Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living

by Nick Offerman

  Every two or three months, something really exciting would come my way, which would usually end in disappointment. To wit: In 1998 I was up for the lead in a movie entitled The Tao of Steve. In fact, the director led me on for a couple of weeks that I had won the part when she had me in to read with other actors, but then they found out they could get Donal Logue, a great actor who had some buzz around him. I believe she sincerely thought I was going to be her choice, but the communication was left in a bit of a gray area, because, as was often the case with me, they found me to be an “adequate” choice but were still hoping they could get someone who was more exciting at the time. So, when they actually did find a more exciting actor, she had to sit me down and give me a talk. She was trying to save face in an unfortunate situation but didn’t do terribly well when she handed me the lamest line ever: “You’re more Gary Cooper and he’s more Montgomery Clift, which is more what this story needs,” as though I would think, “Oh, well, I was crushed, but since you compared me to Gary Cooper, no hard feelings!” I wonder if Donal knows what a powerful Monty Clift vibe he has going on, because he might be able to parlay that into at least a biopic at some point, right? The character was supposed to be really overweight and schlumpy, and Donal Logue did have a few pounds over me at the time, which didn’t help my case either.

  Unfortunately, thinking I was going to be making this film, I had begun to happily gain weight, putting on twenty pounds over three or four weeks, with Pat’s gleeful assistance. In fact, you might say that he made me his project. I ate so much fucking ice cream and so many cheeseburgers that I thought I would clog my circulatory system right into an early grave. We had just seen an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer found out that if he weighed three hundred pounds he could go on disability. So he started wearing muumuus around the house, and there was this great joke that your food’s caloric level wasn’t high enough unless you could rub it against a piece of paper and have the grease turn the paper clear. Homer says to Bart at one point, “Every second I’m out of bed I’m burning precious calories.” It was as though my very own guide for weight gain had been personally delivered via the genius of The Simpsons! So, obviously, I started wearing a muumuu (purchased down the hill at the Rite Aid!) and packing on weight just like Homer. I started quoting the lines from The Simpsons to our oblivious neighbors and the mailman. Getting fat was the greatest!

  Then suddenly I wasn’t getting the job and I had become overweight, and so that, of course, just made me even more depressed. Rather than take the weight right back off again, I chose to shrug and continue trudging through the hard-won life lessons of a young man, now “husky,” in Hollywood.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, I was starting to more consistently land dependable character-actor gigs. I won a role on ER, which was very exciting, as it was the highest-profile drama on television at the time. It was to be the first live episode of ER, and so they wanted theater actors, because the show would be shot more like a live play than a film. Since it was live, we couldn’t stop and do it again if a mistake was made, so they wanted a cast who could hopefully avoid mistakes. It was an incredibly exciting event of which to be a part. A year or two later I was on the fifth episode of The West Wing. This was quite bolstering, the opportunity to work on these shows that had some prestige. Even winning a little guest-star part says to a fellow, “You have worth. Stick around—maybe next time you’ll do three episodes.” I kept getting these invaluable little signals from the business that said, “Stick it out, kid, just keep plugging away. Something good will happen.” Casting people would say things like that to me, too. One benevolent lady told me, “Look, you’re going to do great when you come into your sheriff years. Grow a moustache and you’re going to work like crazy.” I wish I could see her now and shake her hand.

  I was about due for some good news when suddenly I got some. A great theater company from Chicago called Roadworks, out of Northwestern University, was coming to town with a production of Mike Leigh’s Ecstasy. They needed to replace a naked drunk guy in the show, and someone said, “Hey, Offerman’s in LA. Perfect.” So we staged this play at the Odyssey Theatre, which I found to be an excellent and dependable (still is today) Los Angeles institution, and let me tell you, that work put a powerful healing on me. Casting directors came to see us because the company had a great reputation, and I was able to ride on their coattails. Mali Finn, a generous and sublime casting director, sadly no longer with us, showed up, as did a few other great casting directors. Thank my lucky stars, some of these ladies saw something unique in me and began to champion me. For years they would bring me in on auditions and try to get me some really nice jobs. It took a long time, but I began to see more and more fruit from their efforts.

  The best thing that happened immediately was that two casting directors—the same ones from The Tao of Steve, Nicole Arbusto and Joy Dickson, two of my greatest champions whom I love to death—were casting this film called Treasure Island, written and directed by a genius guy named Scott King. It was a delightfully peculiar script, written more like a theater piece than a film, so they were leaning toward some theater actors.

  They ended up casting me and one of the lead actors from our production of Ecstasy (the heroic Lance Baker) as the leads of the movie, and then they cast the lead actress from the play (a winsome Rachel Singer) in a supporting role. I suddenly had a lead role in a movie, a hilarious, weird, and smart movie, and I was in heaven. The filmmakers were “old-timey people”—a sort of revival movement. Fifteen years ago in LA, there was this sect of hipsterish people who would dress in old-timey fashions, like from the big band era. Double-breasted suits and fedoras and poodle skirts and such. Every Friday night at the Brown Derby there would be big band music and swing dancing. They would use pomade in their hair and have DA haircuts and the whole nine yards.

