Jazz at the Merc with Jon Mayer

If you happen to live or work near Old Town Temecula, mark your calendar for Thursday, October 3. I'm thrilled to be joining jazz giant Jon Mayer on piano and the wonderful bassist Chris Conner.

Sherry Williams hosts "Jazz at the Merc" each Thursday in this intimate jazz setting, which I have never seen but it sounds fabulous. The Mercantile is one of Temecula's original buildings  and it has been completely restored and acoustically it's supposed to be pretty awesome. 

 
Tickets are $15, and we play 2 sets. 

The Merc

42051 Main Street

Temecula, CA  92590

866-653-8696

www.temeculatheater.org

Thursday, Oct 3

7:30 pm

Bad Hair Blues

I have bad hair. I mean, really bad, over-processed, dry hair. Which is now turning prematurely gray. (Not exactly prematurely, but hey, cut me some slack.)

This means, I can’t just let it go, leave it alone and let it grow out the healthy way. I’ll end up looking like Barbara Bush. Or Anderson Cooper.

What makes this even worse is that my day job is in Beverly Hills, on Rodeo Drive, in fact. Where I am surrounded by dozens and dozens of industry types, actresses, executives and models, all sporting their perfect silky golden or amber tresses. (For the record guys, nobody is born with hair like that.) I tell myself that these goddess-like locks are actually thousand dollar hair extensions purchased at Umberto, Giuseppe, or Cristophe Salon.

This doesn’t help my plight, however.

Over the past 20 years, I have changed the color of my hair the way women change nail polish. It started with the theater.

I got the lead role in a play, and this character was known for her long black hair. Was I content to just go purchase a black wig? Of course not. I had to dye my hair black. This way, the roots of my hair would blend in with the synthetic wig the theater purchased, and the hair would look seamless. The critics would be truly impressed – no, transcended - by my perfect black hair. (Maybe they were. I did win a Dramalogue Award for that show.)

However, I didn’t realize when I applied the store bought semi-permanent dye that leaving it in my hair for 2 hours might actually lock it in for life. My mother came to town to see me in the play and told me I looked like a witch on Halloween.

After fruitless bleaching and treating, it took 3 years for the Sharpie pen black in my hair to finally grow out, at which point my hair was so dry from all the treatments, I should have just shaved my head.

A few years later, I recorded an album. The producers hired a marketing girl who thought it would be really great if I were a redhead. It would set me apart from everyone else. Sure, why not? I thought. I’d never done red before.

What I didn’t know is that once you dye your hair red, you have to constantly go back to the salon to have it “refreshed” so that you don’t end up looking like a rusty nail. (This involved lifting the base tone a few shades and then adding color.)

6 or 7 “refreshments” later, my hair now resembled brassy barbed wire. The only place to go from here was blonde. If I tried to return to brunette (which I think was my original hair color – I honestly don’t remember), the brassy undertones would remain. So blonde it was.

That particular transformation was a bit shocking. I remember going to a temp job at a law firm the next day, and the attorney I was working for didn’t recognize me. When he finally did, he started laughing, and that’s never a good sign.

I spent the next few years trying to find a balance between blonde and brown, and I think I finally reached it for a glorious 2 or 3 years. Then the gray (white, actually) started to appear.

At first I wasn’t sure what those albino streaks were. I fantasized that my hair was actually turning blonde. Or maybe the sun by the lake that summer simply bleached my hair. I ignored it.

Until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

So now, every 5 weeks, it’s back to the hair salon, to get my “roots done”, hoping that the color matches the rest of my hair. Which it rarely does. And every couple of months, I have to add highlights, so my hair won’t look like a one-tone Chevrolet.

God, it’s endless.

This morning, I decided to wash my hair and let it air dry naturally, just leave it alone, let the September air do its magic.

You really don’t want to see what I look like right now.

"Living the Dream"

My good friend Monica Carrera said to me 2 years ago,

 "I'm going to write a play about 3 women. I'm going to do this."

I said, "Great!"

She said, "No, you don't understand. I'm really going to do this. I am going to finish something I start this time, and I'm making a promise to YOU that I am going to have this play finished in 6 months."

Of course I encouraged her, but I didn't take this promise too seriously because:

a) she had a 3-year old;
b) she had a full-time job; and
c) she had never written a play before. This was probably one of those things that would burn out in a few weeks, when the very real demands of being a full time working mom would douse the flame.

We all have dreams, but life gets in the way.

Boy, was I wrong.

In 6 months, her play about 3 women in their 40's navigating the world of LA was written, re-written, cast, and staged for 3 sold-out nights at the BANG Theater in Hollywood.

3 months later, one more re-write and then a staged reading of this re-write. It was a smashing success.

Now what?

"I'm going to make this a web series," she said.

"A what?"

"A web series. That's the next place this has to go. I have to write another script and shoot a trailer. That's apparently what you do."

I have to say, I've known Monica for years, and I'd never pegged her as the "I'm jumping head first into the fire" kind of person. She had been in the theater world and done some acting in the 90's, but she got married and now had a house and a kid and a normal job and seemed to be living a safe life.

This was an altogether new persona.

She began to dive into the world of film making with tenacity, curiosity, resourcefulness, eagerness, and her entire savings account. I don't know of anyone who would do such a thing at this stage of her life. She hired a director, a crew, a location scout. She held casting sessions. She hired makeup and wardrobe. She took no shortcuts. It was utter madness.

She cast me as "Sara", one of the leads, and for the first time in 13 years, I was acting in front of a camera again.

We shot for 2 days and ended up with so much footage, there was enough not only for the trailer, but also an episode. Behold the pilot episode for "Living the Dream":

I can't begin to express how proud I am of my friend Monica. She took an idea, a desire to write about 3 women - the kind of women we all know here in the Land of Make-Believe, and she created what is now hopefully an ongoing series about these characters.

To keep it going she mounted a funding campaign on IndieGoGo, so that we can continue filming more episodes. It's a long haul, but we're gonna do it!  See the trailer (which started it all) below, with the link for donating: