Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star by Fred Stoller, Ray Romano Read Free Book Online
Authors: Fred Stoller, Ray Romano
they didn’t have to put the comedians up in a hotel. On only a few rare exceptions would the place be cleaned up from the comedian who had stayed there the week before. There were still food containers on the floor, dirty sheets on the bed, and in this case, even the comedian from the week before on the couch. He was a road comic with nowhere to go until his next gig and hoped I wouldn’t mind if he crashed for another few days.
I shut myself in my room, let the pushy intruding comic have the couch and TV, and I vowed not to spend my career being a miserable comedian, getting vilified by club owners and humiliated by negative comment cards. Acting classes would be my way out! Becoming a committed trained actor would be my edge!
5
THE CRAFT
M y first acting teacher had us read scenes while another student would shove us repeatedly. I wasn’t quite sure of the point of that exercise. I found it peculiar but no one else in class seemed to question it and I was too intimidated by the teacher to ask why. Paul, the know-it-all doorman at the Improv comedy club had highly recommended him so I trusted that there must be a strong benefit to learning how to recite material without being tipped over.
The teacher was an ex-actor (no surprise) who was shamelessly trying to use his students to break into a writing career. Once, a student in my class announced he got a small guest role on Saved by the Bell . The teacher’s chubby red face started twitching with nervous excitement as he got up and headed toward the student. “Tell them about me, will you? I got a really great idea for a show about a high school!”
After quitting that class, I hooked up with a teacher recommended by comedian Rob Schneider who would later be on
Saturday Night Live (and give me a part as a reporter in his film The Animal ). For $275 a month, about forty of us sat in the cramped bleachers while he pushed each student’s personal buttons: “Sarah, you’re overweight, not a beauty queen, and still alone. Use that torment in the scene!” When I hinted that I was going to quit the class, he suddenly began praising my progress.
He would assign each student a scene and another student to do the scene with him. Since these classes were stuffed to capacity, you would only do your scene maybe once a month, but according to the disciples in the class, it was just as fulfilling to watch the teacher give his brilliant notes to the others as it would be to actually go up and perform yourself.
We’d have to rehearse with our partner a few times a week outside of class, and if my partner was a woman, that usually was the high point of my social life. Just her showing up at my place, or me going to hers made me feel I was with someone, even for just a short while. I was even assigned a few scenes where kissing was involved. Looking back, I’m suspicious if that was another ploy to keep lonely people paying the big bucks for the classes.
Once I was with my partner in my apartment rehearsing a scene from Annie Hall . She was a nice-looking woman from Germany. At the end of the scene we were supposed to kiss. So we get to the end of the scene and she French kissed me. She initiated it, I swear! We continued to kiss for about thirty seconds. After that I kept rehearsing and rehearsing, talking faster than my usual droll self to get to the kissing. And each time, we would make out. Finally I had to say something. “Can we kiss without the scene?” She looked at me, horrified. “What!? I am married!” So I nodded, rehearsed the scene again, and made out some more at the end of it. Sounds like a good scam, but for all the years and money I put into class, it wasn’t worth the cheap thrills. Not only was I taking a class, but I was also shelling out $60 an hour, sometimes three times a week, for sessions with a private acting coach, something I was scared into doing every time I had an audition. The private coach was an attractive, forceful woman in her early
I shut myself in my room, let the pushy intruding comic have the couch and TV, and I vowed not to spend my career being a miserable comedian, getting vilified by club owners and humiliated by negative comment cards. Acting classes would be my way out! Becoming a committed trained actor would be my edge!
5
THE CRAFT
M y first acting teacher had us read scenes while another student would shove us repeatedly. I wasn’t quite sure of the point of that exercise. I found it peculiar but no one else in class seemed to question it and I was too intimidated by the teacher to ask why. Paul, the know-it-all doorman at the Improv comedy club had highly recommended him so I trusted that there must be a strong benefit to learning how to recite material without being tipped over.
The teacher was an ex-actor (no surprise) who was shamelessly trying to use his students to break into a writing career. Once, a student in my class announced he got a small guest role on Saved by the Bell . The teacher’s chubby red face started twitching with nervous excitement as he got up and headed toward the student. “Tell them about me, will you? I got a really great idea for a show about a high school!”
After quitting that class, I hooked up with a teacher recommended by comedian Rob Schneider who would later be on
Saturday Night Live (and give me a part as a reporter in his film The Animal ). For $275 a month, about forty of us sat in the cramped bleachers while he pushed each student’s personal buttons: “Sarah, you’re overweight, not a beauty queen, and still alone. Use that torment in the scene!” When I hinted that I was going to quit the class, he suddenly began praising my progress.
He would assign each student a scene and another student to do the scene with him. Since these classes were stuffed to capacity, you would only do your scene maybe once a month, but according to the disciples in the class, it was just as fulfilling to watch the teacher give his brilliant notes to the others as it would be to actually go up and perform yourself.
We’d have to rehearse with our partner a few times a week outside of class, and if my partner was a woman, that usually was the high point of my social life. Just her showing up at my place, or me going to hers made me feel I was with someone, even for just a short while. I was even assigned a few scenes where kissing was involved. Looking back, I’m suspicious if that was another ploy to keep lonely people paying the big bucks for the classes.
Once I was with my partner in my apartment rehearsing a scene from Annie Hall . She was a nice-looking woman from Germany. At the end of the scene we were supposed to kiss. So we get to the end of the scene and she French kissed me. She initiated it, I swear! We continued to kiss for about thirty seconds. After that I kept rehearsing and rehearsing, talking faster than my usual droll self to get to the kissing. And each time, we would make out. Finally I had to say something. “Can we kiss without the scene?” She looked at me, horrified. “What!? I am married!” So I nodded, rehearsed the scene again, and made out some more at the end of it. Sounds like a good scam, but for all the years and money I put into class, it wasn’t worth the cheap thrills. Not only was I taking a class, but I was also shelling out $60 an hour, sometimes three times a week, for sessions with a private acting coach, something I was scared into doing every time I had an audition. The private coach was an attractive, forceful woman in her early
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