Pom-poms with Your Hamburger Phone

Ingredients

• An obsessive overachiever who slept with her teacher
• A 30-year-old obsessive compulsive high school guidance counselor and virgin
• A once-homeless, spacey tough-ass Detroit bartender who looks like she just stepped off the Disney Channel
• A "real fixer upper" with braces and... you can never actually remember if there's headgear?, a huge smile, and a nerdy confidence
• A quiet and somewhat passive small-town journalist who "can't even land the shoe shine guy," but somehow gets involved with every guy in town
• A conniving, mature, yet adorable teen heiress with the mind of Moriarity
• A precocious pregnant 16-year-old Minnesotan with an affinity for blue slushies

Instructions

Are you an actor? A model? A comedian? A voiceover artist? A storyteller? Anything remotely related to performing? If you're answer is "Yes"-- if you're answer is "No," keep reading because you might learn something, damnit!-- If you're answer is "Yes," but you don't know your type... 

 

Yeah, that's what it feels like every day that you still don't know your type. For those non-performers out there, I'll attempt to answer your question: What exactly is "type?" This silly stupid little swear word encompasses what you, as an actor, are selling. Sometimes almost irrelevant to what your range and acting ability is, it's the actual look you're marketing, and it's what defines you in the business. You may be 24 years old with a 4.0+++ GPA from Harvard and have never picked up a pom-pom in your life, but if you look like a popular 17-year-old wide-eyed cheerleader, you better know it and be ready to play one. 

Many actors, like myself, were taught in school to screw that confining, mother-effing "type"; we are serious actors who act and that means acting, so ACT! Then, we graduate into a business where type is honored on a professional, respected pedestal and we're all, "... Damn. We all screwed type, then never called him back." So, that's where your ingredients come in.

I've been thinking a lot about my type recently, having been cast and called in for a lot of popular and attractive 16-year-olds. Guys, I don't know if you know this, but I am not 16. And when I was, I was not considered popular or attractive. Look beyond the flattery and to the confusion: Between the slightly vague, 

"16-17 or feels like she could be in that range, very approachable, real and relatable but by no means snotty or with an attitude"

and the ever-infuriating, 

"Just out of high school. 18-20 years old. Beautiful. A sweet yet seductive demeanor. The quintessential girl next door. Can break a heart with the bat of a lash. Fit and thin."

and the fact that I just played a rebellious, popular small-town cheerleader and an adorably naive and impressionable freshman cheerleader, I have been taken aback. None of these fit into my perception of what I thought I've been "selling!" I have needed to go back to the drawing board (until I can get some professional career help). (Don't use this post as a trusted source for accredited career advice.) Remembering various guidance and articles, I sat down and listed which characters on TV or in movies I could play; which actors are "stealing" my parts (what vindictive phrasing!); and which shows could I see myself in. Thus, by this single method alone, without further ado, I present to you, 100% infallibly: My Type.

★ Tracy Flick, obsessive overachiever who slept with her high school teacher and dreams of being President

 

★ Emma Pillsbury (Schuester), 30-year-old obsessive compulsive high school guidance counselor and virgin (for at least a season or two)

★ Candace, once-homeless, spacey tough-ass Detroit bartender who looks like she just stepped off the Disney Channel

 


★ Sue Heck, "real fixer upper" with braces and... you can never actually remember if there's headgear?, a huge smile, and a nerdy confidence albeit being basically invisible

 




★ Shauna Malwae-Tweep, quiet and somewhat passive small-town journalist who "can't even land the shoe shine guy," but somehow gets involved with every guy in town

★ Kaylie Hooper, conniving, mature, yet adorable teen heiress with the mind of Moriarity

She deserves 2 GIFs.

★ Juno, precocious pregnant 16-year-old Minnesotan with an affinity for blue slushies

 





So, those are all the same and that all makes sense. Right? When you bash them all together, there's my type. Right?!

Aaaaaaand that's what an unknown actor's life is like.

I encourage performers and non-performers alike to create their "Who's Stealing My Roles" list (hilarious) and find the best photo and GIF of each to embody both that character and yourself. Sure, it's fun, but mainly I just want to compare amalgamations of batshit bananas "types" we all create.

Love,
The innocent-looking neurotic modest Midwestern high-schooler to early-20s female

Long Island City Iced Tea: Heavy on the Water

Ingredients

• Tim Gunn
• Waiting 25 min for an $8 apple + brie sandwich
• Pepsi
• Not Tim Gunn
• Long Island
• Sunburns
• A slight smell of fish
• Happy people

Instructions

I am hard pressed to scrounge up any remotely negative ingredients for you-- challenged to surmise any real potential disasters for your time at my now 2nd Favorite Place in New York City: (no, Roosevelt Island isn't the first): Gantry Plaza State Park.

