Woes of constant travel
Life Upon The Wicked Road
As a working actor, I am constantly on the go, and, like so many other people whose jobs involve continual traveling, I often go for long periods without seeing my partner. There are also many other things I don't see for long periods including, for instance, the cat, who always contrives to be MIA when I do touch home base, my favorite black tshirt, which has been AWOL for several years now and, of course, my sanity...
A typical week in my life could involve, among other things, tackling the 150 mile drive to Temecula, CA, and back - that's over 300 miles within 24 hours - for several days in a row for a feature shoot followed by presenting myself in Palmdale, also CA, for two Mercedes Benz commercial night shoots. If you look only at the numbers, that's 1 frazzled driver, 1 ships-passing-in-the-night partner, 2 different shoots, about 37 wardrobe items needed for the two shoots, at least 24 hours of driving and approximately 1,300 miles traveled in one week.
Actors, like serial killers, truck drivers, salesmen and other people who wander the highways for work, tend to live out of their cars - at any given time I have about 10 full changes of clothing lurking on my back seat (which would suit a serial killer to a T) - and all sorts of intriguing items usually end up on the "what the H-E-double-hockeysticks happened to THAT" list. This phenomenon is, to say the least, unsettling (to say the most, it's downright psychotic-episode-inducing!) and today, for instance, saw me on my hands and knees searching under car seats among curiously crippled coffee cups and long-emptied sugarfree Redbull cans for an iPod remote that decided to stubbornly remain on the forever-lost list.
To get an accurate picture of life on the road, the stresses of living out of the creatively chaotic back seat must be added to the stresses of performing adequately at one's job of choice, and these must, of course, be added to the stresses of being without one's partner for protracted periods of time. Then there are also the stresses of finding that darn cat before it - yet again - becomes overly friendly with the neighbor's delectable little Persian, but there's no need to go into that particular yowling match right now.
Flying around the countryside and the world - as opposed to driving long distances over it - also sports its own particular charms, and I'd be rich beyond my wildest dreams if I could just get $10 for every time I've had to explain to foot-tapping, stern-faced and, unfortunately, non-English speaking, airport guards why my favorite held-my-hand-around-the-world suitcase has a burn mark on the top right-hand corner of its lid. It coquettishly leaned up against my desk-lamp for far too long one night - but that's a sordid little story that's best told another day - and, of course, Suspicious Guard in Cairo, Hulking Guard in Tel Aviv and Menacing Guard in Warsaw can do nothing but interpret the innocent leather scorch as sure sign of an octopus-tentacled international conspiracy...
Those rare occasions I find myself at home are not spent relaxing but are, instead, spent compressing communications with the other half, fighting over-friendly felines and, of course, planning the next trip!
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