by David Rakoff
By Sunday morning the hall is decidedly sparser—easily one-half of the people are gone or have decided to opt out of poor Larry Reynosa’s relentlessly frequent stretching exercise. There is a picked-over feeling in the room. A buffet down to its garnishes on a soiled tablecloth. “Something very exciting better happen today,” says the couple beside me.
Rinpoche certainly tries. We are told he will lead a special fire ritual that morning in honor of the auspicious full moon. But he is late. As we congregate on the lawn in the hot sun, our numbers dwindle yet further. The ceremony, when he finally begins it, is impressive. A smoldering brazier of pine branches and burning pieces of red and yellow cloth sends a plume of thick white smoke up into the summer sky. Seagal chants the Tibetan verses, which he reads from texts bound up in a beautiful silk and lacquer reticule. The English translation is poetry of exquisite intricacy and refraction, speaking of unknowable worlds of bliss and terror—“The five realms of existence, including one called Hell”—unchartable beauties, nuances beyond our conscious comprehension. We are chastened into silent thought.
Arriving at the dining hall that night, we are informed that there will be an unprecedented evening session. I tell Meg that it smacks vaguely of eleventh-hour bang for the buck. Seagal is trying to make up for his “punctuality issues.” I say this lightly. Meg, whom at this point I would almost sooner saw my tongue off with a plastic knife than have another one-on-one conversation with, says, “Maybe it’s our issue. I view this time as a bubble. Maybe we should go with the flow like we’re in a monastery.” Unable to bear it any longer, I say, my voice far sharper than I intended: “Even in a Buddhist monastery—where I’ve been”—a bald-faced lie—“they show up at the time they say they will. I don’t think it’s invalid, having told two hundred people he’d be here at a certain time, for him to show up then.”
I frankly don’t care whether Rinpoche shows up at all. I am at this point thinking only about the next day, when I can take a cab to the Amtrak station and return to that nest of perversion and unenlightenment known as New York City, where the practice (and criminal nonpractice) of empathy and compassion has all the immediacy, importance, and conflicting allegiances of war.
Meg and I are so clearly sick of each other that her attempt at jocularity merely highlights, rather than defuses, her anger at me. “Wait, let me back up,” she says, leaning over toward me with strained Lotus Eater levity, assuming my position in my chair. “Let me learn nonresistance and try to align myself with you.” The corners of her eyes are shining, as sharp and gleaming as rat teeth. It’s moot, as it turns out, because by the time supper is over we are told that the evening session is canceled.
Disencumbered and disenfranchised, our evening suddenly stretching before us, we start to gather aimlessly in front of the Omega café. Larry Reynosa, who has so far addressed us in traditional Japanese martial arts garb, is there in street drag. A few of the seminarians are asking him questions about his life with Rinpoche. The crowd begins to grow, and a de facto evening session led (not surprisingly) by Reynosa begins to organically take shape in the gathering dusk.
On the periphery of the circle, I begin to speak with an older man whom I noticed earlier. “I’m here ’cause my son did a good job on my taxes and I thought I’d treat him to a weekend.” He is dressed in head-to-toe Early Bird Special: athletic shoes with white tennis socks, shorts, Izod shirt snowed with dandruff, and nylon jacket. He has always been a bit of a seeker, he’s studying Cabala in Philadelphia. I ask him what he thinks of this weekend.
“It’s okay.” He shrugs resignedly. “But I didn’t really sign on to spend twenty-five hours a day with him,” he says, indicating Reynosa.
He is a CPA who refuses to use a calculator. He is delighted when I tell him I’m a writer. “Oh, that must be the most wonderful thing in the whole world! That guy, what’s his name . . . James Michener wrote that book The Drifters, and I read it at age forty and I freaked out. I’m sixty-six now and I thought, If they can do it, why can’t I? And I disappeared for a few years.”
“Where did you go?” I ask.
“Aw, I dunno.” He sighs, suddenly tired at what a long, strange trip it’s been.
