INTRODUCTION

Hallelujah, I have finished writing my book! Wow, that was a lot of work. But finally, after all these months of toiling away at my computer, I am ready to begin. I am writing this introduction as an afterthought because when I started writing this tome, I had no idea what I was going to say, so I had no idea what I would be introducing. But now that I have completed this epic odyssey, I feel, at long last, prepared to write the first page. Isn’t that the way it always is, in everything you do in life? In life itself? Just when you finally figure it out, it’s over. Intelligent design, my ass. First of all, thank you for buying or stealing my book. It has been quite a challenge writing it, and knowing that you care what I have to say enough to spend your hard-earned money on it, or even more impressively, risk jail time to read it, means the world to me. Despite the fact that the protagonist of this story leaves something to be desired, I hope you find a connection with this magnificent journey I have been on.

I have had a job since I was eight years old and if I don’t have work to do, I go out of my mind. I need to be productive, and so I couldn’t have chosen a worse profession than acting, where the average annual work schedule is on par with that of a shopping mall Santa. I have learned to make my own work. I wake up every morning with the same question—“What am I going to make today?” Some days it’s money. I had a family very young and have been driven most of my life to make money and provide for them. But my need to create is something else and borders on psychotic. It really doesn’t matter whether I am making a new TV show, a new sculpture, or a new chicken coop; as long as I feel like I’ve made something that day, I sleep well at night.

I hit sixty-five this year. That was a kick in the balls. My oldest child is forty-one, and I am a grandpa five times over. What the fuck? I’ve always been “the kid,” the precocious teenager who moved to New York as a seventeen-year-old, at least ten years younger than all of my friends, the youngest dad at all my kids’ school events. But you can’t hide from sixty-five. No matter how I look at it, that circle-of-life conveyor belt keeps moving me along and there are fewer and fewer people in front of me every day, and so many more behind. I started hearing a voice in my head saying, “Whoa! Stop! Maybe it is time to stop making things for a minute and take a look at the crazy journey you have been on. It really could end at any time, and it would be a shame not to have taken the opportunity to try to gain some meaning and understanding of it all.” So I started a list (which is one of my favorite things to do) of my life—What is the first thing I remember? What is the second? It was revelatory to lay it all out in front of myself and see how A led to B and B led to C. Of course, being me, I had to make a job out of it, so I decided to shape it into a book for me and my family, turning that list into chapter headings and doing a deep dive into each one. It settled my soul to put a little order in to my chaotic history and remember not only this journey of jobs, people, and events, but the feelings and emotions and thoughts that went with them. Being an admirer of good storytelling, I tried my best to be entertaining and funny, to find a moral to the story and share a little bit of knowledge or dare I say, wisdom, with the reader.

When Start Publishing said they wanted to put it into print, I jumped at the chance to do the work and try to actually write a book. I have been sitting Home and Alone for months now, and frankly, I am sick of myself. I hope you enjoy getting to know me, but I would recommend not reading this book more than twice because after that, I really start to get on your nerves. There has been no ghostwriter. I have zero typing skills, minimal computer skills, and a well-below-average knowledge of grammar, so it has been quite an English lesson for this high school drop-out as well (although I think I finally get where the punctuation goes when using a parenthesis.). I didn’t want to pander to the reader by including too much stuff about celebrities, but my wife pointed out that I have been acting in the movies since I was twenty, so these people are not really celebrities, just my friends and work-mates, and a large part of my life. Besides, none of these people think of themselves as celebrities. They are living inside their own heads just like the rest of us. Managing the power and ridiculousness of celebrity is something no one is trained for, and I have found it will reveal who you truly are, in a unique and distorted way. (And it sure does help when it comes to getting your book published.)

My personal mission of “Empowering Young People” has also been the message in some of my biggest family films, like the Home Alone movies, Rookie of the Year, and Bushwhacked, a message I believe in because I was an empowered kid myself, finding my own unique path to a well-lived life. There is so much potential in each child—even artistic, dyslexic, little hippies like me—and our goal as parents and mentors is to help each kid discover who they are and how to make a life for themselves doing something they love and are good at. I am the living embodiment of that successful strategy, and my hope is that by sharing my story, I can inspire the feeling in the reader that, “Hell, if this guy can build a successful life, anyone can.”

