It’s a beautiful day, so you decide to take a nice leisurely stroll to Joss’s house in the desert. You start wondering what he has in mind. You lose yourself in happy speculation.
Suddenly you notice the world slowly rising all around you. Looking down, you realize you have stumbled into a silty Saharan pit. You are sinking in quicksand!
You desperately struggle to escape, but your efforts only cause you to sink deeper. You look around for something to pull yourself out of the quicksand with. A rope attached to a palm tree dangles tantalizingly a few feet in front of you, but you can’t quite reach it.
With your last breath you scream, “Help me, Joss!” but your cry is quickly throttled by the sandy grit filling your throat. The last thing you see is Joss Whedon running to you wailing, “No, Neil! Not before we shoot Dr. Horrible 2: The Desolation of Moist!”
Your body is never found.
THE END
Once again, the real Neil Patrick Harris.
Thank you, thank you. Please. Sit down.
Now that you’ve begun to appreciate my miraculous powers, I’d like to answer the oft-asked question “Why would anyone want to learn magic?” Simple: because if you can read someone’s mind, you can figure out exactly what they’re thinking. You can even hack someone’s password. I’ll show you how.
Begin by taking an ordinary deck of cards and removing nine of them. Any nine you like. I’ll point out to you that I don’t have any idea which nine cards you removed from the deck. Put your nine cards in a pile, and look at the bottom card, the one facing out. Since I’m not there with you, I can’t ask you to pick a card, so we’re going to say that’s the card you just picked.
Of course, as long as it’s on the bottom of the packet, it’s easy to find. So I’m going to have you mix the cards, but in a specific way. I want you to think of a password, any word with just letters, and fewer than nine letters. It can be any password you’d like. A friend’s name, a pet’s name, a friend’s pet’s name. Don’t say it out loud; otherwise I might hear it. Just remember it.
Now hold the cards face down and spell the password in your head, dealing one card on the table for each letter. In other words, if your password is “dog,” you’d deal three cards, one at a time on top of each other, spelling “d … o … g.”
When you’re done, you will have some cards left in your hand. Drop them on top of the cards on the table and pick up the whole packet again.
I want to show you what’s just happened. Keep the packet in order, but turn it face up and spread it like a hand of cards. You’ll see that the bottom card is now moved, based on your own personal password. Don’t change the order. Just put them in a deck again and put them back face down.
We’re going to keep mixing them, and this time I don’t want you to look at how they’re getting mixed so you don’t know where your card ends up. This time, I want you to spell the word “my.” Just deal cards on the table, for “m … y.” And drop the rest of the cards on top, just as you did before.
Now pick up the packet. You’re going to do the same thing, but this time with the word “password.” Deal the cards down in a pile, spelling with me: “p … a … s … s … w … o … r … d.” Drop the extra card on top, then pick them all up.
And now one more time, the same thing, but now with the word “is.” Deal two cards down. “I … s.” Drop the rest of the cards on top and pick them all up. You just spelled “My password is.…”
Of course, those were words I told you to use, but now I want you to use your own personal password again. Spell your password one more time, dealing cards on the table. When you’re finished, drop all the rest of the cards on top.
If you were doing that on a computer, making up a password and confirming it, you’d think that your information would be safe, and that right now, because you don’t know where your card is, it’s lost in the packet.
But using my best intuition, as well as a little special ability at hacking your password, I’m going to tell you exactly where you card is. Slide the top card off the packet, the first face-down card. And turn it over. That’s exactly the card that you selected!
Thank you. I’ll be appearing in this book through Saturday.
* * *
If you’d like to take part in another magic trick, go HERE.
If you’d like to feel enchanted in a more romantic way, go HERE.
Or, check out the chapter starting HERE.
It doesn’t really flow from this chapter but it’s really cool. There’s, like, a yacht and everything.
Between 1988 and 2001 you star in thirteen made-for-TV movies. You appear in so many that after a while you begin making up new ones in your mind for your own amusement. Thirteen years later, when the editor of your autobiography presses you for information about this period of your life, you can barely remember any details about the movies. In fact, you can no longer distinguish the real ones from the fake.
