watched over by top men. Top. Men.

Posted on By Wil

If you follow me on Twitter (thank you and I’m sorry), you know that I’ve been aggressively cleaning out my garage for the last three days. I’m building a pretty awesome homebrewery out there, and I have to get rid of all this stuff I’ve collected over the years to make space.

Most of the things I’m getting rid of are old clothes, books and CDs. I’ve also come across a bunch of obsolete bits of technology that are going to be amusing to take to the recycling place.

Mostly, I’ve had a lot of joyous memories as I go through these things. I’ve found things that date all the way back to the late 70s, things from all the stages of my acting career, and things from my writing career. Probably the best feeling I’ve had is getting rid of things that I don’t need any more, and reducing boxes of stuff I’ve hauled around since I was 23 and bought my first house from a dozen to half of one.

(Lots of people on Twitter thought it was hilarious to call me a hoarder, but I actually find that a little offensive. I had so much stuff from so long ago, I wasn’t sure I was prepared to emotionally deal with what I’d find, and it was pretty overwhelming to think about going through it all. Turns out making a brewery is good motivation.)

The best feeling isn’t actually finding these old things I forgot I had, though that’s been pretty great. The best feeling is realizing that there’s a lot of stuff in here I thought was really important to me, but just isn’t. Stuff that I held onto when I was struggling in my mid-20s because it reminded me of when I wasn’t struggling in my early 20s, and stuff I held onto when I was turning 30 because I wasn’t ready to completely let go of my 20s. I feel stupid to realize that I hauled around boxes of useless shit for 15 years for no good reason, except that it was a good reason at the time. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m so happy with my life and the people in it, I don’t need to hold onto something that was, because what is kicks ass. I’m grateful for that, and wanted to write it down before I got distracted by shiny things.

Anyway, I’m going to auction a lot of the things I’ve decided to keep for charity in the near future, so stay tuned if you’re into that sort of thing. And if you want to see whatever stupid thing I unearth next, complete with hilarious trenchant commentary, it’s happening on Twitter, where I’m @wilw.

 

my son is pretty funny

Posted on By Wil

I realized this morning that I didn’t have any oranges or orange juice to make my world famous (inside my house) port wine cranberry sauce to go with dinner tonight, so I grabbed a bag and prepared to walk up to the grocery store.

“I need you to get blah blah blah blah blah,” Ryan said.

“I have no idea what you just said, so write me a list,” I said. Ryan tore a page out of his notebook and started writing things down on it.

Anne came out of our bedroom, and asked me where I was going.

“I need some things from the store,” I said, “so I’m walking up there to get them.”

“How about we walk Seamus and Marlowe up there? They can use the exercise, and then they’ll be calm for the rest of the day.”

I thought that was a fine idea, a fine, fine idea, Stuart, and I said as much. I went to the closet to get their leashes and harnesses. I imagine that the following went through their minds:

Seamus: THE DOOR TO THE CLOSET IS OPEN! A WALK IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW AND WE ARE ON IT!

 

Marlowe: DOOR! DOOR! DOOR! WALK! WALK! WALK! WALK! WALK!

 

Riley: I’M A DOG!

Seamus and Marlowe ran to the closet, and showed their excitement to get at what’s inside the closet by making it impossible for me to open the closet. You know, like dogs do. This is when Riley realized what was going on.

Riley: OH SWEET DOGGIE JESUS A WALK IS HAPPENING AND WHEN I GO ON A WALK I GET TO SMELL THINGS AND SOMETIMES POOP ON A YARD AND THEN THERE’S A BIRD AND I BARK AT IT AND IT FLIES AWAY BUT I KNOW THAT I COULD CATCH IT IF I REALLY WANTED TO BUT I DON’T WANT TO BECAUSE ANOTHER DOG PEED ON THIS BUSH AND I HAVE TO ALSO PEE HERE BECAUSE OH MY GOD IS THAT A DOG IN THAT WINDOW? BARK BARK BARKBARKBARK!

 

Seamus: Welcome to, like, an hour ago in dog time, Riley.

So I found myself surrounded by three very excited dogs who were determined to show exactly how much they can jump and bark and generally turn my nice, quiet living room into a maelstrom of fur and jumping.

It took a minute or so (an eternity in “I-am-ready-to-go-on-a-walk” dog time) to get them all leashed up and ready to go.

“Okay, so you guys need to walk Riley,” I said to Ryan and Nolan, “because she can’t make it all the way to the store and back. Also there is no way the two of us can handle three dogs plus a bag of groceries on the way back.”

