You're a Good Man, Chuck Taine

Today is April 5th (unless you're reading this on a day other than the day I wrote and posted this, in which case it isn't).  A number of years ago, DC Comics put out a calender which contained fictional birthdays of their various characters, at this time they chose April 5th as the birthday of my favorite Super-Hero, Chuck Taine, otherwise known as Bouncing Boy.  Coincidentally, it also happens to be my Mom's Birthday.  That reminds me, I need to give her a call.  I'll be right back...okay I'm back, did you miss me?  Anyways, as it is Bouncing Boy's birthday, I thought I'd talk a little bit about him and why he is my favorite.

His first appearance was in Action Comics # 276, where he was applying for membership in the Legion of Super-Heroes, a 30th Century Super-Hero club.  He did not make it in at this time, but by his second appearance, he was a member.  A little more than a year after his first appearance, he was one of the first Legionnaires to be given a real name and origin. 

In the story, "The Secret Origin of Bouncing Boy," it was revealed that Chuck Taine was an assistant to a scientist.  Chuck was given the job of delivering a "Super Plastic Formula," to the science council.  On the way he decided to stop and see a robot gladiator tournament (if you saw the movie Real Steal, it was kind of like that, except instead of boxing, the robots were hitting each other with weapons).  Chuck ordered a soda and put it down right next to the bottle of Super Plastic Formula.  As fate would have it, Chuck drank the Super Plastic Formula by mistake and gained the ability to inflate into a ball and bounce.  

Chuck then decided to try to join the Legion as Bouncing Boy, but as we already know from his first appearance, he was turned down.  The Legionnaires then followed him around for a week, laughing at him.  Eventually, Chuck ended up stopping a criminal who had incapacitated Saturn Girl, and he was finally allowed into the Legion.

Later on, the writers weren't sure what to do with Chuck, and so they had him loose his powers and be moved to reserve status in the Legion.  Eventually he got his powers back, and under the writing young Jim Shooter (who was 13 when he started writing the Legion) Chuck finally found his place in the team.  Shooter wrote him as the self-appointed morale officer of the Legion.  Chuck would use Humor (often self-deprecating) to make other Legionnaires laugh.  One of my favorite lines of Chuck's that was written by Jim Shooter is, "I'm about as stealthy as a near-sighted Hippopotamus on roller skates."  It was also during Shooter's tenure as writer that Chuck started spending time with Lurornu Durgo, the Legionnaire known as Duo-Damsel (previously Triplicate Girl).

After Shooter left the Legion.  The writers again seemed to have a hard time writing Chuck, so in Superboy #200 he lost his powers again and proposed to Duo-Damsel.  They were married in the same issue.  Bouncing Boy and Duo Damsel would make occasional appearances after that, and Chuck would eventually get his powers back, yet again.  Chuck and Luornu would eventually become teachers at the Legion Academy, which trains kids with Super Powers how to use them.

Around 1990 or so, there was the so called "Five Years Later" period, where the story jumped forward five years.  The earth was now controlled by an alien race called the Dominators, and the Legion had been disbanded.  Chuck and Luornu were now instructors at the United Planets Militia Academy.

In the mid-90s, the Legion of Super-Heroes was completely rebooted, so that the characters were just starting out.  Chuck Taine did make appearances, but not as Bouncing Boy.  Instead, he was a young apprentice architect who was in charge of rebuilding the Legion Headquarters after it was damaged by super villains.  Chuck dated both Triad (the rebooted Triplicate Girl/Duo Damsel) and Shrinking Violet (which inspired the following drawing that I commissioned Legion artist Jeff Moy to draw)

The Legion was rebooted again, but Bouncing Boy didn't show up at all.  Then there was a sort of "retroboot" that instead of rebooting the Legion yet again, it took it back to the status quo from the comics from the 1980's.  Bouncing Boy was then again a member of the team (though after Paul Levitz took over the title again, BB was in charge of Legion Academy again instead of being a full member).

At around the same time as the "retroboot," Kids WB had a Legion of Super-Heroes cartoon that lasted two seasons.  Bouncing Boy was a regular on the show and near the end of the first season became the leader of the Legion.  Unfortunately, the second season took place a couple of years later, and Bouncing Boy was no longer the leader.  He was still a major part of the show though, so I shouldn't complain.

I guess the reason I like Bouncing Boy so much is that I think of him as being a lot like me.  We're both overweight and both strongly rely on our senses of humor.  I also liked that he got the girl.  I first became aware of Bouncing Boy in 1990, but at the time (it was during the aforementioned "Five Years Later" period) he wasn't really appearing much in the comics.  Eventually I would get into the Legion in the reboot, and would read the really old Legion comics in the Legion Archives reprints.  Oh, and here are a couple of my favorite comic book covers featuring Bouncing Boy:

There's No Fool Like An April Fool!

