Topic #1: Dressing Room Banter
Case #2: Banter gone bad
Barb Weinberger, Executive Producer
Talk in the men’s dressing room tends to be more explicitly sexual. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that…unless the banter falls into the hands of someone who does not know the meaning of “TMI”.
Remember, you’re often in pretty cramped quarters, you’re getting mentally prepared to be someone else for two or more hours, and the last thing you need is to hear intimate details of someone’s sexual exploits.
One cast member (Robert) was so unpleasant that the cast (men and women) invented a way of talking in code when he was present. You see, often cast members will hang out together after a show at a nearby bar/restaurant. Attendance at these spontaneous get-togethers had dropped off significantly because (a) no one wanted Robert along, and (b) no one was blunt enough to tell him so.
So someone came up with the idea of talking in code. As you’ll see, the code was not hard to crack. But all the cast needed was something that, from a distance, did not sound like an invitation to hang out. Something, in other words, that wouldn’t attract unwanted attention from the creepy Robert.
Actor #1: “What are you doing after the show?”
Actor #2: “I think I’ll go home and watch the news.”
Actor #1: “Oh? What kind of news?”
Actor #2: “I was thinking maybe Mexican news.”
Translation: We’re all going to our standard Mexican restaurant after the show. Come along if you like but don’t tell Robert.
Clearly Robert was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, as he never caught on. Was it mean? Sure. But once you had suffered through an evening of Robert openly trying to seduce the self-avowed lesbian waitress and you realized we could never return to that restaurant without a written apology, you became desperate.
Next Week: Hygiene and other personal matters