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Authors: Blue Blake

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One night while doing the show, we reached the climax when the owner’s daughter would have her clothes ripped off and would be raped. Jax started crying and screaming, “No . . . no . . . I’m pregnant for God’s sake!”
Excellent acting,
I thought, as we tore at her petticoats.
“She’s very good, isn’t she?” whispered another actor playing a lunatic with no ears.
“Tremendous,” murmured another. “I especially like the bit about her being pregnant. Very moving.”
Jax was in fact pregnant, by her Pakistani lover who by now had served his jail time. Who knew?
I remember Mountview Theatre School so vividly because I spent two and a half great years there. The first year was spent split into three classes: One-One, the intellectual group, all very serious, regarding themselves as the most talented; One-Two, the musical theatre group, wild and wacky, they regarded themselves as the ones who would become famous; and One-Three, students who didn’t seem to fit into the other two classes. I was in class One-Two. So was Sam. Jax was in One-One.
Mountview’s main school was based in a huge Victorian building that had once been a private home. Over the years sections had been added on and when the school became too big to accommodate all the students, annexes were rented. Hence, every day Crouch End residents would be treated to a procession of young drama students traipsing through the town center, doing what they do best—being dramatic. I always thought we must have resembled a cartoon drawing of a cloud of dust with various arms and legs flying out as we whizzed by. The movie
Fame
had just opened at the cinemas and we were possessed. The school played it one night to a sold out audience and for weeks we would try to stop cars in the street to dance on them.
We not only had acting classes but various studies in historical dance, mime, circus performance and the class I hated most—fencing. Don’t get me wrong. I hated historical dance too, all that whirling around in tights and a cape. But the saving grace was that the historical dance teacher had an enormous cock. You could totally see it through his tights. It was obscene, and I loved it. He wasn’t hot looking, but he was my teacher and here I was staring at his huge cock as he danced a minuet around the room. I would have blown him if I’d had the chance.
Fencing, on the other hand, was taught by a grizzled teacher who looked like he smoked a hundred cigarettes a day. His claim to fame was that he had taught the sword fighting to the actors in the movie
The Three Musketeers
. I didn’t give a shit, as I said, I hated fencing.
We had to wear white fencing masks and white jackets to prevent the foils from hurting us. They always hurt, no matter what. The straight guys in class were great at it . . . and the lesbians. It was strange. Half the guys in my class were gay or bi, but none of the girls. Then I found out years later there were several dykes lurking in the closet—all the girls who didn’t dye their hair, wore sweatshirts and training shoes, and invariably got thrown out of school end of year for not being “colorful” enough.
All the staff was certainly colorful though. There was Babs, a fifty-something who taught voice and elocution. She was like some fabulous school madam who always wore tweed skirts, pearls and cameo brooches. She took us for vocal warm-up every morning. We would stagger into the 9 a.m. class, covered in last night’s makeup (and that was just the guys). We were drunk every night but Babs never seemed to notice.
Dougie taught voice and acting. It was 1981, but Dougie wore skin-tight bell-bottom pants, flowered shirts and a purple paper-boy cap made of crushed velvet. He was
very
gay. The gayest person I’d ever met. He had never met a color he didn’t like. He was also in his fifties and as bald as a coot. He wore clogs and platform shoes. I had wanted platform shoes when I was ten years old. My mother bought me a pair one Christmas. They were tan and orange. I could hardly walk in them. That didn’t matter; I was ecstatic. They looked slightly girlish. My mother was always trying to cross-dress me. She once bought me a cheesecloth blouse and tried to convince me it was a boy’s shirt. For years I had a pageboy haircut. Only girls have pageboy haircuts. I bet Dougie had a pageboy haircut growing up. He certainly still had the fucking shoes. I really liked Dougie.
