Sex Without Madonna Too

No Dramas

Peter Phelps

.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Peter Phelps

www.peterphelps.com.au

www.marqueemgt.com.au

ISBN: 9781301465095

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - A BEE'S DICK

Chapter 2 - INT. PIG ABATTOIR. DAY

Chpter 3 - THE WANDERING MINSTRELS OF AUSTRALIA

Chapter 4 - SEX WITHOUT MADONNA

Chapter 5 - THE WHITE WHITE BEACHES OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, OR WHY THERE'S NEVER BEEN AN AFRICAN AMERICAN WORLD SURFING CHAMPION

Chapter 6 - LOVE TOUR WORK, WE NEED MORE G'DAYS

Chapter 7 - AUDITION

Chapter 8 - CHARLIE DON'T SURF

Chapter 9 - ITALIAN JUNGLE LUST

Chapter 10 - GUNS 'N' RODEOS

Chapter 11 - FAKING IT NEVER PAID SO GOOD

Chapter 12 - BRATISLAVA - APOCALYSE THEN

Chapter 13 - CREATIVELY UNEMPLOYED IN LA LA LAND

Chapter 14 - BACK

Chapter 15 - COOKING FABIO'S GOOSE

Chapter 16 - THE MID LIFE LUMP

A BEE'S DICK

I've never seen a bee's dick but I imagine it's small. Shorter in distance from base to top than a human step, longer maybe than a gnat's dick. For the film actor, this is handy to know. Because what lies ahead in this book is a firsthand account, an anecdotal stream of mostly experiences in and around film and TV projects, my use of a flying insect's anatomy refers to the amount of space the director or usually the camera operator will say they need the actor or object to move to attain the right composition for how they see the shot. That move is obviously a very small one. American crews often reference a gnat's phallus when that space is even smaller or sometimes the same as it's invertebrate cousin - it's a fine penile line and the technical actor will know his space in time. The physiological analogy may also be where I feel I might sit periodically in the showbiz apiary.

This isn't an autobiography or memoir because it's not a life story and I've read plenty of them so it's not. This book before you does not follow a chronological order as those confessional books by stars and semi-stars tend to do. A non linear ramble, it leaps in and out of events, cuts to people I've acted with, got wasted with, loved, longed for, loathed and cried over and has been partly published in newspapers and magazines, rewritten and updated from my previous book 'Sex Without Madonna', but with new and original chapters so I don't look like I am rehashing some old crap that many of my past friends over the last 30 years may accuse me of plagiarising myself. Which is kind of like masturbation really, 'cause I was by myself in the right mood with the right music, into my own thoughts and thinking about good things until my wife busted me and complained about all the time I was spending by myself and obviously thinking about others when nothing she had asked me to do had been done. Oh and clean up the mess. How the fuck will 'playing on the computer' pay the bills. But gee, you meet the nicest people this way, honey (I never call her 'honey', she's more like pickled onions) and then tells me that this masturbation quote is from Peter O'Toole not Peter Phelps, so stop with the plagiarism.

I started this bunch of yarns when I was living in terminally sunny California -Venice Beach to Marina del Rey to Malibu to Santa Monica - where the dreams begin and end and America screeches into the desert/sea. The process of collecting illegible scribbles on restaurant napkins, receipt backs, old scripts, iDevices and calling friends who would ask for money or swear to sue me if I mentioned that story somehow became part of the unorthodox system of how this came together. I'd been a year out of work in LA when I began this anyway, and as any actor or other artist will tell you, you can reach the emotional depths at the same time you climb the creative heights whilst you wonder how you're going to pay the rent and eat for the next few days. I can tell you now - the same is true 20 years ago as a single actor then as it does now with a wife and kids.

LA, and Hollywood in particular, only heightened the highs and deepened the lows. By Hollywood I mean the game and industry of Hollywood, rather than the inner city suburb, which is and remains a skuzzy, seedy tourist/homeless pit.

