Annie Liebovitz

            This is the email that started this whole project. I was emailing my friend Gretchen McArthur, who is a photographer, about a friend of ours whom she was to do her headshots. I mentioned that I worked with Annie on February 24, 26 & 27, 2006 on a cover shoot for Vanity Fair as a stand-in for Al Gore. She asked for details. The following is the original email as I sent it to her:

Dear Gretchen,

So what’s it like to work with Annie Liebovitz?

      Pretty damn memorable.

      My antennae were up from the minute that I got the call. You said it yourself; she’s a household name, and a brilliant one at that. That, plus the fact that she was the last photographer to snap John & Yoko before he was shot... well, I wasn’t going to miss this one! I mean, how many times do you get to work with an icon? Gail & I packed my bags and I drove to my Mom’s on Long Island. That made it affordable for me to do the shoot & I got to see Mom for the first time since Christmas.

      I got to the studio on Jane St. early that Friday. That would turn out to be a good thing, as they were sticklers for being on time, something I found out later. The studio had the set for the cover already set up, a brick wall covered in ivy, moss and leaves covering the ground. Another part of the studio was just plain white walls. Since this was Vanity Fair’s Green Issue, they had three or four “green” vehicles around, including George Clooney’s battery powered Tango. Also set up at various places were computer screens. Turns out that this was to be Annie’s first digital session. There were also tables and vertical metal racks with pictures on them, including the cover shots for the Rolling Stones Black and Blue.

      The first thing you notice about Annie is that she’s tall. My height kind of tall, around 6 feet. Her assistant Katherine is also tall. So is her sister Barbara, who was filming a documentary about Annie for American Masters, which will be shown Sept 6^th. The three of them standing together looked like the starting backcourt of a WNBA team. It’s always a bit odd at first, seeing a person you’ve only seen on TV or in a magazine acting like a living breathing human being right before your eyes, but once I got used to it, it was pretty much a day at the office. “Good morning everyone!” ”Good morning Mike!”

      The first day was spent filling out forms (including wavers for the documentary), chatting with my fellow stand ins and people from Cadillac (they had a green SUV on the set, so I asked them about it and, since they were the people that brought that vehicle to the Super Bowl, I asked them about seeing the game and the Stones), getting fitted for clothes and doing some test pictures, both on the set and in the white area.  There were a lot of clothing changes, searching for just the right look. We males had quite a few of those. Our “Julia Roberts” had this dress from Bill Blass that matched the set and the theme, so she stayed consistent. I took the train home to my Mom’s, while “Julia” & “Bobby Kennedy” went off for drinks & making out, according to “Bobby”.

      Monday was more of the same. “Julia”, who was coming in from Jersey, was late due to traffic. Annie couldn’t wait, so her assistant/set dresser Mary Howard stood in for the stand in. It was kind of strange to see Mary in Julia’s dress, holding the cover pose, directing how things should be placed on the set. They sent our first Julia home and got a girl from Ford Modeling Agency named Stacy for the afternoon. Lovely person. Speaks fluent French and is an environmental activist. She made some calls to her activist friends after talking to the inventors of the Tango, who were on set that day. Nice guys with a great product. Check it out at http://www.commutercars.com. She’s also one of the shyest people I’ve met. Case In point: we all shared a dressing room in the back where Joe Z had racks of clothes ready for the shoot. Stacy, Joe Z, myself and a couple of dressers are in the back. Now I’m used to having coed dressing rooms, and I know the etiquette pretty well. Stacy wasn’t, and was quite surprised when I nonchalantly passed behind my back her bra, which was on the table in front of me.  Anyway, when we went back on the set, a new element was added: a baby for “Julia”. I supposed that they were trying for a Mother Nature kind of vibe. It didn’t work and wasn’t used, but the baby was cute and a nice distraction. To get the child to smile his Mom stood in the back, jingled keys and called his name: “Hi, Thor!” Yes, that was the child’s name, like the god of Thunder in Norse mythology. Very strange.