But I really fancied Alan, our movement teacher. He was a hunk in his late thirties who wore a mustache and rode a motorbike. He was an unorthodox teacher. Once while demonstrating his non-skills in chiropractics, he cracked a student’s neck, rendering him immobile for five weeks. The student had to walk with a cane for months. Alan wore tights and a white t-shirt and he had really beefy legs and a meaty arse. I wanted him to fuck me so badly, but he only had eyes for my roommate Sam. She flirted with him constantly. Sometimes the teachers had flings with the students. I know this for a fact because
I
had a fling with one of the acting coaches, Terry. He was married to a woman, so of course he was like catnip to a Siamese to me. Thinking back, he wasn’t physically my type at all: skinny, in his fifties, going bald. He wore thick bifocals that blew his eyes up. We would meet at my apartment and I would cook spaghetti Bolognese for us after classes. I couldn’t afford wine because my student grant meant I was living on 15 pounds a week. He would bring cheap wine and we would drink by candlelight and then we would fall into bed.
Jill Megiddo taught jazz dance. She taught me to dance and I loved her. She always wore her thin blonde hair scraped back and she was five feet tall. She had the body of a stocky boy and was married to a choreographer named Ivor Megiddo. Sadly she died of cancer at a young age.
I had natural rhythm but I was a club dancer. I had entered the World Disco Dancing championships in Nottingham and I came in last. They wanted us to dance to “Born to Be Alive,” by Patrick Hernandez and I was so nervous and drunk on rum and blackcurrant that I fell off the stage while doing a cartwheel. I was wearing black rubber pants and a tiger skin shirt. I was a FREAK.
So Jill taught me to dance. I wasn’t great. I was good. Good enough to get a job in any musical in London’s West End if only I could have carried a tune. I couldn’t sing a note. Nevertheless after
Marat/Sade
we mounted the musical
Grease
and I got the highly coveted role of Kenickie, the rough tough who knocks up the school slut Rizzo. I had a big number, “Greased Lightning,” and I had barely begun to learn the song when the casting director realized what a mistake he had made. They took it off me and gave it to one of the chorus but let me stay in the role. “You can’t have everything,” said Keith, one of my best friends. That was rich coming from Keith, who
did
have everything and went on to star in
Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, Cats
, and
Blood Brothers
.
Despite my lack of vocal ability
Grease
was a hit, and the thrill of performing in front of a live audience made it very difficult to go back to school and start rehearsals for a play that was less entertaining . . .
Troilus and Cressida.
I played Troilus and Jax played Cressida. Pregnant. Every time I had to kiss her I could feel her ballooning stomach. She had to wear a long white nightgown that covered her blossoming figure throughout the production. Worse than feeling Jax’s baby kick was that every night I had to break down and cry on stage. Another student asked me how the tears came so freely. I had no idea; perhaps it was just that the entire situation was very, very depressing.
I was broke. I had spent my grant too quickly on unnecessary luxuries . . . like soap. I was stuck doing the lousy
Troilus and Cressida
and kissing the face off of my pregnant friend on stage. I needed a job badly. All I had in my pantry was a bag of sugar and a potato. Everybody was in the same boat at drama school. I was down to my last 20p when the phone rang in my flat.
“Hello . . . ” I said flatly.
“Darling, are you still looking for work?” It was Tricia, a girlfriend of mine.
“Yep.”
“I’ve gotten you a job!” she squealed. “Doing stripping telegrams! Dressed as Tarzan!” I could have passed out on the floor of my apartment either from shock or lack of vital nutrients.
I fell right into the work and all of a sudden I was loaded. I spent the summer break running all over London dressed in nylon leopard skin leg warmers and a leopard skin headband with matching loincloth. My body was a toothpick, but I had no shame. I would run into offices and scream and beat my flat bony chest. I would throw women onto tables and French kiss them to celebrate their birthdays, anniversaries and weddings with my arse hanging out the whole time. I got 30 pounds a booking, half of which I gave to my agency. I was ecstatic to make that much money. However, I still wasn’t about to give up my acting hopes for singing happy birthday in a loincloth.