I have found myself in extraordinary places I had no place being in, working with extraordinary people who I had no business working with. I became a father when I was still a kid. I spent years making a salary of forty-five dollars a week and years making a salary of forty-five thousand dollars a week. I have found spectacular artistic satisfaction in my life in the movies, theater, and television, but have also found deep artistic satisfaction in my life as a bronze sculptor, cattle rancher, and lemon farmer, and mostly, in the creation of my family. I have tried to serve my community to the best of my abilities—coached my kids’ sports teams, taught Media Literacy at the high school, and started a Boys & Girls Club which continues to serve thousands of kids to this day. I visited our troops in Baghdad, Iraq, during the chaos at the beginning of that horrible war. President Obama awarded me our nation’s highest honor for volunteerism, one of the greatest honors of my life. My forty-five-year-long marriage, the incredible success of my children and now five magnificent grandchildren—I have packed a lot into my sixty-five years.

I am hoping the book gives people some laughs and they have fun going backstage with me on some of the movies, TV shows, and plays I have worked on. I try to convey my evolution from an actor into a writer and director. I share my development as a sculptor and why it is so important to me, as well as the importance of the work I have done with Boys & Girls Clubs, to whom I am giving all of the royalties from this book. I track my family and the amazing journey of parenting, as well as the peace and meaning I have discovered by becoming a real city slicker living on our farm and ranch. And I show off my skills at using a thesaurus, finding incredible alternatives to the word “incredible.”

So no more dawdling. Let’s get to it. It is time for you to see what Daniel Stern is really like when he is Home and Alone.

BORN FREE

“You’re writing a book? You can barely even read a book and you think you can write one? You think you are so important people will want to read all about you?” Ahh, nothing more inspiring than a mother’s words of encouragement. You have a mother, right? You know how when you ask your mom about the day you were born and you expect to hear a nice story about the joy of seeing you for the first time and the instant connection she felt with you? When my mother tells the story about that day, August 28, 1957, she tells of one of the worst days of her life. Mom recalls that in the state of Connecticut, they put women under full anesthesia, Lord knows why. Mom evidently didn’t react well to the drug and so when she finally came to, her first reaction upon seeing me was to throw up—a lot, according to her. She felt so sick that she didn’t want to hold me for a while. And just as she was feeling a little better, she got the terrible news that her beloved doctor, who had just delivered me, went home afterwards and died of a heart attack. Yeah, not a great entrance on my part.

My parents’ goal was to make me a fully independent person, as quickly as possible. By the age of four, my best friend and I walked through the streets of Philadelphia, on our own, the two-mile trip to my grandparents’ house. I have Google mapped both of the addresses—our house and my grandparents’ house—to see if my memories match in any way to what the reality is and, shockingly, I remember it pretty well. We had to cross Cheltenham Avenue, a six-lane thoroughfare with an intersection that brings together three different main roads, and I remember us being stranded on the center island, cars whizzing by on all sides. I have asked my mother repeatedly throughout the years, “What the fuck were you thinking!?”

“I knew you could handle it,” is what she says to me. It was crazy to let such young children take off on their own that way, but on the other hand, I still remember it sixty-one years later, and it never fails to make me smile and feel proud.