My friend Maia, a born and bred NY local, doesn't even live in Long Island City and yet she travels to Gantry more often than I do. Not difficult, seeing as today marked the 4th time I've been there-- but they were long, meaningful stays! And very concentrated, once I found this oasis. Regardless, the fact that anyone is coming to the wee edge of Long Island City is saying something. Because, even though LIC is a mere 5 minute train ride from Grand Central (an 8 minute ride from Times Square, a 12 minute ride from Union Square), everyone's eyes glaze over when I say the word "Queens." I could say Brooklyn and receive a much more positive response, despite the fact that most of Brooklyn is further from everything than everything else. I long for the day when "Queens" is no longer a dirty word, and "Long Island City" is not confused for being in Long Island.

After Maia and I waited perhaps longer than 25 minutes for our overpriced apple + brie hot pressed paninis no onions (a sandwich made for early-20s hungry but modest artists looking to ruin their financial situations), we walked along the entire (presentable portion of) Long Island City waterfront. You start at *COFFEED, a bougie/hipster/someoneactuallydefinethesewords coffee & food stand at the head of a modern-squiggly-themed wooden deck; 

walk past a huge soccer/general-good-time well-manicured lawn field thing; 

notice the old train tracks that aren't even creepy, because they've been turned into a community-oriented contemporary art "rail garden"-- and when has that ever been creepy?;

stroll up and down the docks, turning over your shoulder to see 2 massive Long Island signs-- Long Island, like the separate zipcode, separate entirely city of Long Island; 

it's confusing; cover up in the shade underneath a willow tree or lay out in a contemporary, permanent version of a beach chair-- a stocky wooden, bodily-curved reclined chair for extreme suntanning; 

pop a squat under the Pepsi Cola sign and reminisce about how your family is a Pepsi family and no one gets it-- until now;

people watch & gossip on top of a rolling green hill, gazing out at the sparkling water or the joyous playground; 

turning around at the kids' community garden behind you as you walk back to the life of the streets for the train. 

You see, Gantry isn't an escape from NYC. You can see the skyline. You can watch cars drive into Manhattan. You can feel, quite palpably, the gentrification of the luxury high-rises blazing down upon you. It's not like my #1 Favorite Place in NYC: Fort Tryon Park, a secluded park at the top of a hill in Upper Manhattan, at 181st Street, overlooking the Hudson and peering not over Manhattan but into New Jersey. [Here it feels like you're in a nature reserve, and when it's covered in snow it feels like you're snowshoeing up a mountain without snowshoes (so you hate it for, like, a second, but then it's magical again).] But, whilst gushing over Gantry, Maia did tell me that she'd give me her "official" (quotes mine) list of best places to escape NYC in NYC, so that means she, too, sees Gantry as a restful, spiritual break from this damn dark structural monstrosity of a city. 

Gantry is incredibly still, comfortably clean, open yet quiet, and yearning to be photographed. Quite seriously it's the Instagrammer's dream. Or a real photographer looking for views of the skyline, but I think we're all more concerned with Instagram these days in a really healthy way. Gantry is a place where a young couple strolling their stroller waves and bursts into a genuine "hey!" with another young mother strolling her own stroller. And where a lucky/unlucky (depends on the kid) 1-year-old takes the most maturely urban 1st Birthday photos. Hey. I think I see yet another notch to be made on your metaphorical NYC Staycation Belt. 

Oh. Nope. No, that's just Tim Gunn. What I'm seeing is Tim Gunn. Right, yes, I thought we were sitting in the middle of a film set! I knew that man with a walkie who's been standing in the same place for twenty minutes was not a creep but a PA. I'd shoot a film about anything at Gantry-- murder scene supposed to take place on the deck of a WWII submarine? We'll make it work. Ah, yes, back to Tim Gunn: He emerges from the group of the first shot: wind blowing his grey pants, sun illuminating his white hair... and no one around. Runners have run by, strollers have continued strolling, we chatters or nappers on the grass hadn't even noticed he was there. Now we're the only ones snapping quick photos of him as he struts down that walkway by the water. In an attempt to be discreet, as if he could care any less, I don't look into my iPhone as I take my shoddy pictures. This leaves me with photos of the couple standing 20 feet away from him. 

Not bad. 