One day, while Keith and I were browsing through the jobs-offered section of
The Stage Newspaper,
the entertainment bible of every theatre person in England, I saw an advert for professional dancers to join the Olivier Briac Ballet. They performed all over the world. This was show dancing: topless girls with huge feathers strapped on their backs, sequins, g-strings and two pairs of false eyelashes.
“Let’s audition for a laugh,” I said. We did. The audition was held at the dance center in London’s Covent Garden. Keith and I were the only two guys with forty girls, all over six feet tall and impossibly beautiful. They all wore high heels and had hair down to their waists. The showgirls taught us a routine that seemed to include every bone-breaking contortion known to man. It was difficult, very difficult. The routine ended in the box splits, which I couldn’t do, so instead I did a cartwheel. For some reason they liked it. I got the job. Keith didn’t.
I was in a dilemma. I was six months away from graduating from Mountview, but I was ready to leave and see the world. My third year was just a succession of rehearsals and performances, so what did it matter if I left and began performing professionally? I had been offered a three-month contract in Damascus with two weeks rehearsal in Paris. I had never lived outside of England so I was thrilled. I also loved Arabic men (this could have been the deciding factor). I went to see Terry Meech, my sometimes lover/acting coach. I told him I wanted to leave Mountview and perform with the Olivier Briac Ballet in the Middle East. He didn’t try to dissuade me. He told me he thought I was ready to start my professional career and wished me luck. I left Mountview that day, never to return. Two days later I arrived in Paris to begin rehearsals.
My fantasies about romantic Paris were quickly dispelled. The place we were put up in was a fucking dump. We were staying in a small town outside of Paris called Barbais in a huge fortress. The dance troupe was held prisoner while we learned one ridiculous dance routine after another. We were two boys and twelve girls. In no time we were taught “the song.” It had no name but had been composed as a joke by some former disgruntled dancer and passed down from one generation of Barbais dancers to the next. It described the atrocious living conditions we endured in Barbais and it went like this:
Welcome to Barbais
It’s a holiday . . .
If your life is too much fun
There’s no telephone
No way to get home
You will never see the sun
Coffee takes an hour
Dare I take a shower?
Have some vinegar
Freeze in bed
There’s a great big key
That can set you free
But you’ll lost your mind
Instead
Eating shitty pâté
Everybody’s ratty.
 
The first verse is self-explanatory. We had no telephone to contact the outside world. Our parents didn’t know if we were alive or dead or sold into white slavery. We were never allowed outside because of the hectic rehearsal schedule and so our bodies grew pale and pallid from lack of sunlight. We had to boil water in saucepans for coffee but the gas ring threw off only enough heat to boil the water after an hour. The showers were filthy: full of old dancer hair and tampons. If you didn’t drink coffee the only other alternative was horrible red wine that tasted exactly like vinegar. So after a hard day’s rehearsal you had the choice of waiting an hour for hot coffee or a quenching glass of warm red wine. The dancers had constant headaches and dehydration. The blankets on the beds were threadbare and every night we shivered in our little cots. We were given a blanket and a sheet each. There was no heat. If this sounds like Hell, it was!
Every day, the choreographer, Guy Etrange, would arrive to bring us wine and pâté. We would hear the outside gate being unlocked by a giant key that hung on his belt. We ate the pâté from the fridge until one day we noticed an unusual sticker on the delicacy: a panting dog. Surely, we reasoned, they didn’t make pâté for dogs. The pâté couldn’t have been made out of dogs. So . . . OH MY GOD . . . we had been eating dog food that was meant for Guy’s stringy looking cocker spaniels. We were ill for days.
I liked the fact that I was working with twelve girls and only one other guy. Kevin was red-haired . . . speaking of stringy spaniels! We didn’t get on. I thought he was older than dust. I was twenty and he said he was thirty, but he was forty if he was a day. He had a French boyfriend who came to stay for a few days. We heard them fucking through the paper-thin walls. If Kevin had-n’t been so skinny, it would have been sexy.
BOOK: Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star
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