Well Schucky Darn! I thought that saturating myself in the all too familiar country culture I grew up in, where people hang fake testicles from their trunks and rock bumper stickers that say "Don't ride me son...I'm TRIGGER Happy!!!", makes me need a mini Xanax. But other than being housed in an assisted living facility for the dying elderly and having no transportation...things are great here on the hillbilly Vegas strip. We passed through the redneck ground zero...Pigeon Forge....every single day on the way up to Ober Gatlinburg to rehearse our Christmas skating show. Let's just say that its the home of country music's most famous, trani-liscious, size-0, double-D, drag queen of all dreams. I was extremely skeptical accepting this contract and was surprised that what actually unfolded for me turned out to be a totally unexpected peaceful feeling that melted completely over me the second I arrived. Its crucial that you love your new cast for continuity purposes. It's easy to blurr the line between coworker and friend in show business and sometime the results can be messy. Any extended period of time far far away from New York is welcome to these weary metropolitan, crow's feet framed eyes. That damn city has gotten my panties in such a wad for so many years that I'm trying to shake the jade off like a wet umbrella. Manhattan leaves me drained and disjointed and as far as I'm concerned my desperate need to be a part of the city's elite theatre community has come to a screeching halt as I phase into god knows what. I can't fully comprehend my transition from dancer boy to dancer-man because things are changing and fast. Daddy's back aint what it used to be. I thought I would get off the plane at 19 and ping pong my way around every Broadway stage there was. Just kidding kid. So what comes next for me?
I find myself in the first skating show of my career and it feels like Cinderella's slipper. I couldn't be happier to be working with such fiercely professional figure skaters that are jumping and spinning circles around me literally and putting my skills to shizzame! It's terribly inspiring actually to be reminded what truly dangerous and courageous work it really is for these jumping circus monkeys to be doing three triples per program four times a day, not to mention four back flips. Some of these 20 year old boys are still competing for chrICEt sake. They are swirling around in the throngs of a nasty competitive mentality that will probably last a lifetime.
The details of this particular gig have begun to inspire a blog so full of visual detail that I almost cannot contain myself. My fingers tremble with the possibility of present and future posts filled to the brim with all the countrified details that I couldn't even make up if I tried. But where to begin is really the question? Perhaps the Housing! Shady Acres......
I should start with the fact that the performers housing is really an assisted nursing-home facility with morbidly obese nurses named Tammy and Shea on duty 24/7. This place gets literally locked down like fort Knox at precisely 9pm when "quiet time" goes into effect and lasts until 7am. Who are they kidding? Its always quiet time here at Mountain Brook where the silence is deafening. I was just about to say that I have no words for this particularly horrible place but that's not exactly true. In fact the words are flowing like wine as I sit on a mountain of awkward literary inspiration. The crowning moment for me was when I realized there was no wifi in my "unit". Let's call it what it is people....a shitty two bedroom apartment with hundreds of holes in the walls and neighbors that will probably die before I post this blog. I thought about interviewing the old folks one at a time and trying to find meaning in my unfortunate destiny, but that would require me being able to stomach walking into the Fireside Lounge to do the listening. I've heard that if you're sitting in the wrong seat it gets pretty ugly in there. I would never recommend interfering with a dying person's routine like taking the wrong recliner at pudding time. Between the 10AM old person wii bowling happening in the lobby every morning and the lunchroom oxygen parade, I loose my appetite for words altogether. There are lists of prices pinned up on the bulletin board in my hallway for things like weekly bed flipping, personal hygiene assistance, kitchen cleaning, laundry, and packaged sponge baths. The sad part is that while staring at the list of doom I'm consumed with the most disturbing detail of all.....having no f*ing Internet! Truly my rage could never be measured. The shared common area makes me so sad and I dread the big decisions I'll have to make one day with ailing parents looking at a future of assisted living. I literally run into the lobby to pick up any packages or mail and exit with the same quickness. Wild horses couldn't make me linger in that sad place longer than I absolutely have to. You know those movies when someone is holding their breath while trying to save a trapped friend from drowning in quickly rising water...like White Squall? You unknowingly hold your breath with the actor on the screen right? I hate the smell of an old folks home more than anything I can think of. Any quick business I have in the scary old lobby is prefaced with a deep breath and abruptly followed by a French retreat. I come stumbling out of the handicapped doors with my mail needing a sexy anti-anxiety pill of some sort, and perhaps a new career.