John F. Kennedy took office in 1961 and my dad, being an inspired social worker called to serve by a great leader, took a job in the Kennedy administration, working at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on issues dealing with juvenile delinquency. He got a GI loan and bought a small house in Bethesda, Maryland, on Fairfield Drive, a tiny street with no sidewalks, and a stone’s throw from the Bethesda Naval Medical Hospital, now known as Walter Reed Hospital, the Navy base where all American presidents receive their medical treatments. I went to Lynnbrook Elementary School, which was about a half a mile walk from our house. I was two years behind my sister and the teachers were already making it clear that I was not nearly as bright as she was, which was true. I had to go to the little building behind the playground for remedial reading and speech therapy. As far as I know they did not have a diagnosis of dyslexia at that time or place, but that is what I was suffering from. Once we got past “See Spot Run,” I couldn’t keep up at all. I loved when teachers read us stories but was humiliated when we went around the room and had to read out loud. But I also had a lot of successes. I was very good and quick at math. That made sense to me. I took up the trumpet in the band, and really excelled at that, getting the first trumpet seat even though I was only in fourth grade. We played kickball and football with the competitive ferocity of little gladiators, and I was good at sports, so that helped me have an identity as well. I was a very happy kid, and my thoughts were consumed by the same thing a dog might be focused on—playing with a ball of any kind and eating anything that was put in front of me. Our little brother was born and moved into my room. I loved having a brother, but I was six years older than him, and he was not as good at kickball as I had hoped he would be. At six, I took the train to Philadelphia by myself to visit my grandparents. At age eight, I got my first job, delivering one hundred newspapers for a dollar. I added a second paper route the next year, firmly indoctrinated into that atrocious child-labor racket of paperboys, where I would stay until I graduated high school.

Culturally, the world was going mad and sending my little brain all kinds of messages about love, peace, freedom, and equality. I didn’t fully understand it, but I was obsessed with it all, especially the music and the comedy that was happening. My parents were into the folk music of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Simon and Garfunkel. The famed folk singer, Pete Seeger, even came to our house a couple of times with friends of my dad’s. We got our own little record player for the basement, and I spent my paper route money on 45s of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, etc. We would memorize the words to the songs and then put on shows for each other in the basement, acting them out. In retrospect, I realize how seriously I took those shows, an indicator that I wanted to be part of telling stories, but I had no concept of anything called show business at the time. I just loved watching and listening to it all—Get Smart, The Mod Squad, The Smothers Brothers, Tom Lehrer, Bill Cosby, The Three Stooges, and Dick Van Dyke. Jerry Lewis actually made me throw up from laughing too hard at Who’s Minding the Store?

I had a very typical American childhood in a typical American town, including some of the uglier sides of growing up in America. My parents had come to Washington to join a movement for equality and justice in America. Mom was teaching at a nursery school and Dad was dealing with changing the juvenile justice system, working with a racially and ethnically diverse group of exciting men and women on the same mission. We all went to the civil rights marches and anti-war protests, marching through the streets of Washington and into a few scary situations. My poor parents had to miss Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech because it took place on my birthday, but I’ll never forget my dad stopping the birthday party and blaring the speech from the radio in our backyard. My parents had parties with their friends, and this kind of racial commingling didn’t sit too well with our neighbors. Bethesda, Maryland, is located right on the Mason-Dixon line, and where we lived still had a very Dixie feel to it. No Blacks. No Jews. Segregated swimming pools and country clubs, and white supremacy and racism displayed everywhere with no shame or consequences. My sister and I were the only Jewish kids at Lynnbrook. For as much as we fit in, we were also freaks. We got our “Christmas presents” at Hanukah, we skipped school on the High Holy Days, and no one knew what the fuck was going on when we brought in our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on matzoh at Passover. When I was about nine or ten, I had to start going to Hebrew school on Wednesdays after school and on Saturday mornings. (Just what I needed, more fucking school. And trying to learn to read another language, which is read backwards, when I couldn’t even read English? Not going to happen.) We were The Jews. We were The Christ-Killers. We were The N-word Lovers. The kids really didn’t know what half of it even meant and were only parroting their parents’ fuckedup beliefs. Sometimes my friends would call me “a dirty Jew” and an “n-word lover” and, being a little kid who wanted to fit in, I dealt with that by calling other kids dirty Jews and n-word lovers. How fucked up is that? But I guess it was what I felt I needed to do to survive. Lines were being drawn, even among ten-year-olds. If your hair was long enough to touch your ear, you were a Hippie/ Fag. If you went to a peace march, you were a Hippie/Fag. Puberty was coming. Kids were starting to smoke cigarettes and make out with girls, and I just wanted to play the next game and eat the next popsicle. The redneck culture of my friends in Bethesda was crashing into all of the lessons of equality, justice, multiculturalism, and peace that my parents were teaching me, and that the amazing pop cultural landscape was embracing. By the time I got to the end of elementary school, my survival instincts knew something was going to have to change. Luckily, it did.

