Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (14 page)

I also emulated a lot of sports figures in the eighties. We were
really
into sports in my house. Mike Ditka and Dick Butkus were the two most Rooseveltian members of the Chicago Bears organization, to my way of thinking. It was an amazing time to be loving sports teams around Chicago, because the Cubs were great (They’re always great! Shut up, reality!) and the Bears had the best season in NFL history (suck my balls, Miami ’72) in 1985. No question. Then Jordan’s Bulls showed up. Phil Jackson. MUH. STACHE. I was at “teen” age, a very formative time for me to indulge in revering these superhero-looking guys with moustaches, like Walter Payton, Mike Singletary, all the Bears’ linebackers, Wilber Marshall, and Otis Wilson, plus William “the Refrigerator” Perry and Willie Gault. The Cubs were also great upper-lip role models, with Ron Cey, Billy Buckner, Dennis Eckersley, Fergie Jenkins, and Lee Smith all sporting cool-as-shit moustaches. Cy Young Award–winner Rollie Fingers of the Oakland A’s must be included on any such list because he was a bewhiskered badass on the mound who brandished a full-on Snidely Whiplash handlebar moustache that was mighty intimidating to any poor sap facing him in the batter’s box. Also, Goose Gossage, ladies and gentlemen.

Earlier moustached film heroes Errol Flynn and really anybody playing Zorro forever associated for me the gentlemanly pursuit of sword fighting with the moustache. Wyatt Earp brought his hirsute stache to the gunfight at the OK Corral and was justifiably pissed that he was mainly remembered for only that one heroic day when in truth, his whiskers saw him through careers as city policeman, county sheriff, teamster, buffalo hunter, bouncer, saloon keeper, gambler, brothel owner, pimp, miner, and boxing referee. Now, that was a moustache. In the same vein, Mark Twain had the kind of lip bracken to land him on the list of men I’ve always idolized. His sense of humor always sounded to me like if someone real smart came from my neck of the woods, and he said what he meant. I shouldn’t be surprised if, in my later years, I try to emulate his technique even more than I already do, writing stories about mischief while riding the nation’s rivers astride a steamboat.

In general, depending on style, your moustache can read as heroic and lend a granite quality to your visage, or if you go in a slightly different direction, your moustache can connote criminality in a character. I think it’s funny that when I’m playing a sheriff, I think, “I am going to need a kick-ass moustache,” but if I am playing a bank robber or cattle rustler or Irish thug, I think, “Oh, I had better grow a kick-ass moustache.” The important thing is to
start
with the moustache. Everything else can be adjusted around it, forcing your truth to trumpet beneath it, be that truth good or bad, strong or weak, sexy or abhorrent. On the heroic side, astronauts rock a moustache if they know what they’re about.

The straight dope is: If we’re TRUE to our natures, then we grow a robust beard. That is what was intended by the ORDER OF THINGS. Society has put a spin on us, making a “clean-shaven” countenance the social “norm,” which, from Ma Nature’s point of view, is bullshit. But then, so are air-conditioning and Saran wrap and Cap’n Crunch and a bunch of other cool shit that allows us to “rise above” nature at times. A moustache is a socialized way to say, “Okay, look, I’ll let you see most of my face, since that’s what we’re all doing right now, but if you would kindly direct your gaze to this thornbush above my mouth, you will be reminded that I am a fucking animal, and I’m ready to reproduce, or rip your throat out if called upon, because I come from nature.” In this way the moustache can be considered a relief valve of sorts, for the buildup of animal preening that most people completely repress. That’s what makes a man with a good stache so cool, calm, and collected.

It’s funny to me that people ask me for tips on growing a moustache. I often reply, “I honestly don’t know. I was born with this moustache. I just cut it periodically so that it doesn’t go down my throat when I’m enjoying my soup.” My whiskers grow without any provocation from me whatsoever.

I have about as much advice on growing a moustache as I do on growing fingernails or hemorrhoids. I’ll tell you this much: My life is always more delicious when I have whiskers on my face, but that might just be because those whiskers tend to accumulate bacon crumbs and scotch, rendering them literally delicious all day long. In response to the query, “How do you grow that robust moustache for Ron Swanson?” I can walk you through the steps:

1.
I don’t shave my lip area.

2.
After two weeks, I have a passable moustache, in the form of long, luxurious stubble.

3.
I continue to eschew the razor.

4.
After three to four weeks, my whiskers have developed to the point where I can play a sheriff who is so tough that he eats nails, but still not Swanson.

5.
I refuse to shave.

6.
After five weeks, the whiskers growing from just beneath my nostrils have extended down, wirelike, to reach my top lip, a distance of one full imperial inch. Now, and only now, may I don the pleated Dockers and thick, long-sleeved knits of Pawnee’s director of Parks and Recreation with confidence and authority.