Any housing, no matter how hideous, can be tolerated if you can escape it. But the ultimate rub (other than the actual nursing home situation and being denied wireless) is that our "not for profit" skating company didn't even provide adequate transportation for us in a town where people would drive their cars from their bedrooms to their living room recliners if they could to avoid walking at all cost. Betrayed by the gods of wifi, my porn addiction leaves me agitated and angry when it comes to a shaky session with my slippery iPhone. It leaves a lot to be desired and the sexiness factor drops dramatically. Daddy needs a wide screen for his secret vise and a little privacy please. The mixed bird/berry wallpaper in my bedroom would probably make my favorite designer Candice Olson catch on fire and jump out the nearest window. No art. No pics. Only a melange of clustered berries, nail holes, birds, and a paint color I could only describe as "Second Hand Smoke" by Janovizzle. My desperate need to beautify my space and nest into a comfortable winter had me busy running up and down the isles of Home Depot day two. The HGTV design a home challenge began the day I arrived at ShadyBrook. The bare two tone walls were more than I could bare so I ended up taking the crown molding used for windows and door frames and cutting them to size to make my own wall art. My dad had all the tools and I was set. A couple of stops at Jo-Ann's fabrics and there was no stopping me. I cut, sanded, stapled, bolted, puttied, grouted, glued, touched up, and mounted the most beautiful wall art I've ever made in my life with the patient help of my overly caffeinated father. My insane need to decorate helped me bond with my dad in a way I never did before and now my eight framed pieces will mean so much more to me on my wall in New York after such close collaboration. Creative, unprofessional carpentry can be so much fun if you have the time to keep f*ing it all up.And now on to the actual business of show that brought me here. I can't even type the infamous word that has my thumbs trembling with such terror and sick delight. I would never want my blog and this particular gig to show up on a Google search engine together. This is a secret between you...me....and the world wide web. This is also not an attempt to talk badly about something that has become so special to me. I'm merely acknowledging certain hilarious facts about a place I'd never purposely offend.
The endless inspiration for sarcastic blogging is limitless in a town overflowing with larger folks of all ages averaging generally one size and up. There are thirteen year olds being turned away every day from one of the better roller coasters because they exceed the two-seater weight limit for an adult. Or because the safety handle bars wont lock into the proper secure place through all the bulbous fast food layers. The average forty-something woman limping through the park all day looks about 55 to 60 years old. Some of these big hearted hotties look like a melting pear in the hot summer sun. What makes the park such a mullet ridden disaster zone is all the local people that frequent it on a family season pass. It's a modern-free space where the young Mennonite and Amish girls can let their hair come tumbling out of their tight bonnets and go totally wild. And by wild I mean siting quietly and enjoying electricity. No make up. No zippers. No texting. No boyfriends. No nothing.The strangest thing of all is the random feeling of calm that falls over me in this part of the world. Coming back after all these years makes me smile and the country roots that I tried so desperately hard to escape wrap me up like a warm quilt. It feels right. And make no mistake, there is no shortage of quilting action in these here parts either. Theme parks are so hilarious to me. I picture Cinderella and Tinkerbell clocking in, taking that one final deep drag before putting out that last cigarette butt before transforming into the dream team. The memory makers are never unveiled as regular people who need jobs and work long hours for minimum wage. I bet mini mouse may die inside a little when she gets her paycheck docked because she passed out from dehydration. Working at a theme park for the first time in my life has opened my eyes to a world of rickety covered wagons and cinnamon bread that would make a grown man cry. Buying a cheesy stuffed pretzels ($4.95) with a debit card from an old guy dressed as Santa Clause tickles me in all my special places. My discount employee pass has elevated me to local rock star status in Pigeon Forge (the hillbilly strip) that I've termed "Redneck Vegas". My whole attitude toward theme park shows and performers has flipped completely upside down as I now realize how hard it is to pump out four or more technically challenging shows, every one a little more difficult than the one before. By the last performance my body feels like it's swimming through a quicksand tar mix. And as the applause dies when the chocolate funnel cake haze starts setting in so do I. Maybe eating that giant cinnamon bun the size of an actual football right before the show wasn't such a good idea after all tracy Gold!
