Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living

by Nick Offerman

  Once you’ve mastered the card, take it up a notch to handmade gifts. Ho-ho! You think you like the card-fueled oral pleasurings you’re receiving now? Just wait until he/she gets a load of the scarf you have knit for him/her! That won’t be the only load exchanged that night. Making gifts is also a great way to perpetuate a hobby in a productive way, and a solid hobby can keep you out of the hair of your significant other. What do you know? That’s another gift!

  Don’t have the time/budget/inclination to take up woodworking or chandlery or glassblowing? No sweat. Step up to some tasty papier-mâché. I have used this childhood art-class technique more times than I can count (well, actually, no, probably just seventeen times) in my theater work, and it is super fun EVERY TIME. You make just enough of a mess to know that you’ve achieved something, and you could potentially end up with a sculpted masterpiece. Something I love to do as a character actor is to craft my own facial prosthetics for the stage, which is a fancy way of saying that I like to make funny noses. If you cast your face in plaster and then sculpt your new features in clay upon that plaster version of your face, then your noses or chins or devil horns will fit you perfectly, providing countless hours of hijinks!

  Other fun objects to immortalize in paper and glue are the breasts and the penis. If/when you replicate your virile member, or really any body part, it is key to coat the area with petroleum jelly to prevent an intensely painful (hair) removal once the papier-mâché is dry. In the case of a penis casting, one obviously needs to maintain an erection until the glue sets up, which can take several minutes (I’ve read), so be prepared to sustain an atmosphere of arousal for the necessary duration. Once you have achieved crafting a successful facsimile, you can also elongate the shaft of said manhood by sculpting an extra couple of inches in clay, then adding more papier-mâché to the extra length (I’ve also read). When you are happy with your product, you might wonder what the hell you’re supposed to do with a papier-mâché version of your rig. Well, I’ll tell you. Create a waterproof seal on the inside of the paper dick with epoxy or spar varnish. Glue the base of the shaft to a flat rock or piece of wood to create a strong, heavy foundation. Gently cut in a urethra (pee hole) with a sharp knife and paint to taste. Fill partway with water, insert a nice daisy or tea rose, and you have a darling bud vase!

  No matter how you decide to spend a little more time on your gestures of giving, the point is just quite simply that you do. You don’t have to give a person a papier-mâché penis vase to get a reaction, but you won’t be sorry if you do.

  11

  Kabuki Farmboy Takes Chicago

  As is only proper, my years in college saw me undergo a drastic personal transformation, as well as participate in a larger group consummation with those several champions who were to form the Defiant Theatre. Our sage Robin McFarquhar has since asserted that, in the twenty years since our matriculation, he has never seen another band of students with such an unquenchable work ethic, willing to stay up all night regularly to fulfill our artistic missions of mischief and beauty. I am very grateful to hear that I, once again, was in the right place and time to be valued by these peers, despite my relative inexperience onstage. Joe Foust and Christopher Johnson, destined to become Defiant’s first artistic director, spearheaded production teams to create pageants of theater both challenging and hilarious.

  A ragtag team of puckish miscreants coalesced, membership in which required only an adherence to our collective taste and the willingness to work one’s fingers to the bone. The original gangsters were Johnson and Foust, Darren Critz, Chris Kantowicz, Jen Cotteleer, Rich Norwood, Kara Loquist, Richard Ragsdale, and myself, soon to be joined by Michelle “PeePee” Primeaux, Tatro, Emil Boulos, Andrew Leman, Linda Gillum, Rob Kimmel, Lisa Rothschiller, Jim Slonina, Sean Sinitski, Will Schutz, Barb and Chris Thometz, and many others as the years rolled past. We capering fools were drawn inexorably together to weave shows of intelligence and silliness in a way that thrilled us and fed us completely. Joe’s was my favorite brain, wickedly clever and funny for days. A naturally magnanimous leader, he had such a great sensibility for utilizing old-school theatrical conventions in a completely fresh way to incite mirth in any audience. He also wielded a fresh perspective that made him a wonderful and sensitive leader, which I have since learned is exactly the type of person in whose service I thrive.