      It was really on Monday that I really got to watch how Annie did things. It reminded me of how I heard Frank Zappa worked, in that she knows what she wants, but allows for happy accidents to occur and incorporates them into the work. If something doesn’t quite happen she doesn’t throw a hissy fit, but she moves on. For instance, she asked the builder of the Tango if one of the back windows could be taken out of it so the four of us could all hang out of the window. Unfortunately, those windows are glued in and cost $10K to replace, being that it isn’t a production car. So the inventor told her “no”. She did ask a couple of times if it could be done, but in the end, she let it go. She also wasn’t afraid to do whatever was needed to get the shot she wanted. I spent some time in a pedal car that had the seat removed while she straddled it, standing on stacks of boxes, snapping away. I must have had to change clothes about 15 times and went through lots of Dippity Doo to give my hair that Al Gore look. She was polite, professional and nice to everyone. We worked up until George & Julia showed up, around 4ish. George is as nice as they say, Julia was shyer than Stacy. No intros were made; in fact, we were supposed to have been out of there already but George & Julia showed up early. We very discretely made our way out of the building.

      Tuesday was the last day, but still full of surprises. We started the day on a tugboat in New York Harbor. It was cold, clear and windy. The tug had no back on it, so when we went into reverse a lot of water came up on the deck. I laughed as the water came up into the knee-high boots I was wearing. Annie’s assistants were struggling to keep all of the electrical items off the deck, to keep them from shorting out. Barbara’s film crew had less trouble, but they kept bumping into Annie’s assistants. My worst fears were realized when the side of my face that had Bell’s palsy literally froze up. I couldn’t move it at all. I was really worried that Annie wasn’t going to get what she wanted. She told me that it was OK; that she got what she wanted. Whew! What a relief! Funnily enough, I had Paul Simon’s American Tune going through my head that entire time. Seemed appropriate
with the Statue of Liberty in my line of sight.

      Back at the studio, we did a final series of shots on the set. Stacy climbed back into Julia’s dress, which for some reason was being held together on one side of her bodice by a row of safety pins. Sort of like “Bill Blass as done by The Sex Pistols”. They weren’t there the day before. Odd.  I had a nicer surprise waiting for me on the computer monitors. Seems that they took the previous night’s shots of George & Julia, put a Vanity Fair logo on it and photo shopped me into it, just to see what it would like. Boy, I wished that I had a copy of that! I did walk away with Annie’s compliments and an autograph on my copy of Rolling Stone (the one with John & Yoko on the cover). She dug me, Vanity Fair was happy with me and Sylvia Fay was happy. I’m surprised that I didn’t fly home, being that I was on Cloud Nine already.

      So that’s my Annie Liebovitz stories. I hope that this answered all of your questions. Maybe someday I’ve have my “what was it like to work with Gretchen McArthur” stories to tell. Later.

Peace and Love,

Mike Russo.

So how does this work?

                After the casting process is complete, all of the casts, playwrights, directors and technical staff are gathered together for a table read. Since we don’t have scripts during the audition process, this is the first time we get to see what we’ll be playing. This is also the first time that we get to meet the rest of the casts and hear what they’ll be working on, meet the playwrights and the support staff at the Playhouse. For me, this being my third time in the NVF, a lot of that night felt a bit like Homecoming. There were about 6 of us that have been doing the Festival each of its three editions, and it was great to see some familiar faces in this crowd of strangers. It was also nice to see an entire room well-stocked with tables full of goodies for us to nosh on while we’re listening to the other plays.

                Once plates and cups are filled, new people are met and old relationships are rekindled, we go to our seats and open up the binder that holds all of the scripts.  Some are comedies, some are fairly Avant garde, some serious. The play I worked on was called “Stalling” by Katherine Prybish. It’s a two character play about a brother and sister who are trying to decide whether or not to take their mother off of life support. It was probably the most serious work performed in the Festival. Katherine is in her 20’s, and it was ironic that we had works by older playwrights about millennials who never get their heads out of their phones, and she comes up with this very deep piece of work that sounds like it could’ve come from someone much older. I settled into my seat, next to my scene mate Sue Murphy and across from the playwright and our director, Jean Brenner, who I’d worked with in my very first show in the first NVF (I was playing an angry Latino, and Jean said to me “I want them to hate you.” Well, whatever I did worked, because they sure hated my ass by the end of the night!).

