boys and a dog in the pool

I am in my house upstate, having a couple of days of r and r, except I am so busy.  I have been reorganising shelves and cleaning things and airing my VW-mouse-infested-though-not-as-much-as-last-year thank-goodness-van, and erecting a whirly clothesline pole

 Oh it's all go up here you know.  And I also edited this little film made from clips with my underwater flip camera in the pool over the last wee while.  I like it.

I didn't even swim today. But tomorrow I wake up, swim and shower outside, and then face the day.

oooofffff

Tonight I was leaving a party at my friends' house and I knocked a sweet smelling candle off the shelf with my bike helmet and it smashed and splattered across the wall and over the floor of the lobby and the loo. When this kind of thing happens there is no amount of apologising from you or remonstrating insouciance from the hosts that can mask the inevitable: I fucked up, and mucked up their pad, with hot sticky stuff that will be very difficult to get off.

What lesson can we learn from this? Be more careful when leaving friends' homes after a couple of glasses of wine with a bike helmet dangling from your bag whilst spinning round to kiss goodnight to other guests? Check. Don't leave seeet smelling burning candles on shelves by the door that might catch the attention of bike helmets of guests who are leaving and have had a couple of glasses of wine? Check also.  Let it go and cancel continue?  Double check.

Yesterday..

I had a fun-packed day yesterday.  Last night I attended the Watermill Gala in the Hamptons. I was an honourary co-chair and I have been several times to the event. It is a fundraiser for the Watermill Center which brings together young artists of various disciplines and from all over the globe and gives them the chance to make new work in an amazingly inspiring environment.  It is the brainchild of the wonderful director Robert Wilson (here I am with him at the Watermill several years ago), and last night the participants provided entertainment with installations in the forest, and with art pieces everywhere.

It was a fun night and I got to see some old friends, including the gorgeous Marissa Berenson (here we are in my dressing room after a performance of Design for Living on Broadway in 2001), and Rufus Wainwright (who auctioned off himself in concert and was bought by Alec Baldwin!)

 Earlier in the day I went to see my friend Anson Mount in his playThe Fifth of Julyat the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbour.  It was really amazingand Anson was fantastic. It's by Lanford Wilson and is a funny, moving and sprawling tale of family and friends post Vietnam.  If you get a chance to see it, go go go.  I met Anson when he was a waiter at the Kit Kat Club when I was doing Cabaret.  He was still a student at Columbia then, and we became friends and worked together a couple of times, in Elle by Jean Genet on stage and in a couple of short films he directed.  So all in all it was a great day of theatre and art and friends old and new, and it culminated in a pool parrty and hanstands with lots of fun peopletill 3am.

Into the night

Last year I did a show for German/French Tv called Into the Night. I wandered around Edinburgh chatting with the lovely novelist Ian Rankin, and film crews followed us.  Here it is. We'd never met before and it is really interesting to get to know someone in this way, let me tell you.

It's the one that's best of all...

Have you seen the new Google images?  It's so great.  I found out about it hyesterdahy and geeked out for ages looking at old pictures and totally missed my spinning class.  Yes, I know, excuses, excuses.

Anyway, I found a few gems including this, on some atheist website...

I am moved.  I also found this one of me doing a photo shoot in Edinburgh last summer.  Do you see now why we get the big bucks?  Danger money, people!  Peril!

I am thinking a lot about Edinburgh as I have been doing some press for my shows there in August during the festival.  It has been along time since I have performed there.  In 2007 I was in the International Festival withThe Bacchae, but it has been since 1991 that I have performed on the Fringe (in Victor and Barry's swansong).  I am looking forward to it.

Today I was working on The Good Wife again and had a hilarious scene with Mary Beth Peil who plays Jackie.  I love the relationship she and Eli have.  It's pure war, but all done so politely.  And today it involved laundry.

It's hot and sticky here in New York City. Honey has an upset tummy, as she often does on very hot days, poor thing. There have been a few emergency runs to her favourite tree down the street.  And on that note, bon weekend tout le monde!

I just re-read this and realised that the other day I basically made a commercial for the Ipad and today I am schilling Google.  I must try and do this for more personal financial gain instead of casting my endorsement seed so liberally on this blog, don't you think?

Spin, baby, spin!

I started back on The Good Wife yesterday.  It was lovely to see everyone and catch up. It was a bit like going back to school after the summer holidays, except of course the summer is well and truly still with us.  I write this in my underpants. 