Chevy Chase, Maryland, is where the Jews lived. That was the word on the street when I told my friends we were moving there the summer after finishing elementary school. It was only about a mile away and we were all still going to be going to the same junior high school and seeing each other every day in the fall, but I might as well have been moving to another country. I loved my friends there, but it was clear to me that I wasn’t really going to end up on the same path as them. Besides, I was ready to let my freak flag fly a bit. I wouldn’t get another haircut for the next four years.

A YOUNG JEWON THE MASON-DIXON LINE

Junior high was liberating. I still was an academic disaster, but now we had electives like shop, choir, art, and gym, and I was good at all of those things. There were so many new kids to be friends with—Jewish kids, Black kids, Latin kids and, most importantly, little hippies. David Rosenthal had the exact same schedule as me, every class, every day. Not only that, but David and I were starting at a new Hebrew school together, so we saw each other after school all the time as well, and that was where the real bond formed. Our bar mitzvahs were only a year away, so our class met three days a week. There were about eight or ten of us, all of us Little Jewish Hippies, being taught by Big Jewish Hippies, young college students living in Washington, DC, in 1969 with a passion for the teachings of Judaism. Three days a week they had us deeply engaged with Judaism and its relevance to the changes that were taking place in America. Judaism came alive as we debated the meanings of the Torah, the existence of God, the political landscape, and the cultural landscape. To have a group of Jewish friends was something I never knew I needed until I had it. The teachers took us on field trips to war protests in Washington and to the Orthodox Jewish community in Williams-burg, NY. The friendships in the group became very deep, and even after we all had our bar/bat mitzvahs, we stayed on into the Confirmation class, until we were about sixteen.

The music director at the school was a college kid named Eleanor Epstein, a true dynamo who taught music to kids from ages five to sixteen, all at the same time. She was from New York, loud, charismatic, and funny as hell. And she loved to put on shows. I had never been around the theater in any fashion or even gone to a play. I was way too shy to ever be in the shows, but I enjoyed the technical side, doing the lights and building the sets, and got that amazing feeling of camaraderie that comes only in the theater. David Rosenthal was a natural show-off and incredibly talented, and Eleanor gave him great shows to star in—everything from The Tales of Chelm to Fiddler on the Roof, where David was an outstanding Tevye at thirteen (and probably grew his own beard for the role, as he matured very quickly). He was my best friend, and I was so proud and amazed by him, literally shining the spotlight on his talent from backstage. But as he got the laughs and attention, my young competitive spirit was being challenged. It still looked terrifying to me to be in front of an audience and I really loved working backstage, but a seed had been planted.

The summer after seventh grade, my parents sent me off for six weeks to a canoeing camp in Northern Canada called Wigwasati that was owned and operated by my gym teacher, Mr. Wrightson. It was life-changing, being that far away from home for so long, paddling on lakes for weeks, hauling our own food, building tents, and carrying a waterlogged wooden canoe on my shoulders on a mile-and-a-half portage. I overcame challenges and did things I never thought I could, and I came back from there really ready for my bar mitzvah and the manhood that it represents. My haftarah was from Amos, and my dad helped me write a very powerful and political speech, with the words, “Let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” as a launching point for my statement on how I intended to live my life as a man.

