Chris Has Stepped Out

Inconceivable! I Finally Met Wally Shawn

I am a huge Wally Shawn fan and have been since high school. It’s not really a common thing, to be a huge Wally Shawn fan, unless you are well into middle age, have enjoyed a certain type of aesthetically privileged upbringing and are at least a second-generation New Yorker. I am none of these things. But as I said, I’m a fan. A huge fan.

A lot of you know this about me and almost all of you think it’s weird. Even I think it’s weird, but I can’t help myself. Wally is chubby. Wally is bald. Wally speaks with lispy whine and looks like a gnome or a frog, depending on who you ask. And, after I met him last weekend, my suspicions were confirmed that he is actually shorter than I am. I’m not being mean, by the way. These are universal observations about Wally. You can look them up.

You may not think you know Wally, but you kind of do. Now in his 60s, he is the son of William Shawn, venerable editor of The New Yorker from 1951 to 1987. From what I’ve read about Wally, he enjoyed one of those rarefied Upper East Side childhoods that almost always exist as a myth. Except Wally actually lived it, growing up with a constant ebb and flow of the giants of literature, music and theater, the rich, the powerful, the scandalous. You and I read Charlotte’s Web after school.  Wally very likely sat next to E.B. White at one of this parents’ dinner parties. Wally went to Harvard and then to Oxford. And then he became a playwright and an actor.

The first time I saw Wally was in the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, which he wrote and starred in with another playwright, Andre Gregory. It was directed by Lous Malle. The premise is simple: Wally and Andre, mostly playing themselves, meet for dinner at a fancy restaurant and they talk about life. Andre’s point is that we have all so thoroughly insulated ourselves from the world and each other that we aren’t really “living” at all. Wally by and large thinks this is a load of crap:

Andre: What does it do to us, Wally, living in an environment where something as massive as the seasons or winter or cold, don't in any way affect us? I mean, were animals after all. I mean... what does that mean? I think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and the sky and the stars, we're living in a fantasy world of our own making.

Wally: Yeah, but I mean, I would never give up my electric blanket, Andre. I mean, because New York is cold in the winter. I mean, our apartment is cold! It's a difficult environment. I mean, our life is tough enough as it is. I'm not looking for ways to get rid of a few things that provide relief and comfort. I mean, on the contrary, I'm looking for more comfort because the world is very abrasive. I mean, I'm trying to protect myself because, really, there's these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look!

For most of his time on-screen, Wally sits there looking incredulous and alarmed. When Andre says something that particularly rattles him, he squeaks, “What?!” and his food falls from his fork, or from his mouth. I watched the film and couldn’t see myself reacting any differently than Wally. I became a huge fan.

You’re probably a Wally Shawn fan too, though you might not know it. Not a huge fan, like me, but a fan nonetheless. Wally supports his career as a playwright by acting. After My Dinner with Andre came The Princess Bride, in which Wally starred with Mandy Patinkin, Christopher Guest, Billy Crystal and Andre the Giant. Wally plays the inept kidnapper and spends most of the movie running around in tights and shrieking, “Inconceivable!” during the dramatic peaks. After that was the excellent Vanya on 42nd Street (another Louis Malle film), in which Wally, Julianne Moore and some other terrific actors rehearse the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya in the derelict, rat-infested New Amsterdam Theater before it was renovated. Andre (Gregory, not The Giant) is directing them in the rehearsal. Wally plays Vanya.

I won’t see Wally for a few years and then I’ll be watching TV or sitting in a movie theater and unexpectedly he’ll appear. The teacher in Clueless? That’s Wally. The voice of Rex the Dinosaur in Toy Story 2? Wally. The short, lisping alien with the giant ears in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine? Wally again. Sex and the City? There’s Wally. Manhattan? Hey, there’s Wally! He’s everywhere yet deliberately below the radar. He is commited to both the highbrow and the absurd. All of this I respect.