                Now, my attitude towards table reads is to give as much of a performance as I can when we’re reading, even if I’ve never seen the script before, and so it was that night (I’d also heard stories about how Jack Nicholson scared the cast of “A Few Good Men” by really bringing  his character to life at their table read, and I like the idea of bringing the cat amongst the pigeons, almost daring the other casts to top what we’re bringing to ours). I also find that my performance in a first read tends to be the least guarded and most honest, occasionally surprising me with a “Where did THAT come from?” moment. I didn’t have any surprises, but I thought we gave a good read. Jean taped our part of the read, which was a nice template for what we were to build on through rehearsals.

                The rehearsal schedule was fairly brief: only five rehearsals over a few weeks to get ten pages under our belts. In previous years I wouldn’t worry about it, as we were doing staged readings, i.e. with scripts in our hands. This year, everyone was to memorize their parts, no paper crutches to lean on. Because I’ve got two jobs, I had to wedge in time to memorize this stuff, so I wound up working on the script during lunch breaks, before bed, over my breakfast, etc. Sue Murphy got a lot more done than I did, or so it seemed to me, so I pushed myself harder.

                All that being said, rehearsals went pretty well. All four of us worked very well together. Jean directed us as needed, allowing us fairly free reign as far as blocking was concerned. Katherine liked what Sue & I were doing, tweaking the script only in a couple of spots (the characters were originally conceived as being in their late 20’s, and Sue and I could generously be considered as being in our EXTREMELY late 20’s!). Sue came in with such good stuff to play off of, and it was a lot of fun to work on the brother/sister shorthand way of communicating with her. As for me, I went from having the script in my hand to seeing it on the table if I’d needed it, to keeping it in my bag in fairly short order. All in all, a fairly fuss free creative process.

                OK, OK, there was one Sunday rehearsal that I wasn’t quite up to snuff. It was a long week for me at my Hideous Survival Job, and Sundays are usually when I repay my sleep debt. I didn’t get a chance to do that, so my performance was a bit on the flat side. So much so that our director, in an attempt to get more life out of me, had me at one point sing my lines, using a different note for each word. Consequently, I sounded like I was doing an overlong melisma that had no real tonal center. I did, however, have a bit of fun with that process, using Elvis Costello’s “Allison” every time I had to say my sister’s name, but I did resent having to do it at the time. Once I’d gotten home and gotten a nap, I’d felt a lot better, but that was the only real rough patch.

                One of the best compliments we’d gotten as a cast happened during the first rehearsal. Jean, as I’d said earlier, had taped the table read, and we spent part of the first rehearsal listening to what we’d done. John Augustine happened to drift through our rehearsal room at that moment, and he thought that Jean was playing for us some other cast doing our show, hinting that we should be doing it their way. He seemed a bit put out for us, until he’d realized that it was US we were listening to. Made me smile when I figured out what was going on.

               All that's left to talk about now is Tech Week, which I'll do next time.

In praise of the New Voices Festival, Part 1

             

Branch Rickey, the man who successfully integrated major league baseball by bringing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, also has another, earlier innovation to his credit. When he was president of the Saint Louis Cardinals, he discovered that the club didn’t have the funds to compete for talent against richer ball clubs like the New York Yankees. Rather than trying to vie for talent with money that they didn’t have, he decided to grow his own talent, and thus was born the farm system, which every single major league team uses to this day. How appropriate is it then, especially in a county that has a viable farming community, that the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, PA has, in effect, developed its own farm system for nurturing talent? The revitalized theatre has made it part of his mission to feature new works during its season, and has also, through its Education programs, given exposure to playwrights through their New Voices Festival.

                This year (2016) was the third one for the NVF, my third year participating in it, and I’ve loved dong it each time. Why? Well, they actually hired me for one, which earns them some Brownie points right off the bat, but I can tell you that every year has been one of the best experiences I’ve ever had on stage, certainly the most varied. In three years I’ve played an angry Latino, a frustrated, silent waiter, a surgeon operating on a cat’s paw in the middle of the night, a theatre maintenance man, a college professor, one of a pair of siblings deciding on the fate of their mother, and done the background bit in a couple of plays that needed bodies. What’s more, there are no egos on display when we’re putting this on. The spirit of cooperation and fun permeates even the most serious work, and the audiences, which have grown from a hardy bunch of theatre fans to near sellout crowds, are finding the NVF to be a night of rich and varied stage experiences.