The son is as painfully thin as his father, but weak chinned. At least the latter, despite the alpine levels of dandruff and wickedly long eyebrows, still maintains a Martin Landau handsomeness. We decide to head over together to the evening’s concert. Tonight it’s a woman advertised on the flyers pinned up here and there as having “a voice like dark chocolate.” Her tones are not uncocoalike. She sings a lot of noodly Thelonious Monk numbers to which she wrote her own lyrics. In one couplet she innovatively rhymes “just gotta let loose” with “rhythm’ll make your body loose.” Most noteworthy is her earnest, unsmiling quality; even when she smiles she looks serious: Doris Day at Bennington.
Walking back together from the Lake Theater, we run into a friend of his, also an older Tennis Jew: silver hair, gold chain, athletic wear, tan.
“So what was today like?” he asks. “You and my wife doing the same farschtunkener chazerai with the exercise?” Taking his leave, he tells us he is off to the Omega sauna for a schvitz.
The moon is a huge yellow headlight as I walk back to my room alone. I stop to look. An older woman with an ice cream walks by, and I point. She stops for a moment and then, putting a hand between my shoulder blades, says, “Thank you.” Her hand is comfortingly warm; I hadn’t even realized I was cold before she touched me. I sit, moments later, on a lawn chair in front of my cabin, looking up at the stars. Schmuck! I think. Where was this serenity and openness and relaxation three days ago? But I don’t really feel serene, relaxed, or open. What I feel is relief at the impending end of this very difficult, singularly lonely experience. (I will find when my phone bill arrives the following month, over the three days, I checked my messages thirty times. It being a holiday weekend, I received not one call.)
Seagal, expected at nine A.M., arrives at eleven forty-five for our final session. The entire seminar is ending at noon that very day. “Is everybody getting hungry?” he asks the clearly had-it-up-to-here crowd. A young man appears at the mike, unilaterally deciding to start the Q&A early. “We were wondering where you were last night and why you’re late today. It’s kind of funny and I’m kind of nervous asking, but we’re wondering about the mutual respect thing you keep talking about and why you show up for one hour of these three-hour things.”
Seagal’s face is unreadable as he answers, neither defensive nor angry. “I was told about the eight P.M. session last night as I was leaving. I’ve been teaching for thirty years and I’ve never taught as much as I taught yesterday and it comes to a point of diminishing returns as to what you can absorb. I would be happy to give you your money back and a bonus.” He then adds a tad tersely, “In my tradition, teachers don’t explain. I’m not here to take your money. I’m not flippant about people’s time and energy, and I’m very respectful to everyone.”
Immediately mollified about the taking of their money and the disrespect shown by Seagal’s flippant disregard of their time and energy, the audience applauds. The man thanks him for his very direct answer and sits down.
Meg, seeking to calm yet further the now glass-smooth waters, stands up at the mike. “I’ve been thinking about the chocolate cake that my friend [Not me, I hasten to point out. Someone else] and I have been eating every night in the café?” she upspeaks. “It’s sold in such small slices because it’s very rich? What we get here is very rich?” She sits down.
Seagal assumes a demeanor of aching humility for the concluding few minutes of the seminar. He asks in the oblique and roundabout grammatical construction of translated Japanese if it might be all right if he were to possibly read for us a Tibetan prayer called “Inexpressible Confession.” “Would that be okay?” he mewls. Yes! we answer, collective tantrum subsided, triumphantly forgiving and eager for dharma enlightenment once more.
But I leave as he starts in on chanting the Tibeta
n. My taxi is here to take me to the train station. It is a scorcher of a Memorial Day, and as the cab drives away, the vinyl of the car seat burns the backs of my thighs. I am grateful for this small introduction back to samsara—the ocean of suffering, the endless cycle of life, death, and misery that is our world of pain. Cracking a window, I lean back and close my eyes, happy to breathe the stifling air.
LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT
Within the canon of anthropological apocrypha—you know, those mythic studies about cultures with fifty ways of saying “mackerel” but no word for “love”—there’s that old saw about the underlying proportions of the ideal female form being the same the world over, regardless of epoch or region; the Venus of Willendorf is to Cindy Crawford is to a lovely young bride in Micronesia is to the paragon of Inuit beauty, and on and on.