But as I said he is first and foremost a writer, and a very good one. His themes are usually political and dark and the language complex and melodic. His plays include Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner and The Fever. The problem with being a huge fan of Wally Shawn the playwright, however, is that his performances of his plays are as unpredictable as his screen appearances. And he never seems to leave Manhattan. For example, a few years ago I read that he was doing maybe 20 performances of The Designated Mourner. Except it wasn’t being performed in a traditional theater. Rather, it was being staged in an abandoned building near Wall Street and the space only seated a few dozen people. Oh, and there really wasn’t any information about where you could buy tickets.

That’s why after 25 years of being a huge fan I had yet to see Wally perform one of his plays onstage. Until last weekend. I had seen a small ad in The New York Times announcing that The Fever would be performed in New York City for several weeks. In the theater district. In an actual theater. There was even a phone number you could call to order tickets. The ad read, “Please join Mr. Shawn one half-hour before each performance for a sip of champagne.” I bought tickets for two different dates, just in case, and booked my flight. 

And so that’s how I found myself on the stage of The Acorn Theater, a glass of champagne in my hand, standing in line to say hello to Wally Shawn. He was round and a little slumped, and was wearing a tweed jacket and comfortable walking shoes. He was imminently courteous as he received each person, though I noticed he did not shake hands. (Afraid of germs, I thought. Very Wally-esque.) As I got nearer, with Big G behind me, poking me in the spine to move me along since he could tell I was a little flustered, I could hear Wally’s conversations:

Man: “This is my first play!”

Wally (squeaking, though very politely): “The first play?”

Man: “The first of your plays.”

Wally, nodding: “Well, I’ll do my best. I think you’ll survive.”

Woman: “I loved you in Star Trek!”

Wally, tilting head and thinking for a few seconds: “Well, this will be a bit different.”

And so on. Then it was my turn.  “I’m really looking forward to the performance,” I said. “I’ve been a huge fan of yours since high school!”

Wally’s eyes widened a bit. He tilted his head. “Well,” he said. A few people laughed. It did sound pretty weird. I told him about trying to find tickets to The Designated Mourner. I didn’t tell him that when I worked at Disney (the distributor of Toy Story 2) I had a Rex poster hanging in my office. “We’re really looking forward to the performance,” I said again. And then I fled to my seat.

The Fever is a 90-minute monologue in which Wally’s character essentially makes the point that despite all of our hand-wringing and protestations to the contrary, most of us lucky enough to have money and comfort will only help the poor to a degree that does not – wouldn’t ever – impact our own position of privilege. Uncomfortable truths, beautiful words. Then the lights came up and after waiting just a moment as we applauded, he walked up the aisle and out the door. Once again, he was gone. Who knows when and where I’ll see him again?

The Pain and Strain is Mainly on the Plane

I am, as I write this, in seat 22B on an American Airlines flight back to L.A. from New York. The woman at the ticket counter assured me I was first on the list for an upgrade to business class. I was actually seventh and so here I sit, right next to the bathroom and the galley. The flight attendants are great on this flight, though they keep parking the beverage cart right next to me. It is chilled to approximately minus 30 degrees. I am sure I now have arthritis in my right knee. Or maybe it’s just frostbite.

The movie on this flight is, by default, The Queen, since the movie we were supposed to see won’t load properly into the AV equipment. The Queen was the movie American Airlines showed on my flight to New York a few days ago. I also saw it last week in the theater. Let me know if you would like me to recite any (or all) of the dialogue from The Queen for you sometime.

All of this sound familiar? Of course. So I won’t bore you with a rant about air travel, since we all have plenty of those. This is more of an observation on air travel as our collective expression of confusion, suspicion and defiance, the most recent example of which is the new TSA rule requiring the scrutiny of all gels and liquids and the restriction that such items be no more than three ounces each.

We all got the hang of bringing our identification to the airport, putting our laptops into bins and figuring out what, exactly, constituted the one “personal item” we were allowed to bring with us on the plane. We even learned to take our shoes off, an act that I at the time considered the very last straw. I didn’t want to stand around in my socks in germ-infested airports. And though you may be a very nice person, I didn’t want to see the insides of your sweaty Cole Haans as they rolled out of the X-ray machine. We hated the lines and the indignity of it all, but we wiggled our toes, sighed heavily and did exactly as we were told.

