The Play’s The Thing

I am not a homosexual, but I play one on TV. I can readily guess how this came to be, as I am told I am roughly handsome in a way that could appeal to persons of either sex, and I am a pretty damn good actor. In any event, my agent called me in one cool dry Autumn day and told me he had what could be a really good opportunity with some definite possible long term potential. OK? I said, what are we talking about, I asked and he mentioned a well known day time drama, also known as a soap opera, had I heard of it? Schmuck -- a word I certainly knew before I met him but he helped me to understand what a useful word it was – of course I had heard of it, what actor, what actress in a big city market didn’t spend enough time at home during the day to not have become familiar with all the daytime programming?

He was in the middle of lunch, I took a couple of potato chips as he pushed half a sandwich of some sort of salad on rye, chicken or tuna or turkey, it was hard to tell, especially as he had been smoking a cigar in the office before I came in and for all I knew it could have just been a mix of mayo and chopped celery and onions.

I pushed it back to him and said no thanks, I’m fine… I have learned to not meet with your agent on an empty stomach. So what kind of role are we talking about? Well, let me tell you about it… I leaned back and looked around the office as he took a swig from a bottle of seltzer. I had done this many times and could from memory describe most of the many photos and caricatures that mostly covered the higher part of the walls, his grandfather had been a moderately successful small-time agent when people still worked in vaudeville and burlesque and the theater, Jews and Irish and Germans and Italians and a few Blacks who sang and juggled and did humorous patter and did speciality dance numbers, and his father had also been a moderately successful agent when many people who had worked in vaudeville and burlesque and the theater had begun to try to move to television while still working off-Broadway and the Catskills and what was left of live programs, and “Marv Katz, Agent to the Stars” (so it said on the brass plate mounted at eye level on the outside of his office door) managed to carry on the family practice in so far as he represented some people like me who actually managed to work in show business on a regular basis, along with a larger number people of who worked regularly work while waiting for that big opportunity that usually never came about.

Well, he said, here’s the thing, here’s why it could be such a big break for you… they tell me, no they practically promised me you’d be on the show at least four times a week, with some good appearances at least three times a week… one of the producers said he saw you in that off-Broadway show you were in for a couple of weeks last year, (actually ten weeks up to the end of January, where I played a pimp who drank too much and who’d become too infatuated with one of his girls) and you’d play a guy who’s, you know, he’s kind of a tortured soul, he’s a good looking successful guy in the fashion world who’s trying to… trying to find himself in an… you know, an uncaring, no, an insensitive world, you know, who –

And I casually sat up and said – and this is a word I know to only use in certain circumstances, like when talking to Marv – you mean he’s, what do you call it, a fageleh..? and he looked at me like he was oh so disappointed that I used a word that he sometimes seemed to use like he would use grated cheese at an Italian restaurant on all you could eat night when he was talking about certain well known celebrities, and he said, look, it’s not our place to judge people who, you know…

Yeah, ok, I don’t really care what other people do, I said, but do they expect me to just play a role or really be that role? I wouldn’t object to playing a rapist but I’m not going to –

Oh, no, I don’t think so –

OK, look, can you set up a meeting with the producer or whoever? You can tell them I am definitely interested in the part (like any actor would turn down a steady role on a television series.) And he sat up, the scent of his percent suddenly in his nose, and said, yeah, sure, this week, maybe not today but as soon as I can, they asked about you by name, so I think it’s practically a done deal almost, you know? He paused to shove a handful of chips in his mouth and took long swing from the seltzer bottle. You know, what, I have someone coming in in about twenty minutes, but I’ll try and get him on the phone right after, he’s a good guy, I know him, we’re practically like this, he said as he held up his hand and crossed two fingers. And he pulled a desk drawer opened, grabbed and slid a shot bottle of good vodka across the desk and took a swig from another shot bottle and washed it down with a slurp from the bottle of whatever he was drinking with his something salad sandwich. I’ll set it up and let you know when they want you to come in. Trust me, it’s gonna be a really good deal for the both of us, you know? Both of us.


It was a good deal for me, probably for Marv, too, he could sometimes be a jerk but generally he worked hard for his clients and was basically a very decent guy, and he’d gotten me a fair number of jobs and roles, two other off-Broadway dramas and a comedy and a small part in a Broadway show that unfortunately folded rather quickly and some one-time roles on some prime time programs, even a spot on a crime series pilot that wasn’t picked up, but a regular spot on a soap opera was still like a stand-up comic getting a role on a prime-time sit-com: steady work and a good check every week without worrying about the following week.

