loseractor.com

It’s been quite a month for this loser. I have climbed the highest mountains and gone spelunking in the sewers. I have met famous movie stars and almost pooped my pants.

A few weeks ago I got a call to play a bit role in a cool movie. It starred an up and comer who had been in two Best Picture nominees in consecutive years, two veteran character actors who are adored by millions, and a hot ingénue who also has a budding career as a musician. The director was a commercial guy I had worked with before who was doing his first feature. The nice man thought of me for a small part playing a receptionist. They gave me the part with no audition, and it seemed like something I could handle without having a heart attack. After I sent in a requested headshot to the wardrobe department, the director must have seen it and realized that I was a little older than he remembered and might be a better fit for a larger role in the film, playing a quack chiropractor who treats one of the beloved character actors, whom I’ll refer to as Juan Boodman. I had to go in and read for this part, and seeing as how I’ve been working 6,000 hours a week at my advertising job, I was barely able to fit the audition into my busy schedule. I went in there having spent only 9 minutes with the script they had sent me, but was somehow able to walk out with a part in the film. In my acting travels, I am beginning to see a direct correlation between not investing too much and being completely under-prepared to landing coveted roles that I would never get in a million years if I cared too much or tried too hard. So that’s what happened here, I guess. My chiropractor swore like a sailor and choked on the medical terminology to the point where it sounded like I was illiterate. But hey, I must have done something right…a week later I was sitting in my tiny trailer with a stomach virus waiting to shoot an actual scene in an actual minor motion picture.

While I was sitting in my poopy, 3-foot by 3-foot trailer box, I got a call from my agent telling me I’d been cast in a national network fast food commercial that I had auditioned for a few days earlier. It was to shoot two days after the movie job. A commercial like this would bring in at least $10,000, and that is a modest estimate. Wow. This sort of “winning” was completely unprecedented for this loser, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Was Loseractor really going to have this incredible experience acting in a cool indy movie one day and then earn a shitload of money the next selling hamburgers?

No.

Here’s what happened. I called into work and asked my boss’s assistant to ask my boss if I could take another day off to go make this money, and the answer was an unqualified “no”. I had been working night and day on this pitch project to bring in new business for our company, and I was told that I was badly needed in the office and couldn’t do the commercial job. “Well,” I thought, “this is horrible.” But I am a man of my word, and when the advertising agency hired me, I told them that the job came first. It was beyond unfortunate that I would have to call my agent, back out of a job I already booked and lose out on desperately needed money, but that’s what I did. I acted completely unprofessionally in one area of my working life so I could be completely professional in another, but that’s fucking life. My agent sounded ready to slit my throat, but I held firm in my decision not to make money.

Minutes later, there was a knock on the door of my trailer and it was go-time for me and Juan Boodman. I had to play the whole scene behind him as I worked his back. As I laid my hands on his massive shoulders for rehearsal, he asked me if I was a real chiropractor. “No,” I replied, “But I am Jewish.” This got a big laugh from the crew but nothing from Boodman. At that moment, he decided that I was either an anti-semite or simply not funny. Or both. As we began to shoot for real, I was very conscious of remembering my lines. My dialogue was thick with medical-speak, and I was too nervous about not screwing up my lines to really lose myself in the character and enjoy myself. It was also way too important to me that Juan Boodman like me– both as an actor and as a human being. During one take, after I had improved some silly dialogue, Juan broke character and said sarcastically “You’re a funny character actor.” I was so stung and hurt that I could barely finish the take. I couldn’t believe what a fucking asshole this guy was, and how dare he kick me when I was already really struggling. It took a few seconds, but then I realized that he had not broken character at all, and he had actually said, “You are a funny chiropractor.”

I was crazy. This little job was making me big-time crazy. I was so insecure and so desperate for approval that I was psyching myself into a paralyzing misery. This was actually an epiphany. Nothing- fame, fortune, whatever, was worth the sort of brow beating I was giving myself. It was ridiculous that I was letting an exciting opportunity become an exercise in shame and embarrassment.

They took a break in the shooting to move the camera. Me and Juan Boodman stepped outside. I bummed a cigarette off him and he walked five feet away from me and smoked by himself, deliberately not speaking to me and staring off into space. But I didn’t take it personally. He didn’t dislike me, he just didn’t share my need to be validated. He was an accomplished actor who was just having another day at the office, and when I’m at my office I don’t bend over backwards to make the guy who empties my trashcan feel like a superstar.

