Creekside Mexico City. Or, How to Determine if your House is trying to Kill You.

I recently saw a play, Crumble, in which the house a family lives in could speak directly to the audience. The father was murdered by the House who was not okay with being adorned with Christmas lights. I became paranoid. After further review, I have determined that my house Is trying to kill me.

If my quadraplex could speak, what would it say? It would be in Spanish. There would be barriers. Determining each other’s needs would be a challenge. Like most of my intimate relationships, long-term commitment is doomed.

The name of our pile is Creekside Mexico City.

My dear roommate, Travis has a real gift for christening inanimate objects such as houses and sandwiches. But are they really inanimate?

We share a quadraplex with three Mexican families that have 34098 inhabitants. (and that’s not including the animals and babies) . Often, I am not sure who actually lives there. We had some neighbors move out recently and in their truck was seven mattresses and they were still pulling more out while I walked inside. I’ll say this, they know how to consolidate space, and they probably never even played Tetris.

We regularly get gawked at because even though we live about 100 feet from Congress, we are seriously the only white people on the block.

A Neighbohood Soundtrack
4-7:30pm Tejano blasts like a war siren
9-9:27pm Drum Kit made of found objects coming from the little boy’s room next door
10-11pm Live scenes from mexican soap operas that could be useful for either a Domestic Violence PSA or a piñata advertisement
2 – 2:01am Car backfiring/Fireworks/Gunshots one or all of the above

We were regularly visited by a crack dealer that goes by the name of Nathan that lived across the street. He would ask for money and cigarettes. He slowly came to realize that we were just as poor and useless as he was, but that did not stop him from pestering us. I assume he is either dead or in prison at this point, because he disappeared. He did not ever bring us the fruit basket and hand soaps promised.

When we first moved in, we were like giddy newly-weds discussing color palettes and appetizers for dinner parties. I’m not gay, Mom. We took turns marinating our downstairs in retro avocado and dressing the ‘window’ with burgundy curtains. Still not gay, Mom.  (window is in quotes because it is actually a thin sheet of plastic. Don’t tell the scary neighbors). We strung lights in front, invested in some folding chairs and shop was set.  

Then Creekside Mexico City made its move.

The Squeal. The Puddles. The Stench. The Monsoon. The Rain of terror. The Theft.  

For a couple weeks I worked out in my room. Good Idea, said my biceps. The room disagreed. The floor is disguised with a happy veneer of carpeting, but for every step I take there is a squeal of mercy, then a simmering sound like that of a deranged cat whispering “fuuuuckkk you, Michael ssssssss….”. Under my flippers lays an embittered old man plotting my demise.

Then came The Puddles. We would run the washing machine or dishwasher and water would seep up through the tile all across the living room. Then came The Stench. The evasive, ghastly Satan Stench. You would catch a whiff somewhere in the kitchen. It was like poison. As if a demon pooped in your lungs and ran away. The landlords came, the ghost of Satan Stench hid.

Do you smell it?

No. They thought I was crazy. The stench flew past me, mocking.

There! There! I think it’s coming from the vent.

They smelled the vent. Nothing. Asshole.

Again it came. The fridge! It was coming from the fridge!

They, of course, would assume that it would be our own fault, some recently college graduates buying vegetables with health in mind, neglecting them for months in exchange for frozen pizzas. But low and behold, we are poor actors and cannot afford to stock our fridge with anything except condiments.

Finally the demon showed itself in the drip pan. It was a dirty job. I was happy not to do it. Apparently the previous tenant was an elderly woman who didn’t own a washing machine and had a sweet tooth. The freezer was always full of ice cream and the ice cream seeped into the drip pan where it died and rotted without a proper ceremony.

The house lost. For awhile …

One morning, I awoke with a sudden jerk. My face was wet. It smelled like pennies and road-kill. I hurried my glasses on to reveal what looked like an archaic treasure map on my ceiling. But it wasn’t an archaic treasure map. It was a soggy brown blot, quickly expanding and protruding into my private tomb. More copper bulbs sprouted until my ceiling was raining. I threw everything in my room out of its path and replaced it with garbage bags.

The landlord returned. She explained to me that in an effort to prevent the roof from caving in, she was strategically poke one hole in the now pregnant brown monstrosity to drain the carnage. Sort of like how they used to drill holes into skulls to cure headaches. The tiny little hole turned out to be the size of a bowling ball. I slept on the couch downstairs for two weeks. My neck still hurts.