I hope you all can figure out how to **point your phone towards Tim Gunn, consider wearing sunscreen, forget the infrequent slightest smell of fish, and swallow your prejudice towards Pepsi. Herein lies a million likes on Instagram.


*Guys, is it Cof-feed or Coffee-ed? Too much? Maybe later.
** Fine, I did it:

***

***In Websites No One Asked For today: a website that tells you what is shooting in several popular cities and almost exactly where, OnLocationVacations.com! Found for you by me, someone who sadly yet excitedly knew something unnecessary would pop up when she searched "filming today."

11,551 Island Dressing

Ingredients

• $2.75 (or $116.50; depends on how you take your Metrocard)
• 2 miles
• Only 1 pharmacy
• Only 1 grocery store
• Only 2 churches
• Only 1 Starbucks
• An outdoor gym with outdoor gym machines
• A fleet of red trolley busses
• Carrot jam
• Remnants of a smallpox hospital now riddled with cats

Instructions

What do FDR, Gristedes, and New York City's 6th oldest house have in common? 

BOOM: TRAM.

TRAM.

TRAM.

Sorry, I got a little carried away there. I meant

ROOSEVELT ISLAND TRAM.

Roosevelt Island is an island-- one of Manhattan's many small, seemingly sparse, sometimes forgotten moons. It doesn't have a beach and you shouldn't expect mojitos and daiquiris on the reg'. But it does have only one Starbucks, and that's enough to get me listening.

(Of course I know that the line for that one Starbucks must be annoying as balls-- Gosh!!)

If you haven't ever been to Roosevelt Island, what are you doing. Seriously. What are you doing right now that is more important than visiting a hidden gem of history, mystery, beauty, privacy, Mayberry? A "new town in town" (quote from the '60s) where everyone knows your name (gross generalization we made today)-- where, as a visitor, you run into the one sole person you know that lives on the island within your first 10 minutes there. That is actually true. And the island does actually have remnants of a smallpox hospital now riddled with cats. And merely one Duane Reade. And, as its primary/only grocery store, a Gristedes-- how very Manhattan. It's indeed part of the borough of Manhattan, actually-- didja know that?

Didja know that NYC bought the island in 1828 to create a "city of asylums," including a prison and a building literally called the Lunatic Asylum? That, in the Lunatic Asylum, famed journalist Nellie Bly way early originated the plot of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by posing as an "insane" Cuban immigrant and then publishing "Ten Days in a Madhouse?" 

Didja know that the one of the island's previous owners' great-great-grandsons, Jacob Blackwell, built the Blackwell House, which is now NYC's 6th oldest house? And that Great-Great-Grandpa Blackwell's wife was another previous island owner (John Manning)'s daughter, and that Manning was banished from NYC to his own island on charges of "cowardice" due to surrendering Fort James while the governor was away?

Didja know that you can buy Carrot or Beet or Rosehip Jam in Polish Foods section of the "Mega" Gristedes?!

Didja know that the tram only costs ONE METROCARD SWIPE?

Anyways, back to the Mayberry-esque feel of Roosevelt Island: the population of 11,551 seems very large for what we saw. Folks milling about Main Street (the only street; how jaw-dropping cute), families darting on playgrounds, couples relaxing on the park lawns, a Subway being the only fast food. We saw one Chinese place, one Italian, one Japanese, and one all-around American restaurant-- + one NYC-normal street-fruit stand, one hot dog/pretzel cart, and one subway station. The population number almost matches my hometown's, which is a suburb of a suburb and owner of a movie theatre with one screen. 

Alright, I've now fallen asleep approximately 3 times whilst trying to upload some sweet ass pics from my FDR Island Adventure today, clearly to no avail. That's what happens when you only take 1 narcolepsy pill but walk a 2-mile island in the 90-degree heat under a blazing sun. I'm even chewing gum to keep me awake-- yeah, chewing gum while accidentally falling asleep in uncomfortable, unnatural positions... My writing involves a fair amount of personal risk. Physically dangerous. Some might call it a choking hazard. 

And this is what daily blogging looks like.

"If you like piña coladas, and getting drunk in the rain..." "It's five o'clock somewhere..." "Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama... I wanna take you down to Kokomo. We'll get their fast and then we'll take it slow. That's where we want to go-o-o... Way down to ROOSEVELT ISLAND USING THE AERIAL TRAM."

Get there now. It's an island with one Starbucks, and I'm not going to say it again.

(Oh, here we go: Team Tram!)

