Cue, Not to Be Confused with Billiards

There is a moment of excited limbo when you, as an actor, are standing somewhere in the wings, waiting to go on, the delicious process of drainage at work, removing from you all the motives and responses of the you of birth and growth, allowing you to become filled with the you of character, aware of an agenda and expectations, When you are writing fiction, this particular sense is best seen as a cup of coffee with an exponent sign hovering above it because it is often impossible to gauge just how intense and exciting this feeling of being about-to-go-on is. There are occasional moments in real life when you feel such a moment, say in that brief second before you open the door to a classroom, or when you are about to join friends, or indeed when you are about to enter a shard of time that will be all yours, without interruption, to do what you will as the whim takes you. Perhaps Sally will be there, sleeping or watching some focus of stimulation, but perhaps you will be entirely alone, ready to walk-on into an adventure.

Your most vivid memory of such about-to moments goes well back into the 60s when, for a time, you were an extra, working at CBS TV Studios on Fairfax Avenue near Beverly, not yet at the stage of being given lines to deliver, more often than not being a part of a background. You forget the actual drama of the incident because the incident was its own drama. You were an extra in a Playhouse 90 production, a ninety-minute drama in which you had a number of appearances, all of which required you to move quickly from one set to another, often through narrow, poorly lit aisle-ways. The incident began when you made a wrong turn, from which everything about you was a disconnect. You were hopelessly lost. In the rehearsals, you'd judged the amount of time you needed to get from one set to another, thereupon to become a passenger in an elevator or a group of individuals leaving a courtroom, or an individual seated at a bar, staring longingly at the splendid actress, Kim Hunter. But you were lost and the inner clock was ticking. You made what you hoped was a turn that would get you out of terra incognita and into some familiarity, but instead, you came face to face with an icon. Standing there, moodily watching the progress of the story on a monitor was the great stone face of all time, the silent film icon, Buster Keaton. "Don't worry, kid," he told you. "We all get lost once in a while." You hesitated, wanting to convey your respect and admiration. "No time for that, kid," he said. "Keep looking for your way. The cue is everything."

You have been lost more than once, sometimes in search of the cue, wondering if you would ever learn it.

Standing in the limbo before entering your scene is daunting; if you think about what you are doing, it could easily be an invitation to stage fright and that awful sense of being out there before an audience with neither cue nor clue. Watching the recent film Up in the Air, you did not at first relate to the growing feeling of discomfort when George Clooney, in character, stood before a seminar and began inviting his audience to see a backpack. The feeling of discomfort reached its acme when he paused before another-but-similar audience, his own disconnect between cues tugging at him. The way his and your careers have gone, it is unlikely that you will ever meet him as and in the context of your meeting with Buster Keaton, but seeing the film was a lovely redux of what has become a way of life and of looking at events.

Keep looking for your way.

Smile when you find it.

The Past on $5 a Day

The condition comes to us almost like a late allergy, appearing somewhere in early pre-teens or during the midst of the invasion of the hormones called adolescence. It is on us before we recognize it, returning, returning to the point where we take it in like a distant relative, somehow connected to us.

By the time we become aware of it, we've probably read of it in one form or another. For boys, it was probably The Odyssey, allowing us to luxuriate in the adventures "he" had along the way, being told by one librarian that some day I'd come to understand when I asked why it was "he" could fool around all he wanted on the way home, but Penelope had to, you know, keep the home fires burning and keep Telemachus away from Indian casinos. For girls, it was a tougher road, requiring someone such as Cleopatra or Elinore of Aquitaine before it got worked out for such fictional sorts as Jane Eyre and Dorothy Gale. The point is, we've had traveling and return woven into our cultural psyche, and now, as writers' we're always off on some journey to the point where we are on permanent standby.

There have been some splendid destinations, as set forth by the likes of Madeline L'Engle and Philip Pullman, making us recognize how all our imagination is a passport to an alternate universe, somewhat like this one, but in some wonderful, remarkable ways, different. But the most emblematic of the human journey and return cycle is the one F. Scott Fitzgerald spoke of through his intermediary, Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby, where we are "borne ceaselessly back into the past."

"The past," L.P. Hartley wrote in The Go-Between, "is a foreign country. They do things differently there." And we, like restless adults who have found a treasure map cached away in an old book, return with our frequent-flier miles to dig for the treasure on the map, endlessly questing events that have stuck in our awareness like bad breath, tantalizing us with the lure of what we might have done wrong, how we might have done better, and an endless succession of What ifs.

We can be lured back by the merest prompt. A restaurant I sometimes visit with one of my oldest and dearest friends, El Taco Grande in an otherwise undistinguished strip mall on the outer reaches of Carpinteria, seems to attract an admirable working class clientele wherein we are in the distinct ethnic minority, and yet it is a rare visit that does not send me skittering back into the past because of some association with a person who looks like someone from the past or a particular place, which in this case would be Guadalajara, which I adore, and Tlaquepaque which I tolerate, these places coming to play because the Senora makes a point of stopping by our table to remind us, "No te rajes Jalisco," more or less don't mess with Jalisco, the state from whence she and her husband came.

There was a solitary diner today who reminded me of a long-time undergraduate chum whom I invited to stay at my Hollywood Hills apartment while he studied for the bar exam, having run afoul of the poverty tinted life of the wannabe writer and deciding instead to represent writers. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

There are important boundaries to observe when visiting the past, particularly if the visit has been made numerous times before, boundaries that speak forth by demanding our attention to the immediate present. Lest we forget the present. It is a comfort to revisit individuals who have in one way or another moved under our radar, leaving us with an unsatisfactory sense of circularity or completion. It is comforting to run a parallel check on some individuals, seeing them as they once were and as they are now, taking in all the joys of their being the same and the reality of them being different.

Easy as it is to be drawn back, it is important to take good notes here, mark all the details, soak as much of it in as possible. We can not always achieve closure with the past but we can find comfort, a thing like a misplaces wallet or reading glasses or car keys that we tear up the landscape for. Comfort. No small thing.