We went back in and shot another 5or 6 takes. This time I had a lot more fun with it, and even though Juan Boodman never made me feel like a movie star, I got my shit together, nailed the dialogue and did the job they hired me to do. I am a fucking professional.

POSTSCRIPT:

I went in to work the next day, and my boss told me that the reason he didn’t let me do the commercial was because he wanted me to go to LA and present the pitch to the client, and I had to be at work as much as possible in the interim to stay close to the project. I am on the plane home from now, having just won a lot of money in new business for my company. Our team presented the work to a conference room packed with movie studio executives. They gave us a standing ovation, called us geniuses and hired us on the spot. That never happens in this business, ever. They say Karma is a boomerang and I am steeling myself to get hit in the face with one shaped like a dollar sign. Hopefully.

January 2, 2008

So, yeah, I have not posted in a long time. But I have good reasons. I haven’t done any acting at all, I’ve been working a million hours a week, and most significantly, my wife just had a baby. Our first baby. A girl baby. A large, lovely, baby. That is the biggest thing that has happened to me in a while, probably ever, so forgive me if I share this experience. I mean, really forgive me. Fatherhood is usually the moment every great comedian “jumps the shark” and starts to suck. Baby humor is usually only funny to the people that love that particular baby, and with the exception of the Coz, I can’t think of anyone who became funnier in the middle of a diaper rant. Not that I would compare myself to “the great comedians” I mentioned earlier, but even as an anonymous low-level comedic writer/actor I will now enter the pantheon of creative people made weaker by their spawn….But I love my succubus, so at the risk of losing the remainder of my dwindling readership that isn’t immediate family, I will tell you how she done got born.
Friday night, my wife woke me up at 1:30 in the morning….
Wife: Loser, wake up, I think my water broke.
Me: OK.
I got up and turned on the light. The bed was red and soaking wet. Also, my blue, comfy, sleeping pants, which I wear most every night except this one because I loaned them to my wife at midnight to quiet her rage after I refused to wash her maternity clothes at midnight because I was tired and tipsy from a nice big dinner out and I can be selfish sometimes, were also red and soaking wet.
Me: Yes, I think your water broke. Ok, no problem, ok. But why is it red?
Wife: I don’t know. That freaks me out. Call the doctor.
Then we went into business mode. I was completely unnerved by the red water everywhere. My sister-in-law was at the house too, and the three of us got very serious and ran around the apartment organizing for the inevitable. We called the doctor, and she was concerned about the blood as well and told us to head up to the hospital right away. Ten minutes later, the three of us were packed and speeding up the West Side Highway in the Impreza towards Columbia Presbyterian……

February 5, 2008

OK, I think the baby cried or something and then I got distracted for a month and stopped writing this post. Picking up where I left off a month later, I have lost interest in providing a blow-by-blow of the baby’s birth, so I’ll just hit you with some bullet pointed highlights.

• The baby was 9lbs 9 ozs
• The birth was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen
• It split my wife open like an english muffin
• That frightened me
• There was blood everywhere and my wife’s vagina looked like….
a) A smashed Georgia O’Keefe painting
b) Chum
c) “Janjaweed surprise”
d) An as of yet undiscovered deep-sea creature

The baby had two lungs full of blood and the doctors set to work suctioning her on one side of the room. On the other side of the room, the OBGYN was pleading with my wife to stop shaking so she could sew her up. I was the idiot between them holding a video camera with my finger partially covering the lens. My narration was the blathering chatter of a frightened man. I was scared for my wife and my baby—they both seemed to be teetering on the line between very alive and very dead. Had I been a more seasoned birthing partner or a delivery room nurse I may have been more relaxed. As it stood, I was trying to maintain a confident calm so my wife wouldn’t be alarmed at the buckets of blood pouring forth from her middle or the nervous scrum of doctors huddled around our brand-new baby.
Twenty minutes later, it was over. My wife snuggled with the baby in a morphine cocoon and I called all the friends and relatives and told them the good news.
A month in, I am still reeling from the high of being a Dad. My baby is adorable. I love and respect my wife more than ever for the strength and courage she showed during what was the hardest day of her life, not to mention the previous few months of bloated misery she endured. And now comes the payoff. We set about teaching the next generation the difference between good and evil, winning and losing, empathy and apathy, ambition and talent, Asperger’s and asparagus.
It’s gonna be great.