All-Natural, Grass-Fed Human Laws

Ingredients

• 1 person, other than the performers, in the audience of your improv gig... and it's your roommate
• 1 actual 16-year-old in your commercial audition (for a 16-year-old)
• 1 totally separate actual 16-year-old playing your friend in your filmed scene (as a 16-year-old)
• 2 overnight shoots
• 2 times that you throw up in front of your date
• 2 weeks until your day job starts
• $3 for a bottle of water
•  3 career aptitude tests
• 3 teenage tutoring clients
• 4 days as the only woman with 3 straight guys
•  $4 pints of pre-made margaritas
• 4 days in New Jersey

Instructions

1, 2, 3, 4. The simplest numbers... a pattern as old as time (not really, technically.) Today's recipe is brought to you by the idea that all of life's greatest mysteries can be solved by life's simplest lessons-- lessons so basic, so ingrained that they're easily forgotten. But enough with this flippancy! Castrate your carelessness! Do you see that list of ingredients up there? You don't have time for this forgetful nonsense-- you must dig way down deep and selflessly extract some Laws of Nature, or else you'll continue to be subjected to date vomits, shocking career test results, and countless days in New Jersey. 

Lucky for you, I spent the last 2 weeks excavating incredibly simple, inherently necessary human lessons to help you process this batch of ingredients. I know we're working with the basic numbers 1 through 4 so far (totally arbitrarily, by the way), but, since you've all been such good kids lately, I thought I'd spoil you a bit with DOUBLE the amount of Natural Laws-- that's right, double that arbitrary number of 4! Get these 8 Laws into your body, because summer is almost over; the ocean can't wash off your mistakes much longer.

Law #1:

Anything in a script that takes place during the nighttime will be shot during the nighttime. 

(That means that, even though you have narcolepsy, you can’t avoid overnight shoots. Welcome to the rest of your career!)

Law #2:

Drinking on an empty—entirely empty—stomach is never a good idea. 

(That means that, even though you weren’t hungry, that little voice in the back of your head telling you to eat something all day was right. Ms. Monday Fun-day, say "Hellooo!" to Ruined Tuesday!)

Law #3:

When you’re 5’1, roughly 100 pounds, cute, and blonde, don't be surprised when you keep getting type cast as a high school cheerleader. 

(That means that, even though you are 24 and never were anything remotely close to a cheerleader in terms of both physical ability and popularity, you’ll finally be able to live out that childhood adult dream. Cue Hilary Duff's "What Dreams Are Made Of!")

Wanna play a game called "Spot the Real High Schoolers?" 

Law #4:

When you don’t get a weekly paycheck, you don’t get weekly money. 

(That means that, even though you’re tutoring at $90/hour, you won’t see that lump sum of money until the middle of next month when your paycheck comes. Another dinner of homemade, bulk black bean/quinoa/lentils/rice mash, please!)

Law #5:

People like it when you treat them like people. 

(That means that, even though there is one sole woman hanging with you and your boys, you can still tell your boner stories and make explicit sex jokes! Does this mean you really needn't mention how she's cool "not like most girls" and you don't have to reassure her that she’s funny-- no, like, really funny--  at some point, completely out of context? MIND BLOWN!)

 

Law #6:

Deals on alcohol are no different than deals in the clearance section. 

(That means that, even though it’s $4 Margarita Monday, you don’t really want those margaritas. Mmm, this drink tastes not nearly as good as how quickly it was prepared!)

Law #7:

Career aptitude tests make you feel bad about your life. 

(That means that, even though you already know what you want to do and are simply taking a few tests for fun, seeing "Clergy" as your top match is confusing and upsetting. Ooo, here, a "Vice President," you say?? Ain't nothing like knowing I should aim for 2nd best!)

Law #8:

Any venue's drink minimum also applies to you. 

(That means that, even though you've decided not to drink for a while [see above] and you're performing at this comedy venue, you're not special so you're not exempt. That's right, "strongly encouraged" actually means "if you don't, you're an a$$hole!")

NO. No, YOU'RE NOT.
BUY THE $3 WATER BOTTLE.

... Fun stuff, right? I can see that your body is adapting to the rediscovery of these innate truths, and I hate to interrupt enlightenment. So, I'm going to let you sit motionless & affected for a bit while I go make myself a smoothie. You be careful out there, ya here? There's teenagers in these hills... Let's not make the same mistakes they're making. 

Post Script

We've hit the final countdown, lovers. There are only FIFTEEN (15) more recipes left before we hit the mark! It's only taken 2+ years, too! In honor of true & tangible DISASTER, these last 15 recipes will be coming at you daily. That's right. I said DAILY recipes for complete and utter total devastation to your livelihood. I'll see you on the flip-side on September 17th. 

Thanks, Michael.