A friend of mine, Catlin, came by a few months back to do a load of laundry. She plopped in her pile and she joined me at the table while I was googling random shit. She was telling me about our mutual friend, Kathleen’s trip to India. The village right below hers (it was on a mountain) got swept away by a monsoon and she spent most of the trip trying to help out the village. She eventually got violently ill from the water after using it to clean her toothbrush. Kathleen was not a happy camper. What exactly is a Monsoon? I Googled it and found a Youtube video of some skinny African women dancing in the rain. Some crazy rain trance music was blasting.

Um. Mike. MIKE. MIKE!!!

WHAT?!?

I looked at Catlin who was staring in horror at our kitchen. A monsoon of water was gushing out of the laundry closet.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fuck.
We moved all of our belongings out of the way and started sweeping all the water out the door. (Luckily, our kitchen was raked) It took two hours. Her laundry wasn’t happy either.

Life was ‘normal’ again for awhile. Until I returned from my audition for the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia. I drove to San Antonio, flew to Minneapolis, flew to Baltimore, took a train to Charlottesville, car pooled to Staunton, did my Audition, car pooled back to Charlottesville, was driven to Baltimore, flew to Houston, flew to San Antonio, drove back home to Austin. Fell asleep. The next morning I walked out into the parking lot to discover my hood open, and my car battery a-wall. Creekside Mexico City’s Welcome Home Present. Touche Asshole.
Things have been somewhat quiet for a little while sans our loud neighbors. The house pities me because the rent payments are not coming easily. It is in hiding, working out a genius plan for when I am in a more staple economic situation. Or maybe my birthday. I can feel it steeping…

One may tell us that we should move. 

But hey, rent is cheap. And I like a house of several stories. ;)

The Flaming Ghost of FronteraFest Future

“What are you doing putting your manhood on the sink?”



Helen Allen, Laura Lane, Quinn Walton, Michael Amendola. Photo by  Jack DiBlasi


I am currently in rehearsal for a comedy written and directed by my friend John Boulanger. It is called A Writer’s Vision(s).

The play is a conglomeration of short plays John wrote in college. The story chronicles an aspiring playwright, Jerome, who in three wacky acts, with the help of a muse, an inner child, a mad-house of psychiatrists and a drag-queen, learns how to write, play, live and love. It is equal parts witty, campy, absurd and full of heart. It is certainly a ‘wild romp’. I don’t think I have ever said the word romp out-loud seriously, and could never take anyone seriously that did say it. But somehow I feel it is okay to write it down.  I am Michael am John Boulanger am Jerome am a museinnerchildragqueen. And somehow all of those … ‘people’ need to show up and live harmoniously within my body for the performance. Well … probably not harmoniously.

Most people that know of John will immediately associate him with ‘playwright’ because of his critical acclaim with House of Several Stories (HOSS) but he is truly an amazing director, producer and actor as well. John doesn’t even consider himself a writer anymore, which is absurd to anybody that has read his scripts or seen his productions. It’s as if Christopher Durang, Edward Albee, David Sedaris and Mel Brooks procreated a brilliant Mexican love-child, handed him a laptop, and spawned the future of Austin theatre. 

His writing is quick, his direction is quick, the rehearsals are quick. It’s intense. I feel like a fat three-year old trying to catch up with Michael Johnson. In addition, I am working alongside some of Austin’s most notable and experienced talents, Laura Lane, Martin Burke, Babs George, Jill Blackwood, Justin Scalise, Scott Swanson, Scott Shroeder, Breanna Stogner… and then its Travis, Quinn, Nick, Helen and myself trying to keep up. I am the lead and am on every page of the script. I am the luckiest pinball.



Photo by Jack DiBlasi

Like most productions in Austin, one of the biggest challenges is simply finding a place to rehearse.

We are nomads. So far we have done John’s Living Room, Travis High School and the Austin Playhouse. John’s Living Room was a lovely place to read and drink cheap booze, but did not offer enough room to block without murdering a lamp (especially because of the cheap booze). Travis High School only allowed for a couple rehearsals because of stupid Christmas Break, and we couldn’t smoke on campus, anyway.

The Austin Playhouse is actually a well-reputed Theater in Austin, has a good deal of money (for Austin) and thus a pretty decent playing space (for Austin). So we were all very excited. We gathered down-stage center for our pre-rehearsal banter discussing movies we’ve seen and the odd occurrences of our day when the cast of The Importance of Being Earnest, in their comedy of manners, politely told us to get the fuck out. Communication via e-mail often gets flubbed.