The woman running through her lines right now is walking, universal perfection. She is lung-collapsingly, jaw-achingly, fall-down-on-the-sidewalk-teeth-first-take-a-bottle-of-pills-and-throw-yourself-out-a-window beautiful. The planes and angles of her face are a mathematical equation adding up to a great cosmic Yes. She’s hardly alone in her beauty, in this rehearsal room of a major soap opera called, for the sake of discretion, Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Pretty well everyone here is beautiful. Even the older actors are finely preserved and good-looking, all silver birch and beaten gold, except perhaps for the oldest woman, who has a dowager’s hump and has been on the show for decades, since it started as a radio drama, when that sort of thing was beside the point. But the younger actors are the kind of people one generally sees rendered in oils on the covers of paperback novels, locked in heated, semiclad embrace beneath foil letters, as huge antebellum plantation houses burn in the background. That’s a lot of roiling passion at seven A.M. Passion from which I am intrinsically excluded. I am decidedly out of my visual league here. To pretend otherwise would be self-deluded folly. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man may well be king, but in the land of the incredibly beautiful and sighted, the one-eyed man is deformed and ugly.
In the American pulchritocracy—this society ruled by the Beautiful, a term coined by the writer Mark O’Donnell—being on Lather, Rinse, Repeat is equivalent to being presented at Court. Daytime Court. I know that there are millions of people across the country who might literally give their lives to be where I am right now, meeting these actors, this aristocracy of a kingdom I know nothing about; a fabled land where the men are shirtless and the women’s hair swoops with the sculpted undulations of a Mister Softee. A magical place known as (I think) Pine Bluff.
Everyone has told me both their real and character names. However, having never seen the show nor having read the script (tried to; physically unable), I’m not entirely sure which is which, although it’s not hard to figure out when someone says, “Hi, I’m Janet, I mean Crystal.”
I am playing a two-day part on Lather, Rinse, Repeat. I do not make my living as an actor—it’s a hobby. On the rare occasions when I find myself at an audition, it is generally to play one of two character archetypes: Jewy McHebrew or Fudgy McPacker. Jewy McHebrew is usually a fast-talking-yet-beset-with-concern Talmudic sort, whose rapid-fire delivery, questioning answers, and dentated final consonants speak to the intellectual grappling and general worry that is so characteristic of the Chosen People, the People of the Book. Jewy gets to say things like “Papa, I can’t believe it. You sold the store?” or “And so we eat the bitter herbs? Why? Becauuuse, it is to remember the bitterness of our enslavement in Egypt!”
Fudgy, on the other hand, can be many people: there is the phlegmatically imperious, supercilious salesman/ concierge/executive assistant, who generally has lines like “We’re not carrying that this season, I’m sorry. Next!” There’s also best friend/next-door neighbor Fudgy, who is forever barging in to display his laughable sexuality by, say, wearing a Carmen Miranda hat, when he’s not dispensing clear-eyed advice on matters of the heart. He is America’s sweetheart; a harmless queen the whole country can love, with his constant refrains of “Did someone say swim team?” or “Can’t you see that he’s in love with you, kiddo? Just tell him.”
There are, of course, hybrids and permutations. Today’s part, for example, is a little bit of Secular Humanist Jewy McHebrew crossed with Cell Phone Schmuck Jewy McHebrew. I am playing, in short, an agent. A powerful New York modeling agent. Let’s call him Len Rosenfeld. I am friendly but slick; a hard-nosed businessman with an eye and a taste for beautiful women. Yes, women, thank you very much. Fudgy McPacker has left the building.
“Oh, Tawny,” says the International Symbol for Beautiful, making vague washing motions with her hands. “I’ll get you for this, if it’s the last. Thing. I. Do.” It is as if she has raided a Botox dispensary, so unmovable is her perfect face, so uninflected her voice and manner. The director interrupts and suggests as gently as possible that the lines seem to indicate a certain anger and frustration on the part of her character. And, inasmuch as acting is often reductively defined as taking a situation, not in point of fact actually true, and pretending as if it were indeed happening at that very moment, that perhaps she might think of trying a little bit of artifice and simulation when eventually the cameras rolled that afternoon.
“Whatever,” she hisses, rolling her extraordinary violet eyes as she walks away.
