Next, Mr. Maddox drew a squiggly line and said, “Now, this isn’t just a squiggly line, it’s a worm. And it isn’t just any old worm either, it’s a caterpillar. And a caterpillar is one of the most optimistic creatures I can think of. He believes in himself, and he believes in the future. He knows that he’s more than just a funny-looking caterpillar, and that someday he’ll become a beautiful butterfly. That’s optimism, think about that.”
The bell rang and all the kids trampled out of the class, except Scott. He was still sitting, deep in thought. His posture had improved a little, and he was smiling. There was a glisten in his eye that gave him a “happy look.”
That afternoon Scott went home and up to his room, and let me tell you, his room was the room of a pessimist. However, on this day, he cleaned it up, made his bed, took a shower, then sat down and began drawing on pieces of paper.
At bedtime, Scott’s parents looked in and said, “What are those crazy pictures you’ve hung on the wall?” Scott smiled and said, “This is a window, and this is a worm.”
Throughout the next week, Scott’s classmates gave their speeches. On Friday, Mr. Maddox stood up to announce the winners. But before anyone received an award, Scott raised his hand and said, “Mr. Maddox, may I give an optimism speech?”
Mr. Maddox was astonished. He held out his hand, and Scott walked to the front of the class.
“You know, for the last five or so years, I’ve had a bad outlook on life. I’d get on the school bus, and everyone seemed to be picking on me and disliking me. When I got to school, the students and the teachers seemed to be avoiding me. The trees were glaring at me, and the grass never looked green. I always wished I could change things, but I never quite knew how. After Mr. Maddox spoke to us, I decided to give optimism a try. And hey, it worked. I felt better, and so I decided to continue trying. Over the last week, things have begun to change. No one is really avoiding me, the trees are welcoming me, and the grass is growing greener on my side of the fence. And I just want you to know that I’m trying, and I need a few friends.”
Boy, Mr. Maddox smiled the biggest smile he had smiled in a long time. And no, Scott didn’t win an award for his speech, but he won something much, much more valuable. He won an optimistic outlook that changed his entire life.
And maybe—just maybe—it could change yours too.
* * *
If, having practiced this speech to within an inch of your/its life, you feel ready to begin exploring the world of acting, go HERE.
If, having practiced this speech to within an inch of your/its life, you feel ready to audition for your first movie role, go HERE.
If, having practiced this speech to within an inch of your/its life, you feel ready to host a major televised awards show, go HERE.
If, having practiced this speech to within an inch of your/its life, you are so imbued with optimism you are ready to stare down a crazed young actor outside a Los Angeles nightclub, go HERE.
Annie is great. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is great. But it’s Les Misérables that first opens up your adolescent soul to the glorious alternate universe that is theater.
You become acquainted with the show at the age of thirteen, when a friend from camp plays a cassette tape of the London cast recording. (Cassette tapes, of course, being the cool way to buy and record music that will never go out of style.) On initial hearing it doesn’t sound like much more than nonsense gibberish insanity. An opera, in other words. It’s your friend’s explanation of the theatrics of it all—here’s where the barricades go up, here’s where so-and-so kisses so-and-so, here’s where this detective dude commits suicide—that you find really interesting. You can picture it unfolding in your mind … and if you do say so yourself, your mental stagecraft is awesome.
You buy the cast album and play it an infinite number of times. Soon you’re forcing your poor mother to listen to Fantine’s dying song, but only after providing her with enough schmaltzy context to make sure she’s crying by the end. Les Miz enters your psychic landscape, permanently solidifying its place early on in your career when you lose an audition to an actor named Braden Danner, whose principal credit is as Gavroche in the original Broadway production. Oh, no wonder he got the part, you think. I’m just some small-town rube from the Mountain Time Zone, and he’s done friggin’ Gavroche on Broadway, and man, if I could just be in that show.…
A year later you get your first big misérable break when you and your family visit New York for the first time. You see a great deal of the city and discover the reports are true: it is, indeed, a helluva town. But more important, you get to take in some Broadway shows, and even importantlier, you get to see Les Miz, and wow. Wow wow wow. It is a phenomenal, transcendent experience. You are used to the Ruidoso style of stagecraft, the kind where theaters have fold-out metal chairs and basketball hoops hanging from the ceiling. So to watch a show in which an actual workable mid-nineteenth-century-style barricade appears in the middle of everything just blows your mind and drops your jaw. Literally: when the lights come on at the end of Act 1—whose climax, “One Day More,” features a giant French flag waving and the full cast singing in glorious harmony creating a heavenly wall of sound—you actually have to make a conscious effort to shut your mouth. You are utterly overwhelmed.1
Your love for theater never subsides. After Doogie Howser takes off you have the financial means to go to New York during shooting breaks, so you take weeklong trips and see up to a dozen shows—two a day, whenever possible. The experience remains enthralling, but now that you’re a working thespian it’s also educational. By watching carefully you can gain valuable insights about your craft. “That actor’s speaking too slowly. That actress is mugging too much. That guy is drunk and possibly high on coke.” Instructive, instructive stuff.
