Uncle Fun and Sparky Land

     Once in a blue moon, Uncle Fun, Sparky, and the rest of their cohort let me use this space, ostensibly in the interest of equal time, but really because they can’t think of anything to say. This week, they’re all too busy—Funsville has been wrapped up in preparations for the annual Joe Flynn’s Birthday Jubilee. What with all and sundry running around quacking “What? What? What?” at one another, it always makes for more work than anyone anticipates, and far more work than anyone really wants to do.

     All of which leaves me wondering what to do myself, which in turn gets me thinking about how it all started for me.

     By “me”, I mean “me” of course, and by “it”, I mean work in the wonderful world of almost completely obscure entertainment and smaller-than-small-time show business. I came to this game by way of the recording studio, so when I decided to make the switch from voice acting to face acting (what a word to give it in my case!), I had no idea what to do with my hands. My extensive training behind the microphone (almost seventeen minutes, non-consecutively) had already taught me not to do anything even remotely like this:

 

     The worlds of stage, film and television are not nearly so sensitive to the effects of overzealous gestural flourishes, mostly because boom mike operators are careful to keep their expensive instruments well clear of even the most windmill-like of emotive flailing. Even though there usually aren’t boom mikes on stage, theatres do have expensive lighting instruments—but they’re generally hung far out of accidental slapping range for actors of my limited height and jumping ability.

     Still, the question remained when I began my training as the kind of actor you have to look at as well as listen to (seventeen minutes and ten seconds, non-consecutive, to date and counting):

WHAT DO I DO WITH MY HANDS?

     Years upon years of classes (mostly missed), rehearsals, shows, and cab rides to and from cast parties have yet to yield me a satisfactory answer. All I’ve managed to gather is a consensus of opinion among a number of broadly-defined groups with interests relating to the performing arts. Here they are, for the sake of posterity and the furtherance of knowledge, but mostly because it helps to fill space and kill some time:

 

Directors: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as you don’t put them in your pockets.

Stage Managers: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as you don’t drop the props.

Certain Cast Members: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as you keep them to yourself during rehearsals.

Certain Other Cast Members: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as you do it at my place tonight.

Members of Set, Lighting, Sound, and Other Backstage Crews: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as it isn’t something a member of our union should be doing.

Costume Designers: I don’t care what you do with your hands, unless I have to measure you for gloves.

Hair and Makeup Crews: I don’t care what you do with your hands. We don’t deal with them.

Agents: I don’t care what you do with your hands, as long as they sign the contract so I get my fee.

Audiences: Actors have hands?

 

     And that’s the sum total of what I know about what to do with my hands—when I'm performing, at any rate (and the rates I'm willing to perform for are ridiculously low). As for the rest of my time, I probably shouldn’t have put my hands on a keyboard to write this thing, but what else am I going to do before dawn on a Friday morning in November?

     Okay, a lot of things, but none of them fit in right now with my busy schedule of insomnia.