Sitting My Way Through Life

by Kimberly Thompson

  off my toupee and throw it away since it was bad for the environment and to put on this sort of John McEnroe type thing. So many people who saw me later were disappointed. “Awww...I thought those were real people!” “No, that was phony. That was set up.”

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  Q: What advice do you have for aspiring actors headed for Hollywood?

  A: First off, have great support. It really helps to have people in your life while transitioning. Second, make sure you have enough money to live on for several months. The competition is stiff, plus you could work one week and then not work again for months.

  Chapter 8 Let’s Go to the Movies!

  The best part of making a movie? Finishing it. Earlier I told you about a family movie I just finished about these kids trying to hide a stray dog in and around the school. I played the spooky looking janitor. When I was reading the script, the character was described as creepy and skinny, bony and gnarled. When I went to the audition there were several other guys there, and quite frankly, I was the most normal, friendliest looking one there. I was shocked that I got cast. It turns out it was because the powers that be didn’t want the character too scary looking since this was supposed to be a family friendly film. So they went with me, I guess because I have a sweeter looking face than most of those who auditioned.

  At the audition, we went into the room where the producer and director were waiting. The producer was also one of the writers, and they had gotten a nasty surprise. They had been told that the room was really nice, but all it really was, was a tiny little room. They asked if there was anything they could get for us, like eight more feet. I said, “Is that like three more inches?” Every guy wants three more inches. I spoke to the PA after that and he said, “Everyone always comes in here so nervous and that makes us nervous, but you come in all relaxed and joking.” I just got to the point where I finally know what the hell I’m doing. If I get it, I get it. If I don’t, I don’t. I’m not going to kill myself over it. But the thing is, as soon as you walk away you’re thinking “Damn! I should have said this, or I should have done that!” You just beat yourself up thinking “Oh hell. I had the perfect joke!” Sometimes I feel a little risque in some of the things I say or do. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Like with those guys with the three inch thing. That had them laughing pretty good.

  We filmed at an actual school in Eagle Rock. It was a combination Lutheran and Catholic school. In one of the Lutheran school rooms, I was looking at the maps and they had one that listed the U.S.S.R., East and West Germany, and Zaire. In one of the Catholic school rooms, there were graphic pictures of the Crucifixion, but they at least had modern maps. Makes me wonder what those kids were learning. Attached to the school was the church where our green room was located. Many times I fell asleep in one of the pews half expecting someone to yell at me, “Hey! You can’t do that!”

  Have you ever tried to sleep in a church pew? God, those things are uncomfortable. I don’t listen to hard rock very often, but one night I had my headphones in listening to Kid Rock. I wasn’t asleep, but I was zoning in to it. This one teacher came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder saying, “Can you turn that down? We can hear it all the way over here!” They were located about 20 feet away. “How can you sleep listening to THAT?” Well I wasn’t asleep...

  After that, I was talking to the woman who was playing the principal. The same teacher came out. “Can you please go somewhere else and talk? You’re just too loud.” For God’s sake lady! We’re not talking so loud you can’t teach the kids. You don’t need it to be so quiet you can hear a pin drop. It’s not a library. But we were nice.

  Oh, this last movie. Oh, good God! I think I prefer television. They called me in almost every day and a lot of times all it would be was three shots of me. I was the spooky janitor that every school has and the shot would be of my hand just wiggling a door knob or me peeking around the corner to watch these kids conspiring to keep this puppy. It’s a cute story. Very family friendly.

  During my audition for another movie they wanted me to improvise as if I were selling a piece of property in Hollywood. So I say, “Look you can go to Santa Monica Blvd and pick yourself up a nice boy here or you can go to Sunset Blvd. and pick up a nice girl here.” This is from actual experience.

