I would like to share some of my worst fantasies. Daydreams really, except they're disturbing. Daymares, if you will.
I do this somewhat hesitantly, offer a ringside seat to my psyche that is, because though I know they are telling of something about me, I'm not exactly sure what. I offer a window in anyway because at worst, no one cares about my reoccuring terror montages and at best, you have some too.
Everyone has a certain sort set of morbid disaster scenarios, I'm convinced. And by everyone, I mean New Yorkers. And by New Yorkers I mean those on the west side. There are the sprawlingly cinematic big budget global apocalyptic kind, usually experienced on the subway, going over a suspension bridge or on a transatlantic flight. These often involve fireballs whipping through tunnels, odorless poison gases and wildly infectious flesh eating diseases. And then there are more loca-horrors, small scale home grown nightmares, the insidious little imagined machinations that can happen anywhere.
Let me explain. Or better yet, let me just tell you one.
Like all other fledgling starry eyed, painfully earnest and perpetually stoned actors in New York City who study The Method, I've spent a great deal of time in acting studios. You know the kind, floor to ceiling mirrors, nondescript splintery black wooden boxes, ballet bars. The landscape speckled with borderline suicidal thespians, usually found in some sort of a stretch and waxing socialist about The Group Theater.
Actors are constantly stretching. Actors adore being relevant. I don't why this is.
Anyone who has ever gone to a Method acting school also knows that 98% of the student body teeters perpetually on the verge of suicide. Not that any of them will or do in a straightforward way. Drugs, drink and keeping your weight just this side of organ failure are the scenic route to self destruction. But anyway.
It's the resigned state of a future without stability, I guess, and with a krabillionth of a fraction chance at The Big Time.
I was one these types- a stretching socialist lunatic. Deep down I still am I suppose in some ways, with my energies redirected more to page than stage. But back in the day, I had this one recurring worst fantasy.
Usually it would happen just after yoga warmup and before a long day spent in the studio. It was not uncommon in those days (I say this like the late nineties were ancient times) to spend ten hours a day rehearsing in dance pants, memorizing Shakespeare and decoding Chekhov, perfecting my breathing and sneaking out to the fire escape for cigs. It was in some ways ideal, going to acting school. I was like an adult baby; learning to walk and talk all over again. Being told that Ibsen mattered, that the work mattered.
In other respects it was heinous. Having to witness fellow students regurgitate their most painful childhood molestation memories in the form of an acting exercise, being graded on pretending to be a tree, wincing through acting teachers berating ingenues on questionable talent and small tits, these are things I miss less.
Okay. The worst fantasy. I would walk into the bathroom post-yoga warm up and for a flash of a second I would expect to see a fellow actor hung from the ceiling. Not like by invisible Peter Pan Sandy Duncan hanging wires, but by a rope. A noose. Two leg warmed legs swinging as I would open the door. My heart would skip every time, expecting to discover the scene.
This obviously never happened in reality, praise Adler. And I still don't know why I had this daymare. It's much funnier when I tell it aloud, I swear.
