Refereeing, Choreography, and Being 52
Nappoholics Anonymous is a weekly column featuring twelve random thoughts by actor Tony Nappo. Some are funny, some are poignant, some bother him, and some make him weep from sadness while others make him weep for joy. Here are his thoughts: unfiltered, uncensored, and only occasionally unsafe for work.
1.When I started seeing Sean Connery’s name pop up in my newsfeed Saturday. I thought, “Oh, fuck, no. Don’t tell me he is endorsing Trump now, too.” When I found out what had actually happened, I was relieved and thought, “Oh good. He just died.”
That’s how fucked up the world I live in has become.
2. Counterpoint of the Week:
3. One thing I have confirmed about myself during COVID is that I am definitely not a morning person—and by morning, I mean anything before 6pm.
4. Every time I go on a film set now, I am asked if over the past two weeks I have had a cough, or congestion, or nausea, or headaches, or diarrhea, or uncertainty as to where I am, or difficulty breathing. Are you fucking kidding me? I’m 52 years old now. I experience ALL of those symptoms AT LEAST once every two weeks!!!!!
5. Fuck Yeah of the Week:
6. Since we have come back to the film world, I’ve been lucky enough to be on several sets out of the gate. And everyone is doing their best in terms of COVID testing and health and safety precautions in terms of distancing and masks and hand sanitizing and all. But one thing that I have noted, generally speaking, is that the shot lists (literally the list of things you are going to shoot that day) look more or less the same as they looked before COVID hit. I mean, if you have to shoot 10 pages a day, it’s not all that easy to sanitize shit or take all the little extra precautions—sanitizing every prop or piece of equipment that’s touched by anyone, or hair and make-up chairs between actors—that would ideally be taken, especially when everyone wants to hurry up and get the next shot in the can. It doesn’t make a whole big difference to the actors but the crew are really forced to either work their asses right off (which they’re mostly already doing) or cut the odd corner in order to make everything ready for us to do our jobs in the time that they are expected to.
Just an observation. I mean, precautions take time and COVID slows things down, so it seems a bit unfair or unrealistic to expect the crew to be producing shots at the same page count that they were before COVID came to town.
7. Teacher of the Week:
8. Starting a sexual relationship with anyone over forty is like joining the cast of a musical midway through the run. You better learn the established “choreography” in a fucking hurry or else you’ll find yourself sitting at home alone while some young understudy who has been waiting a long, long time for the opportunity swoops in and takes your spot.
9. Guest Post of the Week:
10. I decided to write a book on how to lose weight but I can’t quite figure out how to stretch the sentence “Do cocaine and when anybody asks how you lost the weight, just tell them that you did it by using cocaine and they’ll assume that you’re joking” into 200 pages.
11. Infographic of the Week:
12. I was thinking recently about how I used to referee kids hockey for a few years and how when I was doing that, no matter what call I made (icing, offside, goal, no goal, penalty), half of the crowd would cheer and the other half would scream at me that I was wrong and that I was either corrupt or that I was an idiot. And most of them didn’t even know the fucking rules or were never in the position that I was in on the ice to make the proper call. Their opinions were based on nothing. It also seems to me that that is, essentially, how most people react to politicians these days. And I’m sure, of course, that I may have made the odd referee mistake here and there, but you could bank on that exact same reaction NO MATTER WHAT the call was or when in the game it was made. And the thing of it is, half of those motherfuckers who were screaming at me, no matter which side they were on, were ALMOST ALWAYS WRONG. They might have even known somewhere deep down that they were wrong and that I was right, but they really didn’t give a fuck. They just wanted their team to win. Period. That was their motivation. To wear me down somehow. And that always made complete objective sense to me, so it never really bothered me. Being screamed at came with the job. I’m sure, to whatever degree, politicians feel the exact same way about being screamed at. It’s all just part of the job. The difference, of course, between screaming at referees and screaming at politicians is that, in the case of yelling at politicians, we are all, as a society, SUPPOSED TO BE ON THE SAME FUCKING TEAM.
Tony Nappo
Tony is Italian, he’s from Scarborough, he’s an actor, he’s a father, he’s a really good house painter, and he doesn’t believe that most things matter, ultimately, at all.
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Paintings, Pornos, and Broken Countries
Every single fucking time there is a mass shooting, we all give the speeches, and we all share the memes (to each other, who are all mostly already in agreement), but nothing changes.
Gottfried, Strays, and Easter Eggs
Dogs rarely have a hidden agenda when they meet people or other dogs: they're either wagging that shit or they aren’t.
Slapping People, ACTRA Meetings, and Dog Shit
At one point, I was sleeping with so many actresses that they used to just hold ACTRA meetings in my bedroom.
Birthdays, Cranes, and Judd Apatow
If the Freedom Convoy has answered one question for every Canadian, I think it's this: whatever happened to that dumb kid in my class?
Scorsese, Dentists, and Dying Alone
If waving a Fuck Trudeau flag is a legit way to get a meeting with him, I’m gonna start waving my Fuck Scorsese flag wherever I go and keep my fingers crossed.
Truckers, Porndle, and Bad Boys
In these newly woke times in the entertainment industry, it’s slightly amazing to me that nobody has protested the fact that Denzel Washington isn’t actually Scottish yet.
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