Carv's Thinky Blog I'm an author with a focus on satirical science fiction.

Love (In the Name of Pride)

I spent many hours this week on a project to transfer our old, disintegrating VHS tapes onto DVD. I found a tape my mom made of several of my old TV appearances from 1997-98, the year I spent doing extra work in L.A. I wasn't planning to transfer them, but my wife chided me until I relented. She wanted to show off my fleeting performances on George & Leo, in which I shared a soundstage with Bob Newhart, Jason Bateman, and Julia Sweeney, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which a demonic character named The Judge shot lightning through my eyes into a shopping mall movie theater. (You can find it on Hulu; it's in an episode called "Innocence, Part 1," the highest-rated installment in series history. Coincidence? You be, no pun intended, the judge.) Personally, I just view those clips as physical evidence that I held a minimum-wage job, but she finds them glamorous.

Ah, well. We all have achievements we're proud of. I do, too, though my extra work isn't among them. Similarly, I take no pride in my few speaking roles on TV or in features; the work wasn't challenging, and the finished products were, please trust me on this, laughable. You won't even find them on Netflix. My largest speaking role was in a feature called Dead Air, which IMDB says debuted on Scandinavian television. I was basically cast as the Pig Vomit character from Private Parts, a film which doesn't exactly merit imitation. Good stuff, right? Yikes!

I'd feel prouder of Lightfall's publication if its distribution hadn't been so irreparably bungled. I hope to feel better about it someday, but for now it's wrapped up in too much drama. Contributing to my attitude is the fact that I was only paid $105 for it, a check I received only because it was returned from my publisher's deserted office.

So where do I find my pride? I felt enormous satisfaction with the first full-length play I directed, Tom Griffin's The Boys Next Door, back in 1993, and I felt it again as I immortalized its video on disc. Same goes for my starring role as Norman Thayer, Jr. in On Golden Pond. I was a 20-year-old playing an 80-year-old, and believe it or not, it worked. I'm proud of several of my characters on stage. I feel I've demonstrated impressive range over the years, despite my recent typecasting as Unlovable Old Man. I've played a werewolf, a gnome author, a fastidious skeleton, a concentration camp survivor, the greatest tenor in the world, a gay man, a lovestruck girl, a Southern preacher, a Northern Irish raconteur, the Devil himself, and both Feste the Clown and Sir Toby Belch. In a month and a half, I get to play the Old Man in A Christmas Story--so while he is an old man, at least he's lovable. Baby steps, people, baby steps.

I'm proud of my directing career, especially the aforementioned Boys Next Door, plus Galileo, Proof, and Fuddy Meers. I'm proud to make my living by writing, even when the output is solutions to basic algebra problems. I'm proud of my work as a theatre critic; I think it's brought depth, both welcome and unwelcome, to a field that, until recently, consisted mostly of uninformed backslapping in this region as it has in many others. I'm proud of my novel itself, regardless of how it was dribbled into bookstores. I like what I wrote and feel it speaks to my better nature.

I'm proud of my marriage to Amanda. I'm proud of my education, all eight years and three degrees of it, subsidized in no part whatsoever by my (then) financially strapped parents. I'm proud of my employment at Warner Bros. Sure I was just an administrative assistant, another perk for my department president boss, but I was a glorified perk under the Warner Bros. shield. I attended the premiere of a Harry Potter movie. I partied with celebrities and walked the red carpet. I couriered multimillion-dollar checks and roamed the backlot unescorted. I was part of the Hollywood machine, and who'd have predicted that for a husky bookworm of a Jehovah's Witness kid in a Crowder, Oklahoma trailer park?

Proverbs 16:18 warns us pride goeth before destruction, and I'm sure there's something to that. But achievements of any kind must be preceded by self-esteem, so I suggest to you that a fair bit of pride goes a long way. It's no sin to find needed smiles in your own successes. You pay for those smiles with a lifetime of failures and withering embarrassments. As I like to say, I've spent 43 years failing my way to the middle. But I like it here, Gentle Reader, and I hope it lasts a while.

So what makes you extra special, dear friends? Where do you find your pride?