🎬 Actor – The Giggler

On John MacKay, who my played my father in "I Was a Teenage TV Terrorist," and why I'm formally apologizing for how poorly I acted when I moved to New York and asked him for a job.

My second dad lets me have it.

When I first met my second father, I giggled uncontrollably.

I was eighteen. It was the third day of shooting. My exasperated second mother had kicked me out of the house in the suburbs, and I’d moved to New York City with my first girlfriend. My first movie director was, umm, displeased with the out-of-control giggling, and my first movie producer started to worry about her first “Paramount” film.

In our first scene together, no more than sixty seconds in, my second father lifted me from my chair by my thick brown corduroy lapels and yelled in my face. Big ballbuster Marine eyes. Very, very wide and an only pleasing from a distance Germanic blue. Flecks of drill sergeant spittle were the least of my problems. He got bulldog close to my face, and I’m trying, trying, trying… to hold it, hold it, hold it…. then slipping, slipping, slipping… acting now the least of my problems…

“Tee-hee, tee-hee.”

“And cut.”

By the seventh take my giggling was like clockwork.…