I managed to make it to two auditions last week. The first was a TV voiceover job for an animated toothbrush head. I was to play the role of Leering Toothbrush Head, opposite my wife, the Plain-Looking Toothbrush Head who playfully teases me for my wandering eye. As I sat in the waiting room trying to digest the Worst Script I Have Ever Read In Any Medium TM, it was impossible not to notice that the actress who was to play my wife was actually ridiculously attractive. Like, if you took the most attractive parts of me physically and assembled them, it would equal one of her yeast infections. She was pretty.

The Worst Script I Have Ever Read In Any Medium TM called for me to be suddenly overwhelmed by the sex appeal of a new toothbrush head, which for legal reasons, I will call the Kolgate 361°. My character, it would seem, desperately wants to fuck this new toothbrush. I fawn over her “slim rotating bristles” and other fine features. My Plain Toothbrush Head wife does not stab me in the throat for this, which is what I think my real wife would do. Instead, she just says real passive stuff like “Oh, hush!” or “Geez!”. The script was about a half-page long. After looking it over a few times, I reconciled that the copy was awful, but money is money and I would be lucky to win the part. Then I saw the next three-pages. There were THREE PAGES of helpful suggestions to the actor on how to get into character.
The first suggestion was to think of the toothbrush head characters as Monica and Chandler— you know, the loveable couple from the hit series “Friends”. Given the hilarious script put forth, I could see no reason why my animated toothbrush wife and me couldn’t entertain millions for 8 years in much the same way as Courtney Cox and Matthew Perry did!
The next option was for my character to approach the Kolgate 361° like Shaggy, the hippie from Scooby-Doo, lusting for a hoagie. This was a completely different direction. Gone was the sex analogy— now the toothbrush lust served as a thinly veiled metaphor for drug-snacking, aka, the munchies! At first I was dubious of devouring the Kolgate 361° script from this angle, but who am I to question their wisdom? They are littlest midgets in the Kolgate-Golmolive Empire. I am the gum on their tiny shoes.
Strangely, there wasn’t much of a wait to get into this audition, so before I could get any more guidance from the Kolgate Acting Manual, I was in a tiny sound booth with a beautiful woman pretending to be a covetous toothbrush head. For my motivation, I decided to view the Toothbrush Head of my affection as a big pile of money I could have in exchange for my integrity. This seemed to work. We did four takes in the first direction. Each time the casting director just kept saying “Great! Now give me more of that! Amp it up! Amp it up!”. So I did. The beautiful actress sharing a microphone with me and making me self conscious about my breath kept reading her script exactly the same way each time, just louder. So she went from “Oh, hush…” to “OH HUSH!”. After the fourth read, the casting director came in and gave us the obligatory “Just have fun with it!” and closed the door. I tried a few characters, including a sad imitation of Shaggy, while my Hot Toothbrush Wife screamed “GEEZ, HONEY! WOULD YOU STOP!” through the scrim of my rotten breath.
It’s been three days and I haven’t heard anything. I may not get the spot, but I have become more concerned about my breath and am thinking about investing in a sexy, new Kolgate 361° toothbrush head with slim, rotating bristles.

Due to commitments in the copywriting world, my acting career has become a bit anemic. I haven’t been able to go any many of the auditions I’ve been offered, and I find that when I do go out I have less patience for the way actors are treated. We often have to wait an hour just to get in for five minutes and read shitty copy in the hopes of making the cut to the next pool of two hundred in order to get to go and do it again for the stupid, stupid, client in the hopes of miraculously being cast in the spot which, you are lucky enough to shoot, may not run at all or may just be a promo which will earn you $250 for unlimited use.
Commercial acting is a tough racket. The Screen Actors Guild is a piece of shit. With the dwindling returns from acting in commercials coupled with the travesty of the pay scale for new media use, I believe they should pay actors for just going to auditions. Working on the other side, it becomes more and more apparent how large the pay chasm is between talent and everyone else involved in producing a commercial. Shame on them.