I'm not writing this because of any overwhelming desire to indulge or to purge any dysfunctional demons from my abused past. Apart from telling a yarn I wanted to answer questions many people had asked me about working as an actor inside and outside of Australia. After a time out of work in LA, which is a bitch of a place to be in with even a small amount of time out of work, I asked my doctor back home what the hell I should do with such an early blooming semi existential crisis rising before my fading, leading man eyes. This is the same doctor that fell about laughing when I arrived in her surgery frantically scratching my nether regions and thinking I'd contracted some bizarre life form and would have to live a shamed exile in Patagonia breeding llamas save any fans catch wind of my career threatening disease. I had been to Bell's Beach for the Easter Surf Classic the previous weekend and like all such events in the surfing calendar a certain amount of bacchanalian revelry had ensued. Because the mind of most hard-core surfers never usually prioritises his accommodation with any detail, myself included back in my early 20's, sleeping arrangements were sometimes quite literally wherever one drops. This would always come as a real bed (shared or otherwise), a friendly couch, a pub's moonlit beer garden, or the back of a Ford Fairlane 500. The doctor, armed with this knowledge and familiar with my lifestyle up to that point, simply said, through knowing chuckles, 'You've got crabs, mate. Body lice!'

Crabs! These things looked like tiny fattened anime pets with flaying little alien arms. I had never met these fuckers previously. When first introduced by an exploratory scratch of the groin changing from wetsuit to formal pants in the front seat of Shirley Strachan's Porsche racing back up the highway after some very generous ropes of cocaine courtesy of my new friend and driver on my way to a Channel Seven telethon on live Melbourne TV, I could only think of how charming I was expected to be on nationwide television while hosting a colony of crustaceans I had probably shared with a good proportion of my surfing and rock and roll fraternity. Mrs G. Applegate from Elsternwick, 10 dollars, 'ta', a Leon from Norwood - 5 dollars, thank you (do they burrow into my nuts and I can't have sex again)? - Michael from St Kilda, thanks mate! (if they spread how to stop)! Thank you Louise in Hawthorn (and here's Molly joining the panel and I'm too embarrassed and green to go anywhere near that) Hi Molly, oh yeah, the show's going great (what if they go up the eye of my old fella) - no, I think I'll stick at it a bit longer. Enjoying the show. Enjoying it. (Need to scratch, need to leave, need a commercial break.)

Next morning, brandishing a bottle of lice shampoo and a noticeably relieved outlook on life, I swore the doctor to secrecy - especially in the case of my mother. Luckily the doctor I contacted understood. She should - we share the same mother. My sister and I are both very familiar with Mum's proud and loving espousal of her kids' latest plans and acquisitions. My acquisition of crabs would never enter the equation. The same sister said write a book about it.

So here's a journey to the recesses of a wandering troubadour's mind endeavouring to entertain and give an insight into a job I wouldn't swap for any other - although the offer to crew a surf charter yacht around Indonesia and the Pacific for as long as I wanted has come close. A highly paid gigolo ensconced in a villa in the south of France came second. That one never happened but I did play the surfing skipper of a surf charter yacht in the Maldives, so like many of my acting gigs I got to live the dream for a minute and live vicariously in another's world. Acting has come with some fringe benefits.

INT. PIG ABATTOIR. DAY

Today I sit eating breakfast in the open barn of a disused pig abattoir. Bacon and egg roll lashed with barbecue and Tabasco sauce. I picture the farmer and his wife who lived their life in that abandoned little farmhouse over yonder. Weeds have taken over as it's main feature. I imagine chickens free ranged here and this completes the irony of what's on my breakfast roll. Naturally, cascading yolk and sauce get ready for their close up on my costume and break the moment. We haven't started shooting yet and already I know the wardrobe girls will be cursing my liberal use of breakie on their freshly laundered clothes. I'm not so worried about not knowing all my lines because these upcoming action scenes will have many ad lib moments and I will probably turf half the lines anyway.

Because the tannery of the piggery is still in operation, the piggery smells no different from it's days as a porcine slaughterhouse. Ten pigs are wrangled by their owner with a large prodding instrument to do their little piggy thing before our cameras. They smell less appealing than my regular co-stars and are here courtesy of a storyline that has them as unwittingly portraying the devourers of human bodies. They grace our set for the day's shooting of 'Stingers', the television show in which I played an undercover cop for six years. The scenes this day require me to rescue a kidnapped co-officer and a mentally disadvantaged young fellow I have befriended and in turn, capture the corrupt gang of murdering, embezzling owners of a rehabilitation facility who plan to feed my friends into a pig mincer and feed them Homo sapien's mince to ten very large porkers. This is, apparently, an effective way to dispose of a corpse, as the pigs leave no evidence for our pretend forensics team to work with. Another day at the office. Another slice of knowledge I wouldn't have gotten in an office job.

The bacon and egg roll I ate and partly wore seems to be repeating on me, but not from my insides and not in a good way. Dead pig all around.