Ah, April Fools Day!  As a merry prankster, I love April Fool's Day.  Now I don't always do a prank, I only do one if I am truly inspired.  This year, I am more inspired to talk about pranks themselves and what makes a good prank.  As an example I'm using one that Star Trek's George Takei posted on Facebook this morning.

Friends, I'm thrilled to share this news with you today. As announced at Emerald City Comicon, where I'm appearing this weekend, Paramount Pictures has green-lit a new Star Trek Movie entitled "Excelsior" in which I will play the captain. This announcement is part of Paramount Studio's 100th-year anniversary campaign. The studio has acknowledged the fan enthusiasm for this concept ever since I appeared in command of the vessel in "The Undiscovered Country." J.J. Abrams will direct, with Robert Orci again writing the screenplay. My co-star in Allegiance, Paulo Montalban, has been cast opposite me to play the mercurial "Agha," the grandson of Khan (played by Ricardo Montalban in the Second Star Trek Movie). Also featured are Gilbert Gottfried (playing a wily Ferengi First Officer) and Lisa Lampanelli (as a Bajoran security officer). More to come on this breaking story soon. Thanks again for the years of support, and I'll see you on the Bridge of "Excelsior."

Absolutely Brilliant!  Here's why it works.

1)  There is a small amount of truth in it.  Takei was in fact at Emerald City Comicon this weekend, like he said, and comic book conventions are places that announcements like this one do take place.  J.J. Abrams is in charge of the Star Trek franchise currently so it makes sense that if this were to happen, that he would be the one to direct.

2)  There is a slow build from reasonable to ridiculous.  It starts of fairly normally, Paramount green-lit another Star Trek movie to be made after the one currently in production.  Okay, I can buy that, especially since Star Trek is big enough that you don't need to see how well the next one does to greenlight the one after that.  Someone that I've vaguely heard of with the last name of Montalban playing the grandson of one of the best Star Trek villains ever, Khan Noonien Singh, yeah, I could see that.  Gilbert Gottfried playing a Ferengi...um okay...if there was any Star Trek race that Gottfried could play, I suppose it would be a Ferengi.  Lisa Lampanelli as a Bajoran Security officer...okay this is definitely a hoax.

3)  You kind of wish it was true.  Hell, I know I would be there on the first day to see a movie about Sulu as captain of the Excelsior battling the grandson of Kahn.

4)  It's Funny.  This is the one thing that a whole lot of pranks miss, once you realize that it's a prank, you laugh your ass off.  A lot of the pranks I see are just designed to fool you and are only funny to the person who made the prank in a, "Ha, ha, I fooled them!" kind of way.  But Takei's prank is actually funny.  What makes it funny?  Probably has something to do with a combination of all the points that I mentioned.  If you really want to pull a prank next year, try to follow Takei's example and make it funny.

A Funny Thing Happened...

One of my favorite musicals (and I LOVE musicals) is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  I first saw the movie when I was eleven years old and loved it.  In case you're unfamiliar with it, here is the opening song from the movie.


Keep in mind I didn't understand most of it.  I had no idea what a courtesan or a eunuch was and barely knew what virgin meant.  The movie starred Zero Mostel as Pseudolis, and I became a huge fan of his because of it.  I later found out that it was based on a Broadway musical which also starred Zero Mostel, which in turn was based on the plays of ancient Roman playwright Plautus.  From the first moment seeing the movie, I knew that I wanted to play the role of Pseudolis one day.  I did scenes from it in Drama Class, used the opening song, "Comedy Tonight," as an audition piece, bought the audio tape of the original cast album, and read the play so often I had much of it memorized.

I had hoped that they would do the show at my school when I was in High School.  Sadly, they didn't.  In fact, they did it two years after I graduated (in fact all the plays they did that year would have been perfect for me, as they also did Wizard of Oz and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night).  It felt like I would never get the chance to play the part.

Then, about 11 years after I first saw the movie, when I was going to San Joaquin Delta College, they were going to be doing the show.  I auditioned, gave one of the best callbacks I've ever given, and got the part of Pseudolis.  I was ecstatic from when I got the part, until the last performance.  I remember that people were amazed that I was off script by the second week of rehearsal.

"How did you memorize the lines so fast?" they asked.

"I've had the lines memorized for 11 years," I replied.  "I only had the script the first week so I could write the blocking down."

By the last week of performances, I had come down with a sore throat.  You couldn't tell from my performance though.  Here's a clip of me playing the part of Pseudolis in the opening number:

Sorry about the "Evaluation Copy" across the front of it.  I don't have a decent program to burn a DVD to my computer.

Someday I'd like to do the show again, maybe even direct it since I know the play backwards and forwards.  I definitely have some ideas on how I would do it.