So Marv actually called me the next day, from the sound of it he had some bim in his office who expected him to find her a job doing something or other that could be described as being in show business (I later found out she sometimes worked the strip clubs but he’d actually gotten her a few acting jobs, mostly in second rate mad killer movies), and told me the details, you got a pencil, ready, who what where when and don’t forget who got you this when you make the big time, right, ha ha. Agent is as agent does.

You would know the name of the soap opera if you paid attention to that sort of thing, but to make a long story short, there are two kinds of day time soaps, the long running ones and the ones that run for a while and sooner or later disappear. No one can explain why some run for years and others fade away sooner or later, except that they tend to all look and sound the same; if you have a role on one, you are goddam grateful that it runs long enough for you to be invited to leave and join a night-time series that also has a long run.

So I had a lovely sit-down with the casting director and a couple of other people, and we ate hor d’oevres and drank wine spritzers as they tried to explain this new character to me: young, handsome, a successful young man in the fashion world in New York, but he is struggling with his homosexual desires. I said it was okay with me, so long as I am playing the part of a homosexual, not… they looked at me as I paused to think about what to say to make my point. Oh, don’t worry, you won’t really need to, you know, really get into the role.

Look, I said, I would really like this part, it would be a great chance for me to shine as an actor, but I am not going to get half naked and roll around in bed with another guy –

Oh, no, we understand that you might –

And to be really honest with you, I can’t say I would want to even kiss another guy… and I could see that they were not quite sure how to respond, so I said, look, there are a lot of actors who would jump at this role, and I think you know that, but the fact that you got in touch with my schmuck of an agent – one of the writers suddenly laughed out loud – my agent tells me that you really wanted me for this role… maybe because one of you saw me in that off-Broadway production of –

Yes, someone who I later found out was the creator of the show, she had seen the show with one of the producers, you handled that role beautifully and we thought you would be perfect in this role. Barry, we can work our way around his concerns, can’t we..?

Certainly, Amanda, we can make it work for everyone. I got the feeling that Barry would have almost gladly given up several years of his old age if he could just once push Amanda down a flight of stairs. She turned out to be a very nice woman, by the way, a bit gaudy in appearance (as we were talking to each other, a very attractive redhead was touching up her makeup) but had at least an occasional encouraging word for everyone on the show, pretty much everyone on the show liked her; I later found out that Barry was a relative and he had that ass-backward resentment that sometimes comes from getting a big break from a relative.


Allow me to say that I enjoyed working on the show quite a lot and all things considered I would most likely have chosen to stay there if someone hadn’t decided to write my character out; apparently it was decided that my character was offered a lucrative opportunity to become a costume designer in Hollywood, with a strong hint that I might be invited to return to the show in the future, which in this kind of television series means everything and nothing. In other words, the writers thought that my character had for the time being outlived his usefulness. I certainly took it as a good sign when Amanda stopped me as I was leaving on my last day, she smiled in a way as she casually waved a finger in front my nose and told me that she thought I was very talented and then smiled as she pinched one of my earlobes.

It was all okay with me, although Marv proceeded to act as if the producers had accused me of rape, embezzlement, and espionage.

I can’t believe this! he barked at me when I dropped by his office the morning after my last day on the show. How the hell could they suddenly decide to write out your character, a real mensch of a fegeleh, he said while vigorously gesturing with one hand while shoving what looked like a pastrami sandwich in his mouth with the other.

I shrugged, I said that we both kind of knew that it might not be a long term commitment from the show and anyway how long could I play a homosexual who doesn’t really act like a homosexual? Not the point, he said, not the point, you were great in the role, I made myself watch the show a couple of times and I thought you were great!

But let me forget about Marv for the time being and mention Amy. The first day on the set, I had a good two scenes in the show that day and was in the chair getting some touch up from that attractive redhead who was working on Amanda’s makeup the first day I went in for the casting meeting, and she said to me, so, are we Cuban or Italian? And I said, well, my father is half Cuban and my mother is – no no, silly, and I could see her make a smiling but doubtful face in the mirror as she playfully tugged at one of my sideburns, I mean your character – the up and coming fashion designer who was such a sensation at the City Center fashion show last fall, Lorenzo da Ponte, is that Italian or Cuban or Spanish or what?

I looked over my shoulder at her. Your name? Amy, Amy Bertone. Blue eyes and red hair, very good looking, I thought for the second time. Well, I said, my father is half Cuban and I have some Italian and Irish ancestry, but no one here told me that I was any of the above. Let’s say half Cuban and half Italian, does that work for you?

Absolutely, she said, fits you very well, and she again tugged at one of my sideburns.