Then they announced the gels-and-liquids rule and we all started to have a little bit of a breakdown. My theory is that we reached a tipping point as a society, coming to a sort of collective conclusion that we just couldn’t invest any more energy into an overly complicated directive with a dubious value proposition explained poorly by anonymous authority figures we suspected we didn’t like anyway. They could make us do it, but they couldn’t make us do it well.

Of course this has happened before. Need an example? Let us recall the national effort in the 1970s to institute the metric system in the U.S. Who made that decision? I can’t remember. What I do remember is that my 6th grade teacher added liters and centimeters to math class and we did a lot of converting of miles into kilometers. But it never really stuck. And why was that? Because we didn’t try very hard. We were 11 years old but we were already skeptical that as a country we would actually pull off the metric thing and we somehow understood that if we all pooled our inertia, we could probably hasten its demise. You must have done the same thing too, since that’s exactly what happened.

And let’s not forgot the U.S. Postal Service’s edict that we would all have to convert to nine-digit zip codes. Since the mail seemed to have always arrived with only a five-digit effort, nobody really saw the point of trying to memorize another four numbers. And so we didn’t. I couldn’t tell you the last four numbers of my zip code if my life depended on it and neither could you. Yet we all got each other’s Christmas cards on time this year and so those last four digits continue to bounce off our tightly sealed brains, fall to the floor and roll under the sofa.

The gels-and-liquids edict is closely related to the metric meltdown and the zip code follies. Sure, we understand the gravity of the broader situation. Yet we’re having a very hard time understanding why our deodorant is so involved and since no one is doing a very good job of explaining that, we’re starting to get a little distracted and a little stubborn and thus not quite remembering the rules even though we’ve been told a hundred times now. And that’s why pretty much every time I’m at an airport I still see security people throwing away containers of $40 bath gel and giant bottles of Old Spice while grown men and women beg for leniency. 

The TSA people are trying not to succumb to our woozy mob, but it’s an uphill battle. I’ve been in six different airports in the past three weeks and most of the time my gels-and-liquids ziploc was allowed to simply roll through the x-ray machine with everything else. Only once did someone actually look at it: I was at the Phoenix airport and a female security staffer held the bag aloft, pursed her lips and pondered the contents. “Is there a problem?” I asked. “I was just looking at your mascara,” she said. “I love that brand!” (She’s right, by the way. I use Diorshow Unlimited by Christian Dior and it’s pretty fab.)

But it’s the poor male TSA agents I really pity. My theory is that the reason my gels and liquids just roll on by is that the guys don’t know what they’re looking at and, frankly, they don’t want to know. Liquid eyeliner, liquid mascara, bronzer, peel-off face mask and three kinds of moisturizer. This is The Land Where Most Men Dare Not Tread, and yet these guys find themselves wandering in it, lonely and frightened, 40 hours a week. A few months ago one of them opened my clear plastic bag of overpriced, prettily packaged beauty potions and pulled out my hair goop. The tube was white, the brand name incomprehensible, the writing minuscule. He put it back in the bag and carefully sealed it. It was painfully clear he didn’t know if there was spackle or butter cream frosting in the tube, and he certainly wasn’t going to ask. I don’t know what’s in the tube either, truth be told, but it’s expensive and keeps my ‘do under control like nothing else and if he had tried to take it away from me I would have skipped my flight.

And this is how it always starts. This is how millions of strangers eventually come together and bring about change through a random conspiracy of pigheadedness and ineptitude. Open cans of Red Bull and half-squeezed tubes of Crest still overflow the trash cans at LAX and JFK. Airport gift shop employees have had it with travelers mooching courtesy ziploc bags  (because they forgot theirs -- again) but not buying any magazines or candy bars because now they’re late for their flights. Friends like mine say, “The HELL I’ll cram all my makeup in a baggy. I bought that stuff at Bergdorf!” and check their luggage, thus helping to overwhelm the airline baggage system. Confusion reins, heels dig in, and the system slowly grinds to a halt.

But I try to look on the bright side. We might surprise ourselves this time and actually get our collective act together. Or then again, maybe we won’t. Either way, the result could be a better system. Or at least a compromise, like the metric labels on quarts of milk that we totally ignore. Now don’t you feel better? I know I do. I think I’ll go out and run the hundred yard dash.