There are two other day principals aside from myself. One is an unspeakably handsome man with a sharp and beautifully gunmetal-blue jaw. The other is an actor I’ve heard of and even seen on stage. He is playing a preacher. Fifteen years ago, while he was starring in a hit musical on Broadway, his costar apparently said to a friend of mine at a party, “Don’t put coke on your dick, man. It’s a total waste, it doesn’t work.”
I, Len Rosenfeld, am just passing through this sleepy bedroom community. I happen upon a charity fashion show, being staged to raise money for the church, which has burned down under mysterious, possibly racially motivated circumstances. Although Len has never been on the show before, he is recognized by the grande dame of the town as if he were a frequent visitor. Apparently I never miss a chance to check out what’s happening couture-wise in Pine Bluff.
The extras are almost all seniors, and they almost all seem to know one another. It becomes clear over the course of the long day that doing extra work for the soaps is actually a kind of club. A way for older New Yorkers to get out of the house, be around people, make a little extra cash. It can’t be for the amenities, because the soaps, unlike prime time, are decidedly Spartan. I am wearing my own clothes. They pay you ten extra dollars if you bring your own costume. It is the first time that I have acted on camera with my house keys on my person. Even the divas who have been on the show for decades, who have millions of fans, have the same cinder-block-walled dressing rooms as everyone else. They even have to use the same bathroom down the hall.
Moreover, there isn’t a cracker to be had on the set. In my limited experience, you can barely walk ten feet at a successful sitcom or on a movie set without upsetting some étagère of baked goods and bottled water, or a mandala of shrimp and baby lamb chops. The food deprivation here makes for a lot of low blood sugar among our seniors, which in turn makes them a somewhat unruly mob. Despite an assistant director having shouted, “Quiet, please. Rolling!” one woman has forgotten to turn off the cell phone in her tote bag, which she has brought onto the set. The phone rings in the middle of a scene taking place not fifty feet away. And she takes the call! No one stops her. Indeed, with more than sixty pages of script to film, cut, and print every single day, albeit only on videotape, there isn’t a whole lot of room for retakes. Lather, Rinse, Repeat is a rude, snuffling beast of barely controlled anarchy, so some old bag chatting with her best girlfriend is hardly the kind of thing that rates starting over. Later on, when I actually tune in to watch my episodes, I see more than one occasion where it’s clear that what is being broadcast is a rehearsal take: a woman fucks up her line, literally saying the opposite of what she needs to, th
en backtracks and rephrases it three times. A man, getting up from behind his desk, slams his leg into the side of it and, wincing, lets out an injured “Unh!” before continuing with his line, which he stammers out in a barely coherent, aphasic approximation due to the extreme pain.
The fashion show begins. The description of every single outfit contains at least one word that the actor—the town’s silver-haired patriarch and the fashion show’s emcee—has never seen before. “Is it bow-dice, or baw-dice?” I volunteer as how I think it’s baw-dice. “What’s this? Pail . . . pail . . . ?”
“Paillettes,” I tell him. “They’re like sequins.”
“Do you actually work in fashion?” he asks me in all seriousness.
My character is unmoved by the proceedings on this podunk runway (I’m not bowled over my real self, either, not being terribly fond of teal or shell pink) until of course I see Mimi, the show’s tragic mulatto. The camera sees me see her. I make a note in my program. My look is interested and coolly appraising with an underlying vulpine, frankly sexual quality. I’m impressed. And remember, please, I am a big deal. The urbane toast of the Big Apple, pulling down a high-six-figure salary, living in an extra-ritzy penthouse apartment, I am sure. I am a man not in the habit of having my insatiable, voracious appetite for the finer things in life—chilled baby duck, sushi, chocolate-dipped strawberries, and beautiful women—going unsatisfied. So when I say to Mimi that I think she has an “absolutely fantastic look,” that I am stunned by her style and the way she wears a dress, that I think I could make her very, very rich, and that I would like more than anything to get her up on the runway at a small but quite important show I’m planning in New York City the following week, and she says no thanks, she’s perfectly happy to use her modeling talents only for good, in the name of social justice and the refurbishment of the House of God . . . I am a little taken aback, to say the least. It only serves to pique my interest further. Beauty and pluck. A tiger to be tamed! I leave her my card, convinced that she will reconsider.