Finally, I just want to add that I am a character actor, which means that, unlike “good-looking” actors (your Will Smiths and your Daniel Craigs), who always play (with great aplomb) different versions of the same dreamboat, I, lacking their cheekbones, rely on versatility to color each of my roles with a different crayon or brush. My old pal Mother Nature has done me quite the solid by bestowing upon me a thick mane of hair and a rampant growth of whiskers, both excellent basic materials from which to sculpt wildly differing character details. I have deeply relished my opportunities to try disparate hairdos, from Mohawk to hippie, and the same goes for the facial bush, from Grizzly Adams beard to muttonchops to Swanson stache.

The peculiar thing is, people familiar with my television work now seem to expect me to wield the moustache at all times, when in reality, I will wear it seldom outside of the shooting season. Having enjoyed my life as an aspiring chameleon thus far, I look forward to many more years of it.
Parks and Recreation
films for seven months of the year, and when I add on the month of moustache growth to prepare for the season’s launch, that’s eight months, or two-thirds of my year, that I am locked into that look. Therefore, I take great pleasure in spending my off-months looking like anything but Ron Swanson. Sometimes I shave my head bald, and sometimes I grow a large shaggy beard, and either direction sees me happy as a clam.

For an actor, donning a character is a strange transaction. Ron Swanson, for example, does not belong to me, and so I cannot in good conscience “be” him when I am not at work with his cocreators, my boss and the writers of my show. It’s like the Iron Man suit. As much as Robert Downey Jr. loves to play that particular iteration of Tony Stark, it would hardly be appropriate (though yes, it would be awesome) for him to wear that suit to the grocery store or the beach. It’s no different than the uniform anyone wears at work. Wearing Ron Swanson in my “regular” civilian life would feel to me commensurate with a Best Buy employee putting on that blue shirt and proselytizing to strangers at the car wash on the virtues of high-def televisions. I will have to be satisfied with the amazing good fortune bestowed upon me, that it’s what I get to wear whilst working at the greatest job anyone has ever had.

Wax On, Wax Off

W
ithout teachers in our lives, we would be a bunch of sorry dullards, indeed. Dimwits and dunces. One of the many gratifying advantages of mammalian life is that the older generation tends to teach the youngsters the skills they need to thrive in these harsh elements. I can tell you nice folks as a flat fact that were it not for the teachers in my own experience, not only would I be unable to extricate the toilet paper from the roll, but I would not ever have even found my way to the john. My parents, naturally, have been my first and best teachers, along with their respective families, who shared in the chores.

Many hands make light work, and a little “handful of joy” like myself, not to mention my little brother, two sisters, and a bunch of cousins, provided a workload that was equal to an army of aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Dad first taught me to drive a clutch, followed by my uncles Don and Dan and grandpas Mike and Ray. Each threw in his two cents, instructing both me and my cousin Ryan so that by the time we were nine, after years of gentle lessons, I could engage the consarnit transmission without any crunching.

Grandpa Mike’s teaching was especially efficacious. He was an old man who didn’t have time for maneuvering, so he just went straight at us. I believe Ryan and I were six or seven when he asked us if we would like to sample a chaw of the Red Man chewing tobacco forever in a pouch in his hip pocket. You bet your ass we wanted to try it. Not only did the patriarch of our lives favor this masticating medium, but so did most of our favorite Chicago Cubs! The time had arrived for us to join the legion of men, moving mountains of hay and oceans of yellow corn about the county. Grandpa gave us each a portion and said, “Now, you just chew it, like chewing gum.” We complied, champing away in a manner worthy of any swaggering jack down at the grain elevator, if I do say so myself, lasting all of ninety seconds before we both promptly vomited in the yard and lay down in the grass to die. Class complete. Grandpa Mike wasn’t fucking around.

* * *

L
ater in my ongoing career as a student I was to win the teacher lottery not once but twice, at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Champaign–Urbana. Permit me to “wax on” now, if you will, as I unfold the Ballad of Robin and Sato-sensei.

Robin McFarquhar was my “movement” teacher. In any given year, he shouldered a variety of classes, like Stage Combat, Circus Techniques, Deep-Tissue Massage, Mask Work, Intro to Your Spine, Tai Chi, and Guts. I also took an independent study in piss and vinegar with him. Every student in the department, both undergraduate and graduate, fell under his gentle British wing, and Robin did everything in his power to heap learning upon our virgin, spongelike spirits and bodies. McFarquhar, with his actions, illustrated to me a quality that I have really learned to look for in an instructor: that he/she be one who continues to indulge in a hungry course of learning for him/herself. When he wasn’t laying some delicious tutelage upon us, which meant mainly during summer vacation, Robin was traveling the nation and the world, participating in workshops of all sorts, from Feldenkrais to Alexander Technique to stage combat to literally walking on coals. That might sound extreme to you, or at least a tad hocus-pocus, but let me assure you it was anything but, for he would dutifully return to his classroom every fall and do his utmost to inspire us to perform that very act in all of our work: walk on fire.

