If TurboTax isn't playing some kind of joke on me - some cruel and sadistic monetary prank - I should be getting back a... well, let's just say a MUCH bigger tax refund than I expected! Everyone should use this thing! I knew I was (voluntarily) having an extraordinary amount of money withheld from my paycheck, but holy crap! HOLY CRAP!!!

If you were getting back a larger tax refund than you expected - how much larger? Use your imagination - what would you do with it?

Journalists should be willing to come right out and say, 'Are you gay?' and print the answer. - SF Chronicle

An excellent op-ed about journalism and the controversial topic of "outing." (Thank you, Jess for pointing it out. I heart SF.) The journalism junkie in me was like, "Right on!" but the actor in me couldn't overcome one particular objection. Read: Traditionally, outing was used by anti-gay people as a means to ruin a gay person's life. The revelation that someone was homosexual was so horrible, it meant their demise.

What the hell kind of distant history is this guy talking about?! Maybe he's not aware that being openly gay is still the ultimate Hollywood career killer. Drug addiction? Getting caught with prostitutes? Having sex with a 14 year-old in a videotape leaked to the public? You bounce back. Being gay? "Why yes, I am dead in the water, thank you!"

Name me ten gay hollywood celebrities who are out. And I'm not talking like Clea-DuVall-level-indie-flick celebrities. I'm talking red-carpet-trashy-magazine-cover-Tom-Cruise-level celebrities. I'll give you:

1) Ellen DeGeneres
2) Rupert Everett
3) Nathan Lane
4) Sir Ian McKellan
5) Rosie O'Donnell
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)

I dare you.

Disclaimer: For the record, if I ever made it big, I honestly don't know whether I'd go back into the closet or not. I've been out for long enough that I think going stealth would be practically impossible anyway (and therefore moot), but I really have no idea whether I would if I could. I don't know if I'd be willing to risk potentially sacrificing my career...

I made this a comment on Sylvia's LiveJournal, but got so worked up about it that I thought I'd share with y'all. Lucky you!

Why do these stupid things still piss me off so much a month after they happen?! Did you hear about this?

In January, ABC cancelled a reality show called "Welcome to my Neighborhood" on which different families competed with each other to win a house in a very selective suburban neighborhood. The (obviously diverse) contestants included a gay couple and their adopted kid. All of the competing families had to court the council of other families in the neighborhood with dinner parties and the like, and all of the good Christian families on the council started off the show absolutely appalled that a gay family would even think of invading their neighborhood...

...but by the end of the season, all of the families had totally embraced the gay family. One of the neighbors was even inspired to make amends with his own estranged gay son. Get that? In a conservative neighborhood, THE GAY FAMILY WON and was awarded the house.

So why did ABC pull the show ten days before the first episode even aired, the New York Times reported? Because they didn't want opposition from groups like Focus on the Family and the American Family Association, (which had endorsed boycotts of the Disney Corp. for anti-gay reasons in the past) to interfere with their efforts to promote Chronicles of Narnia among those same groups. Allegedly. Probably.

*inaudible mumbling and swearing*

First off, thank you to all of you excellent people who responded to my last post by saying, "Dude. You don't have sheet music? You're fucked." It was so NOT what I needed to hear ON THE MORNING OF MY AUDITION to inspire confidence. However, there was (thank the gods!) a sheet music store around the corner from the theatre, where I picked up the Maroon 5 songbook out of Utter Fear, so I could use "Harder to Breathe" as a backup to the song I wanted to do a cappella.

Me: I have a song a cappella which is really fun, or something a little more standard from the songbook. Which would you like?
Them: Er, why don't you do something so we can hear you with the piano.

Best Dumb Suggestion award goes to , whose idea was to call Rob in the middle of the night, have him arrange the song for piano accomaniment, get the song back from Rob, and get it into paper form (which would've involved going to Kinko's with my laptop) before leaving for the audition at 8am. Genius, buddy.

All in all the audition went decently. I had to re-start twice because of nerves, but made (if I do say so myself) a stellar recovery, and sounded great. After having waited for me to get through the song properly, one of the auditioners commented, "Thanks for coming. It was worth the wait." They didn't call me back, but that felt pretty good.

Info about helping me land an indie horror flick. Vote for Screamer 178!

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I made the best discovery at work the other day. While looking up "Sacroiliac Pain" in the big book of ICD-9 Codes (used to record diagnoses unambiguously for billing/referral/precertification/etc. purposes) I found the following:

846.# SACROILIAC DISORDER

846.0 Lumbosacral (joint) (ligament)
846.1 Sacroiliac ligament
846.2 Sacrospinatus (ligament)
846.3 Sacrotuberous (ligament)
846.8 Other specified sites of sacroiliac region
846.9 Unspecified sites of sacroiliac region

302.84 SADISM (SEXUAL)

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Academy Awards in 8 hours, 32 minutes and counting. Let's see them fudgepackin' cowboys win them some Holl-ee-wood approval! I wish you all could come to my Oscar Party...

