Lesbian Dancing After The Show: An Improviser's Non Improvised Life

Wandering Minstrel Eyes Part IV: A Coal Town of Actors

We are wandering minstrels. And this time, I didn't want to be.

I was running an improv festival in San Francisco. I had been in a movie in a supporting role. I had turned SAG in San Francisco. I wasn't auditioning anymore as the lone casting agent in San Francisco just called me in for roles. I played Gwenn Craig in Milk. The Real Gwenn is now my Facebook Friend. When she likes something I write, it always, always makes me smile.

I was doing theatre all over the city. Hans and I started Landry & Summers in San Francisco, as I started to like just performing with him. I was hosting other people's festivals and parties including the San Francisco side of The Onion. I was asked (without anyone seeing any of my writing) to be a regular contributor to this brand new writers' site called The Red Room. On its website, Stephen Colbert was listed as a contributing writer.

Ah. So that is what happened to him...

By the time I left San Francisco, I was teaching internationally and doing improvisation solo. Amsterdam, Tokyo, Manila, Hong Kong.

My full name was becoming my first name.

Hey! You're Shaun Landry!

People of my generation know this. When people refer you by your full name, it's the old days' equivalent of making it into the T.V. Guide Crossword Puzzle.

You are Mick Napier. You are David Razowksy. You are Susan Messing. You are Don Hall. You are Joe Bill. You are Mark Sutton. You are Jonathan Pitts.

When people refer to you by your full name. When you are no long Mick, Raz, Susan, Don, Joe, Mark or Jon.

I was no longer Shaun. Or, Shaunie. In the little fishbowl of Improvisational Theatre I was becoming Shaun Landry.

I owe all of this to my husband Hans. He was the one who always pushed me out in the front and quietly smiled at all of this.

He had become a wandering minstrel. I was getting tired.

Tired, probably from the M.S. I was diagnosed with in 2008.

It was all so funny to me. It made a lot of sense to me after I was diagnosed when for some magical reason my eye went blurry to the point of a hazy blind at my computer. My Grandmother and Mom had brain diseases and my father was nuts dying in the care of the state.

Made logical sense to me.

I wanted to stay put. I wanted to have my deteriorating disease in (in my mind) the most beautiful city in the world.

Hans was working for Kaiser. I was working as a full time actor at home. He let me do that after being diagnosed with M.S. He was working there for years at this point moving up the financial world of Kaiser. He was amazing at his job. He kept getting raise after raise.

He came home one day. He was now a wandering minstrel. He needed something new. He asked his people if he could be moved to Southern California.

Hans: They offered me a job in Pasadena. How do you feel about moving there?
Me: Hans, I would rather have my spleen removed for no reason than live in Pasadena.

He then asked if Los Angeles was an option. I said:

Hans? Los Angeles is a coal town full of actors and this is coming from someone who is an actor. It's hot. I don't find it pretty there at all. San Francisco is everything I love. The people, culture, music, food, theatre...everything. I'm working here. I'm running an improv festival. I love it here.

Then he told me how much they were offering him. I looked him straight in the face and said:

I have friends in Los Angeles, and Brad Sanders (my uncle's best friend who I always considered my uncle) is there.

Also I figured this after all of these years: I think I will be fine anywhere I end up in the world. The moment we wander again from L.A.? That's the moment we wander back to San Francisco.

So, I passed the festival off to the people who helped me start it. I called my friend in Los Angeles, J. Anthony McCarthy, and he found us a place to live in Hollywood. I put the deposit down, sight unseen. I did a "Thelma and Louise" trip to see it with my friend Amber Dyson and her friend. We came back to San Francisco and instead of Hans dragging our mass amount of belongings in a U-Haul? We had professional movers do it.

In 2009 at age forty-four I got on a plane with a travel bag of clothes, was picked up at LAX by the owner of The Avery Schreiber Theatre, Linda Fulton, who took me home to meet the movers and all of our amassed furniture.

I was on new adventure. An adventure in a town I had been skirting around all of my life. With my husband, my twenty four year old cat, and a full first name.

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