  I lived in West Hollywood for awhile and I would go walking down Santa Monica Blvd and get propositioned every ten feet by some guy. “Uh... thank you, no. Thank you, no. I’m just going to go pick up some newspapers.” One day, I’m driving my little beat up car and I was turning on to Sunset when this woman practically jumps into my car. “Hi! You wanna party?!” Uh, please go away. I need to disinfect that door now. Some people think I should give tours since I know all these things. I lived on one street called Havenhurst. You go up the street to Sunset and you’ll see these white lines painted. One side says LA and the other says WH for West Hollywood. The reason why is because whenever they do a pincer movement for vice, they’ll send the LAPD and the LA County Sheriffs, who are the ones that patrol West Hollywood and whatever side of the line the hooker or hustler is on, that determines who is going to arrest them. West Hollywood is a real trip to live in. I miss it. During the filming of the family movie, I was really acting like a rat bastard. We were filming at 11 at night and I was getting a little punchy. So here the woman who played the nasty principal was sitting there saying her lines and I’m picking my nose while saying mine. Thank God the director didn’t see me.

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  Q: Would you like to ever do Broadway? A: Oh my God, yes! Yes! Yes!

  Chapter 9 Exit Stage Left

  Hopefully with your costume still intact. In third grade I went to summer school. I started a week after everyone else did and found out they were doing a play. Everyone else had a part in it except me. I was so jealous and upset. I was like, ”No! Me!”

  But in the fourth grade I got the chance to be on stage for the first time ever. They were basically all cartoon characters. Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound. That sort of thing. In middle school I did The Traveling Road Show, where I did a bizarre take on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I was dressed up in this little white blouse type thing with short pants, knee high stockings and this little straw hat with ribbons hanging down. I did this in a sort of Katherine Hepburn style. It was done in an improv type of setting, going off of whatever the audience reacted to. It wasn’t a set script. It was the first time I had ever done anything character based.

  The first play I did was in my sophomore year was Arsenic and Old Lace. I played Dr. Einstein, a German character. I couldn’t be heard with a German accent because I couldn’t project so they put a microphone on me. We had over 1500 students which makes for quite a large auditorium to project to, especially when the acoustics are typical high school auditorium acoustics. In other words, non-existent. I did a lot of plays in high school and community theater.

  I did a touring play with the University of Utah. It was a Greek play and they, every morning, have this tradition. They would play at the University and then they would play around the west, like Colorado, southern Utah, at sunrise, outdoors. My costume had a flap in the back, a flap in the front, and a bear skin rug and that’s it. Outdoors at seven in the morning. The soldiers had on even less than I did. They just had a flap in the front and the back. It got a little chilly at times. The underwear I had on underneath it was powder blue shorts. This character did a lot of running. So instead of the white tailed deer, it was the blue assed baboon. I came into the play about a ⅓ of the way in. We had this woman who was in her 40s at the time. She smoked four packs a day. She was born and raised in Georgia, but then spent about 10-15 years in London, so she had this gravely voice, a very rich voice. She was playing Athena. I could always tell where she was hiding in the bushes because she’d be wrapped up in a blanket, steam coming from her coffee,
and smoke coming

  from her cigarette. So that’s how I knew where Athena was hiding.

  The costume I wore had, around my knee, this beaded band with all these beads hanging down. One of the beads was really, really large. Somehow, that one got right in front of my knee. At the point where Athena comes in, I would throw myself down in terror of the goddess. On a brick stage. That bead hit right on the tendon of my knee. I had tears in the corner of my eye from the pain. I thought I had ruptured something! That was bad. Even worse was spending three days on the road with college students who knew everything about everything. It was like, I don’t want to hear any more about your sex life. Or lack thereof. Shut up. Please. There was one guy who was the only one allowed to choose music. The girls wanted Madonna and he wouldn’t let them have it. I was like, “Please Mr. Director, can I ride with you?” The director had his own car..”I’ll sit in back with the dog. Just please, get me away from these kids!”