David and I also took up hitchhiking as our means of transportation, and the world opened up to us. We would hitchhike to Georgetown to see old Marx Brothers movies, getting picked up by hippies in vans who would offer us Ripple Wine and pot. We’d hitchhike to folk festivals, peace marches, and to get back and forth to Hebrew school. It felt so empowering and grown up. In the summer, David and I, still thirteen years old, somehow talked our parents into letting us hitchhike up to Maine to visit one of the girls from Hebrew school, about a five-hundred-mile trip each way. We did the same trip two years later and there are enough stories in those trips to make an awesome Cameron Crowe movie. We got rides from truckers, hippies, and a couple of very creepy people. We slept anywhere we could—the back of a gas station, the woods along the highway. The airport police in Bangor, Maine, took pity on us and let us spend the night in their jail, eating dinner out of their vending machine. (They did not, however, even try to call our parents or ask us what was going on.) We broke into Tanglewood in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and spent several nights in the storage room where they kept instruments and equipment listening to the concerts in the evening. These adventures gave me the confidence and independence to operate well in the adult world. I was flunking all of my classes, but I became great friends with my teachers, not just in school but outside school as well. I would hitchhike to their houses on the weekends for visits—Candy Means and her husband Howard in the suburbs, Mr. Wallace in Georgetown, and Mrs. Snyder at her rural home in Takoma Park.

I dreamed about dropping out and getting a job and my own place, but the only job I could get was still as a paperboy. I was now delivering The Washington Post, a very prestigious job in my mind, and supposedly the best-paying paper route. I had to get up at four thirty in the morning every day of the week, for three straight years. The guy who gave me his route also gave me his double-sided paperboy bag and a full-sized baby carriage to carry all of the heavy newspapers. It took me about two hours to deliver those seventy newspapers, each one placed inside the door. I would try to go back to sleep for a few minutes but then my mom would wake me to go to school. The real scam of paperboy human trafficking was the paperboy had to pay for the papers up front each month, out of his own pocket, and then at the end of each month, go door to door, at night, to collect the money from each customer and hope for a tip of some kind. I would end up clearing about twenty-five bucks a month. But I delivered the Post all throughout Watergate and got to read Woodward and Bernstein’s articles before anyone else. I am glad I did it, but between the exhaustion from the job, the dyslexia, and the lack of structure at school, what little academic skill I had totally evaporated and I truly didn’t care. My teachers took pity on me, and somehow I graduated junior high school.

Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School had just opened a new theater at the school and David Rosenthal jumped into the theater scene right away, getting the lead part in a Shakespeare play, and building a very cool reputation right out of the gate. I worked backstage with the manager of the theater, Mike Boyle, and ended up with an after-school job there, hanging lights, running sound, and cleaning up when they rented the theater for concerts and dance performances. The idea of being onstage as opposed to backstage was beginning to take hold, but with my lion’s mane of knotted hair, I really couldn’t imagine what possible role I could play or have the nerve to even try out for.

But during the section of English devoted to studying Lord of the Flies, I found an opportunity to write my own part. The book was so good that I made it all the way through, and then we watched the movie, which was absolutely riveting and inspiring. I asked the teacher if instead of writing a paper, I could write a musical play version of the book, and he said okay. That’s right, Lord of the Flies: The Musical was my first dramatic effort both as an actor and playwright. I persuaded Mr. Boyle to let me use the big theater, since we would only be presenting it during the school day to our English class. I took songs of the day and changed the lyrics to fit the story. Cat Stevens’s “How Can I Tell You That I Love You” became “How Can I Tell You That The Beast Is Within You” and the Spirit song “Nature’s Way” captured the themes perfectly. I became obsessed with writing it and directing it, using my sound and lighting experience to make the music sound okay and the show look cool. And on top of it all, I played the lead role, even with my very long hair. I am sure it was horrible, but everything clicked into place for me. I felt myself begin to take flight, a flight that would last for the rest of my life, finding the deep joy of creation and collaboration in the telling of stories, and communicating with an audience through a shared imagination. I must have ended up reading the book fifteen times, which also was a first for me, and began to open my mind to the idea that maybe there was such a thing as a good book, after all my bad experiences with literature up until then.