I had a sentence to say that was so convoluted, long and tongue twisty, but I managed it.  And today I have a day off. I like this acting in a TVshow lark.

Did I mention I took my first spin class the other day and thought I was going to die?  I have never sweated so much, and despite the fact that it is not a difficult concept intellectually, I couldn't get the hang of which way you are supposed to turn the little knob and so as a consequence I think I may have exhausted myself too early, and sat down a few times even when the teacher was screaming for us to stand up.  Talking of which, why doesn't she use a microphone? There is very loud music playing and she will have very damaged vocal folds if she doesn't watch out.  And also, hello, I can't hear you, even though you're shouting!  There is another one tonight and my friend Darren told me the teacher is the bomb so I think I might go.  Imagine if I became a spin addict!

Herer are two videos I found. The first is me on Jimmy Fallon's show launching itsasickness.com, and the next one is a weird painting with light video commercial thing I did ages ago for Turner Classic Movies, talking about one of my favourite films, North by Northwest. Enjoy!

an ipad commercial

I love my Ipad. I really do. I love how I have become slightly less available to people. I look at others frantically reaching into their pockets every time a buzzing heralds a new email and I smile.  I like having less buzzing in my life.

 And you can do fun things like this...This was in my dressing room just after my show at Broad Stages in Santa Monica the other week.

scooting aboot

Today I did a lot of scooting.  I don't know if I mentioned my scooter before. It's actually called an Xooter, and it has a brake on it and everything. I should point out that it's not an electric scooter or a Vespa or anything, it's more like a skateboard with a handlebar and, as I mentioned, a brake.

My scooter is really a concession to my realisation that my skateboarding days are over.  I had always wanted to be a skateboarder.  When I was a little boy growing up in the countryside of Scotland I would be so jealous of my friends who lived in the local metropolis of Carnoustie who had smooth pavements outside their homes, and streets and streetlights and all the normal accoutrements of succesful boarding. I had none.  I lived in the middle of a forest, the roads were uneven and gravelly and the only light by night was the Moon.  It was an impossible situation to reconcile.  I put my skateboard plans on the back burner.

Cut to about thirty years later.  I am a grown up. I live in New York City near a park where there are millions of skaters every day rushing around, doing tricks and generally looking cool. I get a board.  I get, for my birthday, one of the hot, skinny skater boys to give me lessons. I am quite good.  I go to Vancouver to shoot Tin Man and on the huge green screen stages where we shoot so much of it, Iskate back and forth to my trailer, scaring the producers out of their wits no doubt but making the crew think I am totally cool, I just know it.

I return to NYC unscathed and a bit better in my boarding technique.  I sometimes go to appointments on my board.  Yes, I skate on the streets of New York, baby!  Soon I start a job in a Chekhov play The Seagull, at a theatre downtown quite near my apartment and so when performances begin I skate to work!!  I wonder how many Chekhovian actors do that, huh?! Not too many I'll wager.

The thing about skating to work of course is that you have to skate home. I guess you could just pick the board up and carry it, of course, but generally after a show you tend to go out and have a few drinks with the cast and friends who have come to see it and so you tend to throw caution to the wind a bit and decide to skate home, maybe even show off a little to your friends and skate alongside them as they walk to the subway or a taxi or a restaurant.  Can you see where this is going?

One night I was with a crowd of friends and we were enroute from the theatre to a restaurant.  My friend Paul was visiting from Vancouver and we were walking together, me on my skateboard and he alongside me suporting my arm on his shoulder.  We were having fun.  The sidewalk was a bit bumpy but I was a pretty good boarder for a 43 year old man and I could cope.  What I hadn't bargained for was the combo of the bumpiness and my amusement at Paul's hilarious stories.  I guffawed a little too heftily and before I knew it the board had slipped from under me and I was on the deck, and several inches of the skin on my side remained there, ingrained on the scraggy concrete.  I laughed it off, of course, my pride being the most hurt and all that.  The next day though I begged to differ.  I had a weeping raw scrape about six inches long, and suddenly my desire to skate to work was gone.

How many Chekhovian actors have to peel their linen costume trousers off their gooey, scabby hip between acts I wonder?  Not many, I'll wager.

Anyway, now I have a scooter.  And a helmet. And I zip around town and it's great fun, great exercise (fabulous for the abs apparently with all that pushing off) and all is well in the world.

I do feel a little bit of a dork when I dare to cross the skateboard park, but the cool kids don't seem to snigger. Too much

My ideal dinner party

Brian, my trusty assistant, found that list of people I would choose to have dinner with!! It was for a Scottish charity called Victim Support Scotland.