  I did The Three Musketeers one year, and I was wearing pantaloons. One time, I came out on stage, sat down and spread my legs, and the pantaloons ripped from knee to knee. So I had to slam my legs together and do this whole scene, moving in weird ways so I’m not flashing anything out to the audience. As soon as I was finished, I ran off stage to the costumer who also had a minor role in the play. I ran into the women’s dressing room where she was with her eight

  -year- old daughter. As soon as I ran in, she covered her daughter’s eyes and took her out of the room. I go “Look! Look!” She’s going “Oh my God!”. I had to drop my pants. Now I’m standing there with my pants around my ankles with her in this beautiful dress kneeling there in front of me. That looked really bad. She then says “Palmer, this is too big for a hand job. I’m going to have to get a machine.” We ended up having to safety pin it. I walked around very carefully for the rest of the play.

  The next time I did Three Musketeers, I played King Louis the Thirteenth. The first guy to play him played him very eloquently and very sinister. Well, I played him... erm... slightly off kilter. I tried to play him as if he were a little bit mad. Now, the lady who played Lady de Winter had missed her cue, so the guy playing Richelieu is standing there going “ladadadada”. Then she comes on and he’s thinking “Thank God. Now I can go do my next scene with Palmer.” Well, I’m thinking I’ve got another page of dialogue before I have to come on. My friend Elyse is saying “You’ve missed your cue! Get out there!” So I’ve got this great big hat with a big diamond broach and I’m trying to hold it on while I run onto the stage. I see the stage supervisor giving me this glare. If looks could kill there would have been a new king that day.

  I did another play, The Tempest, with the same actor out in the park. He was playing Prospero and I was playing Caliban. My Caliban was sort of like half crab, half man so I was always sort of hunched over. During rehearsal I realized I hadn’t really thought this all the way through with all this knee bending and sideways walking. I was thinking, “Why the fuck did you make this choice?” The costume had this fisherman’s net thrown over the top of it. There were these tiny gloves with fins, the make up was red and orange and blue. Really fun. It wasn’t like a regular set, either. It was made so that we could put it up and take it down really easily. Anyway, I had to come down these steps and I suddenly couldn’t move the net. It had gotten caught on this screw that was sticking out. I’m supposed to be doing all these moves, but I kept trying to get the net undone. Prospero gives me my exit line so I just go and I ended up actually taking the stairs with me. These four steps weighed about 75 pounds and I just lugged them off the stage. In the meantime, Prospero is trying to move up so he can unhook the net, but I didn’t know that. All I could think of was that I’ve got to get off stage.

  Years earlier, with this same company, we were performing next to the Santa Monica Pier. An area that is. um, very bohemian. So we’re doing this play when all of a sudden

  this drunk homeless guy decides he wants to be part of the play. He starts shouting at the audience while we’re trying to say our lines and elbow him off the stage. Finally, he must have seen a couple of cops walking down the street or something, so he took off. Then at one point, I’m on stage playing Falstaff and I’m trying to seduce these two women, and on stage, five minutes too early, come these two women and I’m supposed to be off stage at this point. So I look at them and I just drop down to my knees and one of the women already on stage sort of spreads her skirts and I crawled under her flap. It was like “Holy shit! What do I do now?” There’s a scene called the “buck basket scene”, and it’s where Falstaff is caught on stage and so he dives into this basket of laundry. The servants then cover him up with laundry and carry the basket out. Well, what we did was, we had this basket that had this sort of hole in the bottom, so when they would lift up the basket, you would see my legs coming out of the bottom, walking along with them. It was one of the best visual jokes I’ve ever done. That is the joy of live theater.

