How I Made God Laugh

Yes, I made God laugh. You’ve probably made God laugh too. There’s a large kernel of truth in this joke:

Q. How do you make God laugh?
A: Tell him your plans.

Many years ago, I read one of those self-improvement books on creating the future you want. There was lots of advice on goals, step-by-step plans, visualization, positive thinking, affirmations, etc. One of the instructions was to write down a description of a perfect day in your future — in great detail, to leverage the magical powers of visualization.

So I did it. I made plans.

God laughed.

My goal then was the same as it was for most of my adult life: to write and star in a musical-comedy-variety show. I would introduce each week’s topic with a bit of standup, then we’d move on to skits and songs related to the topic, then I’d close with a final bit of standup. If you’re old enough to remember Dave Allen at Large, it would be something like that, with music videos for the short films.

As the book instructed, I wrote a long and detailed description of that future perfect day, which included a morning writing session, an afternoon rehearsal with the cast, followed by driving to my spacious home in the Hollywood Hills, then taking my wife out for an elegant dinner.

Nowhere in this imaginary future did I mention living on a plot of land in Tennessee. Or owning a flock of chickens. Or smacking myself in the head with a t-post hammer while building a chicken yard for the chickens. Or killing raccoons that killed the chickens. Or working at a programming job until retirement age to pay for the plot of land, the house that sits on it, and the chickens.

When I left college, the plan was to take my band to the top, then leverage our popularity into creating that show I imagined. But my bandmates soon gave up the dream because they wanted to do silly things like get married and have kids.

Okay, never mind the band. I’ll go a different route. I wrote and produced a musical-comedy play titled Homecoming Dance. (That’s where these songs came from.)

After a positive review in the Chicago Tribune, the play sold out a six-week run. When the run was over, I sent a synopsis and script of the play, the Tribune review, and a tape of the songs to every comedy producer in Hollywood I thought might be interested in turning the play into a film.

An assistant to a major producer of comedy films and concerts called me. He told me he was totally jazzed about Homecoming Dance, promised to pitch the project to the producer, and said to follow up with him in a few weeks.

Aha! The plan is working! I visualized it, I worked for it, and it’s coming true!

After a month of anticipation, I called the number he’d given me. A nice woman answered, and when I explained that I was following up with the assistant, she informed me that Hollywood apparently wasn’t weird enough for him, because he’d quit and joined a cult.

God laughed.

My next variation of the plan was to form a Smothers-Brothers type act with one of the cast members from Homecoming Dance. He was a good guitarist, good comedic actor, and good singer. He’d done a fine job during the run of the play, so I trusted him. We spent weeks rehearsing songs and developing our comedy schtick. We auditioned at a restaurant/nightclub in the Chicago suburbs and got a booking.

He was so excited to be on stage again, he showed up for the performance drunk. I mean slurring-your-words drunk. He couldn’t remember his harmony parts for the songs and ended up singing the melody with me – off key and too loudly, of course. He couldn’t remember his lines for the comedy bits. God may have been laughing, but the audience certainly wasn’t. It was one of my most embarrassing, red-faced nights ever on stage, and I wasn’t the one screwing up. I drove back to my apartment in Chicago, chucked my bass into the closet, and spent hours walking through Lincoln Park in the dark, perhaps hoping to be mugged.

I never called him again. He didn’t call me either. I learned later he went to law school and eventually became a prosecutor in the county District Attorney’s office where, I assume, showing up drunk for work is tolerated if not encouraged.

Frustrated by partnering up with people who would bail or choose to fail, the next plan was to temporarily set aside the musical side of musical-comedy and establish myself as a standup comedian first, then move to Los Angeles to break into TV, then leverage that success to get back to my big show idea.

As you know, I did become a comedian. That part of the plan worked. After several years working out of Chicago, I decided I’d move to Los Angeles in another year. But I figured I’d best take some acting classes first, so I signed up at an acting school … where I met a striking young woman named Chareva. Largely because of our age difference (I was 38 at the time and she was 24), it only took me about a year to work up the nerve to ask her out.

She was also planning to move to Los Angeles, so we shared a moving truck and drove to Los Angeles together. It was one of the best weeks of my life. In fact, I’d say we fell in love during that drive across the country. I rented a studio apartment in Hollywood, and she went to live with her sister, who was already there. Later that year, we moved in together.

If one story sums up my time in Hollywood and my attempts to break into TV, it’s this:

Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, I auditioned for guest role on the NBC sitcom Encore! Encore! The agent I’d just signed with called later that day and said, “Good job! Your first audition, and you made callbacks. That’s pretty rare.” If you’re not familiar with the term, “callbacks” are when the producers have narrowed it down from the hundred or so actors who auditioned to the few they think fit the role.

I went to the callback audition and thought I did well, meaning I made the producers laugh out loud with my delivery of the lines.

The agent called that night. “I don’t believe it! You got the role!”

Aha! The plan is working! I visualized it, I worked for it, and it’s coming true!

She called again the next morning. “NBC just announced they’re canceling the show.”

Yeah, it was like that … over and over. I made callbacks for a role on The Drew Carey Show. They whittled it down to two of us. The other guy got the role. They whittled it down to three of us for a role on Will & Grace. Another guy got the role. Lather, rinse, repeat. My agent assured me, “When you keep getting this close, it means it’s only a matter of time.”

I was thisclose for ten years.

Meanwhile, I was still doing standup. I started getting booked on cruise ships, but decided to quit when I called home from a month-long gig and my older daughter Sara (who was around three at the time) started weeping on the phone and asking – between sobs — when I’d be home. I’d been working part-time as programmer between standup gigs, so that became my full-time job. The mortgage and the other bills have to be paid, after all, especially when you have two daughters.

