The Scottish Play - August 25, 2006

You won't find the following story in my stand-up act. It involves a famous actress who is married to an equally famous producer who would most likely sue me if I used their real names. And, while libel lawsuits scare the hair off my asshole, I fully recognize that slander is the stuff that makes the world go round. That is why I tell this story to friends when I'm drunk...

In December of 2001, I went to the Los Angeles premiere of that goofy Tom Cruise movie "Vanilla Sky" with my quasi-famous quasi-friend, Mark Feuerstein.

I was a last minute replacement for one of his more "industry-friendly" buddies, but I was still more excited than a Down's kid at a Shiny Stuff convention. No one in LA will ever cop to caring about being surrounded by the upper echelons of the Hollywood statusphere, but catch any of those "been-there-done-that" actors the next morning at breakfast, and they'll be dropping more names than Schindler on payday.

When Mark first extended the invitation, I was overcome by a naive, perhaps quaint (I now realize misguided, borderline retarded) belief that attending a star-studded movie premiere at the famous Mann's Chinese Theatre "could really do things for my career." I'm fairly certain that exact phrase came out of my mouth at least 14 times while preparing for the event.

I was 100% determined to make an impression on the movers, shakers, and dream-makers. I got a Supercut, I bought a new blazer at Daffy's - originally $495, marked down to $39.99 - and I even wore clean underpants. The morning of the premiere, I called Mark and told him, coolly, that I was just going to take a cab and meet him there. He laughed at my naïve attempt at Hollywood nonchalance and said he'd pick me up.

Mark pulled up in front of my hotel in his 2002 Saab 9000 Turbo convertible wearing custom Armani. I slid into the passenger seat and couldn't help but note that despite my best efforts and my Capital One No Hassles card, Mark looked, dressed, and smelled (he was wearing that fancy "cologne" stuff) about 37 rungs higher up the socioeconomic ladder. He even had a ridiculously even George HamilTAN. I commented on it and he confessed that he had gotten one of those new "spray-on" jobs. I told him, "It's great. The tan goes with your personality - they're both fake." I acted like he was an LA poser, but made a mental note to get one ASAP.

I tried a tanning salon when I first came out for "pilot season," but apparently, there are some shades of pasty Irishman that can't handle a single lambda of UV. For me, "tanning beds" are just "freckle incubators." I step into one of those things for two minutes, and I've metastasized until it looks like I have a box of fish flakes stuck on my face. A freckle-free dye job on my dermis sounded like the perfect solution.

As he pulled out of the hotel parking lot, Mark gave me the quick once-over. I may as well have been wearing Snuffy Smith overalls and carrying a musket. It wasn't that he gave me a look of disdain, but if there's a word that exactly means "look of gentle pity," then he gave me a THAT word. He flicked his turn signal and muttered, "You might want to check out Fred Segal's Department Store when you're here." After quietly crushing my ego, Mark casually slipped on his designer driving glasses and merged into traffic.

My hotel was a number of miles from Mann's but, as we turned onto Sunset headed due east toward the premiere, I could already see the rotating triumvirate of spotlights faintly dance against the darkening sky. The sun was filtering through the smog, painting the sky a beautiful imperial violet--a perfect complement to the Hollywood royalty showing up for the premiere. It was like God was saying, "These are my chosen people!"

When we reached the block where the red carpet procession began, there were already hundreds of people struggling against an impressive array of shielded police officers. They were grabbing at ropes; screaming at nothing in particular with desperate, gaping mouths; and craning their necks to catch a glimpse of whichever A through D-list celebrities were making their way down the quarter-mile long red carpet.

The scene was electric, like right out of a movie. The men were in perfectly tailored suits. The women posed in floor-length designer gowns. I think they even had valet parking. I can't say for sure, though, because Mark is an unabashed Jew and decided we should park 14 blocks away, where parking was free.

While I took the whole thing in, Mark intermittently shot his left hand through his cuff to check his Rolex, impatient that his publicist hadn't shown yet. Although Mark is an established commodity in LA, and most of the paparazzi know him, a bitchy fat girl is always good to have around at these things to bark orders at the press. Finally, she arrived, out of breath (hey, she walked/jogged almost 10 feet), brushed a piece of lint off Mark's shoulder, and quickly escorted him to the entrance of the red carpet procession. Mark surprised me when he suddenly grabbed my arm and gruffly said, "Hey, come with me." What the fuck was I going to say? I feigned insouciance, but I think I pee'd just a little bit in my clean underpants as I stepped onto my first red carpet.