  Scott King was sort of an adjunct to this crowd but he held himself apart from it, and therefore above it. He had come into some money, so he whimsically fashioned himself as an old-time studio head with his company King Pictures. He had a 1932 BMW convertible that he drove around, and he was very generous with all of us working in his company. We had a lot of fun, both shooting the film and socializing outside of it. I had finally found an artistic circle in which I could hang my hat and a benevolent leader whom I could serve with ardor in Scott, a good friend of mine to this day.

  We shot in a studio in Silver Lake, on a period camera called a Mitchell. The movie was set in 1943 and a Mitchell was the actual camera one would have used in the forties. Scott ran a very civilized set, insisting that we only shoot eight-hour days. I loved working with him and the producers. Treasure Island was also where I first met my good friend Austin filmmaker Bob Byington, who was the script supervisor on the film. Speaking of Bob, I ended up making a couple of prosthetic penises for the movie, because they didn’t have anyone else who could, and I had made a lot of stuff like that for theater in the past. We also shot a week up in San Francisco, including some amazing locations in the city and in front of the Bay Bridge.

  It was such an incredible feeling to finally have the lead in a movie that reminded me of the Defiant Theatre in its combined irreverence and intelligence. These people valued me as an actor but also as a dependable contributor; I consulted on acting scenes, drove the art truck, rigged lights, and more, which did my self-worth a world of good. The movie went to Sundance in 1999, and it really got us a lot of nice attention. We were awarded a special jury prize for “Distinctive Vision.” I finally felt like things were beginning to sputter to life for me in Los Angeles. The snowball began to pick up speed, almost imperceptibly, but still, that was a good sight better than slowing down and melting.

  * * *

  Not long after this small triumph, planted in front of Dawson’s Creek one night with our preferred dinners—a can of Virginia blister peanuts and a mason jar full of Jim Beam, water, and ice—Pat and I were undoubtedly feeling romantic after seeing wha
t those rascals Pacey and Dawson were up to. We observed, “Okay. This is pathetic. There’s gotta be some high-quality women in this town looking for us. We’ve met a lot of ladies, we’ve seen how this town works now. We’re smart, after a manner of speaking, and we know that we have unique, weird talents and personalities. There are definitely ladies of refined taste looking for us. We just gotta find ’em.”

  Well. I’ll be goddamned if that speechifying didn’t work, as though we had uttered some sort of necromantic, romantic incantation. Isn’t that The Secret? You just say what you want out loud, and it comes to you? Had some arcane kabbalah from a random episode of Oprah infiltrated our psyches? Whatever the case, Secret or no, within two weeks of saying it Pat met his future wife, Courtenay Valenti, who is a magnificent, beautiful, tasteful woman who also happens to be a brilliant film executive at Warner Bros. and classy as all get-out. It had happened exactly like we wished in our Secret! THANK YOU, DAWSON!!! PEACE, PACEY!!!

  Through the cloud of smoke and patina of Silver Lake dirt, she was able to see the best version of Pat, in effect saying, “You are a brilliant, good-looking guy. Your artwork is somehow simultaneously hilarious and acutely intelligent, and I am laying claim to you.” (And she was right. They have two amazing kids now, and Pat is a champion dad and husband, even as he continues to crank out uproarious, thought-provoking art.) Before we knew it, they were an item.

  * * *

  Shortly after Pat and Courtenay started dating, maybe a couple of months later, I was telling my friends, “Guys, ladies, I’m losing my mind. I have to do a play. That’s my mother’s milk. It’s the only thing that can save my life.” Once again, my heroic casting directors Nicole and Joy, who had put me in Treasure Island, hooked me up with an audition for a play at a new company called the Evidence Room, which had just purchased a building in the Echo Park area. They needed to build a theater in this old warehouse and they also needed to build a set for the show. There was a character in the play who was an East German soldier who had a monologue at one point comparing his anus to his phallus. I said to them upon our meeting, “You don’t know it yet, but you are looking for me.”

  It turned out that an actress named Megan Mullally, who was one of the stars of a popular television comedy entitled Will & Grace, was cast in the lead of the play. This fact was dangled as an incentive when I was meeting the directors of the company, but I said, “Hey, I’m a man of the theatre”—real theatre folk (nerds) spell it with the old-school -re—“so I’m not that crazy about working with a TV lady, but I’m going to audition despite the fact that you’re planning to include her.”

  Regardless of that jackassery, I got the job. And it, and indeed she, saved my life.

  The show was The Berlin Circle by Chuck Mee. He takes Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and sets it at the Berlin Wall coming down. During the first read-through, the cast of twenty-four people was sitting in a large circle of chairs in this empty warehouse when Megan came walking in, all turned out and wearing very cute clothing and what I used to call her “fashion shoes.” She was beautiful, okay, sure, and I thought, “All right, let’s see what you got, hotshot.”

