Why I'm Like This

by Cynthia Kaplan

  The recruiting job sees me through many financially unrewarding theatrical enterprises. And although I am getting what seems like a reasonable amount of work, I succeed in staying just beneath the radar of almost every agent and casting director in the city.

  I get a commercial agent, though, and book a commercial for an East Coast supermarket chain. The commercial shoots in Wilmington, Delaware—a delightful city—and I finish the first day of shooting trying to get the feeling back into my fingers after spending ten hours reaching into the glass-front cases of what is commonly referred to as Your Grocer’s Freezer. I spend the second day of shooting jumping on and off a rolling metal cake rack as it careens through the bakery section, a low-rent version of the old Rice-A-Roni ad. I do this dressed in a skirt and pumps—I am a working woman—and as I roll along I gape at a selection of pastries and sweets and compliment the store’s lighting. Thankfully, the commercial doesn’t air in New York, although my Philadelphia relatives are very impressed.

  I do a commercial for ESPN in which I stalk an old, odd-looking sportscaster. It is a very funny ad and I hope it will do for me what that Dentyne commercial did for the actor Rob Morrow. It doesn’t. The only people who see it are the type of sports fans who watch ESPN in lieu of a career.

  I get a part in a really good off-Broadway play. I play the lead character’s talking dog. This is not the same play in which Sarah Jessica Parker is transformed into the sexiest talking dog on earth and almost steals a woman’s husband from her. In this play the old, mangy talking dog dies.

  I play at least one lesbian a year in one or another downtown theater. Most of these plays are written by the same playwright and are attended by her large lesbian following and by my family, who surprises me by roundly accepting my work-related lesbianism. Their only request is that I provide them with a project-by-project breakdown of sexual content so they know which friends to invite. Some don’t want to see any kissing.

  One of these productions leads to an audition for the lead in an independent feature. I have already been in one independent film that actually made it to the Sundance Film Festival, but my part in it was so small that my character did not have a name. On my résumé, though, I call her Janice.

  The character I am auditioning for, Sarah, is the out-of-work wife of a millworker and she is having an affair with Susan, the college-bound granddaughter of Sarah’s black neighbor. The focus of the story isn’t the sex, the director assures me; it is about Sarah wanting to be Susan. Sort of a Catskills version of Persona. After the audition I go home and read the script. There are a series of funny, pathetic scenes of Sarah lying her way through job interviews in a crumbling, town-that-time-forgot town. I am interested, that is, until the scene where Sarah has sex with Susan and has to simulate orgasm-face on-screen. Is it a tasteful but explicit scene? Or is it soft girl-on-girl porn?

  The director calls and tells me I’m the front-runner for the part of Sarah, and she asks if I will come read with a bunch of prospective Susans. The director and her crew are now ensconced in a room in the offices of a film company on Washington Street. The building has been renovated expensively using a lot of exposed cedar beams and moldings and it smells like a freshly cleaned hamster cage. I read scenes with a succession of attractive black actresses, the last of whom makes the greatest impression. She is beautiful. She wears boys’ suede sneakers, jeans low on her straight hips, a tank top, and a baseball cap on backward. I could never pull that off. And her acting is very sullen, almost as if she isn’t acting. As it turns out, she isn’t. She’s a poet and she has never acted in her life. This bit of information will eventually be the source of one of Life’s Great Ironies. If you can’t guess what that might be, don’t worry, I’ll fill you in later.

  In late August, the poet and I are officially cast. Rehearsal is a strange affair. Nonactors can be more temperamental than actors. It’s not their fault; they don’t know the protocol, like the one where you act with the other person in the scene.

  We shoot the movie over the month of October in upstate New York, the cast and crew all living together in a big house. Someone shoots at us through a window one day because they think we are making pornography. My greatest success is that I manage to convince the director that the orgasm close-up should be of the poet’s face, not mine.

  We run out of money.

  A year later, with more money, we return to the Catskills and finish the movie. In the hiatus the poet has taken acting classes and becomes more fun to work with. We get into a bunch of festivals, including a prestigious festival in New York. The film gets some very nice and some okay reviews. I get some very nice reviews, too. My friends call me and say, “This is it, your life is totally going to change.”

  In fact, nothing happens. Well, one thing. Two months after the film screens in New York, my father-in-law passes away. He was a fairly conservative, old-school gentleman, and it is intimated more than once that seeing me locked in an erotic embrace with a black woman hastened his decline.

  I finally get a theatrical agent when I perform a piece of my own at a reasonably hip theater company and am a hit. There is a sense of legitimacy an actor gets from having an agent, and all these years I have wondered what that feels like. Now I know. It feels mostly like my agent sends me out for things I am not pretty enough for.

  A year later the poet appears in a highly publicized film at Sundance. Her picture is in the New York Times.