I'm auditioning for AltarBoyz tomorrow, after seeing this casting notice on Backstage.com:

"Dodger Stages is casting immediate and future replacements for Altarboyz, an Off-Broadway musical concerning four good Catholic boys and one good Jewish boy, as they sing, dance, and try to save souls."

In case it's not clear from the description and the website, the show is a spoof musical about a Christian boy-band. Awesomeness.

I've been totally excited about the audition since I saw the casting notice, and am planning to sing "Title of the Song," by Da Vinci's Notebook, which is hilarious and fits with both the boy-band style, and the spoof-of-boy-band theme. The casting notice specifies that all should "prepare 16 bars of a pop song, in the boy band style, that shows off range and personality." However, since (to my knowledge, and Google's) sheet music does not exist for the song, I don't really know how big a chunk 16-bars of the song is. So I asked my roommate, Lena, whose knowledge of the business aspects of theatre far exceeds my own, roughly how much time the C.D. (that's Casting Director) is expecting 16-bars to last.

LENA: You're not bringing sheet music?
ME: I was going to do it a cappella. Why?
LENA: You should really have sheet music.
ME: I don't think it exists. Does it matter that much?
LENA: Only if you don't want to look totally unprofessional.
ME: I don't know. It's kind of a goofy show.
(Pause)
I'm hoping they'll find the song quirky enough that they won't mind the lack of accomaniment.
LENA: Whatever. [Translation: "It's your funeral."]

From full confidence to confidence utterly crushed in 1.6 seconds.

Lessons learned today: It doesn't matter how cool they are, or that you bought them at half-price, it is a bad idea to wear your brand new Chuck Taylors when it is 19 degrees outside. Got that, idiot? MAYBE FROSTBITE WILL HELP YOU REMEMBER!!!

Let's see. What's new? I had an audition yesterday for an indie horror flick. That was kind of cool. The audition consisted of a) screaming for the camera, b) doing a short monologue (given ahead of time), and c) 30 seconds to do whatever you want. I did a back flip. I doubt the skill is applicable to the film, but I hope they were amused. Apparently the casting process for this film is really strange - in addition to judging the monologues, they're also putting the scream clips online and letting "america" vote on the best screamer. So hey, if you've got a free minute to help me become a star, go to this website and vote for screamer 178.

In continuation of the voting theme, I've decided to let you, loyal readers, decide what my next adventure in pleasure reading shall be. Is it:

A) The Best American Political Writing, 2005 by Royce Flippin (ed.), or:
B) Temperament: The Idea that Solved Music's Greatest Riddle by Stuart Isacoff.

I can't decide whether the first one would make me one of those people who reads political commentary as a substitute for studying politics and then pretends to be well-informed about "what's happening." In all likelihood, I'll end up reading both anyway, so you're really voting on which one I read first.

And in continuation of the horror theme, I'm not sure if you guys out on the west coast caught this one, but it was big news out here this week: 'Something Out of a Cheap Horror Movie'.

The owner of a biomedical supply house was charged along with three other men Thursday with secretly carving up corpses -- including that of famed British journalist Alistair Cooke -- and selling the parts for use in transplants across the country.

Prosecutors said the defendants obtained the bodies from funeral parlors in three states and forged death certificates and organ donor consent forms to make it look as if the bones, skin, tendons, heart valves and other tissue were legally removed.

(Also here, in an excellent but eerily dispassionate article from the New York Times.)

Basically this former dentist and three other guys, including an embalmer, ran a funeral parlor for FOUR YEARS as a front for an illegal organ and tissue theft business. By contracting to do the embalming for more than thirty funeral homes in the tri-state area, they were able to remove tissues, organs, and bones in a secret operating room, carve up well over 1000 cadavers, and sell the parts for around 4.6 Million dollars to legitimate medical suppliers and transplant recipients. They replaced bones that they stole with PVC pipe. Like the kind used for the plumbing under your sink.

As if this little Hitchcock-ian tale of gore weren't bizarre enough: On Friday, whilst I am reading the article at work, learning about the whole operation (pardon the pun) for the first time, one of our patients calls and informs me that she has one of the bones. *blink blink* My first response was, "Like, in your freezer?" No, indeed. She had received a letter from the CDC informing her that she had been given one of the bones for transplant last year. I imagine it went something like this:

Dear Ms. Happyleg,

You know that bone in your thigh? Yeah. It turns out that IT BELONGS TO SOME POOR OLD DEAD FART WHO DIDN'T REALLY WANT TO PART WITH IT. Maybe the guy from "Masterpiece Theatre." We apologize for any inconvenience.

Yours truly, et cetera, et cetera.

Sheesh.

On the Romantic Front: Things are starting to get interesting. Awkward moment of the weekend? Walking into a shoe store with Boy-I-Am-Possibly-Dating-#1 to buy the aforementioned Chuck Taylors only to run into a guy I hooked up with a while back. The guy's been trying to orchestrate another hookup ever since, and had even texted me just moments before we ran into each other. All of this awkwardness, and it didn't even involve Boy-I-Am-Possibly-Dating-#2. Think how much the future holds!

Perhaps I am a big slut. That would certainly be interesting...