                So what accounts for the success, camaraderie and good times that the NVF has given me? It all starts and ends with the two people primarily responsible for bringing the festival to life: Hester Kamin and John Augustine.

                Hester and John. John and Hester. I can’t imagine, after this many years, one without the other, as both are essential to the equation that is New Voices. I met them both at that first casting call in 2014, braving a dark, rainy night on my way to NY to stop off in Lambertville to show them what I had. Together they find the right actors for the right roles and the right mix of plays that will work together for that night, with results that have been pitch perfect each season.

                While they work together very well, separately each brings a distinct set of skills to the project that complement and enhance one another. John, who is listed in the program as Playwriting Mentor and Instructor, takes the ten scripts that wind up getting chosen for the Fest and, with the authors, works them into shape so that when the actors sit down at the table read to give voice to these works for the first time, they are as close to complete as possible. He knows that a good show starts with a good script, and he makes sure that what we have in front of us is as good as it can be.

                Hester is New Voices’ Mother Superior. It’s Hester who coordinates the schedules of ten small productions, with some nights seeing six shows drift through the three rehearsal rooms in Lambertville. She’s the one who deals with each of the show’s technical issues (props, lighting, sound effects, costumes, etc.), getting the program together, having food in the green room, planning the cast party…there’s nothing that escapes her attention, and all of the shows are better for it. She, John and our stage manager Ellen Gallos also drift in and out of rehearsals to see how the plays are shaping up, ready to offer encouragement and advice when necessary and needed.

The Family Xmas letter, 2014 Edition

December, 2014

Dear Family and Friends,

            Those of you who receive these annually will probably agree with me when I say that I’m not exactly one to sugarcoat what’s happening in my family’s life. Oh sure, I’ll feed you the sweet stuff when I have it to tell, but I’m not exactly shy about serving bitter herbs when that’s all I’ve got to offer. The problem I have every year is to serve up a balanced meal of updates that, once consumed, will leave those whom we have invited to this party happily sated and wanting to come back for more. If the feedback I’ve gotten over the years is any indication, I seem to have found a way to keep you coming back to the table, and I hope that this year’s party is to your liking.

            Twenty Fourteen started with more than a little sense of déjà vu, feeling a lot more like 2013 than it should have. January found me still at the survival job I had taken, auditions and actual acting work having all but dried up. Gail kept busy with the Girl Scouts Historical Committee as well as helping out at the church whenever they needed an extra set of hands. She also became Tina’s way to get to classes at Bucks County Community College, as mass transit from Doylestown to that institution doesn’t exist. We continued to struggle to make ends meet, to live and not just survive, and hoped for the best.

            As the year went on, it became clear that things were going to be different. Tina thrived at BCCC, so much so that she made the Phi Theta Kappa honor society. Gail & I enjoyed her induction ceremony, as this bunch of wisenheimers took their oath as if they were reenacting a scene from “Animal House” (“I, state your name” intoned the group in unison). She’s also kept up with her fencing and even went to Pennsic, a two week gathering of over ten thousand members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, something she hadn’t done since she was little. She has also started making the connections that will help her when she gets into the working world and tries to be a set designer. The new school year found her building on the success of the previous year, surprising herself at times (a 4.0 GPA as of this writing), and genuinely having a good time. Different, and better.

            Gail has found herself with opportunities to use her talents in ways that have left those around her duly impressed. She has been building medieval garb for years, but when Tina’s fencing group needed some special garb built, she rose to the occasion. So much so that when others in the group saw her work, they wanted her to build stuff for them. At the same time, her origami boxes caught the notice of those who appreciate the unique and beautiful, including Peter Yarrow, who we gave one to when he was in town for a book signing. She has also found herself organizing the volunteers at church, gently coaxing people to fill in when no one has signed up to be a worship assistant, reader, acolyte, etc. Different, and better still.

            Princess The Big Fuzzy Dog made it to twelve, and her hips are starting to give her grief. Walks that would take up to thirty minutes at times now take five minutes at the most, as she’s not inclined to move around much. Our bearded dragon, Falkor, passed away, and about a month later we adopted another beardie, Mushu. This one is a very lively critter by comparison, and Tina enjoys having her in her room. Again, different.