I walked a little behind Mark while the "chubblicist" tried to drum up some encouragement for him from the shutterbugs. At first they seemed indifferent; then it erupted: "Mark... Mark... Hey Mark... Mark... Over here Mark...Mark!" Suddenly, they couldn't get enough of him. I wistfully smiled in the background, thinking about our youthful days at Princeton, when superstar "Mark" couldn't get laid to save his fucking life. But he did well with fame; he took to it like a pedophile to the priesthood. My feelings were a collision of pride and envy.

The wave of spotlights, telephoto lenses, and seagull-like yips of "Mark" rolled in front of me as I strolled behind him and his press rep like a forelock-tugging serf. I turned to look at the row of paparazzi and I may as well have been a homeless crackhead itching an open sore - they either pretended not to see me, or glanced at me briefly and winced. I actually think one of the press guys, this little Mexican dude, felt sorry for me. At one point during my sweep of the press line, our eyes met for a fraction of a second and he tentatively raised his camera up and..."CLICK!" The photog to his left turned to him sharply with a puzzled look and the little Mexican dude just shrugged his shoulders.

The red carpet ended as the sun set over the undulating Hollywood hills. Mark and I reconvened and we strolled into the palatial entrance of Mann's Chinese Theatre, with its legendary curving walls and copper-topped turrets. It was awe-inspiring and majestic. Not only that, they were giving out free popcorn! Fuck yes, I thought, I had finally arrived!

As serendipity would have it, Mark bumped into Penelope Cruz by the popcorn buffet. He co-starred with her in "Woman On Top." They shot it together for 3 months in Brazil and had become good friends. Now, this is part of the reason why Mark is more successful than me: unlike him, I would have spent every minute of that shoot trying to fuck Penelope Cruz. So what if she was dating Tom Cruise! I don't want to be sued for libel, but rumor has it that Tom Cruise is a flaming ... Scientologist. How hard can it be to steal a girl from a Scientologist?

Penelope sort of blew Mark off when he tried to talk to her, and he moped about it for the next ten minutes. I tried to make light of the situation by asking him why he didn't try to fuck her in Brazil. He said that he was focused on work and spent his free time playing beach volleyball. "Ohhhhh," I said, "I get it, you didn't try to fuck her because you had sand in your vagina." Mark feebly laughed.

On a deeper, more visceral level, Mark doesn't get me - which is why, four years later, he will invite me to his engagement party but not his wedding. Thank God. I hate it when my rich friends invite me to their stupid fancy weddings anyway: "Hey, you're invited to my wedding in the Caribbean, Bill!... No, I can't pay for airfare... no, I can't give you a place to stay...yes, you need to rent a tux, and yes, a present under $100 makes you a cheap bastard... so, are you coming!?" No thanks! Call me in 3 years when you're having the divorce party -- I'll shell out airfare for that shit.

We finally sat down for the movie and watched a parade of plastically molded stars stumble in late. David Hasselhoff was there, doing his best impersonation of ... David Hasselhoff. Courtney Love, the Hollywood whore du jour, was blitzed out of her skeleton and tripped in the aisle ten minutes into the film. Or movie. Or motion picture. Or whatever you want to call that thing they named "Vanilla Sky."

If you haven't seen it yet, here's what I recommend you do instead: take a crap and then stare at it for 2 hours. That activity will be infinitely more entertaining AND 16 minutes shorter.

Of course, everyone said they loved it and that everyone involved in it would have Oscars thrown at them by the truckload. I knew better. They had "premiere eyes." It happens at Sundance, too -- people head up to Park City, get hammered in the altitude, and think that the celluloid depiction of steaming shit they see at the Saturday midnight screening is going to revolutionize the motion picture industry. "Blair Witch," anyone?

The premiere party afterwards was next door to the theater at an enormous venue called the "Hollywood Ballroom." The plan was simple: I was going to mingle with the execs, and my special brand of yokel and sophisticate charm would instantaneously book me movie roles. Watch out, Burbank, here I come! Yeehaw!

When I first walked in, the place was jumping. Beautiful people were dancing, the music was thumping, and celebrities were smiling broadly for the cameras. I was at the epicenter of the entertainment industry. I looked across the room and saw Kate Hudson with her new husband, Chris Robinson. Awesome -- I knew Kate! We had been good friends at the Williamstown Theatre Festival when she was 16. We used to hang out in my room and microwave TV dinners and talk about love and sex until 3am. Surely, she would remember me? She'll probably melt from the nostalgia my Proustian presence will incur! I scooped up a cosmo from the bar and coolly strutted over toward my dear old friend Kate.

I took a few steps across the floor, and then, I don't know why... I lost confidence. My brain went into overdrive: What if she isn't excited to see me? Or worse still, what if she doesn't remember me? I stopped dead in my tracks, paralyzed with uncertainty. I mutely watched the happy newlyweds smile and kiss for the flashing cameras with my mouth agape like a fish out of water.