Title: A Family Torn Apart
Character Name: Brian Hannigan
Costars: Johnny Galecki, Gregory Harrison
Synopsis (from IMDb): A teenage boy finds his mother and father murdered in their home, but as the story goes on he reveals he knows more than he is letting on.
Memories: You’re pretty sure it turned out you were the killer. You remember filming for two days covered head to toe in fake blood, so yeah, it was probably you.
Title: Snowbound: The Jim and Jennifer Stolpa Story
Character Name: Jim Stolpa
Costars: Kelli Williams, Michael Gross
Synopsis: Two thousand miles from home, Jim and Jennifer Stolpa (with baby Clayton) lose their way and are stranded in an endless wilderness of deep snow, battling for survival against the elements.
Memories: You survived. The shoot was very cold. The “haunted” hotel the cast stayed in wasn’t, but left mints on your pillow. The real-life Stolpas ended up getting divorced.
Title: Modern Family
Character Name: Luke Dunphy
Costars: Ed O’Neill, Sofia Vergara
Synopsis: Three different but related families face trials and tribulations in their own uniquely comical ways … until a series of murders forces one young man to confront his own demons.
Memories: This was later adapted into a popular sitcom.
Title: Stranger in the Family
Character Name: Steve Thompson
Costars: Teri Garr, Randle Mell
Synopsis: When a car wreck leaves a teen with permanent memory loss, his resilient family must help him relearn to read, write, walk, talk … and, hardest of all, remember who he is.
Memories: None, ironically.
Title: This Is One of the Fake Ones
Character Name: Coltrane Q. Fraudington
Costars: Traci Lords, Raymond Burr
Synopsis: When a mysterious bacteri renders all of Connecticut’s children lactose-intolerant, a down-on-his-luck rodeo clown teams up with a beautiful endocrinologist in one last desperate attempt to keep the Nutmeg State’s most vulnerable citizens milk-safe.
Memories: This was Alfred Hitchcock’s last film.
Title: The Christmas Wish
Character Name: Will Martin
Costars: Debbie Reynolds, Naomi Watts
Synopsis: A cynical Wall Street trader returns to his hometown for the holidays and becomes tangled in a family mystery that teaches him about love, forgiveness, and the usual Christmas shit.
Memories: You could tell even then that Naomi Watts was waaaay too good for this.
Title: The Man in the Attic
Character Name: Edward Broder
Costars: Anne Archer, Len Cariou
Synopsis: Based on a true story. An older woman hides her younger lover in the attic of her house for years without her husband suspecting.
Memories: You spent half a day naked with your head six inches from Anne Archer’s crotch while shooting a sex scene. One of those great “if my parents could see me now” moments.
Title: The Man in the Basement
Character Name: Edward Broder Jr.
Costars: Anne Archer, Len Cariou
Synopsis: Sequel to The Man in the Attic. An even older woman hides her even younger lover in the basement of her house for decades without her three husbands suspecting.
Memories: Felt a bit forced.
Title: Joan of Arc
Character Name: Charles VII of France
Costars: Leelee Sobieski, Jacqueline Bisset, Peter O’Toole
Synopsis: Duh.
Memories: Working with Peter O’Toole was a true career highlight. Hearing his fantastic stories, in which he often employed the word “cunt” as a term of affection, was even more so.
Title: The Christmas Pie
Character Name: Nehemiah Featherbones
Costars: Dame Maggie Smith, Dylan McDermott
Synopsis: The hearts of a rural Welsh coal-mining village are gladdened on Christmas Eve by the sudden appearance of a magical mince pie that brings love and peace to all who nibble it.
Memories: A musical. Songs included “Coal!” “Quit Mincin’ Around,” and an ode to the town in which it was set, “Llybrugghyrhurgyrm.”
Title: Decisions: The Neil Patrick Harris Story
Character Name: Neil Patrick Harris
Costars: N.A.
Synopsis: In an interactive format, viewers themselves get to choose whether they now wish to get cast in How I Met Your Mother HERE, hang out with Sir Elton John HERE, or meet Harold and Kumar HERE.