Robin’s movement syllabus at the U of I theater school generally taught one to know and understand the instrument of one’s body, along with its possibilities and limitations (imagine any time you have begun a new program of exercise, and some long-unused muscle group speaks up and says, “Hey! Whoa! You’ve paid us no attention whatsoever for these twenty-seven years, and now you want us to perform repeated sets of lat pull-downs? Take it easy, sailor.”). We got acquainted with all of the disparate muscular work-teams in our own operations, especially those crews handling the spine, that finicky nerve center from whence all bodily motion springs. Once we had socialized with all of the labor divisions, we then put our company to work in tasks requiring both finesse (juggling, mime, court-sword) and brawn (backflips, broadsword, wrestling). As you might recall from your own school days, the divergent realms of theater nerds and athletes seldom experienced any crossover, and so Robin was teaching us merely to be athletes before we could begin to participate in his artistic decathlons.

As amazingly delivered as these disciplines were, they were mostly dealing with the vessel. If it was whisky school, these classes focused on the barrel, with its distinct cooperage, the tinctures in which the oak staves had previously bathed, the truing of the hoops, and the application of peat smoke in some exceptional cases. But, continuing this well-distilled analogy (cough), the real pedagogical treasures in Robin’s classroom concerned the spirits contained within the cask. The man taught us guts, plain and simple. At the top of every session of circus class, the assembled troupe would recite:

“Come to the cliff,” he said.

They said, “We are afraid.”

“Come to the cliff,” he said.

They came, he pushed them

and they flew.

The sense of it is, come to the edge of the cliff, face the leap, and be afraid. Then acknowledge your fear, step forward once more, and then push yourself off the cliff. I was lucky, as I was already stupid, so I was ready to take any flying vault that people would watch, but for many of the softer students, ones who had enrolled in the program aspiring to become the next Molly Ringwald, the prospect of attempting a backflip was terrifying stuff.

Every one of us was gently coaxed toward overcoming his/her own insecurities and, as a result, flying like a motherfucking eagle. These classes took all of the good parts of self-help ideology and the religious mind set and employed them with the sole objective of instilling self-confidence and creativity in the participants. One of the greatest epiphanies a performer can take on board is the understanding that one must simply fly free. Your flight may be beautiful and sexy (hi there), or it might be awkward and labored. It might be hilariously encumbered by disheveled feathers and an ill-kept beak, or it might be workmanlike and steady, but, whatever your aeronautical style, your soaring has just that: STYLE! Whatever it is that makes you different, weird, unique from the others, it is
that
, if anything, which will see you prosper. When I managed to work that golden notion through my thick head, it was then that I knew I would be okay. Not everyone will like the cut of your jib (looking at you, Les Moonves; more on that later), but many others will. One simply needs to seek those others and then somehow trick them into buying tickets for your production of
Gangsta Rap Coriolanus
.

In 2012, Robin McFarquhar invited me to come back and speak to the current students of the department, twenty years after my own graduation. I leapt at the opportunity, remembering so clearly how we yearned back in my own student days for professionals working in “the business” to come and tell us how things stood in the big, bad world outside. I sat in front of the assembled department and told them, first and foremost, to be sure not to squander their time in this facility in which we sat, the Krannert Center, which contains four gorgeous better-than-professional-quality theaters with accompanying scene shop, costume shop, and light and sound departments, staffed by absolute superstars of their respective crafts.

“I have worked all over the country in theater, film, and television, and I have sincerely never come across a bounty of resources like those contained in this one benevolently be-bricked city block of artistic rectitude,” I spoke to them.

“You talk weird,” they replied.

“Silence!” I commanded.

I went on to discuss the pros and, sure, a few cons to working there as a lad, mentioning some faculty members and what have you, and then I came to speak of Robin, who was sitting off to the side, probably willing me to pick up the pace, as teachers are wont to do.

“Let me tell you about this guy . . . ,” I began, but before I could get another word out, I promptly burst into tears.

“Oh, sorry. [
Sob
] I did not see this coming . . . ,” I managed to utter, before openly sobbing for several minutes. No shit. Even typing this description of that scene has me welling up with gratitude for that man. Hard as it may be for you to believe, I didn’t get to where I am today because I’m so cute. I’m sorry, gentle reader, I should have suggested you take a seat before I dropped that thermonuclear-shock nugget.

