Ben Stein's Diary/The Sad Society
Stein, Benjamin J.
Thursday If you have a lemon, make lemonade. I was lying on my bed, "wrestling" with my son, the world's handsomest boy, Tommy. "Wrestling" means that he waits until I'm not looking, then he jumps...
...Save him a spot on the Supreme Court...
...I walked back to my room that night in 1972 with a whole knot of students and we spent the rest of the night laughing and eating donuts...
...It was foggy and slightly drizzling...
...In Massachusetts," she answered...
...The actors looked genuinely scared...
...It was sweet...
...This is now the Sad Society...
...You're just like every SOB lawyer who's ever examined me and made me have to pay money...
...Then she didn't want to bring me a towel to clean off my brand-new Polo blazer...
...Just like that...
...Now I am explaining medical malpractice suits to a group of medical students who are regulars on the show...
...I called her to ask her address so that I could pick her up...
...It all made me sad...
...I asked...
...And wait...
...Without my even asking, he upgraded me to first class...
...Then I had written a piece in the L.A...
...Maybe doctors should have to live with them, too...
...Next to me on a couch sat a skinny, beautiful, but worried woman who was also auditioning...
...The only thing you didn't do is give a little smile before you put in the shiv...
...Everyone looks sad...
...All over my nice leather seats...
...Daddy,did you say you wouldn't take Trixie in your car again...
...A very pregnant young woman sans ring came in and talked to the high school boy behind the counter about an upcoming geography test they faced...
...Suddenly, she threw up...
...It's just that, well, I told my roommates about you, and they told me you used to work for Nixon and are some kind of terrible sexist because of some columns you wrote about abortion, and well, I'd really just not have them ever know I was having dinner with you...
...She had every mark of the beast upon her: Silver jewelry...
...Before I read about the movie, I could not possibly have hoped to get the part...
...N0000...
...But somehow, someone has opened a valve and the happiness has seeped out...
...No one had bought it...
...With the guy I pitched it to who said no...
...I rarely see happy people anymore...
...I don't want to meet them either...
...Endless...
...She looked disgusted, proving my thesis that those who wear their hair in long braids also check their sense of humor in the birth canal when they enter the world...
...I think you can count on me to really, truly humiliate you," I said...
...I kept saying that famous line from Blade Runner to myself...
...According to his rules, I'm not allowed to fend him off or grab him when he lands on me . Anyway, I was "wrestling" with Tommy when I picked up a copy of the New York Times and read an item that really laid me low...
...S toked with rage like Mount Pinatubo, I went off to Universal to read for a part in a new drama show...
...The woman, whose name was, incrediBEN STEIN'S DIARY The Sad Society by Benjamin Stein 54 The American Spectator January 1992 bly, Infiniti, like the car, told me she was not really an actress, but a 37year-old playwright and a graduate of Wellesley "Where's that...
...Floor-length cotton skirt...
...Friday Dinner with Infiniti, my pal from the audition...
...I think I'll wait until I'm seventeen...
...I added a lot of lines to make me even crueler...
...I sat silently...
...I love your work, man," he said...
...It's fine," I said...
...I asked...
...But you just said you weren't ever going to take her anywhere again...
...I hate you," the producer said...
...she asks...
...Schachter couldn't...
...Now, just so you know...
...That must have been a long time ago...
...Hair in comically long braid...
...And don't you always take her everywhere because she's your girlfriend...
...sick of getting taken I can't stand it...
...I walked around in the paths and byways of the campus for an hour...
...She hemmed and hawed about how hard it was to find her house, because it was in West Hollywood...
...Saturday Adrive up Highway 9 to the mountain towns of Felton, Ben Lomond, and Boulder Creek...
...Maybe more than a year...
...Everyone looks worried and somber...
...I had sent it to the star in question via my agent...
...I know West Hollywood well," I said...
...I knew I had the part...
...In the east...
...On my way out, I said to Infiniti that I would wish her well if she would take off her thumb ring...
...This whole town is nothing but a nest of gypsies and thieves...