Actors Are a Cowardly, Superstitious Lot

I've been acting in school plays and community theatre since I was in the 4th grade and I played "An Old Man" in my class' production of (I'm not kidding, I've got people who can back me up on this) Shakespeare's Macbeth.  So obviously I've been around other amateur actors.  Let me tell you, actors have some pretty weird superstitions, and they (for the most part) take them very seriously.

Let's start with one of the more famous ones shall we?  Actors think it's bad luck to wish someone good luck.  Instead actors say, "Break a leg!"  There are a lot of differing theories as to why we say break a leg instead of, for example, "Bad luck!" or "Break a fingernail!" but I'll get into the theories in a moment.  Now as I've been in several musicals, I'd also like to point out that you don't say "Break a leg!" to a dancer, for obvious reasons.  Instead dancers say "Merde!" which is French for "Shit!"  I think that goes back to ballet being very popular in France (I was going to say originated in France, but decided to look it up and discovered that it originated in Italy).  There are probably other replacements for wishing someone good luck, but those are the one's I'm familiar with.

Now, let's get back to "Break a leg!" and it's origins.  I'm going to start with the most absurd theory I've heard, the "Lincoln Theory."  It starts with a fact, John Wilkes Booth (who was an actor), after shooting President Lincoln jumped to the stage and broke his leg.  The theory being that you're wishing the actor you are telling to break a leg, that they will be remembered.  Here's the thing though, John Wilkes Booth isn't remembered as an actor, he's remembered as an assassin (a job-title so nice, they put ass in it twice).  Plus, the earliest documentation of the phrase "Break a leg" is from the 1920s.  You'd think that if it came from 1865, there would be an earlier mention of the phrase.

Another theory is that back in the days of ancient Greek theatre, instead of applauding the audiences would stomp their feet.  So in wishing someone "Break a leg" you're hoping that the audience will stomp their feet so hard, someone will break their leg.  A similar (though less grim) theory is that in Elizabethan times, the audience would pick up their chairs and bang them on the floor, so you're wishing someone in the audience would break the leg of their chairs.  Given how morbid the first theory is, and how hard it would be to bang your chair compared to clapping your hands, added to the fact that again, the first documentation of the phrase "Break a leg" is from the 1920s so these are not likely.

Now that we have the crazy theories out of the way, lets get to two more sensible (though slightly boring) theories.  One has to do with the fact that the curtains on the side of the stage that help hide the backstage area from the audience are called "legs."  The theory is that the stage manager used to tell the actors to go onstage by telling them to break through one of the legs.  The other theory has to do with bowing.  According to the theory, bowing comes from when audiences used to throw money onto the stage at the end of a play to show their appreciation and actors would bend down to pick up the money.  They would sometimes have to bend their knees (or break their leg lines) to get all the money.  So you're wishing that the audience gives you a lot of money.

The last two are very believable, but they're not the one that makes the most sense to me.  My favorite theory is that the phrase came from a German phrase, "Hals- und Beinbruch," which is used to wish people luck, but is literally translated as, "neck and leg fracture."  Allegedly this phrase is a parody of the Yiddish phrase "Hatsloche un Broche," which translates as "Success and blessing."  This theory fits the timeline perfectly as there were a lot of German immigrants, particularly Jewish German immigrants, who became involved in the theatre.

Now that I have spent several paragraphs hammering you with theories about where, "Break a leg!" came from, lets talk briefly about other superstitions.  One that actors tend to take even more seriously than not saying, "Good luck," is that you never mention the name of the Scottish Play, that is to say Macbeth.  On the British TV show Blackadder II,  there was a scene where two actors were compelled to recite, "Hot potato, audience roars, puck will make amends," and then tweak each others noses every time someone said Macbeth.

In reality, the rituals are left up to the person who said it.  The most common are that the person who said it has to spin around as fast as they can three times and then spit (I actually witnessed someone forcing someone else to do this because they said Macbeth), or that the person who said it is locked out of the theatre and made to run around the building three times and then swear before they are let back inside.  There doesn't seem to be any debate as to why you can't say Macbeth, everything I've heard boils down to the play being cursed because of the witchcraft portrayed in it.

Other common superstitions are that you can't whistle backstage (this goes back to when former sailors were stage hands and they would use a series of whistles to communicate when to pull the ropes, actors whistling backstage would cause a stage hand to pull the wrong rope at the wrong time), stories of ghosts of actors haunting theatres, having lucky articles of clothing that they always wear during performances or auditions, or pre-show rituals that they must perform.

I knew someone who had a pre-show ritual where they, and another person, would each take a red vine, do a song and dance incorperating the red vine, drink ginger ale out of a bottle cap through the red vine, stick one end of the red vine in their nose, then eating the red vine.  He had to do this before EVERY performance.   There were other parts of the ritual that I don't remember exactly, every thing he said was very specific.