            Things were also different for me, but not in a positive way (at least not at first). As I said, I was still at the survival job, not earning enough to end the bleeding of our savings into the bills. Our ancient boiler/water heater decided to give up the ghost, and we had to put together the financing to replace it and redo the boiler and laundry rooms, merging them into one, saving us on our heating bills and making it easier to do the laundry without having to go into the garage to do it.

            At the same time the number of auditions I was getting slowed down, and I stopped putting in for background jobs that had descriptions like “non-descript” or “with car”, feeling that if I’m gonna be in the background, I will be something specific, like a doctor, lawyer or musician. Consequently, I barely worked all year. Finally, I got some steady work on an HBO mini-series, “Show Me A Hero”, as a stand-in for Alfred Molina. As of this writing I’ve put in 12 days and have learned a lot on both the acting side and the production side. That’s something, I suppose.

            So we find ourselves, facing the end of one year and on the cusp of another, surveying what has gone past. We’re not where we thought we’d be in some regards, and have moved forward in ways we hadn’t anticipated. We’ve rejoiced with friends and family in their happiness, and mourned their losses as if they happened to us. The future is, as always, uncertain, but we live in a hope nurtured by faith and an inbred stubbornness to make things better. Maybe this time next year, we’ll be able to have a letter that’s a more positive read than the last few. Until then, we wish you all a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and nothing but the best for each and every one of you in the days, weeks and months to come.

                                                                                                            Peace and Love,

                                                                                                Gail, Mike, Tina, Princess & Mushu  

I’ve got to admit, it’s getting better.                                                                                                 A little better all the time (can’t get no worse)

-John Lennon & Paul McCartney   

This year's family Christmas Letter

December 2013

Dear Friends and Family,
We had such hopes for 2013. Really, we did. New Year’s Day looked full of possibilities for us, and I truly thought that we would be in better places professionally, financially and personally. As the pages on the calendar turned, however, reality more than once came up and bit us, laughing demonically as it did so.

So what do you do when your best-laid schemes don’t turn out exactly the way you’d hoped?

You put your head down and keep going.  

In January, I had to face facts: no one was hiring me to have words come out of my mouth, and very few people were hiring me to do background work, aka “being a meat prop”, so I looked for some straight work. The best I could come up with was a part time job that put me back onto a retail sales floor for the first time in over a decade, and the best that I can say about this job is that my legs got really toned and I lost 10 lbs. Their health plan, which I will lose come 2014, didn’t cover much, and my “holiday bonus” was a coupon for 30% off selected items and 10% off of other items in the store, which wound up being worth $8.50. I did get an agent in NY, and they’ve sent me on over a dozen auditions this year, but no bookings yet. So between the day job, borrowing from every conceivable place I could think of, and the rare bird known as an acting gig, it’s been tough.

I keep going.

Tina’s first year of college wasn’t exactly going according to plan, either. While she really didn’t like all of the mechanical engineering work she had to do, she really loved working at the campus theatre, doing behind the scenes stuff and making friends. With her college not wanting her back until her grades were more to their liking, she decided that a change of direction was in order. Starting this September, Tina is attending a local community college, pursuing her dream to be a theater set designer. It’s still a bit of a slog for her, but her grades and her attitude are a lot more positive, and she got some on hand experience helping Town & Country Players with one of their productions.  

She keeps going.

Though it all, Gail remained active with church, the SCA (taking Tina to fencing practice, for instance) and the Girl Scouts Historical Committee while trying to come up with ways to keep us from totally going under. She did this while simultaneously dealing with the unresolved physical and legal issues stemming from her car accident, now stretching into its ninth year, and with her parents and grandmother, living in Florida but desperately needing her help, as their lives spun into chaos arising from their declining physical and mental abilities. She made a trip down to Florida in May to see them and try to make some sense of what was happening to them.

She kept going.

Things started coming to a head in August. By this time, Gail’s Mom had been put in an assisted living facility. Gail’s Dad, Harvey Biggs, passed away August 14th, and as of this writing she and her siblings are still trying to sort out their business (I myself cancelled almost $200 in magazine subscriptions that they had taken out). In September, the attorney handling Gail’s accident told us that a final financial settlement from the insurance company was imminent, and we received that cheque in December. Finally, Gail’s Grandmother, Helen Winterhalter, passed away on December 8th at the age of 101. With their passing there will surely be more things to deal with than we thought we would have to, but we now have some breathing room financially, and having that cushion brought more smiles now than we’ve had in a while.