...on the way back to Los Ange- les, inside the American Air- lines terminal at San Jose, the ticket agent recognized me from Ferris Bueller...
...Someone was singing a song inviting young men to stay at the YMCA if they were new in town...
...She said she couldn't think of any right then...
...There is no joy in Mudville...
...That's it...
...There were a lot out today...
...I was good, and I knew it...
...The curious were invited to come to the support network's office, located in another room provided free by the people of California, for advice on how to become a lesbian...
...In every direction around the field were overwhelming stands of pine and redwood and perfectly blue skies, as blue as in Colorado...
...Have you gotten your driver's license yet...
...More grist for the lawyers' mill...
...I think it was before Americans generally were afraid to eat donuts or even to laugh, and certainly before we were afraid to stay up late...
...Yes," she said...
...These are the real McCoy...
...But I almost never see anyone laughing or smiling or enthusiastic...
...Now sign flashes in a different color to "I am dangerously angry...
...Like, near Tahoe...
...Whew...
...It's a long way from the parking lot...
...Times suggesting this movie in late 1989...
...Evil bikers from hell...
...I asked her which were her favorite playwrights and plays...
...Across the hall, a Halloween party of decidedly gay orientation was going on, even though Halloween was over...
...I'm being cold and sarcastic, and one of the fetching young women students is upset that my cruel questioning has caused the physician to quit his practice...
...The owner was a German immigrant from Dusseldorf...
...But after I read it, I was so angry that I paced the hallway outside the casting room seething with aggression like a righteously offended Perry Mason...
...Amazingly, she took it off, and I wished her well.think of something new to demand from their parents...
...Maybe it's the realization of how deeply ailing the nation is...
...Yeah," she said, "only I like mainly women's plays...
...Yes, Tommy, she's my girlfriend," I answered...
...See, first you rehearse, then you rehearse again so they can light the scene, and then you start to shoot the scene...
...How about Arthur Miller...
...Sometimes I scare myself...
...Daddy, I'd say you have a problem," he said...
...I love The Crucible...
...How could I have driven this fine man out of his life's work...
...The role I was reading for was not a comic role...
...Maybe it's AIDS...
...This party was being held in a room at U.C., paid for by the taxpayers of California...
...The poster advertised a "Sapphic Ball," in which women students who were unsure of their sexual orientation were asked to "come as you aren't" to the ball and try out being lesbians for an evening...
...These are small towns, but except for Felton, they aren't exactly all-American...
...I see rich people and successful people and poor people and lost people...
...he asked...
...The reason I went into shock was that I had written an outline of such a movie two years ago...
...In the airplane, though, I noticed something I've noticed more and more...
...We actors, even though we get paid a decent wage, have to park in the lot, shlep our clothes all the way to the stage, get assigned a dressing room, change into costume (mine is a gray suit), go to hair and make-up, and then wait...
...I think I'll move to Felton and stare at the forest for a year...
...I stopped at Felton High School to watch the Junior Varsity get beaten in one quarter by the Onionville H.S...
...On the freeway, where you can't stop to do much about it...
...Now, bang, a big studio is making it...
...The students looked scraggly, confused, like small children pouting because they were not able to The American Spectator January 1992 55 stoppingly beautiful...
...the woman asked...
...I asked...
...Tommy looked at me carefully...
...Stage Six is a tucked away among some other stages...
...Me, too," the woman said...
...That's right...
...Monday Ah, but then there is acting...
...I got to the campus at about ten p.m...
...She didn't hit you in the knee, pal," I said...
...Then she dropped a can of Coke and it exploded all over me...
...I'm never taking you in my car again...
...And don't you always say she follows you everywhere because you love her and she loves you...
...Well, like a whole series I'm writing for the Women's Playwriting Collective in Oakland about women's issues," she said...
...Scary ones with tattoos, crazed looks, missing teeth, scars, knives...
...Yes, I did...
...That's his problem...
...But isn't Trixie your girlfriend...
...I guess Dr...