  Late one stormy night, properly buzzed, we all convened on our Nevada Street porch, festooned with fairy lights, incense, and candles, to draw up the first charter of our artistic collective, with plans to move our efforts to Chicago and thereby take over the known universe. The swollen sky hinted at great portent. We signed our names to the magnificent parchment in fire, jam, and absinthe. Lightning crashed, the four winds howled, shrieked, and yee-hawed, neighborhood mothers shuddered in their sleep, and the frilly little gillyflowers in the south meadows wilted and shed their pretty petals. The Defiant Theatre was born.

  As daunting as this transition seemed, we had found pockets of encouragement when we had previously visited the city of big shoulders—we’d taken group trips to see plays at the Goodman Theatre, which had been very inspiring. It was there I first witnessed a great Chicago character actor named Steve Pickering, who was a big, thick Juggernaut sort of a guy. I saw him assay some unlikely roles for a guy built like a small tractor, such as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the opening moments of this particular production, Steve/Puck rappelled in from the lighting grid above in commando gear. There was a park bench center stage, which he examined, and then, brandishing a can of spray paint, administered the word fuck onto the bench. He furtively glanced about for passersby, and then he turned around and transformed the F into a P. Puck. This was my kind of guy! After years of being surrounded by more classically thin and frail theater gents, I was very exhilarated to see a guy who was a little more stout (like myself) getting cast in these plum roles. Having had some trouble getting cast thus far, I was reassured by Steve’s success that Chicago might just have some goodness in store for me.

  Fortunately, just as we moved up to the city in the fall of 1993, Wisdom Bridge Theatre, where my sensei, Shozo, had produced earlier award-winning Kabuki shows over many years, like Kabuki Othello, was doing a revival of one of his biggest previous hits, Kabuki Medea, starring a couple of Chicago theater luminaries, Henry Godinez and Barbara Robertson, as Jason and Medea. Lo and behold, we three or four Defiant youngsters were just moving to town with more recent Kabuki training than anyone in the city of Chicago, if not the nation (not a lot of Kabuki training going on outside of Shozo’s classroom). Thus, as if his training and generosity to date weren’t enough, Shozo then handed us our first paychecks in our professional lives as well. Now that’s a teacher.

  A select portion of our Defiant number had already been fortunate enough to participate in a couple of productions of Kabuki Achilles, having toured Japan, Hungary, and Cyprus, as well as performing it professionally outside of Philadelphia at the estimable People’s Light & Theatre Company for several months. Shozo’s bread and butter was adapting Greek and Shakespearean tragedies into the traditional Kabuki style. The epic story lines and larger-than-life emotional arcs lend themselves perfectly to the spectacularly presentational style of Kabuki, which we studied diligently for years under our sensei. Imagine Hector and Achilles in samurai armor, fighting it out with katana (samurai swords). Amazing.

  Amongst the Defiant tribe, this experience resulted in a communal company reverence for the tried-and-true conventions of Kabuki theater, which we did not hesitate to later exploit in our own plays. Conventions like the koken, who are basically stagehands, technically visible but clad in full black robes and sheer black hoods that render them “invisible” to the audience. Koken will scurry across the stage in a sort of ducklike squat-walk to assist the actors in some sort of action. For example, if the character of Medea is getting ready to, say, transform into a demon and kill her children, th
e koken will come zipping out and trick her wig and kimono, whereupon they will turn into flames as if by magic. They’ll simultaneously slash some streaks of red and black makeup onto her face while handing her a dagger, so that in a moment’s time she is transformed from a beautiful woman into a hideous, bloodthirsty she-monster. Because of their all-black garb, the koken disappear into the black stage, so that the transformation appears to be happening as if by magic. These tricks were developed three hundred years ago, incorporating no technology beyond string and paint. Liking that price point, we immediately borrowed the koken, as well as a general sensibility of grandeur, from Kabuki and inserted them into our own Defiant productions. We created a tonal goulash kind of like a Shakespearean tragedy as writ by Tex Avery and Mel Brooks.

