Photo: Brave Lux
What's more chaotic than a life in the theater? Well, life in general, for one thing. Messier than any play, life has a way of hiding surprises in the wings, needing re-writes on the fly, and breaking legs. You might forget your blocking, and just become blocked. But every now and then, there are those moments of applause that keep us on stage.
My guest this week is Chicago actor, radio host, and comedian Scott Duff, who at an early age felt the lure of a theater, of a microphone, of a spotlight. If you set out to build the perfect performer, you could do no better than Scott. Not just because of the natural charisma he exuded during his childhood one-boy productions of the musical Annie -- but because he never allowed setbacks to stop him, onstage or off.
And there were plenty of opportunities to storm off to a dressing room and hide. But he didn't -- not through breakups, and suffering in closet. Not through times of tragedy, when family and friends were suddenly gone. Not even when Tennessee forced him for years to maintain the illusion that he was a heterosexual drama teacher did Scott ever give up dreaming of his next big performance.
And what he found is that even when the material's lame, the theater's falling apart, and the audience is lousy, the curtain might always go up on something better the following night. The show must go on.
It's hard for me to choose which Muppet clips I want to include here, because I would like to just watch Muppets on YouTube all day long. But here are a few that came up in this episode:
Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/