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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Wherein I learn that it's not a good idea to teach your mother how to Google and that good chamber music is like doing it onstage.
Mar 18, 2003 | The night before this diary went live on Salon, I started sounding the alarm. First I e-mailed a heads-up to my employers at an online newsroom where hyperlinks to things like Salon serials are forwarded with hyperactive efficiency. Then I poured myself a stiff drink and dialed my mother's number.
This was not our first conversation about the Sex Film Project. I had given her a vague explanation of my New York audition after being invited here, then received an e-mail from her assuring me that she knew I was an adult, but that she had just searched on Google for John Cameron Mitchell and was extremely concerned about what she'd read on his Web site.
Never teach your mother how to Google.
My next line of defense, after vagueness, was hagiography. Listen, Mom, I said, John Cameron Mitchell is an extremely accomplished and brilliant actor. He was totally amazing in "The Destiny of Me" and "Six Degrees of Separation" (a stretch on my part, as I never saw either play). Had she seen "Hedwig"? My straight roommate, a grown man in his middle-late 30s, blasts the soundtrack in his room until even I can barely stand to hear any more of it. And then there was that girl at Tower who, when I rented the "Hedwig" DVD, volunteered the story of seeing the director having drinks on the balcony of a Market Street bar, and hollering up to him at the top of her lungs, "Hey, John Cameron Mitchell -- YOU ROCK!" Look, Mom, I said reasonably, this isn't some sleaze-bag pornographer. He's the voice of a generation. OK, so it's a sleazy generation. But in addition to all his professional qualifications, he is a mensch.
How I knew this about JCM at that point I'm not entirely sure. I suppose hearing him interviewed on the radio and also thinking that his commentary on the "Hedwig" DVD revealed his lucidity, the benign self-possession hidden under Hedwig's lacerating tranny wit. But I also knew it a decade ago, just from that cover photo of "The Destiny of Me," because an expression of such generosity of spirit couldn't be summoned by even the greatest actor if he didn't possess it himself.
Even if my mother bought my pitch that JCM was a saint among sinners, however, I had the additional problem that the first episode would spell out for her exactly what it is that I've been writing about these past two years. This seemed like the kind of bomb one had to drop personally.
"It's a book sort of based on -- well, pretty exactly based on an affair I had with this couple who resembled you and Dad." I swallowed hard. "It's this whole sort of self-parodying, Freudian excavation thing. Kind of."
"Oedipus Schmedipus," she replied. "A boy should love his mother."
Having survived that confession, I turned to the last one on my list -- the married couple. They were even less nonplussed than my mother. "Cool," said the husband. "When do you find out if you get the part?"
I don't actually know the answer to that question. The process of casting and making this movie is shrouded in some mystery, not least because, as the filmmakers are quick to acknowledge, they're pretty much making it up as they go along. The rough idea was to submit the casting call via the Web site, audition New Yorkers first, and then mix them up with us out-of-towners, cull a handful of actors from that group to participate in a monthlong workshop in the spring, and send the director away to write a script based on the material derived from the workshop. Filming is scheduled for the fall.
That broad outline left plenty of ambiguity. The filmmakers have scheduled six days of social and professional events this week, but which is which? Take the first official event in what they are somewhat lewdly calling Action Week (I had to ask whether this was some theatrical term of art, which it isn't) -- JCM's Wednesday night club in the West Village called Shortbus, "a sweaty teenage dance party for the socially challenged." We were asked to show up at 9 p.m., an hour before the general public was admitted, for an hour of Sex Project-only drinking. Then "the largest game of spin the bottle you've ever played" was scheduled for midnight. Manning the DJ booth afterward would be JCM as his alter ego, DJ Dear Tick ("You're gonna have to burn me out!").