You’re particularly drawn to musicals with big giant sets and visual wizardry. City of Angels, for example. That’s a show that goes from color to black-and-white before your eyes. You sit in the audience and marvel, “Where did the set just go? How do the lights do that? How did they move backward? How did everything go from color to black-and-white in two sec— Wait, now it’s back in color?!?” Then you go backstage and get a tour, and this to you is truly the coolest thing in the world. You’re shown the set and the lights and the costumes and learn another variation on the same basic lesson about showbiz you will learn over and over again—it’s all, fundamentally, just a bunch of crap glued together and spray-painted over. But the wonderful paradox is that knowing this does not detract from the experience of watching it a second time. On the contrary: it makes it that much more miraculous.
One night you visit with Keith Carradine backstage after watching him kick historico-satirical ass in The Will Rogers Follies. You have a pleasant conversation, then watch him put on a cap and jacket, open up the stage door, and disappear into the New York street. The image will stick with you forever. For two hours he was a conjurer summoning up the spirit of a beloved American icon; now, once again, he’s just one of the crowd. Heralded, then anonymous. That’s performing.
* * *
To begin pursuing your love of acting in a way that might just possibly lead to your big break, go HERE.
To finally get your chance to star onstage in a major production, go HERE.
You know, a lot of young boys who are into theater turn out to be … umm … you know, why don’t you just go HERE.
* * *
1Even your brother is impressed. He had felt that the seventy dollars per ticket would in his case have been better spent on a sweater, but afterward he reluctantly admits, “That was better than a sweater,” which is not only a noble admission but an internally rhyming one.
It’s the spring of 1986. In the wake of your star turn in How the West Was Really Won, your budding love of performance is in full bloom. Mr. Cook, the choir and acting teacher, is impressed by your ability and initiative. So is Danny Flores, your band director. You’re the middle school drum major, but you also
play the xylophone, French horn, and pretty much whatever he needs someone to play for a particular song. A little oboe here, a little bassoon there, a dash of tuba. You’re a jack of all instruments, and a master of none.
As the end of middle school approaches, both teachers suggest you consider relocating to a performing arts high school. It’s a nice thought, but not realistic. What, you’re going to move away from your friends and family for four years to pursue, like, modern dance or something? Nuh-uh. You know what that scene’s like. You’ve seen Fame. You like drama, but not with all that … drama.
So your teachers are kind enough to investigate other options for you. They learn about a weeklong theater camp for high school students held on the campus of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. You’ll have to persuade the directors to stretch the rules to let you enroll, since you’re not entering high school until the fall, and physically you are thirteen going on nine; you and puberty have yet to make each other’s acquaintance. But none of this bothers you, because your parents are into it, you’ve always preferred the company of older kids (see “big brother, your”), and besides, theater camp! A week of scene writing, costume building, improv games, cold-reading audition classes, and lots of other grown-up thespian-type stuff alongside high schoolers with similar interests? You can’t wait!
Best of all, the camp even has its own celebrity—illustrious and prolific playwright Mark Medoff. He’s won a Tony Award for his play Children of a Lesser God, which will be coming out as a movie later this year. He’s the head of the Theater Department at NMSU, and he’s heavily involved in the camp. As small-town New Mexicans go, he’s a superstar.
Summer doesn’t seem to come fast enough, but finally Mom and Dad drop you off, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,1 at NMSU. The week proves every bit as fun and engaging as you’d hoped. There are many different theater-based activities, all of which culminate in a showcase of scenes written, directed by, and starring the students. You write a comedy about a couple on an airplane involved in a case of mistaken identity. It goes on to win the Pulitzer Tony Oscar Prize for Outstanding Excellence®, an award bestowed sporadically by the Academy of Imaginary People in Your Head.
As for Medoff, he really is the camp’s big kahuna. When he walks around or attends lectures or classes it feels very godly. His role is largely supervisory, but he also teaches one of the seminars in cold-reading auditions. He is one of two teachers. On the first or second day of camp you and the other kids line up for the auditions class. Half of you go to the room on the left. Half of you go to the room on the right.
* * *
If you go to the room on the left, go HERE.
If you go to the room on the right, go HERE.
* * *
1Not really. You’re prepubescent, so no bush.
“I said smoked turkey, not regular turkey, jackass!!!” The customer’s angry shout jerks you back from fantasy to reality.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Quite the incompetent boob, aren’t you … ‘Neil,’ ” he says, squinting at your Schlotzsky’s name tag.
As you re-turkey the sub you reflect on the shambles that is your life. The bankruptcy. The hoarding. The four failed marriages (two straight, two gay). And worst of all, the utter anonymity. No one knows you; no one talks to you; never in your life has anyone seen you on the street and said, “Hey, it’s Neil Patrick Harris!” No one could care less. Every year when the Tonys or Emmys are on, you feel some instinctive tug, like you’re supposed to be involved in them in some way … but you’re not.