So, one of the little dogs is having a bad summer. Oscar, the Brussels Griffon, was diagnosed with some form of epilepsy a few months ago. He was brought to the vet after he started having visions; biting the air, barking at the wall and then laying under a table for hours at a stretch. The doctor put him on pheonbarbitol—a chill pill, if you will. As caretakers, we are required to split each pill in half and ram it down his throat. If not monitored closely, Oscar masticates until the pill is worked out of his mouth and into the hairy tendrils of his beard. Sort of like an institiutionalized serial killer “playing along” until he murders again. After a few weeks, we were pretty sure the medication was effective. He stopped having visions and was back to his fun, snuggly, self.
Then it got strange again. One night, he fell out of our bed. The next day, his eyes were blood red and he was running a high fever. He wobbled when he walked and refused all food. This time, the vet had much worse news. Oscar was suffering from either Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Encephalitis. The first was occasionally treatable with a decent success rate, and the latter was doom. A few days later, the results came back from the lab and much to our chagrin, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever had been ruled out. Oscar was suffering from some kind of brain swelling, but we wouldn’t know more without a $3,500 MRI. Since this is my brother’s dog and he is not a crazy person, he chose to forego the MRI in favor of the old medical maxim, “Let’s just see what happens when we give him some antibiotics.”
So far it’s been two weeks, and I have to say, Oscar seems much improved. In fact, we took him up to the country this weekend and he frolicked in grass with our other dog, Iggy. They both seemed happy as could be. Until…. one morning I took him out, he crouched down to poop and just stayed there. Five minutes went by, and still he crouched. Ten minutes. Tears began to fill his eyes, and it dawned on me that poor Oscar was constipated. I thought it was perhaps a result of his ever-increasing drug regimen, but what do I know? I called him over, figuring he could just try again later like you or I would do, but Oscar was determined. I walked over to offer some comfort, but could provide none.
Oscar actually had pooped, but it had been stymied halfway out of his anus by a tangled web of hardened feces and matted hair that sort of reminded me of “The Pile” on 9/12. So there we were, Oscar in a real jam and me not quite sure how to help him. I told him to wait there and then I ran inside and grabbed a wet paper towel. As I now recall, I got that burst of adrenaline that one learns about on primetime news specials; the kind that enables a Dad to lift a car and free his trapped infant, or a surfer to punch a shark in the eye. With the moistened paper towel as a tool, I tried to reach through the muddied jungle of fur and pull out the screaming turd. I was however, only successful in excavating half. I enlisted a ten-year old with a passing interest in all things anal as a runner. He brought me wad after wad of wet paper towels as I pulled, planed and smudged Oscar back to health. Once he was no longer crying, I still had to figure out how to prevent this from happening again. I blasted his ass with a high-powered garden hose with the nozzle adjusted to full-torque, but that only succeeded in turning Oscar against me. He stood at the end of the driveway, betrayed.
I had to try a new tactic. I went back in the house and dispatched my tweener minion out to the driveway, with the instructions to bring Oscar to me in the bathtub immediately. I needed to finish the job. I watched through the window as he expertly picked up Oscar by his underarms, careful not to paint himself smelly. He delivered him to me, and I set to work dissolving the sediment that had started this whole mess to begin with. The tub quickly turned the color of chocolate suicide, and after a few minutes fo feckless scrubbing with my hand and a dollop of Head and Shoulders, I was reduced to rolling the final turd boulder between my thumb and forefinger until it dissolved. Oscar shook and whinnied as I pulled his hair, but in the end, I choose to believe he was grateful for my efforts. It can only be that this is just one more crisis in a series of many that has brought us closer together. Here’s to many more!

Long time no post. I have been working dilligently to carve out a career as a copywriter and have subsequently neglected my duties reporting on the trials and tribulations of a pigmentless Hacktor in the big city. I did manage to squeeze in one commercial shoot in front of the camera last week. It was for a health insurance company, and I played the role of a free-floating head discussing health insurance in a somewhat comic fashion. As a free-floating head, I was exposed to my first blue screen shoot. They dressed me in a form-fitting blue tunic that went all the way up to my chin. This was a particularly hot day in New York City, and in order to get clean sound in the studio the production was forced to kill the airconditioning. The aforementioned tunic was made of some space-age material that would let no air pass either in or out, and in wearing it I was able to receive Karmic payback for spraypainting a frog silver at camp when I was nine and setting it on a rock to dry in the hot sun. In between takes the comely make-up woman would dab the sweat from my brow.
“There is a waterfall of sweat cascading from the nape of my neck to my rectum,” I told her. “I cannot help you with that.”
Fair enough. Despite the profuse sweating, the shoot was great. I got to do a little improv, was in and out in an hour and was informed that my bit might be cut into two spots, making me more money. The director is a friend of mine with whom I have worked with in the past. He is efficient and always coaxes a better performance from me, at least in my opinion. This commercial will only run in California, so, Nancy Pelosi, please email me when you see it so I know that you still care.
Also, I am developing a little project for the internet, whereby I get drunk and interview celebrities and the like. It is for a commercial prodution company that has started a web channel with an eye towards sellling their creations to network television. I am more than excited about this project, as it is something I have been dreaming about for several years now. The main challenge seems to be talent wrangling, so if you are famous and enjoy working for free, please get in touch with me via the “comments” section of Loseractor.com.