WHEN WE HERE AT TOTALLY STRAIGHT GUY MAGAZINE WERE TOLD NEIL PATRICK HARRIS WAS INTERESTED IN SITTING DOWN FOR AN INTERVIEW, WE WERE SO EXCITED WE ALMOST SPILLED THE BEER WE WERE DRINKING WHILE WATCHING UFC AND TALKING ABOUT CHICKS. SEE, WE’VE BEEN CURIOUS ABOUT NPH FOR A LONG TIME. THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT HIM THAT DOESN’T … IN MANY WAYS HE SEEMS LIKE HE SHOULD BE … WELL, LET’S GET TO THE INTERVIEW.
TSG: Neil, thanks for sitting down to talk to Totally Straight Guy magazine.
NPH: My pleasure.
TSG: So, let’s get right to it: are you gay?
NPH: Yes.
TSG: Really?
NPH: Yes.
TSG: Really?
NPH: Yes. I am a gay man.
[Pause.]
TSG: So like, homosexual gay?
NPH: Right. I am a gay homosexual man.
TSG: Okay. [Pause.] ’Cause here’s the thing: you seem totally straight.
NPH: What do you mean?
TSG: Hey, don’t be offended. I mean that as a compliment.
NPH: Don’t be offended as a gay man when you say that seeming straight is a compliment?
TSG: No no no, you’re misconstruing me, Neil. Look, I’m not homophobic. I have absolutely no problem with the gays.
NPH: “The gays”? Is that a band?
TSG: Hahaha, no, but you know what I mean. Like, with most gay guys, they act, you know, what’s the word … “gay.”
NPH: Uh-huh.
TSG: Like, they gay it up. They gay things. They go around gaying.
NPH: Mmm-hmmm.
TSG: And so, when you see them, you know … you know … you know?
NPH: Uh-huh.
TSG: Whereas with you, if I were hanging out with you, even for a while, I’m not sure I would necessarily know that, that you—
NPH: That I’m sexually attracted to men?
TSG: Umm, well, that’s one way of putting it.
NPH: That’s the way of putting it. That’s the definition of gay.
TSG: Right.
NPH: My partner David, for example. I’m sexually attracted to him.
TSG: Okay, but—
NPH: So we have man-on-man sex.
TSG: Okay, but let’s—
NPH: Shall I describe it to you?
TSG: No, let’s move on, because you, I mean … Okay, I guess here’s what I’m having trouble with: Barney Stinson.
NPH: Right.
TSG: Horndog. Lothario. Total womanizer.
NPH: Absolutely.
TSG: You were amazing as Barney.
NPH: Thank you.
TSG: So … was that just acting?
NPH: Well, traditionally, when you are paid money to play a fictional role in a comedic or dramatic performance, that is considered acting, yes.
TSG: I have to say, even talking to you right now about being gay, you don’t seem gay.
NPH: Well, looks can be deceiving. I mean, you don’t seem gay either, and yet it’s quite obvious to me that you have an erection.
TSG: [Looking down] Oops.
NPH: A big erection. I mean that as a compliment.
If you’ve had enough of this interview and want to go meet the aforementioned man-on-man sex partner of your dreams, go HERE.
If you want to hear from Barney Stinson himself, go HERE.
To read the rest of the interview, buy a copy of this month’s Totally Straight Guy magazine, now on sale at newsstands, bookstores, and airports around the country.
Congratulations! You have found the hidden page. No other section leads to this one, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone violating this book’s explicit instructions by casually flipping through it out of sequence.
So how were you able to find it? Because you, sir or madam, are a rare breed of individual. You are diligent and intrepid. You are also confident, suave, and alluring, with a keen sense of self, a gift for problem solving, and a unique sartorial style. In fact, you, Neil Patrick Harris, remind me very much of me, Neil Patrick Harris. I have a feeling that if we ever met, we would be besties. Or at the very least, pretty goodies. We would share confidences, or a secret handshake, or a time-share in Sun Valley.