Luckily, there was a medium-sized closet next door that some people confuse for a theater. We gathered our martini plastics and cell phones from 1998 and moved next door where we discovered the set of A Christmas Carol rudely overstaying its welcome. (reference pictures now) It is ironic that we are rehearsing a play featuring three visions, and it is charming to look out a frosted window when it is 80 degrees outside, but it’s like sitting in coach sharing your seat with the left love handle of a super-fatty.

I would like to be in that big spacious playing space with the Earnest cast, discussing cucumber sandwiches in  proper British dialect, when all of a sudden:

“You’re not gay as in happy. You’re gay as in let’s suck some DICK!” reverberates from the wall.

.

The flaming ghost of FronteraFest Future has a home next door, and its name is A Writer’s Vision(s). If you ever wanted to see Babs George describe a pubic hair… 

                        PERFORMANCE DATES:
                        January 21 – 7pm
                        January 22 – 1pm
                        January 28-  10pm
                        January 30 – 5pm

                        @ Salvage VanGuard Theatre.
                        2803 Manor Road
                        Austin, TX 78722
                        Tickets $10 (512) 474-7886

A Writer's Vision(s) (facebook)

Peace, Love and Black-eyed peas,
Dola

P.S. Happy 2011.

Remember your morning poop. Or. Why I think about Jay Jennings at 8am.

What you do before 9am shows your level of commitment to success. Some people will swim 100 laps, run five miles, write a hundred pages, or build a doghouse before you even wake up. By the time you have drug your ass downstairs to start the coffeepot, somebody else has annexed a coffee-cultivating country. By the time you light up your first cigarette, somebody else has made a major step to curing lung cancer. I myself woke up at 10am today, but I have the day off, so shadddup.

My very first class in college was an 8am Movement class with a whimsical dancing old gay man winter named Jay Jennings. The man was always drinking a thermos of tea that we assumed had shrooms in it. There was also a serious consideration that the crane we noticed around the moat during smoke breaks was in fact, Jay Jennings. Whenever we saw the crane… we couldn’t find Jay… He spoke in a very soft, muzzled, throaty voice that shook along with his jaw and his eyes. Hmm… kind of like how a crane would speak… When he spoke to you, his eyes would dart back and forth between you and the grizzly bear that was sneaking up behind you. It made me very uneasy.

Annnnd …GO! AHHH!! You would perform the piece of crap that you assembled at 5 am because you were up trying to understand the genus specie family clusterfuck of a sunflower until 4! Then came his catch phrase! “This is DOGSHIT!” Which, depending on how high YOU were, would either make you laugh hysterically, or scare the poop out your butt. Note to self: Create a To-Do list. On To-Do list, write down to find a catch phrase.

                                                                              

The great white bird directed me in two beautiful shows, Rocky Horror Show and House of Blue Leaves. (More on those shows later…) He had an amazing sense for stage aesthetic and spectacle. (Shrooms) But his classes for the most part weren’t taken very seriously. I’m sorry to say. If he remembered your name, it was a good sign. I think this is a man who has been teaching for so long that he forgets what year it is and he doesn’t necessarily care either. Kind of like me waiting tables. Somehow, his presence would just ring as inspiration, anyway. Here I am thinking about him four years later and I haven’t even had my coffee, yet.

The thing I remember most about his class, (besides snorting a foot of powdered sugar in a dress for my Eddie Izzard piece) was when he introduced us to the book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

Julia suggested that in order to smash creative blocks, I had to wake up and shit out three pages of writing in long hand every morning. There is no wrong way to do the morning pages, Julia wrote. Whenever I DID do the morning pages, they were most often self-pitying bites and snippets of blob. Why did I eat that NutRageous before bed? I have to lose some weight. Must start doing 150 pelvis throttle lifts every morning.. BACKWARDS. Nobody likes me. I’m going to be a pharmacist. People will like me once I am giving them drugs.  But it wasn’t important how self deprecating, angry, stupid or lousy these pages were. The important thing was that they get DONE.

THIS is the big distinction of the artist vs. non-artist for me, I think. An Actor, acts. A writer, writes.  An Artist makes art. A non-artist does not. As for the distinction of what is art, writing, acting, and what isn’t… that’s an argument I can’t even begin to find a foot in, yet. The value of that person is subjective, but the POINT is, if you are not doing ANYTHING, than you aren’t going to get BETTER at anything, and you won’t BECOME anything. We occupy a magnificent fear of embarrassment and failure, but if you aren’t willing to be caught pooping out some drivel in public, then how do you expect to conquer yourself. As Michael Costello would say, you have to live in the shit.

So. Remember your morning poop. 