All this having been said, I am not superstitious.  In fact my friend, Brandon Rogers, and I used to say to each other, "Good Luck, Macbeth!" before every performance.  Ironically this became a ritual in and of itself.  Brandon sadly passed away several years ago, and still, in his honor, I will think "Good Luck, Macbeth!" before every performance I do.

Oh and 100 big, fat points to the first person to identify what the title of this post is referencing.

My Big Fat Life

Since this is my first post on this blog, I suppose I should tell you a bit about myself.  This blog is going to be about my struggle to lose weight (I'm going to try to approach the subject humorously, but probably won't always succeed at it), as well as acting in community theatre and pop culture stuff that I am into.  This post is going to be about growing up and how I became fat. 

Ever since I was a little kid, I was made fun of for being fat, so for years I thought I was always fat.  I definitely am fat now (obese if you want to be more accurate), but a few years ago, I looked at some pictures of me as a child, and realized that I wasn't really fat (and at times not even overweight) until my teens and didn't become obese until I was college age. 

Here's a picture of me from when I played Mustardseed in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, back in the summer I turned 10.

I was a cute fairy, wasn't I?

This was during the period when kids on the playground would make fun of me for being fat.  Looking at the picture, I don't think I was fat.  Hell, I barely qualify for chubby or overweight.  The kid to my right (whom I mostly cut out of the picture because I thought it would be rude to post a picture of someone without their permission) is probably bigger around than I am, and he's not fat either.

Let's fast forward a couple years to 1985.  It was in a lot of ways a very bad year for me, and was very depressed.  I was getting picked on even more than I was when I was younger.  In one particularly bad instance a bully and his gang of thugs beat the snot out of me and left me lying on the ground in the dirt.  Another example is from near the end of the school year, when the teachers had to replace my yearbook because some of the other kids defaced my first one with vulgar insults.  The following picture was taken from when I was in my costume for the school production of The Sound of Music that spring

Nazis aren't as cute as fairies

 Again, I wasn't really fat.  I'm bigger than I was in the previous picture surely, but not what I would call fat.  That summer I would turn 13.  That was also the summer that my parents divorced and my dog died.  I ate a lot to cope with my depression from those two things, and here is how I looked that Summer:

I was playing Johnny Casino (The lead singer of the band that plays at the Prom) in Grease

This is the earliest picture that I think I'm starting to look fat in.  That summer (a few weeks before that picture was taken actually) I was put in an in-patient teen weight loss group, and was put on a strict diet for a while. 

That's me the following winter, when my mom took my sister and I to Hawaii.  I've lost some weight, but I still have a bit of a belly.  Here's me the following spring when I graduated from 8th Grade:

And here's me that summer as Orlando in Shakespeare's As You Like It:

Nice legs

Looking back at those last two pictures, I can't believe that I still thought I was really fat at that time.  I was pretty slim at that point, and then something happened that sent it all to hell:

Not so nice legs

About a week before I started High School, I walked through a sliding glass door at my Grandma's house.  I was immobile for months, and started to gain weight again.  Even when I was able to walk without crutches, my leg would spasm and hurt like crazy whenever I overexerted it.  Over the next few years you can see a steady weight gain.  When I played Schroeder in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown!" the next summer:

The following winter when I miscast as Noah Claypole in Oliver! (the character in the book is described as tall and lanky):

I seemed to have lost some weight a couple months after that when I played Major Magnus Muldoon in The Real Inspector Hound:

What is it with me having bare legs in so many of these plays?

I gained again, the next year when I played Solinus, Duke of Ephesus in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors:

And I really balooned up by the time the Yearbook picture for my Senior Year was taken:

I can't seem to find any pictures right now of the next few years, but after High School, my family moved from the suburbs (where I could pretty much walk anywhere I needed to go) to the country where there wasn't anything within walking distance.  This was when I really became obese.  By the time I moved out on my own, in 1995 or so, I had gained so much weight that it was harder for me to move around and therefore it was harder for me to loose weight.  I did loose about a hundred pounds on a liquid diet in 1997 or so, but when I was off it, I quickly gained it all back.  

Here's some pictures of myself taken at a comic con in 1998, where I'm at a weight that I've pretty much stayed at.  The girls in the pictures are cos-players and/or booth babes so I figure it's okay to post them unedited since they were pretty much there to have pictures taken of them:

In the last six months or so I have lost about 12 inches around the waist (I'm not sure how much weight because I don't have a scale that goes high enough) from a low-carb diet.  Here's hoping I can stick to it this time and keep the weight off.

UPDATE : Okay, so I said yesterday (just a couple sentences above) that my scale didn't go high enough to measure my weight.  Well, just a few minutes ago I decided to check and now I am low enough that it does measure my weight.  So I now weigh 385 lbs.  I think I was roughly 450 before I started losing weight, so that means I've lost roughly 65 lbs.  WOOO!