Yoga

  If one goes to a play, all they will see are actors portraying characters.  They will see a nice stage presentation.  They won't see the preparation.  I wasn't very good in building sets.  There are people that do it for a living and are great at it.  I admire them.  Just like when I took shop in junior high, I was always off 1/16th of an inch.  Actors generally don't have to build sets.  That is a blessing.

 Actors need to exercise before coming out on stage. I learned many techniques to relax my muscles, as well as to get my adrenaline up before a performance.  Despite my great stage fright, I found that exercise helps ease the doubt of doing good on stage. 

 Two of the techniques I have used involved rolling my shoulders and shaking my hands. One was for releasing tension, while the other was for releasing nervousness.  Another technique I learned through meditation.  Tense muscles and then relax them.  Start at your feet and work your way up to your neck.  It takes a while to go through that process, but it is good to prepare your body for what comes next.  Sometimes, I would jump up and down to get my blood flowing and build up my energy.  It may look strange to some, but it helped me get ready, especially if I had to do something physical on stage.  In one play, I was playing a thief being chased by a policeman.  The chase was offstage, so we both ran around backstage until we were out of breath.  Then, we came onstage to make the chase look believable.

 When I was a senior at Presbyterian College, the wife of my drama teacher was into yoga.  She taught us relaxation techniques to loosen our muscles and joints.  I hadn't done yoga before, but I found it very helpful in preparing for the physicality of acting. Much of it was an add-on to my meditation work.  

 The last thing I would do, before going on stage, would be to find a dark room backstage away from everyone else.  I would sit in there for a few minutes and think about what I needed to do.  Then, I would say a prayer.  God gave me my talent for acting.  I would thank Him and ask for courage and clarity of thought.  I would then pray that the audience would receive what I was about to give them.  That prayer would calm me down, and then I would be ready to face the audience.  

 A lot goes on backstage.  It can be very chaotic.  There are people to make sure you enter the stage at the appropriate time.  There are make-up people to make sure you look good.  There are costumers to make sure you are dressed properly for your character.  Wardrobe changes may have to be made quickly.  There are prop people to make sure things are placed onstage for the actors to use.  All the while, there is the actor getting ready to present a good performance with the help of others who don't often get the praise they deserve.  

    

Actor

  One of my regrets in life is not being able to do what I really wanted to do:  teach acting in a college setting.  I wanted others to learn what I had learned on how to be a good actor.  I have to say though, in all humility, I am a great actor.  Anybody can be a good actor, but a great actor is developed from the inside.  Some say that one is born to be a great actor.  You can learn the basics to be a good actor.  You can learn how to sit and how to stand.  You can learn an accent or even bits of a foreign language.  You can memorize lines and repeat them in a scene.  One thing a good actor can't do is separate himself from a character. 

 A character has to be developed to be believable.  You have to know what the character likes to eat; who were his parents; what was his childhood like; who were his friends growing up; what was his education like; did he finish high school; did he go to college; where does he live; does he live in a house or an apartment; does he work; what kind of job does he have; does he like his job; does he like the people around him; does he have any bad habits; what kind of car does he drive; is he married; has he been divorced; does he have any children.  The list is endless in developing a character.  Some of these questions can be answered from the script.  Others might have to be answered in your own imagination.

 I can count on one hand the number of great actors I have seen in my lifetime, either in person or on the screen.  They are a rare breed.  The key to telling the good actor from the great actor is if you forget that you are watching the actor, whose name you might know, and you see the character he is portraying.  If you just see the actor, he is just being good.  If you forget about the actor's name and dwell on the character, he is being great.  Not all great actors are always great.  Most will tell you that sometime in their careers that they have just done a mediocre performance.  

 I am super-critical in my work.  I have to be to get better.  What an audience member might see is not what the actor sees about himself.  That's kind of why I don't like seeing myself on a TV show or in a movie.  I am always seeing something I could have improved upon to make it better.  The director might have thought it was all right, but I didn't necessarily see it to be all right.  I take the acting experience very seriously.  That's why I am a great actor.  