  My good fortune kept on rolling. The stage manager of Kabuki Medea was doing Richard II next at the Goodman and they needed a fight captain, so, knowing that I had a penchant for the stage combat, she fortuitously hooked me into that gig. The fight captain is a member of the cast who is in charge of maintaining the choreography throughout the run of the show and helping to train the actors who need help with their technique. If they had been looking for anything like a good actor, I would not have gotten the nod, but they fortunately just needed a guy handy with the slapstick. To my delight, the former P(f)uck Steve Pickering was also cast in Richard II, as one of the main combatants, so we got to work together almost as soon as I had landed in Chicago. The cherry on top of this excellent pastry was that Robin McFarquhar had been hired up from Champaign to choreograph the fights! Christ, could I have gotten any luckier? My first two pro gigs in Chicago were with my two greatest teachers, Shozo and Robin!

  Pickering took a bit of a shine to me and enlisted me to work on The Old Man and the Sea with him at the Next Theatre, in a nifty adaptation of Hemingway’s classic story with four dancers and some puppets, which were my department. I did the man-of-war bird and the marlin as articulated puppets that could flap and fly for their moments in the spotlight. The four dancers, with masks and a small boat, performed movements that accompanied the words of the piece, describing the action and the sea and other elements with their beautifully effective progressions. I also choreographed quarterstaff fights between the old man and the marlin, then the sharks. This was awesome, at least at first. I had immediately hooked up with my hero, Pickering, and he rewarded me with a fine lesson: Nobody could do what the Defiant Theatre did. Working with Steve was mostly fun, but he was a self-proclaimed benign dictator. Since gigs like these paid little to nothing, there was no apparent reason to continue a collaboration that was not nearly as satisfying as that with my own company. I am terribly grateful for the time I got to spend with Pickering, and for the lessons I took away from his example, but from then on, I would focus my free work upon the Defiant stage.

  Speaking of, we established our company quickly and we found a great little niche audience. Everyone in the company was making a meager income by whatever means we could scare up, but we were all very satisfied to have the opportunity to make some great theater. I could afford cigarettes, coffee, burritos, beer, and weed. I wanted for nothing, and I was making theater sixteen hours a day.

  I was lucky that my day job was also working in theaters as a carpenter, especially compared to many of the company members who had temp jobs in offices or other equally depressing grinds. There was one slow winter, however, that saw a few of us reduced to this quasi-telemarketing job set up by another charismatic Kabuki alumnus named Goldberg (our actual Achilles). The job was to sit in a cubicle and call cardiologists on the phone to ask them to review a new perfusion catheter that they had been utilizing. Adding to the bizarre flavor of the experience was the fact that the company had located its offices directly over the Fulton Street fish market, so this “cool” brick warehouse office absolutely reeked of fish. Anyway, a perfusion catheter is a tiny balloon that is threaded into blood vessels around the heart. If memory serves, they would insert it down in the thigh, I suppose utilizing the femoral artery, and snake this catheter up into blocked regions around the actual heart, whereupon the balloon would be inflated, effectively opening up the blockage. How crazy is that shit? And how bizarre for a bunch of barely employed actors to sit around discussing it over the phone with these surgeons who utilized the technology every day.

  The upshot of that tedious gig was that we fired up a fun competition going amongst a few of us wage slaves. One chap would go into the bathroom, right there at the side of the room, and commit the sin of Onan (beat off), then, upon exiting, he would strike the glass light sconce on the wall next to the bathroom door with the eraser end of his pencil, which would cause it to ring like the bell at a boxing match, signifying a tally of exactly one successfully blown load. We would all keep score, each adding to his/her total at every possible opportunity throughout the day, until at the end of an eight-hour shift, the winner would be feted with beers by the other participants. One of my cronies, whom we’ll call Richard Krishna, and I were usually vying for the title, and I believe my record for sconce-dings in a day of work was no less than nine. You see, no matter how dreary your job, ways can be found of passing the time productively.

