner or later anyway.”
THE ACADEMY OF DRAMATIC ART
At 11:00 a.m. on April 28, 1973, I drove to Oakland University to audition for the Academy of Dramatic Art. I must’ve been nervous, though I remember very little of the day. I was signed in for the audition by a young woman in a floral dress who was a member of the second-year class named Jayne Houdyshell (now a toast of Broadway; then, like the rest of us, someone from elsewhere taking a gamble on an improbable dream).
I was told to prepare three audition pieces: a dramatic, a classical and a comic. The first was Jaimie Tyrone, from Long Day’s Journey Into Night; the classical was Arthur from King John. For the life of me I can’t remember what the comic piece was. Possibly I pulled out old Cyrano again. I remember nothing of the questions or comments made by the faculty, arrayed before me there in the studio theater along a table. I do remember the endless wait for the verdict. It was weeks before the postman delivered my parents’ worst nightmare in a beautiful, fat envelope.
The Academy had been founded years before by an Englishman, John Fernald, who had come to Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, to assume the position of artistic director at Meadow Brook Theatre, a well-regarded regional theater located on the campus. While he was at it, he began the Academy and brought over with him an imposing group of actor/teachers from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) and other schools in London and Canada.
It seems hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people spent a great deal of time, effort and money to become a “trained” actor, whether the training came from RADA or the Neighborhood Playhouse. In the case of the Academy, it was the sort of training that taught you the difference between a sixteenth-century bow and an eighteenth-century one. It taught you how to move, how to fight on stage, how to use your voice properly. Recitation, improvisation, yoga, dancing, singing, sword fighting, neutral mask, commedia dell arte, pantomime blanche, clown work and, of course, Basel Carnival mask technique, later popularized by the Swiss mask troupe Mummenshanz. We studied the Greeks, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter. I’m not sure that sort of training can be found in the U.S. anymore, because this period, the early seventies, was probably the last one in this country in which the stage was not just considered a stop on the way to a career in film or television, but an actual goal in itself.
The irony that, after all this esoteric training, I finally would become famous for belching and picking my nose is not lost on me.
By the time I auditioned, the Academy was in a state of flux. Some of the original acting teachers were returning to England and were being replaced by Americans, trained either in the U.S. or, in the case of our mask/commedia teacher, in the Lecoq school in Paris. The white-haired, soft-spoken Paul Lee was replaced by brash New Yorker Al Ruscio. It was kind of as if the role usually played by Alec Guinness was now being played by James Gandolfini. The message being sent by the school was now less strictly that of the English classical tradition and more a mélange of traditions. Still, Alex Gray, Elizabeth Orion and Kate Fitzmaurice continued to represent the old school, while James Tompkins and Jessica Woods, Ruscio and Kate Williamson brought a variety of disciplines to the training.
Regardless of which school one related to, it was all training and it was an intense physical and emotional workout, occasionally brutal and, provided you didn’t weaken and quit (or weren’t weeded out by the faculty, as many were by the end of the first year), everyone came out of the experience better than when they went in. Some of the most lasting lessons for me came from the English contingent. Liz Orion, in midsentence, suddenly stopping, looking at us and saying reflectively, “You know, much of what we’re teaching you here will be of no use at all once you graduate.”
And Alex Gray, giving me a review at the end of the first year, saying, “You know, Curtis, you’re an amazingly glib actor.”
“Great,” I said, swelling a little with pride. “Thanks!”
“No,” he said, patiently, “that’s not a compliment. You can be glib or you can be good. That’s entirely up to you.” Nothing I ever learned at the Academy has haunted
me quite like that statement.
Varner Hall was where we lived for the two years we were at the Academy. We all had homes away from there, of course, but we seldom saw them. Classes from early in the morning to late in the afternoon became rehearsals that would go on into the night. One verity, pretty much whoever your teacher was, involved the stripping away of “bad habits.” Not bad habits as in sex, drugs or alcohol. Both students and teachers—and sometimes students with teachers—grasped at those bad habits like drowning people would grasp life rafts. In this case, bad habits were bad acting habits, physical, vocal and emotional. This process entailed peeling away bits of you until your ego was exposed and then peeling away that. It involved bringing you to a kind of natural state, from which you could be built up again to their idea of what a good actor was.
Not that they necessarily agreed on what a good actor was. But generally, each student would have his or her partisan. If not, those students disappeared. At the end of each semester, some would be shown the door. Others left of their own volition.
An example of the latter occurred one day when we were rehearsing a class production of Detective Story, our class final. It had been droning on forever, until the moment one actor was to make his re-entrance. Stage wait. No actor. People called down halls, checked the green room, toilets, but couldn’t find him. Finally on an impulse, I checked the parking lot. His car was gone. He had, after months of struggle, realized that nothing was worth this. As he had exited the stage in the previous scene, he just kept walking. Out of the building, into his car and back to Kansas. We never saw or heard from him again.
It was probably ungenerous of me, but my first thought was that this fucker had upstaged everyone. It was an exit nobody could ever top. I remember everyone standing there in the hall, absorbing it. It was like the sailor falling from the masthead into the ocean in Moby Dick and being swallowed up without a ripple. One minute he’s there, the next it was as if you had just imagined he was there. It felt ominous, almost, like it portended bad luck for the rest of us. We reacted the way actors would—some crying, some laughing uncontrollably.
Revenge of the Nerd Page 8