  We read through the script, and my attitude and, well, everything changed. She was so funny and so masterful, such a total pro, that she immediately went from seeming like some sort of TV actor with my own imagined inadequacies to clearly existing as a living, breathing, gorgeous pack of talent. Adroitly extinguishing my misplaced snobbery was the discovery that she had done two Broadway shows by that point. To my embarrassment, I was to learn that she had cut her teeth in the exact same Chicago theater community as my own snotty ass, just some years before me. Beyond that, she was simply hilarious. I am still so besotted by her talent that thirteen years into our relationship, I am amazed that I am the partner to such a bright and shining powerhouse of entertainment. In the play, I was doing a sort of cheap Colonel Klink (from Hogan’s Heroes) German dialect, which, thankfully, she found funny. After the read-through I went up to her, thinking, “Of course, you fool—they have good people on TV, too.” My first words to my future bride were, “Hey, I’m Nick. You’re hilarious and I think this is going to be really fun.” Little did I realize how effective this opening salvo would prove.

  As it turned out, literally no one else spoke to her that day because they were all freaked out by loving her on TV. So my humble greeting turned out to be a huge windfall, unwittingly.

  We had a lot of factors working against our becoming a couple. A rule I believe I’ve mentioned: One doesn’t date another actor in one’s play. Of course, we all end up breaking that rule, obviously, at some point, but everybody knows better. If you have your shit together and you’re an adult, but you are feeling randy toward a castmate, you might make your urgings known to each other, but you simply wait until the play is over to seal the deal. Otherwise, chances are you’re just signing up for little more than an afternoon delight (which can also be a pleasing option). I guess my point is that if you feel strongly enough about your fellow actor that you want to try to make a go at something lasting, then your amour has a better chance of surviving if you cultivate it outside of the theater, ideally after the play closes.

  Beyond that rule of thumb, we were also both staunchly single. Despite the matchmaking glamour that Pat and I had conjured together a few weeks before, I was still being protective of myself because LA and her cute, superficial women had been very painful to me thus far. Megan was extra self-protective because she was on a popular TV show, and I’m sure she had prospecting gold diggers at every available turn. She had been dating guys who were slightly more rock-and-roll style, leather-pants wearing, skinny sort of guys. So we were sort of blindsided when we mutually snuck up on each other.

  Because of our similar theater careers, we became really good friends pretty immediately. Plus, we were the two outsiders in the cast. The Evidence Room was an existing company with a couple of shows under its belt moving to this new home, and we were the two hired guns. This arrangement saw us banding together during rehearsal, during which we discovered that we also shared a filthy, irreverent sense of humor. It didn’t take long, probably a couple of weeks into rehearsals, for us both to realize, “Oh, hang on. Holy crap. I’m really attracted to you.” I can certainly say that for myself, at any rate. Megan’s thoughts might have run with just a modicum of increased elegance.

  I made the first overtures, although we were both sending pretty clear signals. My first hurdle, strangely enough, was a feeling of insecurity at being so outclassed by Megan. I saw her as a “fancy lady” who couldn’t possibly have an eye for a working jack like myself. She wore “fashion shoes,” for fuck’s sake. In a way, my perceived class difference probably helped matters progress, as I felt like I could grow safely close to Megan without any danger of romantic feelings, because of my “low station.” That dastardly Cupid snuck right up in my shadow and filled me full of arrows. Eventually the penny dropped, and I was understandably in some disbelief. To myself, I thought, “What?! No. No way is this happening. Who do you think you are? Is this Beauty and the Beast? She be a lady, the finest of ladies, and you be but a pagan laborer,” but it was too late. Far, far too late.

  Almost nightly, I was saying to Pat Roberts, “This is crazy. I think we like each other.” I would call him constantly to say, “Jesus. Check out what Megan just said,” because she said just the funniest shit. I couldn’t believe that a woman that beautiful and sophisticated would say something so wonderfully pornographic about my balls.

  Things started falling into place, and finally, we were becoming really winky and flirtatious with each other. One day, as she was leaving the theater in her Range Rover, I ran out and stopped her. I knocked on the window and climbed in the passenger seat and looked her in the eye as I said, “This is going on, right? I’m not that smart, but I’m also no dummy. This is happening.”

  She was very old-fashioned and businesslike about i
t. She said, “Okay. There might be something happening down the road, but I can guarantee you nothing is going to happen before the end of our play. But yeah, I think you’re all right.” Then we drove to Los Feliz (which means “The Happy”) where we proceeded to park and make out for two hours. Beck’s Midnite Vultures album had just come out, which included the song “Beautiful Way,” and we played that song on repeat thirty-eight times. Seems like it was go time. We kept it a secret for a while but got busted opening night. The sound designer spotted us kissing out on the deck (that I had built).

  * * *

  Man, brother, I’ll tell you, I was head over heels. I was solid gone, baby, but Megan was extremely old-fangled in her courting allowances. It didn’t take long before I had moved out of the unfinished basement I was living in and moved in with her, but she stepped us through the process in small increments. I got to take her home and make out on the couch, but then I had to leave. Then I was allowed to start spending the night, but I had to sleep on the couch. Eventually, when I finally got to sleep in the bed I had to face the wall and behave myself. She did it for real, because she wanted to be sure that I was for real. It took veritable calendar months before she, as she puts it, “gave up the puss.”