When did you commit your life to acting?
Well, I was about 16. I started acting. And I realized this recently that basically every career choice I’ve ever made has been about meeting girls. It’s true. I did an impro…I took an acting class for some reason, I didn’t improvise.
All of a sudden people were laughing and laughing. And I finished. And all these girls came over and they are like “Oh, you are so funny.” And I realized that, you know, such stocked with acumen, I have made some of the worst career decisions in my life just to meet girls. The worst jobs I have worked over my 47 years.
What are you driving at?
Well, I started out picking raspberries when I was 13 years old.
To meet girls?
Yeah. You wouldn’t think it but they have this, the company has this racket, this crazy racket. It would send these bluebird school buses all over suburban Seattle and get these, all these unwitting teenagers, girls included, and bused them over to the raspberry fields. And it is really, really hard to pick up girls when you are covered in thorny nettles and raspberry juice and drinking industrial grey water out of a hose. I mean, I’m telling you it was Child Slave Labor Day, we were paid, they didn’t pay us hourly. That’s how they were able to hire children to work. And they paid us a dollar and 15 for a flat of raspberries. It takes about 45 minutes to pick a flat of raspberries. And there’s little boys right now in caves in Pakistan getting paid more to make soccer balls. You know what I mean?
I know, we had one on the show last night.
Oh, really?
Yeah. So that didn’t work meeting girls. Any other missteps along the way?
I, many, many, many, missteps.
I’m sorry to hear that.
My next job was at University of Washington. I got a job for the Department of Urban Studies, counting the cars that were in the car pull lane. And the high-tech way they had to do that is that I had a clipboard and a clicker and an umbrella and I sat on the freeway overpass. So this is me. This is me. And, but the reason I didn’t quit after one day, David, is that there was a cute girl next to me doing the same thing. She was doing the other lane.
Doing the other lane, yeah.
So I stayed week after week after week and finally I got up the courage to ask her out.
And?
And she said “NO”.
But at least you were in the arena. You were in the ball park.
I was in this game.
You were in the line-up.
Yeah, to use the headgear analogy.