The Dead Dream

It’s been exactly one year since I got cut from Blue Man training in New York. Two years of buildup from audition to preparation to arrival, and a paltry two weeks later, the whole thing died. In the ensuing year, after spanning more miles than I ever thought to travel, where am I? Where was I? What did I do with my dead dream?

“I guess I need to find a job.”

That’s where I left off. Let’s continue.

September 19, 2013 was a ghost day. After my brief and unceremonious axing, I walked a half-mile up Broadway to the Strand Bookstore. I spent too much money on books and continued on to Union Square, where I wandered listlessly and chewed bitter pizza. I was a hermetically sealed sad-sack whose attention extended not one nanometer beyond my doughy frame. Over the next few days, I watched the first season of Orange Is the New Black, wallowed, and made arrangements for my return to Torrance – my childhood home, a bowl whose hopeful contents remained in a thirteenth-floor meeting room at 599 Broadway.

Coming back empty meant two things, though: (1) I had nowhere to go, and (2) I could get there however I wanted. So, that’s exactly what I started to do. I got a job at my local Barnes & Noble (where I earned my $8.50 an hour, thanks very much). I put the word out to everyone I could think of that I was back for the foreseeable future, ready to move on from the black (Blue?) hole that consumed the last two years of my life. I quickly resumed accompanying modern dance classes, and shortly after I started at B&N, two emails plotted my course.

The first was from the secretary of Chapman University’s dance department, a lovely woman named Clara. She was one of the people I contacted when I got back, and luckily enough, the school needed someone to accompany beginning modern technique classes in the spring, four days a week from February to May, for much more than I was making at B&N. This was good news.

The second email was from an incredible musician named Brian Wood, whom I had met a few times, but always in passing and never while playing. He was taking over a department at Cal State Long Beach for a semester and needed someone to cover his accompanying gig at The Wooden Floor, a non-profit in Santa Ana that I performed with in June 2012. Three nights a week, with good pay and the chance to work with a deeply and positively influential program – this was very good news.

Thanks to these openings, a little over three months post-New York I started enjoying some semblance of a professionally musical lifestyle. I had the day job, but it wasn’t a restaurant and the bulk of my income was coming from genuine music making. This was fresh and satisfying, the way that good salads look on TV. Driving all over the damn place wasn’t ideal, but I grew up amidst Southern California’s hastily vomited civil landscape and knew that to get anywhere – especially from Torrance – traffic was the common currency. (Aside from totaling my car right after New Year’s and finally replacing it on Super Bowl Sunday, the driving thing wasn’t all that bad.)

The following spring progressed explosively with three regular accompanying gigs, Barnes & Noble, musical theatre pit work, frequent appearances with a flamenco group in Newport Beach, performances with two reputable contemporary music ensembles (Eighteen-Squared and the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet), and the joyous occasion of getting to play on my good friend Maria’s final violin recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Sleep rediscovered its elusiveness of my college years but lost its potency of absence against this unprecedented cascade of music. Many of these opportunities came by way of my former percussion teacher, Nick Terry, and I still owe him a good bottle of wine.

Then came summer. Some of my accompanying gigs continued, I happily bid adios to Barnes & Noble, and I got to work up my piano chops again to accompany ballet classes. Most important, though, was my introduction by my friend Maria to a charter school in Eagle Rock called Renaissance Arts Academy and the opportunity to work their three-week summer intensive. Without diving into the insane details, this school is non- (if not anti-) traditional. Summer intensive mornings were spent thinking and discussing, and afternoons were spent rehearsing different orchestras. I usually left early to drive down to Santa Ana and accompany at The Wooden Floor, so I unfortunately missed most of the music happenings, but at the end of the intensive, the two directors said that they would be happy to bring me on full time in September. Bittersweet it was, however, that I could no longer accompany at The Wooden Floor.

I want to touch briefly on The Wooden Floor. It’s an after-school program that offers free dance classes, tutoring, college prep, and family counseling to over 350 underprivileged kids. RenArts serves a similar population, so I’m grateful to The Wooden Floor for the opportunity to experience unknown backgrounds and approach those whose story differs wildly from my own. I would be dead at RenArts if it wasn’t for the experiences I had at TWF. Thankfully, both continue to do incredible work for their respective communities.