On 'Stingers' we aimed for authenticity. As an actor that's my main goal. The good guys and bad guys we dramatised each week inhabited an environment that kept our minds off the fact that an actor friend had just got a feature film on a pristine island off Thailand for Hollywood money and a cut of the film's profits. This thought and the smell of a fellow actor's erstwhile dinner can only help this actor's sense of method acting when we shoot the final scene of the day, which involved the strangulation of a one-eyed kidnapper and his, now, magnificent reaction to said strangulation.

Ah! The glamour, the excitement! The smell of success and dead pig! Days like this never appear in the 'Acting for Dummies' books. The chapter entitled 'Authentic Acting for Mastering Scenes Involving Skinned Pig Whilst Lunching In a Piggery' is no where to be found in 'The Acting Textbook' (an oxymoron)?. There's no month put aside at NIDA or WAPA or VCA that involve intensive, film-based, weekend workshops to hone the skills of the actor on stage and especially in front of the camera and wrestling with pigs to identify, use and enhance the environment you are working in and honour the piece of writing you are attempting to make sense of.

'Stingers' was cancelled by the Nine Network after six years and one hundred ninety-four episodes. A rare feat and a time for all involved in the show to be proud of.

In my thirty years of getting paid pretending to be other people before a camera or on stage, I have never once wanted to do another job. Days that are the darkest, wettest, coldest. Days of indecipherable words one must make flesh and blood. Of folks you don't want to pretend to hit in a stunt fight, but hit for real. There hasn't been a morning I've woken wishing I was in other work. This absurd thing called acting. Never has it felt like 'work'. Work is the wrong word for it. It conjures toil and effort. Although it can require getting dirty - whether that be applied dirt from a make up artist or from hitting the dirt and muck for the sake of art, it is play. Like the school playground. We all played out dramas in this arena and it wasn't work. Turning the eyes of Erica Robinson in Fifth class and impressing her with your new Citizen watch, or your bloodied face as you walk heroically off the footie field. The first kiss. Acting, not work. Having to beat St Augustine's rugby team at eleven years of age because a couple of the dad's hated 'the Catholic bastards'. This wasn't work. It required acting. Attempting to be the best halfback in the district needed no script or direction. It was role playing nonetheless.

Lunch is just about to be called. It lasts forty-five minutes. The guy that pumps the poo out of the trucks and buses that act as our make-up, wardrobe and green room facilities, has arrived and has started to pump out the poo. The aroma of roast beef, steamed vegetables, chicken curry and something with fennel in it, shares the air with pig flesh and the bouquet of 1.6 million Melburnians poo. (Timing is of the essence in this business.) The poo pumper hasn't far to go to deliver his goods. We are shooting in Werribee, 35 kms southwest of Melbourne - home of one of the largest sewage treatment plants in the world. Ten thousand eight hundred and fifty hectares of poo in all it's stages of treatment from your dunny door to theirs to it's final journey into Port Phillip Bay. The plant is close to our piggery set. The wind is blowing an easy 12 kms from the northwest. I'm starring in my own TV series as Australia's favourite undercover cop. I know my lines and the ones written for me. Today, the office stinks and I don't want to be anywhere else.

No courses or training films, books or multimedia platforms can bone the actor up on the peaks and valleys that he must go through to call himself a professional actor in Australia.

I teach film acting. It's one of the things I do. It's what I tell people I do when not being paid to act for a living, but it's not an accurate description. Teaching. I can impart knowledge of what is required to gain technical skills to work in front of a camera. I can tutor my students in the business side of being an actor - know your lines, be on time, be good to your Mum and fellow actors, etc. I question whether you can teach this organically abstract thing called acting.

What I can do in this book is offer a few yarns gained through experience, providing a few insights into ... what is it? This thing called acting for a living? A job? A profession? A trade? I think it's best described to my daughters as playtime that Daddy gets money for (or not, as is the case in a film I am shooting as I write). Sometimes Daddy has to fly away from home for a little while to do dress-ups. Pretend games with imaginary friends

THE WANDERING MINSTRELS OF AUSTRALIA

It's 1572. Thursday. You are a minstrel, wandering with four other men and three boys through Robin Hood country. Two small wagons, a horse and a donkey and a dog you can't yet name 'cause no one named dogs then, make up the rest of the troop. You wear your nobleman's livery because at one stage he had you sponsored as servants and your job was to entertain his guests and he wouldn't know if you existed now. This is why you are scared. The government has only just passed an Act against 'masterless men' like you. As you run through a lyric and strum your mandolin you are becoming increasingly freaked out about the thought of some government agent whipping you and burning a hole through