{"id":1132,"date":"2011-09-29T00:00:28","date_gmt":"2011-09-29T06:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/?p=1132"},"modified":"2011-09-29T00:00:28","modified_gmt":"2011-09-29T06:00:28","slug":"cbc-v","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/cbc-v\/","title":{"rendered":"CBC V, or Why I’m Not An Actor Anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re a Good Man, Charlie Brown<\/em> performed for two weekends in June of 1982, one weekend at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Hollywood and one at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley. By all accounts, it was awful, as most of the kids had any idea what they were saying or why it was supposed to be funny. I, of course, was genius. Sheer %$^&ing genius.<\/p>\n

So Charlie Brown was over. Kaput.<\/p>\n

Or WAS IT?!<\/p>\n

See, after the show\u2019s initial run, a remarkable transformation took place.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Los Angeles Children\u2019s Choir, a staid, conservative sort of dealie with hordes of children standing on risers and singing Bach cantatas, was rechristened the \u201cKids of the Century,\u201d where every song required dancing or a simulation thereof, and everyone eventually had to dress up like Michael Jackson. (I actually, at one point, owned a pair of parachute pants. I did not, at the time, own a single glove with sequins, although I do now.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I was ill-suited for this particular transformation, yet I stubbornly hung on and\/or refused to go away. So I became the Kids of the Century\u2019s Human Tree \u2013 a tall, dippy guy in the back who sort of flung out his arms on occasion but never really did any actual dancing. I was always in the back row \u2013 and there weren\u2019t enough back rows to hide the inadequacy of my boogie. Lucy, on the other hand, was a spectacular dancer and perfectly suited to the new format, so she soon became the group\u2019s centerpiece, thereby putting her even further out of reach.<\/p>\n

Another equally remarkable thing happened at the same time. You\u2019re a Good Man, Charlie Brown<\/em> refused to die.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t make any sense, really. I had been in L.A. Children\u2019s Choir-produced shows like The Wizard of Oz, Hans Christian Andersen<\/em>, and Tom Sawyer<\/em>, and all of those stayed dead after the final curtain came down. (Okay, they revived The Wizard of Oz<\/em> for Christmas that year, but it died forever after that.) It had been everyone\u2019s understanding that Charlie Brown<\/em> would suffer the same fate. But somehow, it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m very fuzzy on the details. I don\u2019t remember a moment where they decided to bring it back, because it never really went away. The rehearsals just sort of\u2026 continued. We met every week at a scary, dilapidated school on Hollywood Boulevard across the street from Barnsdall Park \u2013 Los Feliz Elementary, to be exact. Necessary modifications to the show were made – the tall and small cast combined into a single cast, and the ensemble of thousands was stripped down to a handful. Our Charlie Brown left for greener pastures, but I had no illusions that I would be picked to replace him. I was Schroeder, and I would remain so indefinitely.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting, though, was that as the Kids of the Century became increasingly cult-like, the Charlie Brown cast became the cult in the center of the cult. There was no need to actually rehearse anything at these rehearsals, which usually degenerated into free-for-alls where we just enjoyed the chance to hang out. (How could they not? We were rehearsing a show we already knew with no performance date in sight.) But Charlie Brown gave us inside access into the inner circle, so we suddenly became the cool kids, even though I was far less cool than most of the other kids by any objective standard.<\/p>\n

The timeline here is very, very fuzzy, but between 1982 and July 13, 1985 \u2013 more foreshadowing, but earlier in the post this time \u2013 we would put on excerpts of the show in school assemblies all across the greater LA area. My Schroederdom wasn\u2019t really a problem, because we never really did any dialogue from the show \u2013 just the big group numbers where everyone more or less had a piece of the action. We got photographed and written up in the paper, and I got to ditch school more than a few times, which is always a good thing.<\/p>\n

Sometime in early 1984, I think, we finally remounted the whole show in a professional setting at the hole-in-the-wall 99-seat Tracy Theatre in beautiful downtown Burbank. The only original cast members left were myself, Lucy, and the small cast Snoopy. We got reviewed by actual newspapers, and, if you take their word for it, the show was actually pretty good by this time. The one weak link, though, was the stringy oaf playing Schroeder.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not an actor anymore for a number of reasons, but I think the seeds of my disillusionment with the acting profession were planted during that Burbank run. It was there that I discovered that acting is not an intellectual exercise, and that, for actors, intelligence is not necessarily an asset.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s somewhat self-serving of me to say that, as I\u2019m happy to blame my poor acting skills on how wicked smart I am. But it wasn\u2019t the fact that I was brilliant- it\u2019s the fact that I thought too much, that I tried too hard. By this point, I felt like I was too old and too tall to be playing on stage with these other kids, and so I overthought every moment. Why am I doing this? Isn\u2019t this silly? Why isn\u2019t this working? Every joke became labored, so I never got laughs. So that led me to overanalyze the whole thing even more, and I ended up giving stilted, lifeless performances.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong. There are many intelligent actors, and some of them are very gifted performers, too. But in order for that to work, they have to find a way to mute the self-critical director\u2019s commentary that runs through their brain every second of every performance. Stupid actors don\u2019t have that commentary running, and so they perform uninhibited, without fear of consequence. That\u2019s one of the reasons why some of the most talented stars of our generation are also mindless boobs when it comes to their positions on the issues of the day. They\u2019re in a profession that rewards the effective bypass of critical thinking.<\/p>\n

Anyway, if this whole trip down memory lane is boring the snot out of you, don\u2019t worry. There\u2019s only one more Charlie Brown story to be told before we get to July 13, 1985\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019rea Good Man, Charlie Brown<\/em> performed for two weekends in June of 1982, one weekend at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Hollywood and one at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley. By all accounts, it was awful, as most of the kids had any idea what they were saying or why it was supposed to ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}