You’ll note that it never occurred to me to drive to the store, because it’s a gorgeous day here and walking places is usually better than not walking places, for distances under 5 miles.

Anne and I headed up to the store, and the kids took Riley around the block. About ten minutes into the walk, I realized that I’d forgotten my phone and Ryan’s list.

“Ryan wanted me to get things and I forgot the list,” I said.

“Call him,” Anne suggested.

“I also forgot my phone,” I said. We looked at each other. Seamus growled at something that only he could see. Marlowe wagged her tail so fast I briefly wondered how wagging dog tails could be employed to power small villages in the developing world.

“You’re on fire this morning,” Anne said.

“Yeah, I know. I’m awesome.”

We got to the store. Anne told me she needed mayonaise to make the wasabi deviled eggs, and waited with the dogs while I got the things I needed. That’s when I discovered that there is pretty much a wall of mayonaise options in our grocery store, in amounts ranging from “I need a little mayonaise” to “GORGE MYSELF ON GALLONS AND GALLONS OF DISGUSTING STUFF MADE FROM EGGS AND OIL AND SHAME.”

I completed my purchases, in the process reaffirming my superpower of wrecking whatever line I’m in simply by the act of choosing it: I got behind two guys who had two things: Pedialyte and Tums (clearly recovering from a hangover). Instead of it taking them less time to pay for them than it’s taken me to write this paragraph like it should have, they paid with a combination of dollar bills, grimy handfulls of change, a little bit on a debit card … and then remembered that they really needed cigarettes so the whole thing started over. Then we got to wait for the cigarettes to show up from wherever they keep them locked up in the store.

I met Anne and our dogs outside the store, and we began the walk home. Seamus and Marlowe were very excited to see children out with their parents, squirrels everywhere, and something on a yard that couldn’t be seen, but required enthusiastic rolling around and grunting to fully appreciate.

We got home, and Ryan met us at the door.

“You didn’t take my list!” He said.

“I know, I was distracted by dogmageddon when we were trying to leave.”

“I tried to call you and your phone just rang and rang!”

“That’s because it was left on the kitchen counter. Didn’t it raise any suspicions when you called my phone and then something playing my Doctor Who ringtone made noise in the house while I wasn’t picking up?”

“Shut up.”

That’s when I saw his list, which made me laugh so much, I wrote almost a thousand words just to introduce it on my blog:

Yep. He’s my son alright.

I am always thankful for my life and the people who are in it, especially my family. This morning’s walk to the market is just one small reason why.

From the Vault: Matt LeBlanc, Vampires, and Me

Posted on By Wil

I saw on Twitter that an episode I did of the old series Monsters was on Chiller channel today (You can also see it on the YouTubes: Part One; Part Two). Here’s a story I wrote about it my column in the LA Weekly in 2008:

Super Fun Happy Slide: Reflections on an Acting Career

I spent the first two thirds of my life working as a full-time actor, but about five years ago, my primary focus shifted from acting to writing. A funny thing happened on my way to being a full-time writer, though: I started working a lot as an actor, both on camera (CSI, Criminal Minds) and with my voice (Teen Titans, Legion of Superheroes). This has lead to a pretty standard question when I do interviews: “What do you like more, acting or writing?”

“It’s a lot like asking a parent which child they love more,” goes my standard response, “the truth for me is that I love both of my children for different reasons, and I don’t think it’s possible for me to love one more than the other. However, it is impossible for me to imagine my life without them in it.”

My acting career has spanned just a few months shy of thirty years. During it, I’ve worked with awesome people, complete douchebags, famous people who were intimidating, famous people who were gracious, famous people who were on their way down, and soon-to-be famous people who were on their way up. This week, I thought it would be fun to combine my actor side with my writer side, and tell a story about one of those people.

In 1990, I did an episode of the syndicated television series Monsters. The show was a lot of fun to work on, and though it’s not one of the the more memorable entries on my resume, the experience I had while shooting it was. The episode was called “A Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites” and I played a teenager who is convinced that the neighborhood barbers are vampires. Nobody believes him, so he convinces his friend to join him in some casual late night breaking and entering to get a closer look inside the barbershop, where he hopes to find irrefutable evidence that will ensure he gets the girl, who is never seen or implied, but was an important part of my motivation.