I’m in Philly for my first shoot on the other side of the camera. We are shooting at night for a few days in a row, and so far so good. My 12-year old nephew recently went on a field trip to Philly with his 6th-grade class. The teacher imparted these words of wisdom to the students just before they stepped off the bus:

Don’t be-bop with the homies and don’t talk to the mentals.

If you can say that sentence in your head with a thick Philly accent, it becomes even more precious.
I wil try to post again upon my return next week. I have some news.

I realize that I haven’t written much about my acting travails of late, because there haven’t really been any. I had one audtion for what my agent referred to as “The Secret Cookie”. The hidden identity of the “Secret Cookie” was not too difficult to decipher, as the script had no less than five uses of the phrase “Double Stuf.” I don’t know why the company felt compelled to shroud its product in secrecy yet give it away in the same breath, but I have learned not to question the genius of American Corporations. The script chronicled the huge announcement of two famous football players (who are also siblings) trying their hand at an up and coming sport, that of licking the soft, creamy, filling of a “Secret Cookie” in some sort of competitve fashion. I was to audition for the role of a reporter who was covering this press conference, and I threw myself into the ethnically diverse throng of fake reporters that accurately represents the cultural swirl of Amercian reportage with the full force of all of my acting abilities. Our inquisitive rainbow hurled well-scripted questions at the “Granning” brothers like “C’mon what’s the new sport gonna be?”, or “Is it hockey?”, and “C’mon, spill the beans!”. At a cue given by the casting director, we all stopped our chatter to allow one lucky actor to yell one final, overly expositional question like “Please tell us what new sport you two famous football players are going to start playing?”.
Then, the more famous of the two says “We are joining the D.S.R.L.”. At which point the reporters murmured amongst ourselves like the crowd of desperate extras we really were. “What is this thing you call the D.S.R.L.?”. The subtext of which was “How many reporters do you think they’ll cast? Do you think we’ll be downgraded to extras?” “Am I black enough?” “Do I read ’serious journalist’?”.
I guess I did read “serious journalist”, because I was brought in for a call-back a few days later. I repeated the brilliant performance that had served me so well in the first round, and I was not too surprised when my agent called the next day to ensure that I was in fact free on the shooting days, because I was one of two people left in the running to play “White Journalist” in the Secret Cookie commercial.
As the shoot day neared and I still hadn’t had confirmation from my agent that I was chosen, my body became soggy with dread. I put in a call to my agent, and the assistant let me know in no uncertain terms that I was probably released but she couldn’t be 100% certain. My heart sank appropriately, and I said, “Well, please let me know for sure when you find out. I have to let my work know if I will be travelling to Tennessee for a week, so ya know, just let me know for sure so I can plan accordingly.” I never heard back.

