Five

December 6, 2005

Five

It’s interesting how every year your capacity for doing things drops a little. It used to be people had to walk. Then there were bicycles, then there were cars. It used to be people had to drive. Now we have cruise-control. It used to be people had to ink, write and dry. Now we have type-writers. It used to be people had to type and change the paper and rewrite everything every time they decided to make some change. Now we have voice-recognition and copy-paste. Even sentences get shorter with time. They do.

What I do for a living always makes people laugh. I’m basically an actor whose job is to overact, a salesperson that sells shit no one wants, and a television host for a show no one watches. Well, there’s some people that watch it. It gets translated to about ten different languages.

Where I am right now is the parking lot of Studio 4. There’s only one studio here, and they still call it Studio 4. Marcia should be finishing the make-up on Kathryn right about now. I call Kathryn, Heather on the show. She calls me Dave.
“Hey Joe. What do you know?� That’s Marcia. She saw A.I. too many times. Imagine Rosie O’Donnel, then slap on Fran Drescher’s voice, throw Phoebe Buffay in there, and complement that with Barney the dinosaur’s sense of humor. That’s Marcia. She was a nice girl.
“Hey, Marcia. Is Kathryn here yet?� I ask to make conversation while we get to the make-up chairs.
“Yeah, she got here really early, like always. She seems a bit upset today, though.� Marcia was the sort of person who somehow read other people’s feelings. She also believed in astrology.
Kathryn is sitting on the set already trying to memorize her lines. Her P.A. is on her cell phone with the laundromat fighting over some stains in one of Kathryn’s dresses. Think: Monica Lewinski. Imagine Suzanne Sommers, mix that with Winona Ryder’s ability to get in trouble, Monica Geller’s analness and throw in Cameron Diaz’s laugh. That’s Kathryn.

Today is a full day multicamera shoot for a vacuum cleaner that could suck someone’s stomach out if you put it in their mouth. If one were so inclined. The way Marcia puts make-up on me, makes me look like I just won a Ken doll look-a-like contest. She does the what-do-you-know joke again and leaves me to familiarize myself with the product.
I’m supposed to be this incredibly smart man who knows just about everything there is to know about everything and therefore always has the best products ever and shows them to my co-star Heather.
All she has to do is say “Wow!� “Really?� “Amazing!� “How does it work?� “It probably costs a million dollars!� and “Where can I get it?�.
I have to say a lot more, but always remember to every once in a while throw in a little “And there’s more!�.

Marcia is sitting just off-stage ready to run with her make-up case up to Kathryn or me and touch us up. Turn us into the winners of some doll look-a-like contest.

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