Summer eventually wound down with no big pizzazz, and hey, here we are. Today marks a year since I got on with my life. I’m still in a happy relationship with the endearing Tina Persky (whose generous support remains constant), I have a full beard, and I enjoy days filled with music. While working full time at RenArts I continue to freelance – including a recent psychedelic tropical kickoff event for an arts festival, and an upcoming three-week Oktoberfest gig (lederhosen and full-size chicken suit included). Damn good humans surround me and I finally moved out on my own.

My big New York dream collapsed under its own weight, but the mental unshackling of two years of expectation freed me to explore a vast landscape of expression, collaboration, and fulfillment. In short: the dream died, and I woke up.

Day 10: Fireworks

I went on stage last night at the Astor. 300 seats, nearly all full. Eight trainees in the back row, two directors a few ahead. Three vets backstage; two for the whole show and one to take my place. Wardrobe, props, sound, lights, the whole deal. Everybody warm and supportive.

Our training tech was on Monday. It consisted of running through the pieces we learned but without full makeup. It was extremely rough, and once we were done I didn't stop stressing about it until about 6:00 last night, when I got to the theater to start warming up.

Warm-ups: bike shorts, mantard, basketball shorts, t-shirt, in-ear monitors, boots. Sound check on stage to run a few pieces and practice catching and chair-walking. Done with sound check around 7:00.

Down to Wardrobe to get the bald cap on. Alcohol clean, two layers of glue, cap, more glue, PAX. Circle meeting at 7:30 with the whole cast and crew. Upcoming shows, an open apartment, a trivia question. Back to Wardrobe to get blue and finish the costume. Up to the stage at 8:00. We get our cue to get behind the curtained box on stage and set up what we need for the top of the show.

Scrim, Paint Drumming, P&C. The first three pieces happen too quickly to register. I make all three of my catches and my spin painting turns out great. Back offstage to wait. GiPads, Crunch, Screen Hopping. Modern Plumbing video starts and I'm ready to go back on.

Drumbone, Feast Picking, Feast. Again, it all happens so quickly that it's like I never learned the blocking in the first place. Feast ends and I get off stage. Back down to Wardrobe to scrub and tear and rip my way out of the costume and makeup until I see myself in the mirror again. I'm too rough getting the makeup off of my eyelids and there's a red patch that burns on each one.

Leave the theater. Get on the subway. Get off the subway. Walk to my apartment, collapse, shower, get on pajamas and go to another trainee's apartment to play Mario Kart, drink a few beers, and have a good hang. It's really a great group of guys.

The past week-and-a-half and my experience here in New York has been a fireworks show. Illuminative, explosive, intense, bright...and brief.

At my post-swap meeting this morning, the directors told me that I would not be continuing with the training program because I'm not where I need to be on the acting level. It's something I felt on the very first day of training, so after everything I've been feeling and working through since then, I knew that this was going to happen. The directors acknowledged that I've been working hard and that the ethic is there, but this just isn't a good fit for me as a performer. I can't argue that at all. On a superficial level, I really thought that it was, but after getting inside of it I realized that this is a planet away from what I'm capable of doing right now.

So here I am. I'm in town until Monday. I'll probably explore the city and make the most of the ton of free time I now have. Even though I half-expected this outcome from the beginning and I prepared myself for it, nothing softens the blow of a year-and-a-half buildup collapsing after less than two weeks. I also have the distinction of being the first guy cut from the training class, which I'm not particularly proud of.

The next chapter of my life starts now, and I really don't know what that entails. I guess I need to find a job.

Day 5: Avocados

This week unflinchingly stretched my perception of the words "fatigue" and "stress." I have neither been more exhausted nor more neurotic than I am right now at 11:00 on a Friday night. We've been in New York for just under a week, but it feels like two or three. The nine of us are out of our minds over the fact that this is only the end of the first five days of training. Five out of sixty-one. That's one-twelfth of the way to the finish line. A hair over 8%. Arriving in Chatsworth on a trip from L.A. to San Francisco. We are crawling naked on the tip of the world's largest, coldest iceberg, and boy, do we feel it.