Melty

  When I first started working at Belk in Columbia Mall, I was put in charge of the Books and Candy departments.  I loved to work in Books.  I had a lot of experience selling books.  Candy was a different story.  Despite wanting to sell books, I found that the majority of my time was spent selling candy.  Of course, I had to sample the candy to know what I was selling.  At least, that was my excuse.  

 One item we sold a lot of was something called "Smooth N Melty Mints".  They were flat and came in several bright colors.  They came in a cellophane bag.  Most of our sales came from folks planning weddings, because they served them at receptions.  They were $3.99 per bag.  

 A man came into the store on a Saturday in the summer to buy several bags of the mints.  He was getting them for his son's wedding that evening.  There was a warning on the bag that said not to leave the mints in a hot car.  After all, they would melt.  He bought the bags and left.  A few hours later, he stormed into our store and laid these blobs of melted mints on my counter still in the bags.  He said he had driven over to Dutch Square and had left the mints in his car.  When he came back out, they had melted in the bags.  I showed him the warning on the bag about not leaving them in a hot car, but he was furious and wanted to sue the store for selling a faulty product.  He wanted to see my supervisor.

 I called her to come out and talk to this angry man.  When she heard what had happened, she had to stifle her laughter.  I was trying to do the same.  I wanted to suggest to the man that he take some scissors and cut the mints, but I knew that would just throw gasoline on a fire.  He wanted to exchange the mints for good ones.  My supervisor showed him the warning label on the bag, but he wasn't satisfied.  He threatened to cut up his Belk charge card and told us he would tell others to do the same, because we sold defective merchandise.  My supervisor told me to give him an exchange for new bags, which I did.  

 My supervisor told me to throw them away.  I kept one bag to show customers what would happen if they left the mints in a hot car.  It never happened again on my watch.

Streaking

  Back in 1974, I was a junior at Presbyterian College.  There was a fad on campuses all over America called Streaking.  Students would run nude across campus and try not to get caught by the police.  We were warned a head of time that the PC students were not allowed to streak.  It would mean that the police would arrest whoever they caught, and the school would take appropriate disciplinary action including expulsion.  

 There was a rumor around campus that some students were going to streak on an upcoming night.  The police were ready, as were the administration officials.  No girls showed up for the event, but a few guys did.  They had bags over their heads to avoid being recognized, and there was alcohol involved.  One of my Theatre friends went running across campus, but his bag turned sideways, and he couldn't see out of the eye holes of the bag.  He ran right into a police car and was stopped.  He was fined for indecent exposure and let go.  The school didn't do anything except tell him not to do it again.

 I got caught up in the streaking fever that night, but I wasn't going to run across campus.  I stripped down in the restroom of the Student Center and ran ten feet to the next building over which was a classroom building.  I don't think anybody saw me, because all of the attention was on the students across campus.  Just as well.

 Some of the girls did expose their butts from the windows of a dorm to the adoring boys down below.  We cheered for more, but that was all they were willing to do.  

 It was a wild night at PC.  It was supposed to be a religious school.  It was in name only.  

Plate

  I never had a vanity license plate for my car.  Personalizing it just wasn't what I wanted.  Maybe it was a little paranoia, but I just didn't want to stand out in traffic.  I wanted anonymity.  I just took whatever plate the DMV would send me.

 One day, I got the plate in the mail, and to my surprise, the plate read "DMW 777".  It had my initials spelled backwards plus three "7s", which was my lucky number.  When I had plates before, I had to remember them by making up words that were close to the letters and numbers.  Now, it was a no brainer.  Was it a stroke of luck that I had this special plate?  Was it random?  I didn't really have a clue, but I knew I could easily remember it.

 I worked at Columbia Mall, which had some crime areas near there.  It wasn't in the best of neighborhoods.  As I was getting off work from Macy's, a friend wanted me to see her new car.  When I walked back to my car, I saw that my license plate was gone.  It couldn't have fallen off, because I had securely fastened it.  There had been a rash of stolen license plates from cars in the parking lot.  Panic set in.  What if the person used my plate on a car involved in a crime, and I would be blamed for it.