Shortly after they get inside, the barbers show up, reveal in the usual manner that the damn kids were right all along, and strap our heroes into barber chairs, where vampirelarity ensues … with one of the trademark Monsters twists: instead of drinking their victims’ blood, they collect and feed it to a horrible monster who lives in the basement. The show ends with the the two kids, now adults, working in the same barbershop and serving the same hideous master, in the same manner.

As far as the standard “boy meets vampire, boy’s blood is fed by vampire to hideous monster, boy becomes adult minion of hideous monster” story goes, it was pretty good. It also managed to sneak in a subversive message about the importance of breaking the cycle of vampirism, which qualified the episode as “educational” in some Eastern Bloc countries.

Here’s where the story gets weird. The other kid was played by a young actor who was pretty new to Hollywood. Though he would eventually become one of the highest paid actors in prime time, he hadn’t done very much before we worked together, and I was the well-known veteran on the set. His name was Matt LeBlanc; you may have heard of him.

Neither one of is knew that our career trajectories were on decidedly different paths when they intersected, but we liked each other right away, and rather than retreat to our individual dressing rooms when we weren’t filming, we hung out like old friends, and in the course of getting to know each other, we discovered that we both liked Monty Python, MST3K, and Zucker Brothers movies.

One Friday morning, he asked me, “Did you see The Simpsons last night?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t watch The Simpsons.”

He looked surprised. “Dude, it’s exactly the kind of show you’d like.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve watched it a couple of times, and I thought it was funny when it was part of the Tracy Ullman show, but I just don’t think it works for a full half hour.” I was 18 at the time, and due to my vast experience in life, the universe and everything, I was certain that The Simpsons wouldn’t last more than two seasons. (Someday, I’ll tell you how I also predicted that nobody would remember Nirvana after Smells Like Teen Spirit, or thatArrested Development would be on the air forever. Ahem.)

Matt turned to face me, put down his script, and for the next twenty minutes, reenacted the entirety of the previous night’s episode, a rerun from the first season titled “The Crepes of Wrath.”

“They send Bart to France, where he gets stuck working at a vineyard. They make him sleep with a donkey, they put antifreeze in the wine … it’s really terrible. But there’s this part where he picks a grape,” he stood up, and held an imaginary grape between his fingers. “And then he looks around …”

Matt looked to his right, then to his left, the grin that he’d trademark four years later beginning to stretch across his face. “They cut away from him, and show that there’s nobody around,” he held his hands in front of his face, pantomiming a camera panning from side to side. “But when he tries to put it in his mouth, a hand shows up from nowhere and smacks him in the back of the head!” He started to giggle, “and then the French guy goes, don’t eet zee grapes, Baaharrt!”

His fake French accent was hilarious, and we both giggled like idiots for several minutes. For the rest of the episode, whenever we were supposed to be serious or focused, Matt would catch my eye and quietly say “don’t eet zee grapes, Baaharrt!” and I would crack up. I never ratted him out, even though the director grew tired of my seeming inability to keep it together when I was supposed to be skulking around the barbershop, or watching my precious bodily fluids flow down tubes into the gaping maw of some nameless horror.

On the final day of production, we traded phone numbers and planned to stay in touch, but when we didn’t have working on Monsters in common, we returned to our regular lives and never got together to hang out and watch The Simpsons together.

A few years passed, and one night my friend and I watched an episode of this new show,Friends. I wanted to watch our Ren & Stimpy compilation on VHS, but there was a girl involved and … well, you know how those things go.

I recognized Matt as soon as I saw him. “Hey,” I said, “See the guy who plays Joey? That’s the guy who convinced me to watch The Simpsons! We worked together on Monsters. Cool!”

I was genuinely excited for him. We’d only worked together for a week, but I liked him a lot. He was such a kind person, so guileless and so excited to be working as an actor, it was like one of the good guys – somebody who actually deserved success – had made it.

Life is rarely comfortable for anyone who hopes to be a full-time actor. It’s intensely competitive, unreliable, and totally unpredictable. While some will get to grab the brass ring and never let go, most of us spend our entire careers watching fate dance right up to us, seductively unzip its top just enough to get us excited, and then laugh as it dances away with a different partner. It’s like Lucy with the football, and it sucks. But there are moments on the set, when a guy you just met puts on a hilarious fake French accent and says, “don’t eet zee grapes, Baaharrt!” and you collapse into giggles that you can viscerally recall fifteen years later. Those moments are priceless, and even though they don’t put food on the table or open up any casting office doors, they’re a big part of why I keep coming back to the dance.