ACTING | FICTION
Becoming Immune
Feel how the bones can stretch when God is not looking
Juan Felipe is the character I become in the play. He has thick hands and coffee skin. Juan Felipe likes women, but he doesn’t taste of them. He’s a priest, gone astray, far from God. And I am in love with him. Though we’ll never touch.
My name is Harden Song.
My name is Albert Garibaldi.
A long time ago, when I first started acting, my name was Albert Guide, surname pronounced French for added density — like “geed,” to rhyme with mead. Only no one could say it the way I meant it to be spoken. And stage directors, who never like to be told how to run their shows, tended to avoid casting a Guide (to rhyme with ride or hide).
So I changed to Song. Not that I’m made for musicals, but there’s something easy about Song, comfortable. Non-threatening. When I’m overweight, which is a common state of existence between plays, the name makes me seem lithe and fluid. It’s the illusion of music, that I might walk like a composition with an upward lilt, lithely flowing from stage left to stage light. They say Song glows confidently, owning a marquee.
Of course the first name, Albert, had to go as well.