  When I was 19, I worked at this theater that was really a kind of training ground for me. I really learned a lot doing arena theater (an arena theater is where there is an audience on all four sides of the stage). We were doing a children’s show called Bobo, the Clown That Ran Away. I played Mr. Frumpkins, the world’s greatest doll maker. Well, these theater people were really cheap. They wouldn’t even wash the costumes, so one weekend I took my costume home and washed it and forgot to bring it back for the next Saturday’s matinee. Well, they were also doing a show called Walking Happy which has this scene of devils and the devils are wearing long johns with tails attached to these back flaps. At that time, I was wearing these gold yellow bikini briefs. So I go upstairs with only ten minutes to change into my costume. That’s when I realized I hadn’t brought my costume with me. So I started looking around, and I saw these devil costumes. At that time, I was a bit heavier than I am now, and so I grabbed the largest pair I could find, and I saw that the tail was just pinned on. I unpinned it, put on the tights and went downstairs. Now these things are skin tight, stuff is bulging all around. I get on stage forgetting that they were using yellow lights to make the set look warm. That’s when I found out that the tails on the devil’s costume was what theld the flaps together. So here I am, walking around stage, saying my lines and the flaps are coming undone! The problem with yellow lights on yellow material is that it makes it look like there is nothing there. Suddenly, I’ve got all these six to twelve year olds screaming, thinking I’m flashing my ass at them. The guy who played Bobo has rolled into a corner between the stage and the first tier and he’s laughing. All this time, I’m completely oblivious to what’s going on. Finally, Bobo grabs me, gives me my exit line and throws me off the stage. That’s when they tell me what had happened. At first they thought I had planned on doing this. Dear God, no! I’m not that bad!

  However... the first play I did there, The Pigeon Roost, takes place in the first century A.D. Well, all the actors had scrolls that they would have to read. Being 19, I grabbed up a whole bunch of Playboy and Playgirl magazines, cut out the pictures, and plastered them in these scrolls so when they opened them up there were these pictures. The actors couldn’t turn away to hide their faces because of course the audience was all around them!

  Another time on stage, I had to play 20 different characters. The play consisted of several stories, and each story had like three or four characters, so I was constantly going back and forth to change costumes. Anyway, in this one story, I played this noble knight who was wooing this woman. I was thinner and had hair at that time, and I had to lean in and almost kiss Athena (who was played by that four pack a day actress I mentioned earlier) just as the lights went out. The problem was that the light board didn’t always work right, so it would be lean in and “go out please. go out please.”. I’m the only member of my family who as an adult never smoked, so it was like WHOA! as her breath hit me in the face. It was like, “Donna, I love you, but PLEASE take a mint BEFORE we do this scene!”

  I
have tried doing stand up. Twice. I don’t do stand up. I suck donkey dicks in hell at stand up. In regular conversation, I’m okay at telling jokes, but in front of an audience? No way. I once tried telling the kid on toast with mustard joke on stage in front of a bunch of Mormons. They did not appreciate that.

  Chapter 10 This and That

  Missed opportunities, people, and other various things. I’ve been getting so close to things. Like, I had a call back on this Jennifer Love-Hewitt project. Then they did a recasting, so I lost out on that. I got a call from my agent, the next day. I went in and they wanted someone very real, very normal sounding, but kind of a little off, so I had this whole thing about being an executive with this virus that we would release into the atmosphere and everyone would get it, but we would have a cure for those of us who were “in the know” and the rest of the people would be put on this sustained medication that would bring in thousands of dollars every month, and we would get the government to pay for it, and there would be taxes and we would get that from the middle class and we would just be doing very well. So I did all that and I got a call back that very afternoon. That threw me. I’m not used to getting instant call backs. I’m used to waiting and let things have time to digest. So I went home, got the call, went back down and did this thing again. I kept the character, but I forgot all the stuff about the virus that would have made me stand out. This was for the original cast of The Office. That is one that I kick myself in the ass for.

  I also did an in-house commercial for Heinz, who was rolling out a new product: their full immersion marinade. Basically it was this stuff you put in a plastic bag, fully immersing the meat instead of having it just like in a bowl. They set up a green screen in the backyard of this house, and I was in this really loud swimsuit. It was yellow with blue flowers and green leaves. They put a little kiddie pool out and I was to get in, splash about and be totally bored. The next moment they do a split shot so that there are two of me. As the second me, I do this little hop into the pool with this great big WOOSH and the water goes up and everything. This was marinade and full immersion marinade. This was supposed to go national, international, cable, billboards, cut outs, just everything. This was marinade and full immersion marinade. This was supposed to go national, international, cable, billboards, cut outs, just everything. I was looking at a few hundred thousand dollars. I finally saw a quarter page ad in TV Guide. They had totally dropped the whole thing. I was so heart broken. Damn.