The day came for us to present the show to our class, maybe forty kids in a theater that sat fifteen hundred. I can’t remember if I was petrified or confident to start with, but by the time the performance was over and I took an actual bow at the curtain call, I was higher than I had ever been in my life. The adrenaline rush was enormous, and the dopamine hit from people treating me like an actor, like a “star,” applauding and telling me I did a good job, was like nothing I had ever come close to imagining. I had been working so hard on the play that even my parents took note, and my mother actually took time off of work to come during school hours to watch the play. She had to get back to work afterwards, so it wasn’t until I got home that I got to see her. This was the most successful thing I had ever done in school, and I was expecting my mom to have been impressed. And she was, just not in the way I had anticipated.

“So, what did you think?”

“Truthfully, I found it very sad.”

“Sad? You mean the story was sad?”

“No. . . . You were sad. It was sad watching you.”

“Why was it sad?”

“Is there something wrong with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why would you do that? Why are you getting up in front of people and showing off like that?”

“It was a play.”

“I know it was a play. And you were in it, up there on the stage, showing off in front of everyone. I am seriously worried about you, that you feel the need to do something like that. Showing off like that just to get attention. We haven’t been giving you enough attention and I have been feeling bad all day that you have been in so much pain and I haven’t even noticed until it comes out like this.”

Ironically, my parents love the theater. They had season tickets to Arena Stage in Washington for decades, went to New York to see the shows every year, and loved talking about the terrific plays and actors they saw. So I really did not see this reaction coming at all. They knew David Rosenthal was in plays and thought he was great, never mentioning what kind of cry for help he might be exhibiting. My sister’s friends were in school plays and my parents might have even gone to see them. But me doing it was shameful. An embarrassment. Either an ego trip or a mental breakdown of some kind. Obviously, it still rings in my head. Who the fuck would say that to their kid in that situation? I have asked my mother on many occasions if this really happened and if that was her real reaction. She stands by all of it, and still feels it to a certain degree. I laughed her off, truly not hurt by what she said and maybe, in fact, a little sad for her, that she couldn’t see the joy and awakening her son was experiencing because of remnants of the old Jewish shtetl mentality of never drawing attention to yourself. I had found my voice and my identity. My connection to the world of theater, first backstage and now as an actor and as a creator, was bonded for life.

For a Mother’s Day present that year, I got a haircut. Not only did it reduce my mother to tears of joy, it was the perfect excuse to get out of the trap of my physical appearance and open myself up to try out for the prestigious summer stock theater program at our high school, run by our esteemed Mr. Dalla Santa, head of English and Theater. I got a couple of small parts, including one where I got to yodel my own song in Leave It to Jane, a campy 1920s-style musical. I was already over six feet tall and weighed about 120 lbs., and the sight of this pencil-necked geek yodeling got laughs every show. The next fall, I got the lead role in Prom-ises, Promises, a Burt Bacharach musical in which I played a young businessman. It was a huge part, with nine or ten songs to sing, and I had to learn how to sing for real. This was before all of the wireless microphones they use now; I had to project my voice over the orchestra. I think I was pretty good in it. My parents came to see it, both of them nearly fainting from nervousness, but they ended up loving it, amazed at what I had done. WNET Public TV was doing a special series on the schools in the area, and we got to go to their TV studio and do two songs on television, which felt incredibly cool. The next summer, we had another high school do a joint production of Fiddler on the Roof with our school, directed by their theater director, Mr. Perialis. I really went for it at the audition, dancing and singing “If I Were a Rich Man” with abandon, and I beat out the star of their high school, as well as David Rosenthal, for the role of Tevye. That was a confidence builder and turning point. I had to actually act in that one, play a character that wasn’t me, wear a beard and a costume that weren’t mine. The show was really good, caught a buzz, and sold out the fifteen hundred tickets a night for its summer run of six shows. They decided to restage it in the fall, which was the beginning of my senior year, and we sold out again for the run. I was living the life of an artist—I’d built a potter’s wheel in the basement, I was making metal sculptures in my metal shop class, acting, and singing in three different choirs—but I was flunking every non-art class. The guidance counselor told me I was going to have to go to summer school to graduate and it was only November. It was obvious what the next step had to be—I dropped out of high school and never went back.