Jay Jennings endorsed this idea. And I have recently discovered that Jay is 156 years old. And still teaches movement.

Or take some shrooms?

*photo from http://www.theatreanddance.txstate.edu/department/faculty/jennings.html

Now for the lesser known: 'Poor, Fat and Balding' Artist

I don’t mean to sound crass, but drop kicking a bite-size yipping dog must be incredibly satisfying. Perhaps I do mean to sound crass.

There was a time when I knew I would grow up to be great.

I didn’t know how or in what fashion, but I believed that I would be successful somehow. In my head, I ran thru the professional rolodex like a divorced house-wife. Michael Amendola the Cartoonist. Michael Amendola the chess master. um…basketball player? professional bowler. PUNK ROCK BASSIST! …poet, no, I mean journalist, playwright… I am so happy that I never bothered to order business cards… and then finally, Life handed me ‘Actor’. 

Life told me that, in being an actor, I would have a good chance to experience all of these other professions without having to earn a million degrees! In my eyes it was a GET EVERYTHING I WANT AT ONCE scheme. (yeah, brilliant, Michael) I wouldn’t have to limit myself to professions either, for example, I have played a dog, without the luxury of eating my own feces (although some theatres on the east-side would call for that).  My K-9 readers and method-actors-playing-dogs will feel me when I say that HAVING THE FREEDOM TO CHEW UP ONE SHOE AND POOP IN THE OTHER WITH AN OBLIGATORY UNDERSTANDING IS WONDERFUL.

‘Actor’ is a package deal. It includes self-obsession, self-deprecation and schizophrenia. It never gets old, there are multiple selves to obsesses over and deprecate all the time. Okay, Life. It is a deal. I’ll be an Actor.

I have never once had any intention of having a ‘normal’ job, dolling myself up in an uncomfortable uniform with pleaded pants and a shirt that would always look horrible due to my unevenly proportioned chimpanzee physique.  I would not be satisfied unless I got paid to vomit out the essence of what it is to be eternally angst-y, confused and gluttonous. In other terms, I wanted to be an artist.

How do I earn such a title? Am I an artist, now? Is there a check-list I can download? At the moment I am fulfilling damn near every cliché there is. My life is as follows: I work in two restaurants (check!), besides that, I spend all of my time in rehearsal for low/non-paying low/non-attended plays in low/non lit warehouses(check!) chain-smoking on the patio of coffee-shops, and chain-smoking on the patio of bars (check! Check!) 

And.      

I live in Austin, TX.(check x amillion!)

Keeping Austin Weird, Keeps Michael Incredibly Poor. (Please sign my petition to end KMIP) I would be considered a ‘starving’ artist if I really didn’t have such a lust for food. I am more like a cookie-binging artist that pays rent two weeks late.

Mmm…cookie.

I have to constantly remind myself that there is little worse than being both poor and fat. At least with ‘Starving Artist’ you get the romantic allure and the occasional beautiful (yet inevitably deranged) girl that wants to go slumming in Bohemia. The Poor, Fat and Balding Artist may as well kill himself. And I only earn that title if I HAVE in fact earned my ‘Artist’ stripes.

Does that mean I should kill myself? Note to self: create to-do list. On To-Do List, write down to write down the pros and cons of killing self. Or… just kill self. Jesus I am lazy.

Anywhoo. When I was in middle school and high school, I always carried a journal around with me. I would rarely give my teachers or friends my full attention because I was busy writing about how their mothers must have treated them or drawing the back of some squirrely-kid’s head. It got so bad that my pre-cal teacher would hand me sharpies at the beginning of class for my demented cartoon masterpieces. It was a miracle I ever got into college. Luckily Texas State University had incredibly low standards, as did I at the time, so we got along just fine. I abandoned my self indulgent journaling for Aderol, beer and script memorization and never saw my inner-monologue again. Too busy trying to survive to reflect on how I was surviving and what was going on outside of that.

Lately I have felt less than inspired creatively despite the fact that I have been working as an actor non-stop since graduating. The Service Industry will suck your soul dry and replace it with pure hatred for the human race. I decided that my goal for next year would be to not work in the Service Industry, and I am happy to say I will be escaping its cruel seedy talons in T-minus 6 months.

I will be moving to Staunton, Virginia to begin my 11-month contract with the American Shakespeare Center.  I am finally truly taking myself out on an adventure, and I thought this would be a wonderful time to re-ignite my relationship with the blank page. (Which I have just successfully filled with overly-wordy tangents)

So that’s it for my introductory return. Now if you’ll excuse me, there is a bite-size dog next door to be drop-kicked.

Dola