So here then, is the line-up for my dead and alive people dinner party...

Bonnie Prince Charlie
I sort of sense he would be a bit prissy and it would probably be very entertaining listening to him tell tales of marching around the highlands in drag, covered in mud, desperate to get home to France for a croissant and a cafe au lait.

Gore Vidal
Because everything I have ever heard come out of his mouth has been either hilarious, contentious, outrageous,scandalous or a combination of all four, so the perfect dinner guest to stir things up.

Lord Lucan
Just because it would be really great to get the real story

and my Granny, because she was always the best fun and said the most surprising and nutty things and I would love to see her again.

A weekend of ask alan

Lucas from LA has something to confess:  i must confess that im looking forward to see Burlesque in theaters.I realy like your acting skills and you do a fabulous performance in every movie i believe you did it with burlesque again :) , I was wondering about the soundtracks because i heard that there will be only twelve songs is it impossible? And do you have any favourite songs from christina from the movie?? Well Lucas, I too am looking forward to Burlesque. I saw a few of the big numbers being shot and they sounded and looked really amazing. I don't know about the soundtrack in terms of numbers of songs, and I am sure that since the film is still being edited there will not be a final list available yet. But I do remember a crazy good power ballad that Christina sings in the middle of the film that will rock your socks off. Now say five Hail Marys and begood boy.

Linda asks:  Ever have your portrait painted?  Ever wanted to? I have had my portrait painted a few times and I really like it.  I especially like when you don't have to be totally still and can chat, then it is sort of a like a fun therapy session and the artist is your shrink!  Most recently my friend David Remfry has done a few of me, one of which was hung in the Royal Academy's summer exhibition a couple of years ago.  He has also done Honey and Leon several times too. And then my friend Grant Collier did one a while back (infact these pictures are from a shoot that he took to use as source materil for the portrait in 2000. ps smoking is bad, okay?), and a long time ago in the early nineties my friend Gerard Morris from Glasgow first did a portrait of me. Come to think of I have been painted or drawn by quite a lot of people, and also my husband Grant is an illustrator so there are always pictures of me appearing in my bags or stuck to the bathroom mirror. 

Molly asks: After a friend and I spent a while trying (and failing) to imitate your lovely Scottish accent, I was wondering- do you ever have trouble mastering accents or dialects for certain roles? If so, which ones, and what helped you overcome it?  I certainly do have trouble sometimes! But I just practice, listen to tapes and sometimes I work with a dialect coach if the accent is really unfamiliar to me. At drama school we studied phonetics a bit and so I still have that tucked away in my brain somewhere and it comes in handy sometimes. I think also that because I am Scottish and was told from my first day at drama school that it was imperative for me to be able to lose my accent and do a standard English one if I ever wanted to work, I have a more inquisitive and attuned ear!  How ironic that I make my living mostly by playing Americans these days.

From Marilyn: PLEASE...more photos of you doing yoga poses in your underwear.  It fuels my fantasies and gives me very pleasant dreams. I think you are the most talented, gorgeous man I have ever seen and I loved you in The Anniversary Party. Marilyn, I am blushing.  And you need to get our more! But I will see what I can do about the yoga and the underwear combo. It mohgt have to be swimming trunks and underwater yoga.

Jane asks: which five people (alive or otherwise!) would you invite to dinner, and why?  I answered this very question for a press thing a while back and have been trying to find it online today with little success. I can't actually remember who I said so I am rather curious to find out.  I think it was for Visit Scotland or the National Library of Scotland, but I could be wrong.  I will have another dig and get back to you.

From Mimi: Not a question but an apology for interrupting your show at Feinsteins Sat. before last. Seems the Gray Goose got the best of me, You were fantastic and made our trip to New York a memorable one. Thanks so much! Thank you Mimi. You were actualy really good value and gave me a lot of material.  No worries.

Cara asks: hey Alan, what do you do to relax? I come to my house in the country, where I am right now.  I am looking at rolling hills, I slip into the pool and have a sedate swim occasionally, I watch my dog rush down into the meadow and chase away deer.  Later I am going to cook our dinner over the fire pit. That sort of thing.

Alan, am i hallucinating, or do you only have one dimple...on your face that is. I think I have two but sometimes the less big one doesn;t show. Maybe I don't smile hard enough or maybe I am not fat enough.  I think it appears less and less these days.  But the first one is an ample sufficiency I think, don't you? Oh look, I think there are two in this picture with Marc from the Castro last weekend!