I liked her. On the other hand, I found the director who handled the first scene I was in to be unnecessarily overbearing. I understand that the director is basically in charge but he is also supposed to maybe listen to suggestions from others and not generally act like a tone deaf know-it-all. Let me rephrase myself. The director is not supposed to be a schmuck. This guy was telling me how to put my hands on my hips and how high to hold up my head and just how to purse my lips. Maybe he was just playing with me because it was my first day on the show, but I almost expected in the second scene I had that he would tell me which foot to first enter the door on and which hand to put in which pocket.  I would later commiserate with a few of the other performers about this, and one simply looked at me with a shrug and practically whispered at me “Amanda’s nephew…” At this point I decided that I would do my scenes as I saw fit and if the nephew gave me a hard time I would remind Amanda that she said she really liked the way I had handled that role in that off-Broadway play…

So, the story line as it involved me was that one of the older female characters was dying and she had a son, and they had never managed to deal with his sexuality, and now that she was dying, he showed up on the scene and they were trying to reconcile. The actual line was that she had been on the show for quite a few years and now wanted to retire and maybe do some other roles in prime-time or maybe on stage and maybe just spend a lot of time relaxing and enjoying the rest of her life. I was told that when she was reminded that a character can go away on a long vacation but really can’t come back from the dead, she just smiled and shrugged. As it was, her leaving the soap got a fair amount of coverage in the newspaper gossip pages and the tabloid mags and tv shows, and two months later she was on one of the prime time crime dramas, hamming it up on the witness stand about how her husband was dying and in such pain and she wanted to put him out of his misery, and she stopped hamming it up at the end when the character was asked about that huge insurance policy she was going to collect on. (I wrote her a note that to me it was a three and a half out of five stars performance, and she wrote back that I wouldn’t know a star if it bit me on my taut muscular backside you naughty boy and my performance in the scene on the soap when she died impressed the hell out of her when she saw it, much love & best wishes, your mother, Evelyn.)

But I had a good seven week run on the soap, and Marv ruined my plans for a vacation by letting me know that he had found me another part in another off-Broadway show. I am told that I was quite convincing as the violently alcoholic son of a very strict minister and his very depressed wife. The show ran for six weeks, but before it was over, I got a call from Amy, whom I had been sort of seeing from time to time and who told me over a dinner at a Greek restaurant that she had heard rumors that Amanda wanted me back on the soap, they just hadn’t yet figured out an angle. I thought I had seen Amanda in the audience one night; I couldn’t be certain, but I thought she kind of liked me. So with a break in my career I went to the airport with my passport and a couple of hundred dollars and a credit card in my pocket and a change of clothes and a camera in a carry-on and booked a flight to Paris. A few days there, a few days in Madrid, a few days in Naples and Rome. I could almost swear that the air in every city had a different good effect on me.

I felt very refreshed when I got back to Manhattan with a few gifts for a few people and dropped in on Marv to say hello and give him a bottle of sweet liquor I’d bought while in Rome. Schmuck, he almost hollered, where the hell have you been, I’ve been calling you all week! I took some time off, I said, I think I earned a vacation, I did some travelling in Europe… Have you ever been to Rome? It’s –

Who cares, taking a vacation doesn’t pay any bills, you’re lucky you didn’t get robbed! You want a vacation, go to the Catskills for a week, meet a nice girl or two, lots of women go there looking for a guy like you! So, what do you want from me, I said, and he calmed down – I believe his rant was just an agent’s act, and if it wasn’t I didn’t care – and replied, the soap wants you back.

We had another drink from the shot bottles and fifteen days later I was back on the show. Amanda and Barry had come to see me in the drama I did after I left the soap and she wanted me back. Let me remind you that New York City is almost overrun with actors and actresses who would do almost anything to get a steady role on any television program, so it really was flattering that she wanted me back on the show, but the problem was how to bring back my character. Let me rephrase that. It was easy enough to bring me back because my mother on the show had rewritten her will and I had come back to collect an inheritance, etc etc, but that can only carry a story line so far, maybe a few weeks, and even then only a few paragraphs in a story line. So… after some, no, after many story conferences, it was decided that I would come back for the inheritance, but they would then twist me into a position as a costume designer for a big deal producer in NYC and there was a brother (or sister) I hardly knew who wanted to challenge me over the inheritance… and… how about there’s a woman who is so attracted to him that she decides that she was going to turn him around. OK.

Enter Amy, part two.