...A group of kids were pretending to be a jug band...
...That's it, Trixie," I said...
...Like which ones...
...Yes, that would be better," she said...
...Maybe it never happened at all...
...Saturday Along drive out to the beach with my handsome devil boy son, Tommy...
...Okay, now I know...
...I drove home from LAX, past the darkened donut shops and nail salons, and realized that something's going on...
...Patients have to live with a doctor's mistakes...
...Plus, the scriptwriter-producer is a longtime friend, or so I thought when I talked to him about it a year ago...
...I feel sure that I can," she said...
...The acting is free...
...I can find it...
...I walked to my old college, now called Porter, and got tea in the coffee shop...
...I was spared hearing what those issues might have been by being summoned to the office of the director, where I read my lines viciously for the producer, director, and another producer...
...He had read it, supposedly, or someone who worked for him, and after much thought it had been turned down...
...Damn it all...
...As we landed, he started off on a long drunken tangent about racing cars and I left the plane...
...I stood outside and read a poster from the Gay and Lesbian Support Network, an official student organization at U.C., Santa Cruz...
...Lighten up...
...and was directed to Stage Six...
...Boulder Creek and Ben Lomond are particular faves of bikers...
...But you should know that I will only drink water at dinner, because I am cleaning out the toxins from my body to try to get at the truth of my memories of incest survival...
...Finally, after doing nothing for four hours, we started to rehearse my scene...
...A big studio here and a big star here are making a black version of a famous movie from the late 1930s...
...That was before I was afraid to eat donuts...
...That's what it looks like to me...
...On the way up, a stewardess crashed one of those huge serving carts into my knee...
...Waiting is what we get paid for, a smart fellow once said...
...I didn't drive that man anywhere," I say, in a voice that would make a cobra shiver...
...No," the young man said...
...I walk over to her desk, menacingly, lean over it, and glare at her...
...Oh, yeah...
...In fact, you'll probably be really good material for one of my plays about the humiliation of women in Hollywood...
...Maybe it was just a dream...
...Hey, this is Santa Cruz...
...I want more life, f---er!," which is what robot Rutger Hauer says when he meets the scientist/industrialist who "created" him and then doomed him to an early death...
...Maybe it's the absence of an explicit spiritual basis for life...
...Massachusetts...
...I yelled at her and a drunken man behind me said, "Hey, she's just a little lady doing her job...
...As we drove, we noticed Trixie looking sick...
...One night in 1972, I took my little Weimaraner puppy, Mary, inside my jacket and we watched a movie called Fallen Angel in a class about Film Noir in a big roomfilled with students...
...0 56 The American Spectator January 1992...
...In this scene, I have already questioned and tormented a physician who apparently did not give his patient adequate warning of the possible risks involved in a tubal ligation...
...I tried to remember when it was fun to go out with women instead of an ordeal...
...She hemmed and hawed some more, and then I said, "Would it be better if I just picked you up on the corner...
...I showed up at Universal at nine a.m...
...I asked...
...Now, this is where the lemon/lemonade comes in...
...We talked about the Breidenbacher Hof, a really great hotel, and then I drove back to Santa Cruz...
...It doesn't mean I don't want to see you," she said...
...It was a serious role of a vicious, angry trial lawyer suing a doctor...
...Yes...
...Yuck...
...Their music was pretty good...
...A ring on her thumb (which is like a neon sign flashing in hundred-foot letters—"I am a child—I am a spoiled child—I am a very spoiled child...
...It was swell...
...I went into an A & W Root Beer stand and bought french fries...
...This country is heartFriday Atrip to glorious Santa Cruz, my former home, my old stomping ground, the place where I was happiest in my whole life...
...I am so Benjamin J. Stein is a writer and actor living in Malibu, California...
...Wrestling" means that he waits until I'm not looking, then he jumps on my knees or my chest or my head as hard as he can and then screams with delight when I cry out in pain...
...By "bikers," I don't mean your sissy citified bikers with their pretty clothes and pink Harleys...
...Junior Varsity...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