As I stood there, I reflected briefly on my last encounter with Kate. Before she blew up with "Almost Famous," I bumped into her on 57th Street and 9th Avenue in Manhattan. She seemed happy to see me and gave me her number, insisting that I call her. I nervously rang her home two days later and fucking Kurt Russell picked up. That time as well, my confidence withered. I mean, come on, it was Snake goddamned Plissken! I didn't leave a name or number; I only said I would call back later. Of course, I never did.

And then, almost as soon as they had arrived, Kate and Chris vanished. After about 15 more minutes rooted in the same spot, I realized something very important: everybody who was anybody left about 14 minutes ago.

See, at LA premiere parties, celebrities and producers show up for quick photo-ops and then hightail it back to their Mulholland Drive Mansions or beachfront bungalows to quickly scrub off the smell of desperation that has accumulated in their clothes like so much cigarette smoke. Only Hollywood's undercrust™ will remain after the half-hour mark.

I looked around and saw that the only people left were hangers-on, wanna-bes, and professional eye candy/dancers who were being paid to pretend like they were having a good time. You could instantly tell who the latter group was because they were the only ones smiling and definitely the only ones dancing. Dancing is anathema to Hollywood.

My mouth curled into a smirk and I started laughing at my profound insight. That was when I had another, even more disturbing realization:

I was one of the wanna-bes.

There was, without a doubt, some other asshole across the room holding a Fruity Pebbles cosmopolitan just like mine looking at me like I was the undercrust, and then there was another asshole looking at him thinking the same thing, and so on, and so on. It was like one big re-iterative mathematical fractal pattern that traced around the entire ballroom, stitched together by a shared sense of deluded self-importance.

Regardless of my epiphany, at the end the equation was the same: me = wanna-be.

The difference is this: I wasn't going to bow out of this turd tango until I at least had a story to tell. But how? Maybe a little Red Bull vodka might get those Irish neurons riverdancing across the synapses...

I started to get a little sloppy. It didn't matter; it looked like Mark had gone home and no one else there knew who the fuck I was. That was when it hit me like a ton of dildos...

I could be anyone I wanted -- I was completely anonymous!

I knocked back a couple more drinks while I knocked around a few ideas. I had just been cast as the lead in this terrible kid's film called "Just 4 Kicks," and I was supposed to don a Scottish accent for the role. This would be the perfect way to practice.

And so it was, that night I decided to fashion myself into a drunk, party-crashing Scotsman from Glasgow named "Duncan." I decisively grabbed a full bottle of Grey Goose off of a table. Before the bartender could utter one syllable of protest, I shot off my first Scottish brogue of the night: "Fook off!"

It was on.

I prowled around the periphery of the ballroom, looking to test out my new character. Lo and behold, across the room I saw an attractive and legitimately famous actress decked out to the nines. I can't name names because I can't afford attorney's fees, so, in honor of the fact that it was a Tom Cruise movie opening, let's go with Katie.

I sauntered over to Katie, told her that my name was "Duncan," and that "I loooved" her "in Beetlejuice." My accent sounded pretty good and what made it more convincing (at least to me) was that I was pie-eyed -- a drunken slur really seems to enhance the Scottish dialect. In general, I find that when doing a foreign accent, it helps if people can't understand what the fuck you are actually saying.

The 60,000 euro question was: would this incredibly talented, seasoned, and award-winning actress buy it?

Well, apparently, when Scottish and hammered, I can be pretty persuasive.

Despite some initial reluctance on her part, we settled into a nice conversation. I told Katie that I was a mechanic from Glasgow in LA for the first time, visiting a friend I met while a foreign exchange student eight years ago. I pulled this stuff directly out of my anus. It was like I was watching somebody else say the words.

After about 30 minutes of "Duncan," I realized there was no going back -- there would be no way I could ever tell her the truth. That, in and of itself, would have been fine, but after another hour of drinking together, Katie started telling me all kinds of personal shit.

It did strike me as odd to see Katie -- an actual celebrity -- still at the party well after the magical 30-Minute demarcation point. By now, she should have been at her mansion, wrist-deep in a pint of Cherry Garcia, sending a Guatemalan home for the night. Instead, she was hanging around -- the epitome of glamour -- in a form-fitting, vampy black dress, talking to me. I knew something was up, so when she told me that she just found out her husband was cheating on her, I wasn't overly surprised.

Apparently, while her successful spouse was producing horrible, clichéd Hollywood movies, he was also having a horrible, clichéd Hollywood affair with his secretary. To make matters worse, Katie and he had two kids together. Her last swig of Grey Goose revealed that, as we spoke, Miramax McPowerlunch was at a spa in Arizona for the weekend with the secretary, leaving Katie reeling, depressed, and looking to feel attractive again.

