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2:47 pm - Sunday, Jan. 07, 2007
My Life Needs A Great Theme Song
Sun 1/7/07 (12:04 p.m.)

My Life Needs A Great Theme Song

Just finished watching Neil Simon getting the 2006 Mark Twain Award at the Kennedy Center (Last night after work, I watched Steve Martin getting the same award, I�m assuming for 2005).

It was a bit of a nostalgia trip, since I�ve done a number of Simon plays over the course of my acting life�Come Blow Your Horn, Star-Spangled Girl, The Odd Couple, Barefoot In The Park, and Broadway Bound�taking me, in the course of some twenty-five or thirty years, from high-school to community theater to summer stock, and I basically recall all those experiences as �good times�.

(Oddly enough�since I can be a pretty funny guy onstage-- I don�t see any of my work in those shows as being particularly distinguished. I got laughs, don�t get me wrong, but I wouldn�t pull out any of those roles and say �That�s amongst the best stuff I ever did�. Though I�ll always have a special fondness for Star-Spangled Girl, since that�s when I met and became friends with Jane Z.)

When you add the Simon plays I�ve performed to the Simon plays I�ve seen, and the Simon-penned movies I�ve watched...well, that�s a lot of Neil Simon.

And while I may not feel I �distinguished myself� in the Neil Simon work I�ve done, I�m way more �Neil Simon� than �Shakespeare� as an actor, if you know what I mean. Certainly he�s had more of an impact on my life as an actor, my sense of humor, and my sensibilities.

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Had an absolutely miserable time at work last night (As I said to one of the QC�s�ArcLight-speak for �Supervisors��if I could have quit, I would have quit).

I don�t want to spend a lot of time hashing over what went wrong...but I will say this�I never wanted to work �Guest Services� (I was recently drafted and �trained� for the position. And I put �trained� in quotes because the training at ArcLight, in a word, sucks). And last night was the reason I never wanted to work Guest Services.

The ArcLight website stinks. The automated phone system stinks. The outside kiosks stink. When required to actually perform their ostensible function�to make things easier for our �guests�--they respond by overloading and shutting down (This has been happening pretty much every weekend since shortly before the holidays, and with a couple of big movies playing at the theater right now�Pan�s Labryinth, and Children Of Men in particular�last night was more of the same).

And when that happens, many, many unhappy, frustrated, often downright angry guests come where?

You guessed it�to Guest Services. Where we get to be the helpless, underpaid, overworked recipients of their unhappiness and frustration and anger.

But I�ll spare you an extended rant, cause I think you get the idea (In addition to the fact that ArcLight doesn�t have the services to successfully handle a busy weekend�which seems like a big problem in an industry where you do your most business on the weekends--when the services do �work�, they seem to be tremendously user-unfriendly; I know there are a lot of stupid people out there, but so many people can�t figure out how to do what you�re supposed to be able to do on the website�buy tickets, pick your seat numbers, log in as an ArcLight �member�, etc.�that I have to believe a piss-poor website design in the problem.Which leads to more of the unhappiness, frustration, and anger I mentioned previously)

I don�t like to fail (That�s one of the reasons I�ve often failed to even try in life. But that�s the subject for another journal entry). And I particularly don�t like to be set up to fail, by a system that seems almost specifically designed to piss people off, then lead them to me.

I don�t want to be the front-man for ArcLight if ArcLight can�t do it�s fucking business right.

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When I got home from work last night, I�d calmed down a bit (The second set of the night was not as bad as the first), but was still feeling pretty angry and depressed; my anger often leads to depression, since when I�m angry, I pretty much always end up feeling impotent, and trapped in the situation that�s making me angry.

And if you can imagine, if I�d jumped on Diaryland at that point, the entry I would have written would have been quite a bit darker than what I just wrote. My fury in a situation like last night, since it has no safe/productive outlet, can easily turn into self-loathing�Basically, the message becomes �Fuck me, I�m an asshole for messing up my life so bad I�m in the position I�m in in the first place, 45 years old, and working in a fucking snooty movie theater for chump change and no benefits�.

But obviously, you don�t care to hear that, and I don�t really care to write it (Though I think if I�m feeling it, I should at least address it). So instead of giving full-on vent to a load of anger and frustration and helplessness and self-loathing, I watched some tv (The Steve Martin thing I mentioned earlier), and surfed the web.

And in my web-surfing, I stumbled on a site�speaking of �nostalgia�--that I got a big kick out of. It�s called Toon-Tracker, and it�s basically sound files of cartoon theme music, from the 30's and 40's on.

My own big cartoon-watching era was from around the mid-60s to the early-70s, and it was fun listening to music I hadn�t heard, in many cases, since I first listened to it on Saturday mornings as a child.

And I realized, once again, that while I was watching cartoons as a kid (And this applies to the live-action tv I watched as well), what was really staying with me for a lifetime was the theme music; I can�t tell you a single �plot line� of most of the shows I watched back then, but I remember almost all the music.

I don�t know what that �says�, if it says anything, but I find it interesting.

Well, I could write more, but I imagine I�ve taxed your stamina enough at this point (I know I�ve certainly taxed mine, cause I�m going back to bed).


 

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