In short, we are simpático, as a Frenchman might say, if he also spoke Spanish. So let us do something special to commemorate our newfound kinship. Since no one else knows of this page, let’s you and I come up with a code word, so that when we finally meet in person we can whisper it to each other and seal our bond. I propose the word “Kungaloosh.” Do you object to this word? If so, speak up now.
I can tell by your silence that you approve.
We are truly, in every sense, on the same page.
For now, feel free to come here whenever you need a rest from the day-to-day travails of the busy life you lead as Neil Patrick Harris. Relax in the cozy chair below with a drink HERE or HERE and kick back with a good book. This one, for example.
Once again, congratulations, my new boon companion.
Until we meet again, I bid you a hearty Kungaloosh.
Rent gets you a lot of action, and not just offstage. It raises your standing in the theater community, and shortly thereafter Dan Sullivan, one of America’s great stage directors, asks you to play Romeo opposite Emily Bergl’s Juliet at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. It’s another liberating moment for you, though in a more purely professional way. Eight years of working almost exclusively on television has left your acting persona feeling trapped in perpetual close-up. Even your character in Rent wasn’t the most physical guy in the world. But Dan wants Romeo to be a freewheeling, heroic lover, so you find yourself onstage every night fighting with broadswords and daggers, climbing balconies, braining Tybalt with a rock, and doing all kinds of cool bodily shit. (One reviewer describes your “nimble shimmying,” which sounds almost pornographic.) To get so overwrought with emotion by the death of your lover that you cry, weep, bang your head on the floor, and flamboyantly kill yourself even once is cathartic. To get to do that eight times a week for two months is positively therapeutic.
Shakespeare is dead, but the modern-day Shakespeare is alive and well. His name is Stephen Sondheim, and your next role is in a staged reading of one of his masterpieces, Sweeney Todd. You play Toby; the sublime Christine Baranski is Mrs. Lovett; and Kelsey Grammer is Sweeney. At least he is allegedly. You and your cast-mates are surprised to learn as you begin rehearsals that Kelsey and his wife, Camille (and what a great couple they are; no doubt they will last forever), have gone to Hawaii for a
vacation. A week later everyone’s on a soundstage working on the big production number when Kelsey shows up and marvels at how good you all are. Which would be a nice thing to hear from an audience member. Only he’s not an audience member, he’s the star of the show, and shouldn’t he, you know, maybe be onstage doing this with you right now?
You’re well aware of the different levels of focus and preparation needed for TV work and stage work. But Kelsey … well, Kelsey is becoming aware of it now. His voice grows more and more strained as he rapidly realizes how much work he should have been doing and how much he should have already gotten down. On a weekly series you can learn a lot of material quickly, and no doubt he had often done so, and brilliantly, but it doesn’t work that way with theater—much less within the limited rehearsal period of a staged reading, and much much less when it’s Sondheim, and much much much less with a show as elaborate and musically challenging as Sweeney Todd.
So come the night of the performance the director makes the ultimate TV-star concession: he puts five teleprompters onstage. Five. Two in the front, two in the wings, and one in Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop. For the rest of the cast it’s kind of like doing Sweeney Todd: The Infomercial, because when you’re talking or singing to Kelsey he’s staring away from you, reading his next lines on the screen behind you or beside you, or the one stuck smack-dab in the middle of a goddamn Victorian-era bakery/barbershop.
It’s a little awkward. But it’s totally worth it for this: Sondheim singles you out for praise! There’s a section of the show where Toby rhythmically chants an improvisation on a children’s rhyme:
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker man.
Bake me a cake—
No, no,
Bake me a pie—
To delight my eye,
And I will sigh
If the crust be high …
Sondheim had only put x’s in the score, to indicate that the words had a rhythm but not necessarily a melody. But you make up some weird singsongy tune to do it to. Sondheim comes to see the performance, and afterward, in an elevator full of people, he tells you he likes your tune so much he’s going to change the notes in the score to match your melody. When he leaves, the rest of the elevator turns to you and squeals like schoolgirls, which is exactly what you would do. Oh wait, you’re squealing too, actually.