I’m a wiseass. Wait, let’s pause while legions of my friends throw down their Xbox controllers to fire off strongly worded, if badly spelled, emails of outrage and dissent.Sorry guys, I am. And when I was asked in a casting workshop over the weekend to improv a scene that showed who I truly am, I ran with it.
I rehashed it below, and here’s a little background: I happened to get paired up with a former classmate of mine, Barry, a sarcastic gay guy in his 50s, and our only direction was to create a father/son relationship. Barry, by the way, happened to be wearing a Velcro brace under his shirt as a result of a lower back injury.
ME: Dad, we gotta talk.
DAD: What’s wrong, son?
ME: It’s about your new lifestyle.
DAD: Do you have a problem with me coming out of the closet?
ME: No… but why’d you have to come so far out of the closet?
DAD: Meaning?
ME: You’re a total man-whore.
DAD: I am not.
ME: You slept with my best friend.
DAD: What, do you expect me to sleep with people my age? Forget it.
ME: He wasn’t even gay.
DAD: He is now.
ME: I know! You’re like some sort of gay superhero.
DAD: Guilty. By the way (unbuttoning his shirt to reveal the Velcro brace) this is very slimming.
ME: See? Who asks his son for a girdle for Father’s Day?
DAD: You resent me for leaving your mother.
ME: No, I understand that. It’s just our relationship is really odd. Most dads take their sons to a ballgame. You want to go get mani/pedis.
DAD: We can go to a Dodger game.
ME: Not after you went down on Tommy Lasorda!
The scene was a hit and the casting director loved it. Sometimes this business makes you want to go home and curl up in the fetal position. Other times, when you knock it out of the park, you feel like a million bucks Euro.