  Maybe the best I can hope for now is that everything will collapse and I will have to move, I don’t know, somewhere horrible, so I can rise again from the ashes like the phoenix, and I, too, will write of those harrowing days and nights and, who knows, maybe also start a grassroots organization that in five years’ time will make me both financially independent for life and a good person.

  jack has a thermos

  NOBODY loves a gadget like my father. Right up there with things that taste good are things that do things—unscrew tops, uncork bottles, inflate rafts, deflate rafts, juice oranges, blend milk shakes, vacuum spills, water lawns, keep tennis balls fresh. Like some kind of one-man Consumer Reports, he has tested the usefulness of several decades’ worth of power tools, barbeques, and exercise equipment, the last in a never-ending quest to get in shape. I remember in the late seventies there was a rope thing that you attached to a doorknob and you put your foot in one end of the rope and your hand in the other and when you pulled with your arm your leg rose up and vice versa. It was simple, really. You just laid there on the floor, watching TV, using your own body parts for resistance. Unfortunately, the doors in our house had warped smaller from the air-conditioning and when you pulled on the rope you also pulled the door open.

  Most people think of gadgets only as novelty items, clever contrivances that are possibly of more interest than of actual use and which make good jokey gifts at Christmas and Hanukkah. But as far as my father is concerned, any device, large or small, that promises to accomplish a task better than whatever device came before it qualifies as a gadget. Call him a technophile, call him a prophet, call him a sucker. I call him the Gadgeteer.

  Over the years the Gadgeteer has bought untold numbers of flashlights and telephones and popcorn poppers. Inevitably, our family had multiple generations of things—five juicers in ten years representing biannual improvements in juicer technology. We had a camera for every occasion, a small sampling of which included a classic thirty-five-millimeter Nikon, the very first model of the Polaroid camera, purchased on a trip to Florida while they were still unavailable in New York, and a spy-sized Minox. On vacations my mother referred to herself as “Sandy Hold This” because my father would invariably insist that she carry his cameras and binoculars in her purse or slung over her shoulders, an upper-middle-class sherpa.

  Surprisingly, our kitchen and workshop did not boast a full array of Ronco products. That is because you had to mail away for those. Nothing is worse for my father than waiting for something he has suddenly decided he has to have. Part of the
pleasure he gets from making these purchases is the immediate gratification of bringing them home as soon as he has discovered them. The rest of the pleasure is derived from the gadget itself, which is also, by its nature, a source of immediate gratification. You do this and then this happens. If it takes more then ten minutes to accomplish a task, it is not a gadget. Also, if it is not fun to use, it is not a gadget. The washing machine and the dishwasher and the iron are not gadgets. The vacuum cleaner is not a gadget. Or rather, the conventional vacuum cleaner is not a gadget. The nifty, outdoor, suck-up-water-nails-and-industrial-waste vacuum cleaner is a gadget.

  My father gets enormous satisfaction from the knowledge that he is taking care of his family by bringing home a better mousetrap. Many was the Saturday afternoon he returned from an excursion to the hardware store or the electronics store or a store in Westport called Silver’s where pretty much everything they sold with the exception of luggage was a gadget, and presented us with his latest discovery.

  “You’ve got to see this. It works like a dream. It’s much better than that old thing we had. Wait a minute, let me just, wait, I think there are instructions somewhere, okay, this fits in here and this fits like this, there we go. Okay, now try it.”

  Sometimes the latest generation of a gadget had become more complicated, enabling it to accomplish a new set of tasks and broadening the scope of its usefulness.

  “Look at this, it has twenty different functions, twice as many as before. It’s really amazing, the things you can do now.”

  And sometimes it had been simplified to an almost Luddite state of grace.

  “Do you remember how the other one had all those buttons and dials and you had to set it every time? Christ, it was a real pain in the ass. This one you just turn on and off. You won’t believe how easy it is.”

  Unfortunately, my father’s technological prescience did not always result in a step forward for the Kaplan family. In addition to a museum-quality collection, Calculators Through the Ages, our basement housed a whole host of devices that were not so much functional as hyper-functional; they were too clever to actually work. Recreational items often fell into this category. Lounge chairs that doubled as floatation devices, safe versions of games that aren’t fun if they are safe, science or craft projects that resulted in something completely unidentifiable. Occupying a prime corner of the dog’s room—that was the room in our basement where the dog slept and where my brother and I were supposed to hang out with our friends but never did, opting instead for the paneled den with the big color TV—was a drawing contraption made of liter-size plastic bottles that you filled with water and hung from the ceiling and there were some magic markers and pulleys involved and some string and you were supposed to be able to draw enormous geometric shapes with the bottles and markers swinging in various directions. Sort of like a giant Spirograph. I am probably missing some important part of the description but I can tell you, I saw the thing in action and nobody ever knew what was supposed to happen. Then there was the giant chess set which consisted of a shaggy chess-board rug, about five feet square, and a set of ten-inch-tall, sand-filled chess pieces. They were hard and large enough that if someone threw one at your head it could make you cry. This was not a gadget in the literal sense, but was, from my father’s point of view, a new way to play chess, and thus qualified as a gadget in spirit. I think he had a vision of my brother and me lying around on the floor, improving our strategic thinking while listening to the Archies. I don’t remember ever playing a complete game of chess on that rug, possibly because at the time of its purchase my brother and I were totally consumed with making monsters by putting rubber globs in a heat chamber. Now that was a good gadget. The only member of our family ever to use the chess set was the dog. He lounged on the rug and occasionally carted the pawns from one end of the room to the other in his mouth.