To my parents’ credit, they supported my leaving school. My sister was brilliant, in her second year of college and heading for a law degree, but they could see academics were not going to get me anywhere. They had to accept that I had some kind of acting talent, even if they didn’t understand it at all. They had no concept of what a career as an actor would even look like, and neither did I. But I needed to find out, and soon, because like Big Ben, I was met with a near-hourly reminder from my mother—“I don’t care what you do but you are out of this house when you turn eighteen.” That gave me about eight months to figure out where I would be going.

GLENN CLOSEIS MY WITNESS

I had a small window of time to try to figure out how to make money on my limited acting skills before I needed to move out and get a full-time job and a place to live. (At that point, Plan B involved finding an old school bus to park somewhere and live in, and getting a job at the car wash, which looked like fun.) It never crossed my mind to go to Hollywood or New York to be an actor. Not once. I didn’t think of those as real places where real people go to try to “make it.” The Arena Stage was, and still is, one of the premiere regional theaters in the country, but the dream of being an actor at Arena Stage was almost too big for me. Rehearsing in the daytime and performing a different play at night sounded very intimidating. Besides, sometimes they did Shakespeare plays and other classics, and there was no way I could ever be in one of those because I couldn’t read them and I didn’t understand what they were saying. Arena had an apprentice program, but even that seemed way out of my league, so I never even applied. My dream job was to get into Dinner Theater! Dinner theater is exactly what it sounds like—dining tables are set up around a center stage and the audience eats dinner during the play. Oh, and the actors are also your waiters. This was the only aspect of show business I thought I could probably fake my way through and actually make money as an actor—although at seventeen, I was much, much younger than everyone else there, so I knew my chances were pretty slim. I auditioned for a couple of shows but didn’t get anything, although I did get the experience of seeing a dinner theater production of Company where the actors performed “The Ladies Who Lunch” while serving lunch.

The only relative I had even remotely connected to show business was a cousin of my mother’s in Philadelphia named Sam Kressen. Sam was a dear and funny man, a jeweler by trade but a part-time local actor as well. His big claim to fame was that he looked very much like Ben Franklin, and in Philadelphia, that was a valuable thing. He played him in everything from local commercials and posters for the city to touring companies of 1776. So now that I was considering being a professional actor, my mom drove me up to Philly to have a serious discussion with him about the profession. We went to his apartment for tea, and he told me everything he knew about show business, which I will share with you now.

1. You need to have a picture of yourself, and it has to be printed as an 8x10-inch photo. No other size will do!

2. Your best friend is the Yellow Pages! Look up agents, casting people, and theaters in it and then send them that 8x10 photo and tell them you want to be an actor.

3. Most importantly, the life of an actor is all about The Three Ds: Disappointment, Disillusionment, and Depression. You will be rejected every day of your life for one reason or another, and you have to learn to live with The Three Ds.

That was it. Not exactly the direction or opportunity I was hoping for, but it seemed to make a lot of sense to my mother, so it was worth the trip. A few weeks later, Sam got me an audition for the bus and truck company of 1776 that he would be touring with for eight months. A real audition! My girlfriend took my picture and we had it printed in the correct, 8x10 size. I went to the audition and did my best but did not get the part. Sam felt bad, and I did too. It turned out he was spot-on correct about Numbers 1 and 3 in his guide to an actor’s life, eternal truths that still apply to this very day, even if the Yellow Pages did not turn out to be my best friend.