Not that it’s been exactly doom & gloom 24/7. The outpouring of support from our friends, both online and in person, regarding both Harvey & Helen’s passing have been tremendous. My own Mom is still going strong, albeit slower, but that’s to be expected. Janice calls us every so often, and between those calls and her Facebook postings we can see that she’s thriving, which we love. While we have no direct contact with our 4-year-old grandson Zachary from either Kate or his father, the occasional You Tube video we catch and the annual pictures sent by his other grandparents let us see that he’s growing and thriving. Would we want more contact? Absolutely, but we take what we can get.

So we end 2013 a bit more battle scarred than when we started, but in some ways better able to handle adversity that comes our way. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re less afraid of what might be lurking behind every tree. So to you, dear friend, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and whatever you do...

Keep going.



Peace & Love,




Gail, Mike, Tina, Princess & Falkor

“Courage is fear that has said its prayers.”- Anne Lamott

Only a test

Can anyone see this? http://youtu.be/0GNbeG5IzJk

When?

The whole reason behind doing this blog was to talk about things that happen to me while I work as a background actor on various film & television projects. For some reason, people like to hear about what happens on these sets and to hear what the famous actors are really like. I must admit that I enjoy the attention, and I'm always excited to work on something good, and I hope that I convey some of that to whoever is listening.

I didn't want to spend the rest of my life as a background actor. The next step was to actually get paid to speak lines. I'd go on auditions and never book anything. Theater, film, television, you name it, they didn't want me. The only principle work I've ever gotten as a SAG Actor was when I thought that I should've been upgraded on "Morning Glory". One of these days I'll write the full story about it, but the bottom line is that I had to complain for six months before I actually got the upgrade. Nobody was exactly chomping at the bit to offer me a role,and four years later, that hasn't changed.

Getting paid theater work was worse. I auditioned for a production of "I Love My Wife" at the Montgomery Theater, playing bass and acting, and thought I'd done OK. I got a call a few days later from Tom Quinn, the director, while I was in Port Authority waiting for the bus to come home form some audition. The first thing he asked me was "Why did you pick that song?" that I auditioned with. Strange question, I thought. Over the course of the conversation, Tom told me that 1) I could sing but I'm not a singer, 2) my acting shows no training and 3) I'm a heavy handed bass player. I had to do a major sell job in order to get cast. Once I did, he gave my song and a bunch of my lines to another actor. At least the other theaters were kinder when they didn't hire me. I didn't have to endure the humiliation of having my lines farmed out to the rest of the cast.

At some point, you have to ask yourself if the dream you're pursuing is gonna happen. You look at what's gone on in your life, particularly at the kind of work you're doing, and you have to make an assessment based on what's really happening, not on what you hope would happen, what you would like to have happen or what your fondest dreams are. You wake up after a few years thinking you're on the right track, but you're not. You're just another delusional fool, a marginal talent who thought that he was more than he really was.

I've taken a look at my so-called career, and here's what I saw. No principle work over the past four years. Revenue flat from last year. I've submitted for hundreds of roles over the past few years, and I've only booked background parts. The only time people want me in a speaking part is when no money will change hands. The only survival job I can land is part time at a pay rate barely above minimum wage. I can't make any of my bills without help, and if I try to refinance my mortgage, banks say no because they can't reconcile the debt-to-income ratio. Not exactly a bright future.

What makes things worse are the well meaning friends who say things like "Oh, you're so talented!" " What a wonderful voice!" "I'm sure something will happen for you!" They don't know how much that hurts. I've been hearing things like that all my life: from teachers who had really high expectations of me, from people who have absolutely no clue about what's really going on.

I don't think God wants me to do this. I think God wants me to be what I am: a nameless, faceless entity, destined to be nothing more than a clerk in a store, shovelling out low priced product to the uneducated, the inbred, the addicted and the illegal. The only success I've ever had was working in retail, and maybe that's where I belong.

Funny. I'd always hoped for more.