  * * *

  At Defiant, we prided ourselves on building our sets and props for next to no budget, often from scraps we would collect in the fruitful alleyways of Chicago. I was the technical director, or “TD,” which simply means I had all the tools. We depended heavily upon each company member to come out and help with each build, but there were a few core stalwarts who brought most of the magic home. Joe Foust could literally make anything out of gaffer’s tape, a condition born of necessity, but I was to learn later how valuable our poverty actually was to our creativity. Bigger theaters with a healthy budget could do things like drive a motorcycle onto the stage or build an entire two-story house set, whereas we would have to make our motorcycle or our two-story house out of refrigerator boxes and egg cartons. The amazing thing I learned was that audiences enjoyed ours more. If a crowd witnessed an actual motorcycle rev and roll onstage, that’s a neat spectacle, which then immediately fades, as in, “Oh. Wow. A real motorcycle,” and then it’s over, the exceptional but momentary delight of seeing an unexpected but recognizable quantity. But when an audience has to buy into whatever illusion you’ve created, say, a motorcycle made out of two people with some mailing tubes and two umbrellas, then they experience the delight of creating the object together with the performers, in the imagination. That’s more fun and abiding for them, because they are part of the transaction, as opposed to just sitting and coldly observing. An audience loves to have a hand in making the magic real, which is what I think should be connoted by the term an “engaging” piece of theater. Our shows were just plain really fun and, in one way, the greatest work of my life. The group of artists and the freedom that we had at the time allowed us to create and perform pieces unhindered by obligations, financial or otherwise. An artist cannot do his/her best work unless he/she feels the necessary freedom to do so. For me, this freedom culminated in Defiant’s third season, particularly in our production of Ubu Raw.

  What is considered by history to be the first absurdist play, Ubu Roi, or Ubu the King, was written in France in the late nineteenth century by a gassy guy named Alfred Jarry. Our original translation, penned by Foust and Ragsdale, was called Kabuki Ubu Raw. In both cases, it’s a sort of filthy Macbeth story. Jarry initially wrote it as a puppet show making fun of his science teacher. When first produced in Paris, Pa Ubu entered and proclaimed his first line, “Merde!” (“Shit!”). The theater rioted at the profanity and they shut the show down. There’s a lot of innuendo, like, “By my green candle!” which, considered nothing short of pornographic at the time, is now completely tame. But more on Ubu Raw later.

  * * *

  We few core company members, our lives were fueled almost entirely by the ambition of youth. None of us ever had quite enough to eat, but we would work late into the wee hour
s of the night just the same. In a play called The Quarantine, I was acting in the show, so I’d rehearse the show from six until ten, then I’d go backstage to my tools and work on a life-size dummy of me, complete with a life-cast foam latex head, for, what else, the disemboweling scene. I remember driving a three-inch screw into my own knee (on the dummy) and actually thinking, “This is awesome and also kinda weird.” I’d think, “It’s opening night tomorrow night, or I guess tonight. It’s three in the morning. I’m going to maybe get about three hours of sleep from maybe five to eight A.M. This is the greatest fucking life.”

  Exhaustion would occasionally catch up with me. There’s a scene in Ubu Raw in which a six-foot ladder with a two-dimensional boulder attached to its front is placed center stage, and I could, as the titular Pa Ubu, “stand” astride the boulder by climbing up the ladder and straddling the top. On the night of our final preview performance, I climbed up, struck a pose, then passed out and fell forward onto my head. After laughing for a while, Joe realized something was wrong when I got to my feet and began whispering my lines. He came out to stop the show and I said insistently, “No, no, I’m okay,” like a goddamn five-year-old. I was about to commence a broadsword fight with the character BuggerAss, but Joe took away my broadsword. We collected ourselves and then finished the show, minus the fights.

  When I first moved to Chicago I lived with Joe and Ragsdale and Tatro in an awesomely crappy apartment at Chicago and Ashland in a pretty bad neighborhood. It was an old storefront that had been converted into a living space, which meant a kitchenette and bathroom had been installed, but no other rooms, so we built our own! Short on materials (to say the least), we just built four bedrooms with eight-foot-high walls (the length of a sheet of plywood), leaving a couple of feet of open air above the walls. Not exactly the most ideal situation when it came to privacy, but we were like family by this point anyway.