Patriot.

The coolest show that most people didn't see.

A Rolling Stone article came out this week about a short lived show on Amazon, Patriot, created by Steven Conrad. Here’s a link to the article.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/patriot-spy-series-amazon-1235459206/

Patriot holds a special place in my heart because I had a small recurring as Gayle, the local bartender. It was my first recurring acting job, and when I booked it I jumped around with excitement. I still remember getting the call from my agent who said the director “really responded” to my tape. It’s a funny verbage in acting, they will say someone “responded” to your audition, as though the art you made with their words just happened to hit that part of the knee that makes your leg kick up at the doctor. It’s not about getting it right, it’s about the impossible to explain magical tie that binds like minds. Sometimes in acting, when the project is interesting and good, the way your mind works matters. It’s not always that way. Often it’s just based on your ability to say the words and then the face you were born with. And that’s just fine.

But like minds is always better.

I still remember my first day on that set. I was working with a professional dog actor, a golden retriever named Charlie, who had a resume longer than mine, and the lead actor, a genuinely lovely actor named Michael Dorman, who we later discovered had gone to high school in New Zealand with a girl who later married a college friend of mine. It’s crazy when the world shrinks that fast, and it happens more the older you get. We are all living in a giant circle and either grasping out and finding a hand to hold as we circle around each other, or we’re just missing and grazing fingers, or we spin past, never to meet but still sharing a common orbit. So that day Michael and I landed on the same prism and filmed a scene in the “bar”, which was really just a sound stage on the west side of Chicago. I’m always amazed by the way they do that in movies in TV, making something look like something. Sounds simple, right? It’s not. Making a dark warehouse look like a roadside bar with sun streaming through the windows and barstools that don’t look new and dust on the window sills. Those departments put so much work into making it all look so real. And it really did.

Right before we filmed, they changed my outfit from jeans into a skirt, and I panicked. I hadn’t shaved my legs that day, so I asked production for a razor and ran to my trailer where I teetered on the honeywagon sink frantically trying to shave and nicking myself all over the place, cursing wardrobe and the director for wanting to shoot the scene from down low. There’s your DVD commentary, you’re welcome!

ANYWAY.

The legs got shaved and the scene got shot. I was thinking about it and of all the things I have shot, I only remember the actual lines from a couple of them. You learn it all so fast and then you spit it out and it’s gone. But I remember that scene really well. Good writing is like water when you’re parched as an actor, it seeps right in and it’s heaven.

Here’s the scene from that day.

HALT. I never forgot that. I still think about it all the time, because I tend to melt down when I am any of those things, but especially lonely. I really related to that part of the characters in that show, that most of them were so deeply lonely. Weird. Funny. Trying to hold out a hand but unable. Living with secrets. Even Gayle, my role, in her small contribution, was part of that group. I liked her. I knew her. That, I think, is what the niche devoted following probably really responded to. That THING. When you try and try to be part of the world, and maybe you even seem like you are. Some of us are even passing as social people, but deep down we don’t feel like most people really KNOW us. See the full picture.

The show is about spies and secrets and all kinds of wild capers, but what I think it’s really about is the common experience of operating on two levels: the one that the world requires of you and it’s subterranean counterpart. The place you go when people aren’t watching. The ways you wish you could express that just haven’t been able to swim up the surface. Because… “normal”. I think one of the greatest tricks of our brains is that we think anyone doesn’t have those. It’s wild right? I walk around all the time thinking that someone else doesn’t know the messy or imperfect parts of me when they must because they have them too. Maybe we can have a secret code.

Wait, we do! Because when someone tells me that they like Patriot it makes me feel like they are aware and in touch with that lonely feeling. I sense that maybe they’ve got that little secret in them, that they really want to belong, even if they might never feel like they do. Even if part of them doesn’t want to, because belonging sometimes feels like it means erasing the messy and the imperfect, and that’s an impossible feat.

ANWYAY.

I’m proud to be part of that little Patriot club. Hey, we all want to belong.

Later today I am going to the memorial for one of the actors in the show, Tony Fitzpatrick. I didn’t know him all that well, but we were in two projects together, Patriot, and a movie that was also close to my heart, Knives and Skin. He was a Chicago institution as an actor and an artist and a general true citizen of Chicago. To me, the part I saw of him, he was extremely generous and talented and also cantankerous, which I think is a cool combo. I’ll be happy to honor his memory and to see some of the members of the Patriot family.

Rest in Peace Tony Fitzpatrick.