#SOBLESSED: the Annoying Actor Friend's Guide to Werking in Show Business (15 page)

As I take my bow, I can only hope that the front row
of rush seats leap to their feet, causing a default standing ovation from the
remainder of the audience. Thank you – I am #grateful. You began this
journey knowing you were #blessed, but now I think it is safe to say that you’re
officially… #SOBLESSED.

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Thank you for purchasing
#SOBLESSED: the Annoying
Actor Friend’s Guide to Werking in Show Business.
If you have reached this
chapter, you either skipped ahead due to disinterest, or you made it through my
over-bloated blog post that I lovingly refer to as
Annoying Actor Friend and
the Order of the Phoenix
. Congratulations! Now that you have reached the end,
I would like to take a few more minutes of the time you devoted to reading this
on the subway, at tech rehearsal, or in music theory class, to give you a
behind the scenes look and fairly transparent analysis of my parody Twitter
account-turned-blog-turned-how-to-book, and general distraction from my real
life, Annoying Actor Friend.

Before all of this began, a friend of mine said,
“Twitter is where people go to feign relevance.” This person did not have a
Twitter account, so I assumed he did not understand it. Then I thought of my personal
account’s meager two hundred and forty followers – which consisted of a handful
of friends, companies I had never heard of, and nameless folk with an egg
avatar. If my friend’s assertions were correct, then I was unabashedly
irrelevant.

Who was even I talking to? Why was I doing it at all?
Why does anyone tweet? I could dive into a trite philosophical discussion about
the Twitterverse, but that would risk boring you to shit, when all I really
want to know is – why was I writing what I thought to be profoundly funny
tweets and essentially auditioning them under the false hopes that a Twitter
juggernaut like Rob Delaney would retweet them, thus garnering me hundreds of
followers and steam rolling my social media existence into something
worthwhile? More importantly, why was I bringing my work home with me?

When actors don’t get validation from good auditions,
positive feedback, callbacks, or an actual booking, then we need to find a way
to source that desire elsewhere. There is such a thing as over-sharing and I am
not entirely sure the majority of people, myself included, really care that
much. We take to social media with our frustrations and elations because we just
cannot keep them on the shelf. The simple act of a “like” or “retweet” from a
friend or complete stranger lets us know that someone else is out there saying,
“I’m right there with you. You matter.” That action fulfills our primal need
for attention. Once the craving is satisfied, we transition back into society
until the urge strikes again.

Let us assume that since you are reading this book, you
are a well-adjusted Awaresie who does not commit social media atrocities
– or at the very least, knows how to ration your social media masturbation
so you don’t become a serial offender. But, what happens when a friend’s public
addiction to validation reaches heights that eventually make them insufferable?
You can block them, un-friend them, or hate-watch them. Still, even when I take
joy in screen capturing an offender’s post and sending it to friends who share in
the hate-watching of that individual, there is a part of me that goes to a dark
place of resentment. I remember a moment before I created Annoying Actor Friend
when a peer from my school went through a weekend social media humble-brag
bender, and after I expressed my feelings about it to a colleague, she said,
“Oh, he’s just really proud!” and I responded, “Great. He can call his mom.”
Was I just annoyed? Envious? Disillusioned? All of it? This peer was merely one
of several friends who were pushing me further and further away from them by
unknowingly, and unintentionally, making me feel badly about where I was in my
career.

Would you go up to a homeless person and tell them
that you have an apartment and how grateful you are for it? Would you tell a
friend whose show just closed, how blessed you are that your show is going to
Broadway in the spring? Why do we think it is acceptable to blast that behavior
to over a thousand people while safely hidden behind the cold backlight of our
own personal megaphone? I had made my social media mistakes in the past and was
trying to learn from them while it seemed people I knew were actually getting
worse. Finally, I threw my hands up and said, “I can’t take this shit anymore.”
I wish there were a cool story about how I spent weeks developing a deeply
layered Twitter persona. Nope. I was bored, it was hot, and someone I did not
even know typed the “blessed” that broke this jaded camel’s back.

It took roughly seven minutes to create the account.
Three to deal with the limited characters allowed in the name, two to rethink
the handle because my first choice was taken by someone who had not tweeted in
four years, one to type the bio, “When it rains, it pours!” and one final
minute to Google image search, “annoying actor,” and choose the first photo
that popped up… Ellis from season one of
Smash
. The uneasiness that I
felt whenever Ellis appeared on screen is the exact same emotion I feel when
one of my friends behaves like an “annoying actor friend.” His picture was used
to link a preconceived feeling with my writing. I figured if you saw a picture of
Ellis and read the word “blessed,” it would all sort of make sense. Annoying
Actor Friend was meant to be a quality. Not a literal persona.

Now that the account was created, it was time to
experiment with the content. After tweeting, “The Secret really does work,” “I
am so blessed,” and a few examples of, “#ReasonsIDidntBookIt,” I sent a text to
a friend to ask them if they found it as funny as me. When they concurred, I
did what any enthusiastic go-getter does – absolutely nothing until I was
drunk. After downing one or four alcoholic beverages that night, I proceeded to
follow roughly three hundred actors ranging from college theatre majors to random
celebrities (most of whom I did not know personally), and retreated to my
bedroom to pass out for the remainder of the evening.

Upon awakening, I was astounded to find that not only
was I devoid of a hangover, I had gathered thirty followers over night. This was
an unbelievable accomplishment considering my personal Twitter account had failed
to attract thirty followers in the previous two years. Before I started, I
thought I was the only one who found the genre of actors I was parodying to be
obnoxious. This accidental social media experiment was proving I was not alone.
In addition to my new audience, I received a few mentions from other users
complementing my account. It was rewarding, and considering I was in the middle
of a career drought, I thought, “This must be what callbacks feel like!”