If you want to be an actor, learn to do stuff. Take lessons, learn to play the guitar, learn to juggle tennis balls, learn to deal cards like a casino dealer, learn to walk on your hands and do a cartwheel, learn to flip an egg in a frying pan. You can never tell – I once lost a small role to a guy who of all things could play, just barely, the bagpipes. Anyway, Amy wanted to be an actress but she was smart enough to have two cards up her sleeve, so she also studied cosmetology, with the result that she landed the job doing makeup for the soap where I met her and she sometimes got herself written into the show as a minor character who did make-up for the characters when they were doing a scene in a beauty parlor or some such thing. Again, thanks to Amanda, who hired her when she came in to try out for a role and ended up talking her way into doing Amanda’s eyes.

So it was decided that Amy would become a small addition to the cast, she would become infatuated with the ruggedly handsome fashion designer who had recently returned from Hollywood because a big producer wanted him for a series he was doing in NYC, and Lorenzo needed to deal with a legal battle with the brother (or sister) he never knew he had all those years now that the deceased mother had rewritten her will, etc etc, all typical daytime drama twists and complications. In my opinion, the biggest complication was what to call her character: we can’t just call her Amy, when the credits role at the end of the show the viewers will think we’re lazy if it says Amy played by Amy, so I finally suggested, look, she had red hair and blue eyes, right? And the Irish have red hair and blue eyes, right? So they gave her the name Colleen.

And so it seems that the twists and complication can become limitless. The brother (they decided on a brother; I can only wonder how long before a long lost sister turns up) and I at first pretend to act like the long-lost Joseph and Benjamin, and next thing you know we get to do a fight scene. And Colleen continues to press Lorenzo to change his way of life and ends up claiming he raped her. Did I mention that it turned out that Colleen and Lorenzo were both secret alcoholics? Oh, yes, and did I say my long-lost brother and I to Colleen look a great deal alike in the dark? And I continue to do off-Broadway shows a few nights a week from time to time.


I am not a Christian but I play one at home. My father is half Cuban and half Irish-American, and my mother’s side is half Puerto Rican and half Italian-American, and while all should be standard issue Roman Catholic, my father’s father had many children (he made a good living, he’d learned to be a master welder in Cuba before he and his family decided to get out before the Reds took over) and I have a lot of relatives who are other kinds of Christians, Pentecostal and Jehovah’s Witness and Seventh Day Adventist, and what they all have in common is the desire whenever they see me to fill me with the love of the Lord and the fear of eternal hellfire.

My father was not an educated man, although his high school diploma was proudly displayed on the dining room wall,  but he was a smart man where it counted, like my grandfather he mastered the same trade and did very well for himself as a union welder, and my mother waited tables (with the result that we frequently on Saturday night had meat loaf that the diner owner would have otherwise thrown out, and pretty good, too, all things considered) , with the result that my siblings and I were able to grow up in a pretty nice house in a pretty good neighborhood not far from Manhattan, and we were lucky enough that we never really wanted for anything.  It was one of those houses that had a bit of a back yard and sat closely side by side on either side to another house, not too many blocks from the El,  closer to the Steinway St subway station and near the RC church some of my family attended.

When I was about fifteen I announced, after a great deal of thought, one evening at dinner that I wanted to become an actor, and there was much shaking of heads and many comments of “be real” and “don’t you want to eat every day?” and “yeah, you and a million other people.” My older sister Camilla, though, said, well, let him try if he wants to, and my father finally said, okay, just have a back up plan for when you don’t make it. Thanks, dad. During the next two and a half years in high school, I did the drama club and actually got to play Stanley in Streetcar, and afterwards people came up to me at the party afterwards and told me how good I was, and my father smiled and patted me on the shoulder and then pushed me a way a little and said, ok, go and be a bum.

But I understood the risks and made myself do well in high school and went to college, where I majored in drama but also got credits in education and would have probably landed a job in a high school… except that I got my first off off-Broadway part before I graduated, the play ran for five weeks and I got some very good reviews for my role as a petty thief in a slum in the 1930s. Broadway, here I come.

But my point is that I would sometimes go back to my parents’ house for the weekend or a holiday and sleep over, and that one crucifix still clung to the wall over my old bed as well the identical other over my brother Simon’s bed (we weren’t rich enough to have that large a house), and on Easter and Thanksgiving and Christmas, between plates full of too much good food, there were endless debates on the true nature of religion and belief and faith and salvation among my relatives, and as an actor, I often got the brunt of the woe unto thee lectures. One Friday night I hurried over for Christmas, I had played a small part in a film and one of the scenes I was in had to be reshot at the last minute, and oh the looks I got that night because my character was Jewish and I had forgotten to take off the chain with the Jewish star I was wearing. (Good scene, too, I got to be shot in the chest by a guy who was supposed to be my best friend, I didn’t have a line, just needed to look at him like “how could you..?” and I slowly pulled the Jewish star from under my blood-stained expensive shirt and showed it to him, as if I were saying , hey, we’re both Jews, how could you do that to me,  like that would mean anything to a drug dealer who thought he’d been cheated, and I was congratulated for not hamming it up before I fell down dead. Drug dealer plots tend to run those ways.) The producers let me keep the thing, too, I like to think it sometimes brings me good luck.