Now listen: that's terrible stuff. Here was a vulnerable and mature woman telling me secrets that writhed deep within her gentle soul. I decided that I was going to drop the charade and connect to her without the facade. "I'm sorry, my name is Bill Dawes and I'm an actor. I'm actually from Virginia. I just put on the accent to meet you. I really like you, and I apologize for keeping it up so long. Now that the subject matter has gotten more serious, it seems right to tell you the truth. I don't want to betray your trust." That's what I said...

...inside my skull. What actually came out of my MOUTH was a little different:

"Lissen: I tink ya shoul take me home wit cha to get revenge on that bleedin' fooker!"

To this day, I don't know why I went in for the kill -- I guess mostly because I'm a guy. Maybe part of me really believed what my Scottish alter-ego was saying. I mean, I hear about men leaving their wives and families of 15-plus years and I want them to suffer. I want them to know that their wives can also can get laid and shouldn't be taken for granted. I want to picture their faces when their wives tell them that, as payback, they got soundly fucked by a twenty-five year-old stud after a premiere party. Men who leave their devoted wives and "upgrade" to young, dumb bitches disgust me! Shit, I'm wracked with guilt right now just thinking about the moment when I do the same thing to MY future ex-wife.

Katie and I started negotiating the logistics of my going home with her. There was talk of "babysitters" and coming into the house through the back door so the "help" wouldn't know. There were soft "I'm not sures" rebutted with vigorous "Why the fook nots." Katie was a little ambivalent, but after a last shot of vodka, it looked like her thirst for revenge and my drunken mechanic from Glasgow would finally win the war of attrition.

Then, the unthinkable happened:

"Hey, Bill, I'm taking off!"

It was the husky and unmistakable voice of Mark Feuerstein.

Damn, he's still here! Shit, I thought he went home a long time ago!! Fuck, he just called me "Bill"!!!

My eyes popped and all the muscles in my body contracted in fear as he strolled up to us."You gonna come with me?" Mark said, in his signature New York gravel.

I tried to send him psychic voodoo brainwaves and Morse Code with my eyelids to let him know that he was, in no way, to ruin the ephemeral illusion I had just created for this woman.

So, winking, I said in my drunken and absurd Scottish patois, "I tink aym gonna foind moy own way home."

There was an awkward silence as Mark absorbed this. "Oh.... you're doing your Scottish thing."

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, FUCK!!!

Katie's frozen face had the exact same expression people have when they realize that their Starbucks venti coffee is inducing a massive shit and they're 7 blocks away from their apartment.

Mark subsequently uttered the worst cover in the history of cockblocks.

He said, "Oops."

Oops!

And then he walked off.

Cockblocker

I scrambled furiously to recover, "Ohhhh, that Marrrrrrrk, always takin' the pess out o' me!" I laughed and shook my head in the ensuing dead air.

"You're an actor doing character work, aren't you?" Katie said finally.

"Noooooooo," said Duncan McBustedGame.

"I have to say, that's some of the best and most consistent character work I've ever seen."

"Wha' are ewe talkin' ABOOT?"

"Nice to meet you, Bill."

She extended her hand to make it very clear the game was over and the possibility of sex was now less than zero. After a few more pathetic attempts at convincing her I was not acting, I stumbled off in search of Mark. To the other wannabes eavesdropping on my own private episode of Punk'd, I just pretended to be a befuddled drunk from Glasgow who didn't understand what was happening.

Finally outside, I got in the car with Mark, still flabbergasted by what had transpired. He didn't apologize and, frankly, didn't get why the fuck I even did it. I tried to explain it to him and noticed that I still had that Scottish accent locked into my speech patterns. He looked at me like I was playing bagpipes full of crack.

Mark dropped me off near my hotel and, overcome with national pride for my horribly oppressed peoples, I marched to McDonalds to binge eat. Even the McGeniuses working the cash registers on the midnight shift at the Sunset Boulevard McDonald's couldn't tell I wasn't Scottish. I'm also pretty sure they couldn't tell what the McFuck I was saying.

I ended up getting McSick in the parking lot.

As I stood there, hands on knees, watching the special sauce spread in rivulets on the asphalt, I did a quick playback of the evening: In two hours, I went from being a handsome, premiere-attending potentate to a red-nosed, puking imposter.

I think I kept up the charade for my enthralled audience of one until I got home and passed out in a sea of crinkly yellow cheeseburger wrappers.

My guilt over that night has been replaced by the impish amusement I get from telling people about it. The guilt has also been replaced by my genuine desire to bump into that beautiful, talented woman once more. In my fantasy, she instantly remembers me and we have a good old laugh about it. She has no hard feelings; she punches me in the arm and lets me buy her a drink.

Then I take her home and fook her.

Posted by Bill Dawes at 9:00 AM

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