 There was a Richland County Sheriff's substation inside the mall.  I went in there to report my stolen license plate.  They told me I wasn't the first one that this had happened to, which I already knew.  They gave me a slip of paper to take to the DMV to get a new plate and to present to any officer, if I got stopped before getting to the DMV.  Thankfully, there was a DMV close to the mall, so I didn't have to go far.  I could take a lot of backroads getting to the mall from my apartment so as to avoid as many officers as possible.

 I got a new plate with random letters and numbers.  I really liked "DMW 777".  I hope whoever used it after me liked it, too.  All the way to jail.

Forging

 From early on in my academic years, I had been told by teachers and my parents how smart I was.  Testing revealed that I had an above-average IQ bordering on genius.  There were two problems with me being so smart.  The first was that I didn't study for tests. I just didn't see the need to study.  The second problem was that I just didn't care about my grades, even though my teachers and my parents did.  It was very hard for me to make an A or a B, unless it was in a class I liked.  Unfortunately, there weren't many of those classes being offered. When I got to college, I found that I was very good in Speech and Drama.  I loved those courses and made A's in those.  I had a 4.0 in my major which made up for those F's.

 In 8th grade, I was not doing well at all.  I got beat up every day by bullies. I hated coming to school.  My grades were suffering.  So, I decided to do something that would avoid the embarrassment of bringing home a bad report card.  A parent had to sign the report card, before the student brought it back to school.  I learned how to forge my father's signature.  

 He signed things in a very distinctive way.  It took practice to sign "John K. Durst" correctly.  The last name was easy, because he used the line off of the "D" to go above the rest of the letters and cross the "t" at the end.  I worked for about a week to get his signature down to a copy of his.  I would turn in the report card with the forgery, and my teachers never knew the difference.  Some kids would be creative and change "F's" to "A's" by just adding one line.  Some of the teachers got wise to that and changed from printing grades to using cursive writing.  It was harder to make that change for the students.

 One day, my father asked me why he hadn't seen my report card in almost a year.  I tried to make up an excuse, but nothing was very believable.  He called the school and asked them if they were still issuing report cards.  They said yes, every six weeks.  My deception had been discovered.  My father was mad at me along with my teachers.  I felt the sting of the paddle that my father gave me for my forging his name. From then on, my father knew when a report card would be released, and he demanded to see it.  Those days weren't happy after that.  

 I still didn't study, and I still didn't care about my grades, but at least I graduated by the skin of my teeth.  High School.  College.  Graduate school.  No more forging.

Amazing

  One of the places I loved to go to, when I lived in Fort Worth, was Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington.  It was halfway between Fort Worth and Dallas.  I also loved roller coasters, and I found that I could ride one coaster and sing the first verse of "Amazing Grace" before the first drop.  For some reason, I found that very calming.

 Before moving to Texas, I went to Six Flags there while in college.  They had two things there that I really liked.  One was a tower that you could go up in and see the entire park.  The other was a gondola ride that went across the park.  Since I was a little mischievous back then, I used both things for pranks.

 I was riding the gondola ride and had some pennies in my pocket.  I was about 20 feet above the ground, so I dropped pennies from the gondola on unsuspecting people.  I tried not to hit them on their heads but aimed for right in front of them.  Sometimes I missed and actually hit some people.  I didn't think they knew it was me, but I learned later that some people had reported the Pennies from Heaven.

 I moved onto the tower.  It was much higher than the gondola, and it was a hot day.  How do you cool off the people walking below the tower?  By spitting off of the tower and aiming at people.  It seemed perfectly logical.  I got a few good spits off of the tower, when a security guard came up to me.  He asked me if I had been spitting off of the tower.  I denied it, but they had witnesses.  He then asked if I was the one who was throwing pennies at people off of the gondola.  Of course not, I said.  They had witnesses.  I was asked to leave the park.  I was with some friends, but they didn't care.  

 Fortunately, it was about the time I was to meet up with my friends to leave anyway.  I bet the people I threw pennies near kept the money, and the ones that got spit on got cooled off some.  They never got the chance to thank me.  I was the "Lone Stranger".