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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
I meet the director and struggle with my biggest question: Will he make me a star? Or will my audition expose me as a fraud?
Mar 14, 2003 | [To read Part 1, click here.]
Sex Therapy Camp
My second day in New York I got my hair cut a few blocks from where I'm staying in TriBeCa. A middle-aged queen with a wicked look had leered cheerfully at me as I made the appointment the previous day. This turned out to be Fenton, who as he cut my hair the next day regaled me with stories about being a sort of proto-radical faerie in Cleveland in the early '70s at a house frequented by Jimi Hendrix -- among other celebrities who are miraculously still alive, so I probably shouldn't name them. What, I asked, was Jimi Hendrix like? The answer came in the form of Fenton's forefingers held about 14 inches apart. "I've been looking for Jimi Hendrix ever since," he said wistfully.
Another habitué of this circle was an extant pop diva, excruciatingly famous in the 1970s, whom Fenton remembered as "that fat hairy cow screaming while she shoved a cucumber up her twat." Fenton -- who in his prior location in Times Square would periodically take 20-minute breaks to entertain the out-of-towners, swishing down the block sporting dark sunglasses, a smoking jacket and a feather boa -- also lustily described the spectacle, witnessed the previous week, of Nicole Kidman carrying her own boxes as she moved into the apartment above the salon. I left my haircut a few hundred dollars poorer but with the sensation of having soaked for three hours in well-aged filth and glamour -- more than my money's worth -- and that with the sounds of 30-year-old starfucking tales reverberating in the room and beating against the impalpable tremors of the new upstairs neighbor unpacking boxes full of marked-up scripts and little golden statuettes, and the simple fact that I was getting the first tax-deductible haircut of my life, I had entered a special psychic and circumstantial realm: pseudo-celebrity's waiting room.
This room is a very strange place -- exciting, scary as hell, possibly related to hell, as limbo is -- right next to it. It's awfully warm in here, though not altogether unpleasant -- the excitement is radiant like a photograph by David LaChapelle, who knows the light and color of pseudo-celebrity's waiting room (the nameless naked model bathed in a golden haze of opium smoke), knows the hues and tones that evoke ineffable bliss, that both blind and elevate those of us crowding the room, sick with hope that we will be chosen.
"Many are called and few are chosen, said the rabbi from Nazareth," Albert Fuller has reminded me so regularly over the past 10 years. As a performing artist and Juilliard teacher for 40 years, he knows what hes talking about. As someone forced from the stage, from music, I unfortunately also know what he's talking about. The homily haunts me; I live in exile from New York, from relevance to the art pulse that animates this city. John Cameron Mitchell has called me here. Will he choose me to stay, or will I fly west a week from now, unchosen one more time? Which is scarier?
Ten minutes past midnight I arrived at the director's second-floor walk-up in the West Village. All the strategic and moral calculations inspired by his invitation were briskly erased as the director extended his hand, gave me a businesslike handshake, and after showing me into the cluttered living room of his one-bedroom apartment, offered me an array of nonalcoholic beverages. I opted for water in a coffee mug, which I managed to spill on the carpet and couch only three times in the next 90 minutes.
Seated beside John Cameron Mitchell on his sofa I had some of the typical responses to meeting a screen actor for the first time -- that is, in addition to repeatedly flinging tap water all over his apartment. He's shorter than I would have imagined. How strange, I thought, that he doesn't walk around his apartment in a blood-stained fur coat and feathered blond wig, making lewd wisecracks and periodically breaking into heavily German-accented heavy metal. But there was also the thrill of recognition, that this was the same voice, the same eyes and sensual lips, the same prominent, virtually equilateral nose. Once or twice Hedwig peered out at me, and winked.
We talked about my fears , particularly the one about the boyfriend and his sudden metamorphosis from audition video assistant director No. 3 to victim of somatic jealousy symptoms. The boyfriend was under the impression, I explained to the director, that as part of the filmmaking process cast members were supposed to become involved with each other, in an extra-professional capacity, to establish a sexual and romantic relationship with them from which to build the movie.
