Marathon Of Weird: Day 6

Friday, December 22, 2006

In our final installment of The Marathon Of Weird, I take you back to the days of yesteryear. Way back to 1996.

In November of that year, I appeared as an extra on the hit CBS show, Touched By An Angel. Hey, don't judge me. As an aspiring young actor living in Salt Lake City one did what one had to do.

My big break... Episode #308, "Something Blue". The entire episode revolved around the events on the day of a big wedding.

Extras always arrive early and spend lots of time doing very little. Hurry up and wait, as they say in the biz. Having little to do makes for a lot of mingling on the set though. I spent a fair amount of time the first day (I spent a total of three days on set) chatting with Richard Gilliland about football, Shakespeare in Cedar City and how much he really looks just like my father.

I was no ordinary extra however. I had been specially selected (by a game of rock, paper, scissors I think) to be not the best man at the wedding but the guy next to him. The next best man, I think they call it.

In the wedding ceremony scene, the wedding is interrupted for some reason or another and the bride storms off in tears. The cast is told to react silently but with emotion. The wedding party's reaction is to be a featured shot so we are to pay special attention.

The actress whose job it was to disrupt the ceremony had quite a bit of trouble with her lines and we feigned our surprise to her troubling news somewhere between twenty and twenty-five times. It got a little old. On the next-to-last time, the actor who played the best man turned to me and said, "This time, do a HUGE double-take and mouth the words 'what the hell' really exaggerated."

"You know I will."

"Aaaannnnd. Action!"

Head turn... head turn... (silently) "What... The... Hell?!?"

"Perfect take. Cut and print!"

My twenty-four perfect, serious and inconspicuous reactions went on the editing room floor. My impersonation of a street mime with Tourettes Syndrome ended up as a featured close-up broadcast into 25 million households a few Sunday's later.

A less-lazy man would dig up the video tape and post a clip up here. Since this is me, you'll just have to take my word for it.

That concludes The Marathon. We now return you to your regularly scheduled bullshit.

Oh... the final tagee is Sideon, the bastard who tagged me in the first place. (Hey, you never said no tag-backs) It will be you assignment to write an essay about a topic of your choosing. The essay should be no less than 700 words and must contain the words "gizmo", "pelt", "smuggle", "monkey" and "troll".

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