A few weeks ago I took Iggy and Oscar for a walk in Prospect Park. Just a few feet into the park, Oscar strained against his leash to investigate a suspicious trash bag lying in the shade of a large bush. Judging by the shape of it, there was no trash in this bag. It just bulged out in one jagged direction and didn’t have the look of a trash bag that contained picinic detritus or 430 recyclables. This was a suspicious trash bag indeed. It had a thick, double-tied knot at the top, probably to ensure the death by asphyxiation of some poor creature or perhaps to keep the stench of hooker limbs away from the prying noses of the man. I was just praying it wasn’t a baby in that bag.
When I got back to the apartment, I told my wife about the mysterious bag and of course she told me I was crazy, because I am. I love crime. I shouldn’t say that. More accurately, I feel compelled to watch crimes, injuries and horrible fires play themselves out in real time. I always believe things are far more sordid then they appear. Everyone is either a drug dealer, a narc or most probably both. I would rather watch an online beheading than get a backrub. I am drawn to every siren I hear like a moth to a flame, and I generally have no problem dropping whatver I am doing at the time to watch a homeless man get roused from a bench by an officer on foot patrol. I don’t know why, I just find these “incidents” as I call them, completely fascinating. Anyway, I told my wife about the incident with Oscar and the bag and she told me I was crazy.
Later in the day, she and I met up with another couple in the park for a picnic. As we entered the park, the stench was overpowering.
“What the fuck is that smell?” my wife asked.
“It’s the murder bag. Look.” I pointed to the sad little trash bag up on the grassy knoll, and sure enough, it was alive with a coating of 3,000 flies. “I told you. There is something dead in there.”
Curiously, there was a large Mexican family holding a giant picnic no less than forty feet away from this misery. They were playing soccer and laughing it up without a carcass in the world.
We went on the picnic and had a great time. My wife had made egg salad sandwiches and wrapped them individually, a June Cleaver touch that was a nice compliment to the homemade iced tea. As we lazed beneath the eave of a large oak tree, my mind kept drifitng back to the crime-scene-in-waiting on the other side of the park. It was 90° out and whatever or whomever was in that bag was quickly being brought to a boil.
The sun began to set and we slowly made our way home. As we neared the bag, we were again assaulted by the odor. This time our friends notice it first. I brought them up to speed on my theories while my wife interjected her doubts. But there was no arguing that smell. It was death in a bag. As luck would have it, a policeman in one of those tri-wheeled cop buggies pulled up to the bag at the same time we did. The others in my party were too grossed out to stay and watch the unveiling, but there was no way I was going to miss it. Two small Mexican children wandered down from their picnic to join me in grisly delight. The young officer stepped out from his vehicle. He seemed a little bummed to have drawn this assignment, and I didn’t blame him. He poked the bag with a stick and nothing moved. Conscious of his audience, he realized that he had no choice but to forge ahead and open the bag. He made a show of snapping on a pair of white, latex gloves and pulling out a large, scary knife from a sheath he had strapped to his ankle. I didn’t realize cops even had those, but good for them. I’m sure they come in handy.
By now a small crowd had begun to assemble around the cop and the bag. Murmurs of ‘What’s going on?’ and ‘Ewww’ swam amongst the flies and injected the humid air with anticipation. The rookie leaned over and cut the knot off the top of the bag. He peered in and immediately recoiled, ran over to the bushes and vomited. The crowd took a fearful step back and allowed him his moment. The cop, slightly embarrassed, wiped the excess vomit from his lips, and in his best Lenny Briscoe, he quipped “I guess someone forgot their doggy bag.”
Ok, he didn’t say that, but I wish had. After he vomited he said, “Well, it’s an animal, but there are so many maggots I can’t tell what kind.” Wow! I felt really proud of myself. I may look “faggy” when I’m out and about with my rhinestone-studded pets, but I can deal with the ostracism. I know for a fact I am Park Slope’s premier gay-seeming amateur detective, and it feels really good. What are you?

I have been called a fag twice in the last week while walking my small dogs. The first time was late at night. There was a gaggle of young ruffians standing across the street from my apartment next to the park in the usual spot where I prefer to walk the dogs. Seeing as how it was near midnight and one of the men had his shirt inexplicably hoisted above his nipples (perhaps in an effort to beat the heat), I elected to stay on my side of the street and let the dogs do their business close to home. I could feel their eyes upon me as I implored the dogs to hurry up, and I was hoping against hope that the gangsters would mind their own business and not go through the trouble of crossing the street and killing me. Luck was on my side, and just as I was heading back into my building, one of the goons, perhaps “the smart one” yelled “Bye fag!”.
The next evening I was walking the dogs again. This time the park side of the street was asshole free, so I laconically ambled across the street, Iggy and Oscar in tow. Oscar pooped while Iggy and I watched, and as I did so a beat-up Honda peeled out from the stop light that had just gone green. A chorus of “Hey, Fag!” rained down on me from the crowded car, and I bent down and picked up Oscar’s shit with and inverted sandwich bag and a heavy heart.
After the second oral gay bash I gave the dogs their treats and shared with my wife the details of both incidents. She pointed out that Oscar wears a leather collar with rhinestone studs that spell out “Oscar”, and Iggy is a very tiny chihuahua that may seem like more of an accoutrament than an actual pet. Of course neither of these details excuses the behavior of the nice people who berated me, but I did concede that I may be “gay-seeming” while walking my dogs.