We learned six of about thirty pieces this week to prepare for our swap-ins next week. Trainees will start swapping with regular New York Blue Men, the first going on Monday. I go on Wednesday. The last of us will go two weeks from today, meaning that those guys are reasonably assumed to make it to week three. As for me, going on Wednesday night with a post-swap check-in Thursday morning, that could be the end of the road. At this point, I'm not sure how I feel about it.

On the one hand, it's the chance to join a very tightly knit, elite class of performers of which there are only around eighty worldwide. (That's 0.00000001% of the population – one of our directors said that for every 1,000 guys that audition, ONE gets hired.) Despite that opportunity, though, the past five days have run me absolutely, thoroughly, to-the-bone ragged. Small example: I get a cold sore maybe twice or three times a year, either as a periodic inconvenience or as the result of stress or being sick or something. As of yesterday, I have three. The cause couldn't be clearer.

I'm honestly too tired at this moment to care about whether I make it or not. It could go either way. Thursday morning I will either be happy that I made it past this benchmark or relieved that I'm out of the fire. All I know for sure is that these were the five most grueling days of my life (so far), and I'm sleeping in tomorrow before taking a book to Central Park for a few hours.

For lunch this week, I've been frequenting a Subway around the corner from the training space. There's a big sticker on the glass above the ingredients that strongly recommends adding avocado to your sandwich. I haven't done it; partly because it makes me homesick for California, and partly because I now know how it feels to be pitted.

Day 2: A Lack of Competition

Two days in, and we already learned 3.5 pieces from the show. I can't believe how quickly things are moving along and how much has been crammed into the past 48 hours.

We had a meeting yesterday morning where we talked over the details of how training will progress and what it will entail, and one of the veterans who will be handling much of our training said something that put us all at relative ease: "We want to hire all of you." Training isn't a competition. We are all aspiring for the same goal of getting hired, and part of that is the ability to collaborate, help each other, and support each other, which can't happen honestly in true competition. Now that the nine of us have been learning and working together for two days, that collaborative spirit is really showing. We stay to practice for hours after the scheduled sessions are over, giving each other notes, honing the various "skills" that we've acquired in the course of learning these pieces, and just providing genuine and much-needed camaraderie. Each one of the guys is fantastic, talented, and fun to be around.

We worked on a lot of drumming today, which I felt great about, considering my background. It's a lot easier for me to pick up than some of the technicalities and blocking and minimal character work that we've covered so far. I have a long way to go on that front, but all in due time. We have 2.5 more pieces to learn this week and another 20-or-so after that. By the end of week four we'll know the entire show.

It'll be easy to get overwhelmed by how intense and full the next month is going to be, but the most important thing for us to remember is that the difficulty of the material we're learning can't outweigh the joy and fun we feel while performing it. It's a total head game.

...or so the saying goes.

Day -1: Time to Start

The city has been walked, pizza has been inhaled, beers have been imbibed, and tomorrow morning at 10:00 myself and eight other trainees ascend into madness.

The nine of us finally met at the 5:00 Blue Man Group show this afternoon at the Astor Place Theatre. It's a great group of guys. Everyone has strong personalities that will be a ton of fun to work with in the coming weeks, and the camaraderie has already taken root.

New York is an overwhelming city in every possible sense of the word. It's hard not to get distracted by everything that sweeps by on the streets and subway platforms. Lots of smells, about half of them pleasant; restaurants abound like I've never seen; and they've apparently figured out how to immediately force a ton of crystal meth into the system of anyone who gets behind the wheel of a car. Taxis are particularly tweaked. All things considered, the city is vibrant in a near-threatening way. No matter, though. I'm here to work.

There's not much that I can skillfully impart here about how it feels to be on the eve of the biggest opportunity of my life, but I will say this: I'm ready. It all starts in twelve hours.

As a Coors Light ad on the subway said: "Go Blue or Go Home."





Oh, also, I just shaved my beard and can't stop touching my face.

View from the High Line.

Day -3: Testing, Testing

This is a test first post on the blog. I fly out from LAX tomorrow morning at 10:55 and arrive at JFK at 7:21 P.M. local time. I'll be lucky to get to my apartment in the city by 9, but we'll see. Adventure awaits!