But not that night. Oh the fun I had trying to convince my Aunt Sophia that I had not turned my back on Jesus and made a pact with the Devil, she had heard all about how actors would turn to the dark side in order to have success, was that what I had done, did you, I heard all about this, did you get a tattoo of the pentagon? I wanted to laugh but she had always been very nice to me so I just smiled and tried to assure her that I was working for Satan, but he had made me a really good deal. Meanwhile, at the same time, behind her back, I truly thought that my father was trying his best to not laugh out loud at the scene and I suspect that my aunt would have run down the block for a priest, any priest, to perform an exorcism if my father hadn’t finally stepped forward and put his arm around her should and reassured her that I had done nothing of the sort. Mind you, my mother practically needed to grab my ear and drag me to church for confession and communion once ever so often, but that didn’t matter, because Sophia happened to be a Seventh Day Adventist and didn’t think much of the R C church.

And then my father dropped the bombshell he had been holding back for the evening, probably for several days: his father had been diagnosed with cancer and would probably only live for perhaps a few months longer. This came to many of us as a shock, but I can’t say I was entirely surprised, and I don’t know why anyone else should have not realized that this was a distinct possibility, as grampa seemed to almost always have a cigarette in his hand or dangling from his lips. We were mostly a non-smoking bunch, if you want to describe having a cigar after dinner most of the time non-smoking. My father and some of my other male relatives went for the daily or occasional cigar and I would sometime have a good cigar at a wrap party (or to be obnoxious)… and as he got older, my father got into the habit of smoking about half a cigar after dinner and he’d then leave the rest on the stoop where some derelict usually found it.

Well, there was too much to be said but not much to say. Cancer is cancer, we all knew that it meant goodbye, we could only hope for the best. Prayers were said and a few recriminations were passed around, he should have known, we should have told him, prayers, perhaps there will be a miracle, there is always hope.  And my father merely smiled as he looked down at the table, we should just hope for the best, he said, and we should try to make the time he has left good for him.

I said good night to all after a while, hugs and kisses where appropriate, hopped the subway, and finally showed up at Amy’s apartment with a box of donuts. I know I woke her up when I knocked on the door, she was in a robe and her hair was a beautiful red mess but she seemed glad to see me.

Let me mention that by this point I had met Amy's family and they seemed very normal and pleasant and didn't seem to mind that I wasn't Jewish. I saw various disagreements concerning business and politics but definitely saw no disagreements over which temple was the true temple of God, and it was during my first dinner with her family that I found out that she thought her family name, Bernstein, sounded too ethnic so she changed it to Bertone, which sounds almost as ethnic to me.

“What?” she said with a half smile and I said, can I come in, I want to talk with someone and everyone else I know is dead.

She laughed and let me follow her in as she closed the door. I knew where she kept a couple of bottles of wine and took a bottle of merlot. She must have understood that I had some sort of problem to deal with, she gave me a look of understanding that something what wrong and went to find two wine glasses.
So, what’s up, she said, and I said, I was with my family tonight we were having a very nice dinner, and then my father told us that my grandfather has cancer, the doctors say he only has a few months to live.

Wow… wow, that stinks, I’m really sorry to hear that, she said. She drank half a glass of wine and said, Still… you know both my grandfathers died when I was very young and I never got to know them. You were lucky to have him for this long… that really stinks.

She took a glazed donut and took two bites before she put back in the box. I don’t know why I thought to buy a box of donuts, but I picked it up and finished it.

Amy was very attractive in just about every way I would want her to be. We finished the bottle of wine and shared another donut. I told her how he had come to see me in a couple of plays I had appeared in and he always told me I was very good, and I always loved him for that.

You are very talented, she said, everyone who knows you knows that, and I could only say ‘thank you.’ She smiled as she took my hand in hers and said, “you’re very welcome…”

I once heard that redheads make the best lovers. So be it.

I leaned back and let myself feel comfortable in a corner of her elegant second hand couch and she reclined against me, I knew I had been lucky in more than a few ways, and I although I was depressed I still felt very lucky in at least one more very important way. Shhh.