“Where I am today,” by the way, is in class, a class of my own devising, based upon the generous teachings of men and women like Robin McFarquhar, to whom I would say, “I shall forever don my largest cap just so that I may doff it to your life’s work.”

As luck would have it, when I had finished crying like a baby in front of that assembly of twenty-year-olds and I had spoken my heartfelt piece about Robin and his auspicious curriculum, another of my teachers walked through the studio door. I said, “Oh, great, and then there’s this guy . . . ,” and promptly renewed my sobbing. That teacher was Shozo Sato. My sensei.

This is a cheap comparison, but it will go a long way toward elucidating for you the basis of my relationship with Sato-sensei. The original version of the film
The Karate Kid
(1984) features an absolutely enchanting performance by the great Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi (if you have enjoyed the newer version with the winning Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan, then you should check out the old-school flavor). Shozo came into my life and immediately bewitched me and my future Defiant Theatre cronies with his Kabuki Theater class.

A traditional four-hundred-year-old Japanese theater form, Kabuki literally translates to: “sing [
ka
] dance [
bu
] skill [
ki
],” or “acting.” This very presentational style employs some of my favorite aesthetic tricks and techniques, such as the use of silken fabrics to represent elements like water and fire and blood (to great effect—a stabbing victim might erupt ribbons of red silk from his chest, eliciting gasps from the audience) or simply the employment of hugely broad mugging during
“mie”
poses (grandly expressive freeze-frames onstage describing moments of great emotion). At such moments in the execution of Japanese Kabuki productions, expert audience members will shout either the actor’s last name, as a great compliment to the performer’s skill, or even more flattering, the name of the actor’s house, as well as the phrase “You are better than your father!” the pinnacle of praise. Next time you see me in a play, it would not hurt my feelings were you to shower me with such a pronouncement.

Another stroke of great fortune in my life was landing a role in Shozo’s touring production of
Kabuki Achilles
in 1991. What started out as an enrollment in a reputedly cool class became a tour of Japan, complete with participation in an ancient theater festival in the small mountain village of Damine. In addition, three or four of my closest new buddies were in the show as well, so we were treated to quite a vacation. For most of the cast, it was our first-ever international travel, and Shozo and his wife, Alice, did an absolutely masterful job of parenting their brood of twenty students, who were incredibly fond of sake, it turned out.

That tour was so rich with beautiful experience and detail that it rather merits its own volume, but one chapter sticks out in my memory. Because Japanese farmers lavish an exceptional amount of attention on the cultivation of their fruits, especially melons, that particular fruit is considered the finest delicacy on the Japanese menu, bringing a price astonishingly more dear than the finest steak. In Tokyo, my dear Joe Foust and I were seeking breakfast one morning in the hotel restaurant when an old gentleman noticed us buying cigarettes from a vending machine. He was very friendly, trying to communicate something to us, the meaning of which we could not discern.

Gamely, we kept pointing at ourselves and stating, “Illinois Kabuki,” whereupon he would grow excited and noddingly exclaim, “
Hai!
Kabuki. Kabuki!” He was awfully nice, buying us each a pack of smokes and continuing to energetically speak a stream of unintelligible Japanese. He even gave me an enthusiastic handshake at a certain point, which in Japan was apparently executed a little differently than I was used to. “Kabuki! Kabuki!”

It grew a bit strange, although this man was clearly a big fan of our show, which he must have seen at one of our tour stops. He brought us over to his nearby table for breakfast, it would seem, as he persistently pointed at the melon on the menu, the most premium item, so expensive, we were told, that it was often purchased as a gift, much like a bottle of fine champagne in the States. Eventually we thanked him as best we could and called our friend Tatro over, explaining that the gentleman wanted to buy him some cantaloupe. Joe and I withdrew to our people, and as we explained the odd scene to the group, Shozo began to laugh very loudly. He reminded us that the word
Kabuki
, besides representing a revered national art form, was also slang for “prostitute,” since the style had been initially developed by traveling bands of whores visiting the camps of warring shoguns. Well, I guess that explained the ticklish handshake. Everyone had a good laugh until we remembered Tatro. Running to his rescue, we were surprised to see him sitting with the old man having a good chuckle, finishing up a beautiful serving of melon. “Best damn cantaloupe I ever tasted,” he said. “This guy is a hoot!” We never did tell him the rest.

Because of my ability to carry heavy objects, Sato-sensei made me a bit of a teacher’s pet. Pulling weeds in his garden one day, he casually dropped this bomb: “The act of pulling weeds has the very same impetus that causes war. We’re killing these bad shoots so the ones we favor can receive all the sunlight, nutrients, and water. That’s all war is: killing weeds.” That was the first but certainly not the last time I was floored by my sensei’s wisdom.