Where did it all go wrong? you wonder as you squeegee industrial-strength mayonnaise over the bun. You are haunted by a nagging sense of what might have been, the lingering suspicion that everything could have worked out far better, had you just made a single choice differently at some point earlier in your life. But when? Which decision?
You stare at the long line of customers. Half of them are in one line, half in the other. Something about the tableau fires a long-neglected synapse. Something about drama camp. Something about auditions. Wait, now you remember. You were thirteen and about to auditi—
“Hey, I want that sandwich today, moron!”
Just as suddenly the flash is gone, and you are back to your life of sleep, sandwich making, compulsive masturbation, and TV.
Maybe tonight you will watch a rerun of your favorite show, How I Met Your Mother. That Barney Stinson character is hilarious. Sometimes you like to pretend you are him. Or at least the actor playing him. But you’re not.
No, you’re not Dustin Diamond.
THE END
You are five years old. You are hanging out with your mom’s dad, your beloved Grandpa Scott. He hands you a match, a cork, a needle, a clear plastic cup, and a comb, and challenges you to make the match move on its own.
Wait, which, what? How is that possible? That’s not possible, Grandpa Scott.
Grandpa Scott sticks the needle upright into the cork, and then balances the match sideways on the tip of the needle—like a compass needle. Then he rubs the comb against his head for static electricity and holds it against the cup. The match begins to swing up and back, as if it’s being turned.
Holy crap, that’s cool!
It is magic. Magic in its purest form: ordinary items being manipulated by someone with more knowledge than you for the benevolent purpose of creating amazement. And you’re instantly hooked. You go to the local library and check out every book on magic you can find. Before long you are gathering friends and family for impromptu and fairly awful magic shows that teach you three important things about yourself: (1) you love performing in front of an audience, (2) you must have a very loving, indulgent family if they’re sitting through some of the crap you’re making them watch, and (3) you love knowing secrets. It’s a fundamental part of your nature. You love to be in on secrets. Not gossipy secrets; actual secrets, secrets of information, of mechanics, of science. It’s a blissful rush you will pursue your entire life, whether the secrets concern theater set design, Cirque du Soleil tricks, food preparation, cruise-ship logistics, or casinos. But no profession is more explicitly about secrecy than magic.
You often travel from Ruidoso to Albuquerque on weekends to visit your grandparents, and whenever you do they take you on a trip to a shop on the outskirts of the Winrock Shopping Center called Fool’s Paradise. It’s a mecca of magic, everything a kid could dream of: row after row of practical jokes, optical illusions, sight gags, and every kind of trick or effect you can imagine, along with many more you can’t. You love how the illusionist behind the counter teases you with trick after trick that he refuses to teach you … unless you buy the items, naturally. The world of magic is a bottomless well of sheer knowledge. Palming coins, for instance: there are front palms and back palms and finger palms and others, and learning them all requires practice and subtlety. You invariably leave with a large bag of tricks and practice in the back seat with them all the way home. Once there you continue practicing while popping in a VHS tape of a magician on Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin, or a David Copperfield or Doug Henning special, or the latest Magic of the Network Stars.1
It’s a weird profession, magic. Literally anyone with around $20,000 can go to a store like Fool’s Paradise, buy an entire act’s worth of illusions, make up a business card, and call himself a magician. And people in fact do this all the time. That’s why there are so many bad magicians. They’re just doing the same acts they’ve seen other people do, and not as well, and without any showmanship. But magic is like pizza: even when it’s bad, it’s pretty good. When you watch your cousin do a card trick at Thanksgiving, you’re still blown away by it, even though he’s got no flair and he smells funny. And so when you grow up, you want to be a magician. In fact, why wait that long?
So at age eleven you decide to turn pro. You perform at the seventh birthday party of a girl from your Episcopal church congregation. You buy a cape and top hat, stuff some tricks into a paper bag, and on the day of
the party set off to seek your fame and fortune.
Everything goes great. The rope trick kills. The coin tricks destroy. Even the zombie ball works, and you hate the zombie ball. Then it comes time for the amazing finger chopper. You put the birthday girl’s index finger in a mini-guillotine, lower the blade, and “sever” her finger without injury. And this is the moment you discover there is more to magic than merely performing the trick. There is also the little matter of understanding your audience. For the birthday girl’s little sister has witnessed your sleight of finger, and is at an age where she has not yet grasped the basic premise that magic is illusion. To her, you are genuinely dismembering her big sister.
And so when the blade comes down she begins to scream. And then another girl screams. And then four more. And soon every girl in the party is in full-bore freak-out mode, and the birthday girl’s mother, your employer, bounds in to see what is going on. The image greeting her is that of a rail-thin blond-scarecrowy seventh-grade boy dressed in black, one hand holding her daughter’s finger, the other having seemingly just removed it, standing amid a tableau of girlish terror.
Appropriately—and yet ironically—you don’t get a tip.
* * *
If you would like to pursue magic as a hobby despite this fiasco, go HERE.
If you would like to pursue magic as a career despite this fiasco, go HERE.
If you’d like to perform an actual magic trick right here right now, go HERE.