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Date Posted:08:30:30 10/08/99 Fri Author: Hank Foley Author Host/IP: NoHost / 207.247.146.148 Subject: Oct. 22, I'll be the "Caller" in David Mamet's "Four A.M." In reply to:
--Stacey
's message, "Hey everyone! Tell me what YOU'RE up to lately!" on 16:10:44 10/07/99 Thu
While anyone local IS welcome, the Theater Fellowship at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian CHurch (some name, huh?) where I'll be doing this uses their "Scene and Poetry Nights" as sort-of a fundraiser, as well, meaning that I can't lessen the $12 ticket charge, though it does include dinner.
My wife Summer is directing as she did in the spring when we did Joe Pintauro's "Birds in Church" in the same venue. We rocked that one. Of course, it wasn't too hard to be the best of show because so much of the work is so bad, but, it was an easy gig to do and I'd wanted to do "Birds in Church" ever since my scene partner (New York actor Grant McKeown, who was also in my wedding) and I did the 6-page play in workshop with our mutual coach.
This time 'round, the subject matter is one that has intrigued me for years. At many a street corner, especially around Rockefeller Center, if, as you step off the concrete of the sidewalk onto the tar of the road, you look down, you can see, pushed into the tar, a plaque or "tile" of sorts. It says, "An Arnold Toynbee idea in the movie '2001,' the resurrection of the dead on the planet Jupiter." The "tile" goes on from there to rant about how the reader (I assume, it says "you") "MUST MAKE AND GLUE TILES!!!!!" It is the weirdest thing. Odder yet, whenever the roads are resurfaced, they reappear. Whoever the perpetrator-nut or nut-group is, I think they're in contact with the road repair arm of city government and know the schedule (and probably the location of each and every "tile") of resurfacing for every road because these things reappear RIGHT after any road is redone. It's bizarre.
Anyway, I think David Mamet noticed the same oddity because he wrote about it. I've been meaning to write him for years and ask if he ever did any investigation into it, or, probably rightly, just assumed it was some insaniac.
The play, just 5-pages, has, therefore, been an interest of mine since I first read it and realized I knew something of the same mystery. My former techinical director in the theater I ran, Kaddy Feast (an excellent T.D. or stage manager, non-union, though she's left off, even with paying tech work for the time being, to return to acting - she almost always acted in any evening of one-acts that we did, while T.D'ing, too) is playing the irrascible late-night radio call-in show host who treats my outlandish statements as if they were perfectly normal, except to point out certain logical fallacies as is the announcer's job to do.
I told Summer that this is the last play that I'm doing just to do build my resume, but, as I think about it, I really love this weird little piece.
Kaddy has most of the lines. Not only is the part right for her, but also, during the day on Oct. 22, I'm taking a 6-hour test (the series 7 for my securities biz-related day job). I'll be in a review class for five of the ten nights before then and will really have to study in order to pass (about 70% fail, first time around), so I won't have time to rehearse like I should nor work on lines, so having fewer at least makes it a little easier on me.
In the last few days, I've sent out a PILE of pix from work to Backstage submissions and haven't been caught once, but, this morning, as I stole postage off the metered machine, I punched in $77.77 instead of $0.77 and hit "dispense" before I realized what I had done! Oh, no! I don't know if it is possible to cancel it once it's been dispensed! Probably not. I went ahead and did the balance of what I wanted to send out, scurried out to the mailbox before my official time to arrive at work, and emailed the company to ask if there's a remedy.
I'd have asked my buddy, Kurt, here at work who normally sends out my mail clandestinely, slipping it in between the regular business mail of the office, if there's a fix for my blunder or I could've asked him in the first place to mail out the envelopes (also plucked from office inventory), but I didn't want to ask him for too much and I was concerned about how he would receive the news of the $77.77 mistake.
So, far, no word back from the company that makes and services the postage metering machine.
I wonder what I could send out to make use of one package at $77.77 in postage.....