  My father’s all-time biggest turkey took up residence in our garage in 1979. It was a Citroën with a hydraulic system that enabled the car to rise up when in use and lower down when at rest. The intention was, ostensibly, to give the rider the impression that he was floating gracefully above the roadway like a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. He wasn’t. The Citroën was already so low to the ground that even levitated to its full height, you still had to crouch down to get in. It was a thankless car. It made my mother angry every time she saw it skulking menacingly on its haunches in the garage, and she was filled with dread at the thought of inheriting it when my father’s muse, Gadgetella, struck next.

  It struck all right but it didn’t strike a car. Sometime around my sophomore year in high school my father decided that what we needed in our backyard was a hot tub. He and my mother had long debated the pros and cons of installing a pool, and one day, on the umpteenth fact-finding mission to the pool store, my father fell in love with a redwood hot tub. He went home and made drawings and calculated figures and he came up with the idea of having an eleven-by-thirteen-foot tub with a swim jet, the swimming equivalent of a tread-mill. He found a carpenter from the Old World who hand-cut and-fitted every redwood plank and built beautiful curving railings. In the first week after it was finished my brother and I stood at my parents’ bedroom window and watched our father’s white body flailing away against the foamy jet. That’s about as long as that exercise regimen lasted. In all fairness, though, the hot tub was pretty great. If I’d been popular it would have been really great. And being Jewish, no one ever took their bathing suit off. Still, friends came over often and we steeped late into the night, playing with the jets and breathing in the bromine-scented steam. In the summer we turned off the heater and used the tub to cool off in, like a little swimming hole.

  There were ways in which my father applied his gadgeteering skills with more serious intent. He was one of the first people to have a phone in his car. This was the late 1960s, decades before cellular technology, and it was essentially like having a shortwave radio in your car. He loved the idea that he could talk to a client or call my mother to say he’d be late without stopping to find a pay phone. The Mobile Phone, as it was called, looked just like the phones in our house, except it sat between the front seats in a box like the Batphone and to get a line out you actually had to talk to the Mobile Operator. At stoplights my brother and I used to open the window, hold out the receiver to the driver of the car next to us, say, “It’s for you,” and collapse in hysterics. In those days my father was a hero because he could stop for distressed motorists and let them call for help, and they often couldn’t believe their eyes when he offered them the phone.

  He was also on top of the computer thing very early, and both he and his business, a consulting firm, were transformed by it. One room of his company’s offices was entirely devoted to a throng of huge Burroughs computers, whirring and ticking and hacking away, floor to ceiling, twenty-four hours a day. They were straight out of a 1950s sci-fi movie, and it was not hard to imagine them eventually breaking free from their moorings and galumphing down the hallway to my father’s office. He would yell “Aaargh!” and that would be that. “Some day,” my father told my brother, who was something of a techie himself—he worked in the AV Lab in school and was one of the kids who wheeled the overhead projector into your classroom so the teacher could show you transparancies of Europe Before the Great War—“Someday,” my father predicted, “everyone will have a computer on his desk.”

  Now that he has one on his desk, it is continually breaking down because he refuses to leave it alone to do its job. There is always one more thing he can get it to do. “I was just trying to make the cross-referencing easier and I completely screwed the thing up. I was on the phone with the computer guy for half the day. But I know what I did wrong, so I just…come,” he says to whoever is nearby, “I’ll show you what I did.” He just found some software that helps return the computer to where it was before he messed with it. “It’s really fantastic. I can’t believe it took them so long to come up with something like this. Before, you made one little mist
ake and you wanted to tear your hair out. Christ.”

  But nothing, no computer, no telephone, no waterproof wristwatch or rechargeable battery, no bagel slicer or egg coddler or collapsable beach chair with cup holder and shoulder strap, no fold-into-a-tiny-pouch travel bag, nothing, has captured my father’s imagination to the extent that the thermos has. Is it too big? Is it too small? Does it attach to the car? Does it have its own carrying case? Does it keep things icy cold or boiling hot? These are the questions that consume him on a daily basis. And of course the thermos he is using at present is always the best one there is.

  It is helpful to view it as a sort of mathematical model: Jack has a thermos. Maybe you have a thermos, maybe you don’t. Either way, Jack wants you to have his type of thermos, because according to Jack, his is fantastic. Yours, if you are not just reusing spring-water bottles—which, I might add, Jack thought a very good idea for several months—serves your needs. Jack’s thermos does not serve your needs, or rather, you don’t give a shit about the whole subject. Still, Jack buys you his type of thermos. Both because he wants you to have something fantastic and because he wants to prove to you that he is right. You use his thermos a few times. It’s okay. When you concede as much, Jack tells you he has found a thermos he likes better.