Gerald writes: I am so amazed and thrilled at your participation with Intact America and NORM UK.  If only more celebs could follow.  Have you visited the websitecircumstitions.com?  I get so sad/mad when I hear of this being done to babies or teens - a bit like the twilight zone.  Thanks again, best wishes, and cheers. Gerald, thanks for writing. I didn't know about circumstitions.com, and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. There are some scary statistics on it.  It's great to find more and more places around the world where people are questioning why we do this to our children, and also especially in Africa where the whole idea that circumcision is neccesary to combat HIV is being undermined and re-examined.

I read you do not add people on facebook and I understand why. But if you ever start to, lol...It's not actually me on facebook, I am afraid.  Just someone still pretending to be me so I am sorry if I haven't friended you or whatever it is.

Louis writes: I had the privilege of seeing your delightful show last night in San Francisco, Mr. Cumming. It struck me early on that what made it so charming -- in addition to the excellent material and the expertise and sophistication of you and your colleagues -- was the boyish enthusiasm you displayed. I have some questions, all of which (happen to?) come around to authenticity, which seems so central to the success of the act.  This may be the least interesting: How much of the anecdotal material is literally true? How much license do you take? Set aside obvious facetiousness. I, for one, wouldn't expect the dialogue you quote to be verbatim. But I ask because in recounting one of your wonderful stories (sorry: which one slips my mind at the moment), something struck me as implausible.  It's all true, Louis.  Some of them are indeed implausible but that's why I tell them!  Everything I talk about on stage actually happened Maybe the hardest (and stupidest) question is: Since you're an actor, and a good one at that, is there any particular reason for an audience member to believe that your authenticity is genuine? I'm quite happy to believe that it is, mind you. Why thank you. Since I begin the evening by pointing out that it took me a while to summon up the courage to do the show precisely because there is no characater to hide behind, and that I am being myself, open and truthful, I would hope that the audience would believe me. I think people can discern between a perfomance and a person. Obviously I tell some of these stories again and again, and that is where my skill as a performer comes in to make them seem fresh each night, but then everyone tells their funny stories repeatedly and you don't question their authenticity, do you?  Maybe you do.  And here's the one I'm most interested in: Why do you choose to retain your brogue in so many of the songs, and specifically in the one from Cabaret? I ask because it distracted me in that one, with the German words and all. I'm secure in presuming this is a choice, since the U.K. rockers always struck me as pretty good at imitating old black guys from Mississippi, and I don't suppose they've done the dialect work you have. Again, I am singing the songs as me, not as a character, and as I point out when I sing the Hedwig medley I have never had a sex change operation but I can still feel Hedwig's pain!  The whole evening for me is about stripping away the normal layers of character, accent and other attributes of my work as an actor and connecting with the audience as Alan Cumming the person.

I saw you 7/10 at the Castro Theater. It was a wonderful cabaret experience. My question is when did you know you wanted to sing as a child, and do you think anyone can learn to sing (well)? I asked Sam Harris this question, and his answer was that his father was a high school music teacher and he always had music in his home as a child. Is this true for you also? I suppose I always wanted to sing.  I always did as a child, just as I do now. I sing as I walk along the street, everywhere.  But the kind of singing I do in my show is more about a desire to connect through a song and intrepet songs by being myself.  I think the singing I wanted to do as a child was more about showing off. There was nobody in my family who was a musician so I didn't have a role model in the way Sam did.  I think of singing and acting as kind of the same thing and I have come to be as confident at singing as I am with acting rather late in life! Isn't ths a spooky picture btw?  It looks like Lance is a ghost!

Does it ever bother you to know that you have younger women (20's) that are huge fangirls?Why ever would that bother me?! Bring it on!

I just wanted to let you know that I will never eat another rubbery shrimp again without thinking of YOU!  Thank you for a Great Evening.   love Ili B.  I am sure there is some relevance to this from one of my stories but right now it escapes me.  Or maybe there isn't. Either way, thanks. Love from shrimpy.

Have you ever done any movies where you kiss a guy? Not like the little pecks in Cabaret, I mean really kiss; like smooch.  I want to say duh, but I don't mean to be rude! I just did in The Runaway, I did in Ghost Writer, The L Word, oh lots of times. Other times onstage I have done too. I made out with Dominic West in Design For Living, and lots of boys in The Threepenny Opera.  I'm an old pro at kissing boys.