Mike Boyle, my high school theater director, recommended me for an apprenticeship to work on the lighting crew at the Washington Shakespeare Festival, a nonprofit organization that put on plays every summer on the National Mall in front of the Washington Monument. At my interview with the producers, I guess I told them of my experience working the lights at the B-CC theater or asked about the hours and the pay, but I honestly don’t remember much of it at all. Just that one lucky moment, crystallized forever in my mind—that tiny little moment that changed everything. I had been teaching myself to play the guitar and had a habit of chewing on a guitar pick. As I got up to leave, the producers noticed as I put the pick back in my mouth and asked if I played guitar. Even though I only knew a few chords, I said yes, trying to seem cool and figuring they would never know the difference. A week later, I got a call saying that I had gotten the job. It would only pay one hundred dollars for two months of work, but it would be great experience to learn lighting from professionals and get my foot in the door with the producers. But when I reported to work on the first day I was in for the shock of my life. The producers met me with the news that I would not be apprenticing with the lighting crew; instead, they had cast me as an actor in the play! What? What the fuck was going on? They proceeded to inform me, “We needed someone who plays the guitar to be in the play, so instead of working on the lighting crew, you will be playing a servant who plays the guitar in the big wedding scene. Although it won’t be a guitar, you will be playing the lute, a guitar-like instrument, because the guitar hadn’t been invented yet. You will also be playing a few other minor roles, as well as helping with the props and changing the scenery between scenes. And when performances begin, you will also help seat people and hand out programs.”

My jaw was on the floor. I was going to be in the play? I didn’t even know what play they were doing, since I thought I was only going to be doing the lights. When they handed me a book, I started to sweat. When I saw that it was Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, panic set in. I mean, I knew it was the Washington Shakespeare Festival, but I didn’t think I would be involved in the Shakespeare part of it. I would have to actually learn Shakespeare!? I couldn’t learn Shakespeare, because there was no way I could even read Shakespeare! To make matters worse, it turned out that this was the first day of rehearsal and we were all going to read the play out loud. I looked around and it was a room full of actors, no lighting people to be found at all. A fucking cold reading of a Shakespeare play, my worst fear coming true! I met the other apprentices, who had other small roles in the play and similar backstage responsibilities, but they obviously knew what their jobs were before they arrived. All of the professional actors and the director gathered in a circle to start the read-through while I furiously tried to find my little parts in this incomprehensible book. The actors began, and I couldn’t understand a fucking word any one was saying. Absolute gibberish. An actual nightmare come to life.

The play progressed, my first scene came up, and I found my first line—“Aye, sir!” Hey, I knew how to say that. And I did. Later in the scene, my second line—“Aye, aye sir!” A little trickier, but I nailed it. The play moved on. I felt relieved that I had made it that far, hoping my part stayed in understandable English, as opposed to whatever language everyone else was speaking. I ended up with a couple more lines of a very similar degree of difficulty, and by the end of the read-through, I felt I could handle the job. The cast were all professional New York actors who had been brought in to do the show, so that meant full days of rehearsal and a chance to watch and learn what real actors did. This was going to be better than I ever could have imagined. The only hitch was going to be this lute thing. The lute? Well, I was so bad at guitar at that point that maybe I would have better luck with the lute. When I told my parents that I was in a professional Shakespeare play and that I would be playing the lute, the look of dismay on their faces is something I still remember, because I felt the same way.

It was the time of my life and the turn in my life I was looking for. The cast was a group of incredibly talented people, starting with the young, on-the-verge-of-greatness Glenn Close playing Katherine. Glenn is a force of nature, and my god, the way she spoke the language brought it to life in a way that even Dummy Dan could understand and love. She was funny and bawdy, with an inspiring confidence and a generous heart. Richard Greene, Roy Brocksmith, and other Broadway actors were all astonishingly great in the play, but more importantly to me, so accepting and encouraging of me as a young actor. I was glad my part was so small so that (a) I wouldn’t be revealed for the uneducated idiot I was, and (b) with little responsibility, I mostly just hung out with everyone who wasn’t in the scene that was being rehearsed. It gave me a chance to get to know all of these talented people who had moved to New York to be actors. They shared their experiences, what life was like, how you got jobs, found acting schools and apartments, and made it sound possible. They knew I had dropped out of school and was not a trained actor in any way, but they made me understand that there is a place in acting even for people like me. It isn’t all Shakespeare, and no degree is required. I was making real friendships with real actors, who accepted me as an adult and an equal, even though I was just a seventeen-yearold puppy.