The people in the audience were just local folks who loved to hear good stories. I was now a 62-year old successful adult in another time and place with nothing to prove to anyone - except to myself of course. There would be no Hollywood agents in the audience looking to discover the next Jim Carrey. I was no longer a scared kid in Hollywood trying to prove myself. That evening, when I got to the Story Project theater I started to relax. The emotional wound from the comedy club failures was very real and present. But in my gut I felt like a struggling 24-year old actor. In my mind I knew that my streaking story was one of my best stories and that it had worked in front of hundreds of corporate and association audiences. I finally realized that those comedy club experiences had created an emotional wound that had never healed.īut it made no sense. The fear of stepping onto that stage and telling the same story in almost the same environment, was making me crazy. I was getting all plugged in to the emotional states that I had experienced so often in Hollywood. It looked exactly like one of the clubs where I’d bombed in Hollywood.ĭuring the day, I noticed that I was starting to panic. And there it was, the stage with the microphone on a stand and the brick wall. In fact, the revelation and analysis of how I told that story became the foundation for The Story Theater Method.įast forward to December 13, 2012, the day before I was to present the streaking story for The Story Project. I was doing some research by watching a You Tube video of people telling their stories onstage in the Story Project theater. It's a story that's brought me countless speaking engagements and more that a million dollars in revenue. I discovered how to tell my streaking story so well that it became the one story I could always count on for laughs. It wasn't that the story wasn't funny, I just didn't know how to tell it. It was hilarious and the audience howled with laughter. But this time, I wasn't in a comedy club and I wasn't trying to be funny. I hadn't planned on telling it, it just happened. Life moved on and 17 years later after I'd left Hollywood, as I was speaking to a small audience in a meeting room in a public library, I told my streaking story. It had left a mark on my psyche, a wound. I decided that I'd never try stand-up again. I tried to use that story as comedy material at five different clubs before I gave up. I tried it again at another comedy club and once again, no one laughed. When it was my turn, I stepped up to the mic told my streaking story. It was the typical comedy club stage with a microphone on a stand and a red or brown brick wall in the background. I had a funny story.Ī couple of weeks after the streaking experience, I went to an “open mike” night at a comedy club. After getting arrested naked, I felt like I had something funny to work with. I even had the bow tie and dorky glasses to complete the look.Īll of my friends told me that because I was so funny, I should try stand-up comedy, but I never felt that I had any good material. I was a character actor and had become really good at acting the nerd. In other words, I was the funny one, the one who got the laughs. The cops took it very seriously.Īs an actor, I usually played the part of the comic relief. As it turned out, we not only went streaking, we were ambushed by some overly zealous cops and got arrested…naked. So my partner and I decided to go streaking. The year was 1974, during the height of the streaking craze. It had to be a risk, something outside of our comfort zone. The task was to find a partner and then go out into the surrounding community and do something we would never do. One night we did an exercise called Outer Theater. ![]() Over 44 years ago, when I was a young actor in Hollywood, I joined an experimental theater company. The theme for the evening was Actors, and because I was a professional actor for 16 years in Chicago and Hollywood, I was invited to tell a story. This is the the story of how telling a story healed a deep and painful emotional wound.īack in 2012 I participated in a local evening of storytelling called The Story Project. But why? The story I was going to tell at a local comedy club was one I'd been telling for over 15 years. ![]() I got more and more nervous and upset as the day progressed. I was starting to panic and I didn't understand why.
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