Born Yesterday

Group Texts and Shared Meals

Jason Kuykendall, Sharon Reitkerk, and I

at the opening night party of Born Yesterday

Born Yesterday is a TBA recommended production, and runs through February 27th at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek.

I play Harry Brock, a loud mouth scrap iron magnate.  He is loud and obnoxious and so much fun to play.  I am having so much fun doing the show, and on top of that, I am having a great time bonding with these two lovely individuals.  Due to the amount of time we all spend on stage together, our schedules ended up being pretty full, and we started having meals together, and then text conversations, at first for sanity and then for fun.   This has allowed some of the group to influence the others in a dramatically positive way, given that they eat a very healthy example always everyday with absolutely no exceptions but girl scout cookies.  She cannot resist girl scout cookies.  It is her kryptonite.

In addition to the positive, we all got the same 24-hour virus the day before opening, which was thankfully a day off.  I assumed that it was my fault and told no one, hoping that I would recover in time.  We all did recover, but in the picture at the top this post, we are all 90% Pedialyte and homemade soup from Tim Higgins, the best husband in the history of husbands, a serious amateur mixologist, and a very patient man.

And the most interesting direction about costume I have ever heard:

“So could you stop running?  Keep lifting weights, but your face needs to look fatter.  And we’re going to give you this fat pad for your stomach”

Now, I will be the first to admit that the fat pad is just the smallest bit of padding, but it has a very real effect of giving me permission to just push my belly out there, Something that I’m not sure I would do with such enthusiasm, “How could you not want to marry me?” did I not have the permission of the pad.  Not to mention the permission of the script, which describes Brock as “simply gross”.  And let me tell you, I totally embraced the bulge.  Beer and burritos and big meals and the whole nine yards,  but since there is a real possibility of being flown in the air  in a body stocking during Rock of Ages, I have started going in the opposite direction.  Back to calorie tracking and working out six days a week.  If you feel like giving a little motivation in the upcoming weeks, please do.  A little help from a lot of people can be way more effective (and cheaper) than a personal trainer.