Off to bed...

Awesome Moment of the Day: Getting on the subway behind a tall guy in a green down jacket and then sitting down across from him and realizing he's Ben Shenkman. I love this city. Someday, I'll be taking the subway, and some young actor will be sitting across from me and then I'll catch him making far too many glances in my direction. Because of Karma.

So, as much as I love working on the same day as my aunt once a week, generally not being busy and surfing the internet or doing crosswords to pass the time in between annoying patient phone calls, I can never quite get on board with her tendency to count on my sympathetic ear while she proceeds to rip on my mother. Inevitably, when she finishes criticizing virtually every aspect of my mother's life - from her decision to marry my stepdad (which I happen to agree with her about), to the way she raises the three of us, the way she approaches her job, approaches life, and so on and so forth - when she's covered all of those topics, she'll give me this expectant (is expectant the wrong word?) look that can only be translated, "I mean, what is wrong with this woman, am I right?"

Marian: I know you are my aunt, and I love you, but when you give me that look, I just want to punch you in the face. (That's a properly phrased "I" statement, right? Thank you, three years of HA training.) No. I'm too nice for that. I want someone else to punch her in the face.

On the Romantic Front: It is possible that I am dating two guys at the same time. Simultaneously. With an as-yet-unscheduled date with a third guy on the way. I do not know whether I am dating two guys at the same time (simultaneously), but it is within the realm of possibility. This lack of knowledge could cause the Romantic Front to become problematic soon. Either way, I am sure that it will make for much heckling and amusement on your parts.

Getting the hang of this blogging thing, I hope.

And what did today bring, you may ask?

Well, I sat around the apartment all day, eating leftover food (note to self: buy groceries soon, as in tomorrow), surfing the internet, and watching television on DVD and OnDemand. In addition to some good ol' Firefly, my roommate and I watched all 10 episodes of the first season of Weeds. (That's only 5 hours, people! It's not as bad as it sounds!) Mary-Louise Parker rocks my socks. As an added bonus, Allison Janney had a guest spot in one of the episodes. Does life get any better than this? Seriously, you've got to see this show. Especially if you grew up in Suburbia.

I haven't showered yet. I didn't even change out of my pajamas. And I am unashamed. I like to think that George Washington fought the revolution and Abe Lincoln kept the union together so that one day, across these United States, Americans would honor their memories by spending a day exactly like this.

After much foot-dragging and being lazy about the whole thing, I finally have my very first professional headshots. For those non-actors among you, headshots are RIDICULOUSLY expensive, considering that actors tend to be dirt poor. Of course the photographers tend to be dirt poor, too, so I guess that's how they eat and bathe themselves. Fortunately, my photographer (who is a friend of mine from the camp I worked at over the summer) gave me a tremendous discount - he knocked his fee down to $350 from $500, a whopping 30%. In gratitude, I am including a link to his website. He is simply awesome.

Tom LeGoff: The Ballard Institute

Nonetheless, after spending $350 on the photos and getting back my retouches from him, I had to lay down another $389.61 to get a total of 300 headshots printed. (Reorders will be cheaper at 15% off) This means that if I hadn't been fortunate enough to know Tom beforehand, I could have been out almost $1,000 for 300 photos. Sheesh.

I am quite pleased with the photos, and so I am posting them here for all those people who said they want to see them when they're done.

Smiley.

Don't Fuck with Me. (To submit for stalker roles, murderers, and suchlike unsavory dramatic characters.)

Quintessentially me.

Of course, this last one is almost totally unusable for a headshot, and I didn't even bother to get it printed, but it's a great photo of me. Over the course of a 2 hour photo shoot yielding two or three hundred photos, there are many inevitable blinks, flinches, and other outtakes. Tom snapped this one just after he had said something pretty funny, and the result was a great candid photo. It may be my favorite photo of me ever.

The rest of today will include:
- Showering
- Watching TV on DVD with my friend Paul, with whom I had a "was-it-a-date?" a couple of weeks ago. It turned out that he was seeing someone, but we've been friends since then. We originally met through friendster, a fact of which I am properly ashamed and embarrassed. Heckling is therefore unnecessary.

Number of Best Picture Nominees seen so far: Three, leaving Munich and Good Night and Good Luck. It'll be a tough call between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Heath Ledger for Best Actor, but as long as someone wins for playing a big homo, I'm happy. My roommates and I are having an academy awards party for which I suggested the theme "The Academy Awards are SO Gay," but was rebuffed. Besides, isn't that the theme every year?

Speaking of Bareback Mountain, I must direct you to the best review of the movie I've read so far. I spent weeks trying to articulate why the other reviews left me feeling irritated and offended, only to discover that the New York Review of Books had read my mind in a review titled "An Affair to Remember," by Daniel Mendelsohn:
Why critical acclaim for Brokeback Mountain has been subtly but definitely homophobic.

I suppose this is the inaugural post for my blog.

Rules for this blog:
1) Don't expect me to post too frequently. I'm terrible at these things.
2) Blog sounds like a caveman word.

News for today:
I started my blog. What else do you need?