When video equipment became affordable to people without a studio budget, I decided I’d just shoot and produce the pilot episode of my show idea – which I was calling In Defense of Common Sense – and shop it around. If you’ve been a regular reader, you know the rest: that pilot became a film called Fat Head.

After the marathon of effort to get Fat Head in the can, I spent a lot of time thinking about my future. I’d slowly grown to loathe Los Angeles and the Hollywood culture, which prompted an obvious question I’d somehow failed to ask myself: Why am I still here? I came here hoping to break into television, but do I even want that anymore?

No, I don’t think I do. This culture is toxic, and I don’t want to raise my daughters anywhere near it. In fact, I don’t want to be near it myself. (I started to explain why I think the Hollywood culture is toxic, but realized that would be a post-length rant.)

I floated the idea of moving to Chareva. Turns out she didn’t like Los Angeles either, but never said anything because didn’t want to pour cold water on my dreams. You’re a good wife, I said, but those aren’t my dreams anymore. It’s time let go.

So we moved to Tennessee.

The next plan (which was admittedly fuzzy) was for Fat Head to bring in enough money to stop programming for a living and focus on making more films. Again, if you’re a long-time reader, you know how that worked out.

The first two distributors ripped me off. Fat Head was the DVD distributor’s biggest seller – one of their sales people told me so. They declared bankruptcy without sending a single check. The international distributor – flat-out thieves — placed the film in TV markets all around the world, then claimed they’d lost money. For the first two years after the release, I believed I’d sunk a ton of effort and money (some of it borrowed) into a film that would never pay me a dime. Chareva still remembers me slamming my fist on my dashboard and yelling, “I wish I’d never made that %$#@ing movie!”

I finally found an honest distributor who put Fat Head on Netflix and Amazon Prime and sent royalty checks every quarter. (They still do.) I eventually made a healthy profit, but it was never the huge payday I wanted – that is, the payday that would have allowed me to quit the programming job and just produce more entertainment for a living. I’ve worked full-time at my job since we bought the farm in 2011.

I’m not complaining by any means. One of the questions you’re told to ask yourself when choosing a satisfying career is, Would you do this even if nobody paid you? Well, I started programming as a hobby. I liked it. I was good at it. So the answer to that question is yes. The “hobby” ended up buying the farm, paying the bills, and funding the 401k. It just wasn’t the glorious entertainment career I envisioned when I was a young man making plans.

I’m less than four months from retiring from the job, and with that chapter of my life closing, I’ve been thinking a lot about the 43-year journey from college to now.

And you’re probably asking, “Is there a point this story?”

Well, I think so.

There’s a common structure in comedy movies that looks something like this: we meet a likable protagonist who wants something, and wants it badly. Hilarity ensues as he chases what he wants. People and circumstances prevent him from getting what he wants. He gets himself into trouble or embarrassing situations pursuing what he wants. And although he comes close – perhaps tantalizingly close — he doesn’t get what he wants.

But … wait for it … at the climax of the story, the protagonist realizes that in his crazy pursuit of what he wanted, he ended up getting what he actually needed all along. His ego wanted this, but his soul needed that, and now he has that. Happy ending. Roll credits.

As a young man, I made big career plans — and God laughed. I pursued those plans with enthusiasm and faith — and God laughed. I visualized, wrote down positive affirmations, said them out loud, etc., etc. Some of my plans completely flopped, while others sorta-kinda-but-not-totally worked. That perfect future day I wrote down never happened.

But I’m glad I made those plans. In the goodbye post I wrote four years ago, I said this about everything that happened after Fat Head was released:

It felt a bit like hopping on a bus for what I thought would be a short ride across town, then realizing I’d inadvertently taken a long ride to a different country and being pleasantly surprised by the people and the surroundings. Call it an attitude of Go With The Flow, or Things Happen For A Reason or whatever, but I had a strong feeling of This is where I’m supposed to be now, planned or not.

I’m still where I’m supposed to be. And I only ended up here by enthusiastically pursuing plans that never quite worked out.

If I hadn’t become frustrated after partnering up with actors and musicians who bailed or chose to fail, I might not have set my sights on becoming a standup comedian, which was a huge and positive turning point in my life.

If hadn’t wanted to pursue acting, I wouldn’t have taken acting classes, and I hadn’t taken acting classes, I wouldn’t have met Chareva – my soulmate and wife of nearly 25 years.

If I hadn’t moved to Los Angeles to pursue dreams of breaking into TV, I wouldn’t have learned that I loathe the Hollywood culture and don’t want to be part of it. I might be sitting around dreaming of What Might Have Been and wondering if I missed out on a great life because I didn’t go after it.

If I hadn’t given up the standup career and made Fat Head, I wouldn’t have done a deep-dive into nutrition and health, which has led to me being a healthy and energetic senior citizen.

And if I hadn’t gone to Los Angeles and ended up loathing the place, I wouldn’t have moved to Franklin, Tennessee – and I friggin’ love living in Franklin, Tennessee. I feel more at home here than in anyplace else I’ve ever lived.

Nights on stage with my band, belting out four-part harmonies. Nights on stage acting and singing in a musical-comedy play that I wrote. Nights on stage as a standup comedian, feeling exhilarated as 200 strangers laughed at my material. Nights on stage acting in sketch-comedy shows. Writing and shooting Fat Head. Conducting those street interviews with people who happened to be funny. Editing the film, recording and mixing the music with the composer. Writing, editing, and animating Fat Head Kids. Traveling to give speeches people invited me to give because I’m the guy who made Fat Head. The farm work. The chickens. All of it.

My plans didn’t take me where I expected to go. But man, they gave me a helluva ride.

I don’t know what the next chapter in my life will bring … but of course I’m making plans.

We make plans, and God laughs. And if we’re wise, we laugh right along with Him.