The theatrical run of HOT KEYS, Jeff Weiss' aptly titled downtown production, was at once the strangest and most gratifying theatre experience of my life. Curtain went up at midnight and came down at 3am, I spent most of my time onstage oiled up and half naked, but it was the best acting work I'd ever done. Jeff forced me to forget many of the weird acting habits and pretensions I'd collected at NYU while studying my 'craft..' Before the first performance, he blazed up the fattest spliff I'd ever seen and nonchalantly said, 'just jump off the mountain and see what happens.' I jumped off the mountain for three months with that show.

It took me much longer than three months to appreciate how unique and bizarre this lower east side theatre world was. On one of the first weekends, as I left PS 122 in the early morning hours after a late night show, I was accosted by a short, chubby little gay dude in khakis and a blue button down.

"Hey Bill."

Great, I thought, another creepy dude with money who thinks I'm some insatiable Chelsea bottom.

'Hey, DUDE,' I responded.

I probably made the 'Dude' a little more staccato and sharp than it had to be. I had gotten in the habit of appending a 'dude' or 'man' to my same-sex Manhattan greetings as a not-so-subtle way of spiking the Village gaydar with a 'HETERO' blast. Since I looked...well...gay, it was all I had.

"Uh, listen," Gay George Costanza stammered, "I'm doing this play 'Tartuffe' in a couple of months and I think you'd be great to play the Prince."

Really? The Prince?

That's what my career needed as a jump start - the opportunity to play a piss-ant part for no money in some black box theatre on the 4th floor of a walk-up in Greenwich Village. The amount of classical off-off Broadway shows in the city was astounding. It wouldn't surprise me if this show was being put on in... shiver... Brooklyn. The only thing that makes my skin crawl more than Brooklyn is the idea of doing theatre in Brooklyn. You mean I can have all the filth and danger of a big city with all the inconvenience of a shitty suburb!? Yay!

Luckily, I had an out...

"Well, I'm still in school right now so I can't really do anything else. This show is an exception because it plays so late."

"Okay, well my name is David Saint, and I'm a fan of your work. Maybe some day in the future we can work together. Good luck."

And then he walked away.

Very polite, very professional, I thought. Hmmmm, I guess he DIDN'T want to sleep with me... am I losing my looks?

Continue reading "Jeff Weiss, Part 2"

Any graduate acting program seems to suffer from the same set of awful ironies. First, they make admission incredibly challenging because they're separating the wheat from the chaff. Then they spend the next three years reminding you how bad you suck. Second, they stress the honor and artistic integrity of being a devout theatre actor, but the only alums they celebrate are the ones that get sitcoms. By my third year in the MFA program at NYU, I was ready to shoot the esteemed faculty right in their fucking faces. Other than my acting teacher, Ron Van Lieu, the feeling was mutual amongst the faculty.

The singing teacher hated me because I was an awful singer, which happened to coincide with HER being an awful cunt. The voice teacher hated me because, try as I might, I could not get much past the third row of a theatre. The Shakespeare diction coach hated me because... let's be honest - it's 'Shakespeare diction' - it was painfully pointless and my only joy in the class derived from my ability to mock it at every turn. I was as close as you can get to being persona non grata in the NYU MFA program. As a result, I got cast in a lot of roles with "#1" or "#2" as their suffixes. The types with lots of standing around but only one line and it was always something like, 'My liege, dost thou desire thy sword?' For most aspiring actors, this kind of experience would have destroyed their spirit, Luckily, part of me knew the whole concept of a school for acting was fucking retarded and silly, so I was able to enjoy the best part of NYU every day, and that was the NY.

Still, it was clear to at least one other classmate that I was sort of unhappy there. Or at least that I didn't fit in. So one day, this classmate, Flo, came up to me and said, "You know Bill, my boyfriend did a show with this actor in Seattle and he's got some crazy late-night serial show in the East Village. It's pretty weird shit, but this guy is supposed to be pretty interesting. He's holding auditions tomorrow if you wanna go."

Fuck it. I went. Why not?

Continue reading "Jeff Weiss, Part 1"

My "How to Spoon" short w/Michael C Hall is up against two other videos over on Atom.com. Voting goes until 6pm EDT and the winner gets...something, I'm not really sure.

SO VOTE FOR IT NOW over at the Atom.com Showdown! I'll be your best friend!

Much like my time as host/comic-in-residence/room destroyer at the Times Square Laugh Factory in New York City, I will be doing a College Night every Thursday at 10pm here at the Hollywood Laugh Factory on Sunset Blvd.

As part of the deal, if you print out this page you and every person in your party will receive $5 off admission. Additionally, college students get in for $10 since this is...ya know...fucking College Night.

All you have to do is call the reservations number at (323) 656-1336 to get your tickets, then come armed with this page printed out and/or your student ID for the discount and/or reduced price. You don't have to call ahead to get the discount on tickets for my College Night if you don't want. You can just come to the club and wait in line, but waiting in line to buy tickets is like buying porn. No one does that anymore. So come one, come all to the Bill Dawes Thursday Callidge Nyte @ The Hollywood Laugh Factory every Thursday night at 10pm.

If you is smart like I is, you be coming there much times.

December 20, 2008:

"It's like you--no matter how much I blow you off, you always come back."

The burst of adrenaline her comment elicited sent a concussive wave of chemicals through my brain and pasted a look on my face that, I'm sure, was hard to disguise. If I had the ability to TiVo my life, I'd probably wear out the remote in amused Golem-esque self-loathing watching the expression develop. My eyes popped, my jaw dropped, my face reddened. On stage, I shoot hecklers down with the ease of a seasoned crowd sniper, but in my real life I'm not as nearly adept. Her sentence rendered me utterly speechless.

She - let's call her G - stared me down with her entitled smile; the same stamp of smile that has challenged and weakened my spirit throughout my life. Smiling dark eyes, full lips, at least one unique quirk. With her, it was the beguiling way the tip of her tongue nestled, wet and coquettishly, between her upper and lower set of teeth; poised to say something scandalous.

I wanted to say something quick and smart like, "Pfft! Nigga please!" but this bitch had my number and she knew it. It could not have been more obvious. I couldn't have been more submissive if I had been a Korean in a leather harness licking dried dog poo off the sole of her shoe.

My brain continued to buzz from the cocktail of adrenaline and fear. I ransacked the relationship archives of my brain and mustered quite possibly the most pathetic and feeble response of my life... and that's saying something.

"You shouldn't SAY that." I spurted back.

"Oh come on, it's true, we both know it." G laughed.

"Yes, but it's not something you should say out loud." I had a yuk-yuk-isn't-the-war-of-the-sexes-funny smile on my face, but my attempt at levity was betrayed by the fact that my normally beady eyes had enlarged to the size of saucers like some Japanese anime character. "AKIRAAAAAA!"

Silence followed, mostly. It was peppered by a one-sided argument between our Pakistani cab driver and whoever was on the other side of his blue tooth. I looked at the cabbie through his rearview mirror and could have sworn I saw a smirk on his face. Busy with driving through Manhattan traffic and arguing with the leader of his sleeper cell, even Ahmed could tell I was pitiful and pussy-whipped.

Continue reading "Meeting Mystery"