3. The Bold Acting Newsletter: The Vodka Stump

April 23rd, 2023

Harvey Milk said You gotta give’em hope. Well, Sean Penn said that while playing Harvey Milk in the eponymous movie Milk. And really the screenwriter said that but nobody pays attention to the writer. So Sean Penn at the behest of the director said it. So Harvey Milk said it. Anyway, who cares about attribution really. As David Shields writes in The Trouble With Men — and I paraphrase to the point of annihilation — there is no point in attribution when everything has already been said. Besides, putting quotations around sentences is fingerly strenuous.

Hope is where the heart is. It’s not the best strategy. Blind faith is much the same. Hope is for the secular. Hope might even be involuntary. It creeps up on you. You try, try, try and then you find yourself day-dreaming about already being where you want to be. That feels different than visualization. It feels lazier.

It’s 1985. I’m 13 years old. I’m with Rich Fister and Andrew “The Nurse” Nizinsky. We’re hiding inside a huge and hollowed-out old-growth tree stump in the forest behind my high school in West Vancouver. We call it the vodka stump because more often than not there is a bottle of Smirnoff vodka hiding in there. Much like the Egyptian pyramids no one can possibly explain why this happened. The important thing is the cheap grain alcohol within. It tastes like shit but it gets three idiotic teenagers hammered. And that’s what matters.

“Did you see Rachel Boobs-A-Lot today?” I asked. “She was wearing her Jordaches!”

“I love Jordaches,” Fister said.

The Nurse stood up and swayed. “That reminds me I got Math right now.”

I had a crush on Rachel (whose last name was Babalos so you can see how comedic geniuses such as ourselves would have come up with a pseudonym of that calibre) and she liked me but I didn’t know how to make a move back then. I didn’t know how to do anything.

On the way back to school we were slurring our words.

“What’s the one thing you want more than anything?” Asked Nurse.

“Boobs-A-Lot, obviously,” I said.

“Maybe some Jordaches,” said Fister. “How about you, Nurse?”

“I’m gonna puke,” Nurse said.

One day the stump was empty. Same as the next day. And then the next. But we never gave up on it. We hoped and we prayed that there’d be alcohol in there. Booze was our top priority. To this day the stump is there. I walked past it in March when we were back home. Still no vodka.

What I didn’t know at that age was a thing called agency. That if I wanted vodka I’d have a better chance of getting it by changing my approach. If something isn’t working you have to alter course. It’s so hard. But alter you must. And chances are you’re not going to get it right the first time. I wish I had known this at that age. When I finally figured out I could hang out at the liquor store and get an adult to run for me that’s what we did (why we needed to be shit-faced all the time I still cannot tell you).

Now there was a new problem: Sometimes those people you gave your (parent’s) money to would just abscond with it and drive off. Being more juvenile than man, sometimes you were relieved you could go back to being a kid for the night. Load up on junk food and just rent History of the World Part One again from Frontier Video. The point is that no matter your course in life there’s going to be a tonne of obstacles. And there will be hope. But hope is the icing on the cake called hard work. Hope isn’t a strategy. But you still have to have it.

Here’s how I have found hope:

1. By teaching. I meet all these young people and they are just so with it. So together, so polite and hard working. They give me hope.

2. By going to class. I meet all these young people and they are just so with it. So together, so polite and hard working. They give me hope.

3. By volunteering with the West End Phoenix. I am surrounded by caring left-wing-nuts who decided to start a newspaper in 2017 when almost every other newspaper was dying.

4. If you’re a parent then you have to have hope. You have to be an optimist. Otherwise why would you bring kids into this weird place?

5. Doug Ford. The unrelenting contempt he has for people gives me hope. Because of how I see them fighting him, not giving up. No matter what he does to hurt us people are not apathetic. People go out and march. People sign petitions. The people will be heard. My fellow Torontonians give me a great deal of hope.

The juice is in the action. I saw that on a bumper sticker today. And the action is spurred on by adversity. And the result is art.

People making art give me hope.

One day Rachel told me we were boyfriend and girlfriend. She was tired of waiting for me to make a move. We lasted about a month. She finally broke it off.

“All you ever do is smoke weed and skateboard with your dumb friends,” she said.

All true.

Practice focussing with laser-like intention on the art you want. Be as cold as ice about it. Say no to fun stuff and stay home and burn the midnight oil. Do this especially when you’re young and unfettered. Do this too if you’re old because you’re time is running out.

Hope is not visualizing. Hope is not daydreaming. Those are active and necessary parts of the creative process. Hope is the kid inside of you wishing upon a star, or a stump. Or a Rachel.

Harvey Milk was talking about us. We gotta give each other hope. Over and over again.