The tone for the account was inconsistent at first. Occasionally
I would write creative content, but I often drifted from my own tweets to
tweeting at actors who said things I found annoying, to just doing straight retweets.
There was risk involved, but what did I care? I was anonymous and my followers
were urging me to become somewhat of a social media police. The attention was
addicting. Casting directors I could never get appointments from were suddenly
retweeting me. Actors and writers that I admired were now following me. I think
people connected to the account because they all thought it was someone they
knew. People were so convinced it was the person sitting next to them in the
dressing room, that nobody ever stopped to wonder if I were a bored accountant
who knows a lot of theatre people and is just really observant.

Anonymity during this process caused a few problems
when I finally met certain people I had conversed with through my fake account.
Sometimes they would say, “Nice to meet you,” and I would stumble and say
something like, “I think we’ve met before, but I can’t remember where… Um… No,
wait… Nice to meet you, too.” There were also times I would recognize someone
who followed me and almost wave, like when you see an obscure celebrity and
think it is one of your friends, then stop and say to yourself, “Nope. You
don’t know them. That’s Carrot Top.”

After the first week, certain circumstances urged me
to delete the account. I worried about how it could affect my career or that of
the people close to me. However, the amounting followers were addicting. By the
time I had reached one thousand, I only wanted more. As summer turned into
fall, I realized I was essentially milking the same joke and if I wanted this
deliberate life-distracting hobby to last much longer, I would need to evolve
before the novelty wore off. [Cue movie montage to the song “Hip to Be Square”
by Huey Lewis & the News looped over images of me tweeting about the
Rebecca
scandal, fall shows opening, fall shows closing, Russell Crowe as Javert, a
#blessed here, and a #grateful there – as we transition to February, 2013
and the impending season two premiere of
Smash
.]

Without
Smash
, this book would not exist. Up
until the point
Smash
returned for its sophomore season, I had been
confined to one hundred and forty characters and had been looking for an excuse
to expand. I just could not figure out what to write about. Enter,
Smash
.
Since alcohol and
Smash
already went hand in hand, I figured I would write
a drinking game to be played while watching the season premiere. You can imagine
my surprise when I learned there were already six hundred and sixty-seven
drinking games devoted to
Smash
. What I hoped would set mine apart was
that it was designed to be as much about actors watching
Smash
as it was
about
Smash
. For example: Drink whenever someone complains about
Smash
not being realistic. Drink whenever someone at your party name-drops a friend
on
Smash
. Drink whenever you get so upset at
Smash
that it becomes
necessary to exit the room.

The week I posted, “Get SMASHed,” I received a tweet
from a follower requesting that an Annoying Actor Friend blog become a fully
realized thing. At that point I was working off a free Tumblr, which I actually
had no idea how to operate, and at the mere suggestion from
one
person
to expand the blog, I was like, “You like me?! Sure! I’ll make it a thing!
Anything for attention!” So, I desperately threw down twelve dollars for a
domain name and a little bit more to self-host the site. Let it be noted, I did
it fully knowing I would never make a dime off of annoyingactorfriend.com. I
did it because a small amount of people enjoyed my work and wanted to read
more.

With
Smash
’s return, I found that I could
write a weekly recap of the show that incorporated facets of the business I
wanted to lampoon, while at the same time spoofing how most of our community
got unusually high off of complaining about
Smash
– and I could
also make fun of
Smash
. It was also an exciting excuse to make a meme of
Bernard Telsey next to Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. A win-win!

Borrowing from the viral YouTube sensation, “The Crazy
Nastyass Honey Badger,” I aptly titled my
Smash
recaps, “SMASH Don’t
Give a Shit!” and equated the series to a primarily African indigenous
carnivorous weasel that is able to hunt and feed on venomous cobras because it
just does not give a shit. There was always something about
Smash
that
got under people’s skin. Like it was actively trying to piss us off. My premise
that
Smash
did not give a shit about being realistic to Broadway, and
that I loved them for it, became the framing device for my weekly recaps. Finally,
I had a platform to write about theatre, under the guise of making fun of
annoying actors who complain about
Smash
, while literally complaining
about
Smash
. The concept’s intentional but exceedingly labored internal layering
was over thought, and not something I am convinced ever truly came across. What
did I care? As far as I was concerned, nobody was going to read it anyway. I
didn’t give a shit!

The fact is, my first few recaps pretty much fell on
deaf ears. Then came episode three, “The Dramaturg.” That was the episode when
the production team for
Bombshell
, the fictitious musical within the
series, hired a “show doctor” to help with the libretto – except they
called him a “dramaturg.” You can imagine the horror that ensued within my
circle of friends by that inaccuracy. Naturally, I had a blast writing the
recap, and when I posted it the following evening, I expected nothing. When I
woke the next day, “SMASH Don’t Give a Shit!” had found its way to Facebook and
I had messages from cast members of the show. Uh-oh.

I will always stand by the professionalism of
everyone involved with making
Smash
. Broadway shows get panned and
picked apart all the time, but not to the extreme that was done to
Smash
.
Broadway-hate is fairly local and usually among friends.
Smash-
hate was
national and public. It appeared that since it was a television show, it was
fair game to gripe about freely on Facebook. It was like people forgot that they
might be friends with a cast member. When it is a Broadway show someone is disenchanted
with, there is a rare chance they criticize it publicly. Facebook is questionable
with its constant profile privacy changes, and any comment you make may
randomly end up on a creative team member’s newsfeed.
Smash
was another
world’s interpretation of our world, and therefore something close enough for
us to care a great deal about, but far enough away that it seemed making fun of
it would not necessarily harm us professionally.