Opera, Christian Girlfriends, and Small Pieces of Wisdom
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. The thing I find frustrating about opera is that it takes so fucking long for anything to happen. It’s like setting the Leafs’ season to music.
2. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I could look around an audition room at twenty actors and know it was either gonna be me or one of two or three other guys who would get the part. But now, at almost fifty, every single actor in the room could do the job easily, they’ve all been around for thirty years and they are wonderful craftsmen with great resumes. It’s the best and worst part of the this stage of auditioning. The worst part is that everyone in the room is so fucking good, the best part is that you’re still in that room.
3. Breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day.
4. When life hands me lemons, I dip them in cement, let them harden, and slip them into a pillow case. Then I head over to Life’s place and hide in the closet till it falls asleep. Stupid Life.
5. One of the frustrating things about having a Christian girlfriend is that I never get any credit for ANYTHING. Kate will lose her keys or wallet and I will search for them forever, and when I do finally find them, she’ll say, “Thank you, Jesus.” ’Scuse me? I didn’t see nobody named Jesus around while I was looking under the backseat of your “effing” Jeep for the sixth time.
6. I slapped my penis against my keyboard this morning for ten minutes just to see what would happen. Turns out, I wrote two new Bryan Adams songs and a Little Mosque on the Prairie reunion.
7. When my daughter Ella and I did that viral Rob Ford video, for a week she was in the newspapers and on TV and everyone was congratulating her and wanting to interview her and say hi to her and take pictures with her. A week later, it was all over with and everything went back to normal. I told her that, most of the time, the second week is a lot more what it’s like to be an actor in Canada than the week before had been. She said, “I know, I know, like Andy Warthog said.”
8. When it comes to the book I wrote about being a redundant braggart, I wrote the shit out of that book.
9. About twenty years ago, I remember running into Shawn Doyle, before we knew each other all that well, on a streetcar and asked what he was up to. He said he was learning Hamlet. I asked when he was gonna play the part and where. He wasn’t. He was just learning it for something to do. “Why the fuck would you do that?” I asked. He answered me, quite seriously, “It’s what you do when you’re NOT working that defines you as an actor.” We have since become good friends and have had many conversations over two decades, but I have never forgotten the wisdom in that conversation or in those words.
10. I tried that tea bagging thing that everyone is always talking about. I don’t get it. I burned the shit out of my scrotum and the tea just tastes like salt.
11. I cannot believe that Stratford has, once again, passed on Cliff Saunders and me starring in our two-man show, Chico and the Man: The Musical. They literally said, “Either write a part for one of the Dale sisters or go fuck yourself.” Harsh.
12. The older I get the more I realize that when you are given a note on your performance by a director, if you aren’t seeking clarity on what the note means, just say nothing. If you do understand the note and disagree with it, just nod and say okay and do what you want, anyway. Nobody will care whose idea anything was, in the end, as long as it works.
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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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.
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