Oh, Man! Balaban!

Dear Mr. Balaban:

So, I was at the pool last night, doing laps (I was going to try to go to the “water exercise” class but I flaked because I was kind of scared of the music they play there sometimes…I mean, I don’t think of “Piano Man” as a song to get my heart rate up, if you know what I’m saying). I was, as usual, in the slow lane. This weird guy who swims there sometimes wasn’t there…if you swim laps at your local Parks and Recreation pool, Mr. Balaban, I’m sure you have this guy too. Doesn’t wear a swim cap. Long shag. And he has, seriously, the most tsunami-like crawl stroke I have ever seen anywhere ever. He doesn’t just put his hand in the water when he makes the stroke (eew, “makes the stroke.” Sounds dirty. It’s not though. Sorry.) but slams it in the water. Kapow! Every time. No, it’s more that he just lets it fall there. Like he’s just swimming along, minding his own business and his hands and arms are falling from a five story building with stunning regularity. I don’t get it. I see him there all the time, and I wonder if anyone has ever mentioned that maybe he might want to be a little…uh, smoother? Quieter? Anything, so long as he doesn’t create a tidal wave every time he passes me. I’m in the slow lane, Mr. Balaban. I need all the help I can get.

But this has nothing to do with you. In fact, I’m not even really sure why I was thinking of you while I was swimming anyway. Maybe it’s because I saw A Mighty Wind a couple of weeks ago. I liked it just fine, but I have to say that I noticed you played sort of the same character again. I checked your IMDb profile and they seem to have noticed it too. This isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a bad thing. I like your character in all its muted variation and permutation. Obviously I loved your work in all the Christopher Guest movies…for some reason in the your opening scene in Best of Show, I’m all about your baby-talking to the dog. And all about you conducting the orchestra in Waiting For Guffman, and all about you shielding your eyes when you come into Enid’s room in Ghost World. I know you’ve been in lots of other movies, and I’m sure I haven’t seen them all (when I read you were in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind I was all, “Yeah! The French interpreter guy! That’s Bob Balaban? Oh, man! I wonder what he looked like in the seventies?”) but I’m pretty sure you’ve played pretty much the same person over and over again. My question for you is: what’s that like?

I mean, are you just playing yourself? Are you really kind of a cokehead and you wear a big gold chain and a shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist and you have a kidney shaped pool in the Valley, like in Boogie Nights?, or are you more of a season-tickets-to-the-symphony kind of guy? How did you start of playing your character? Did you ever think about being an eighties sitcom star or something? Do you get up every morning and say to the mirror, “Every day, and in every way, I will be the best Balaban I can be.” Do you?

I don’t know. I don’t know what my deal is over here. I just keep thinking I’d like to see you play a gay stripper (with a boa), or a drug dealer, or a trailer park dad, or some sort of a Rambo guy. A cop out to avenge the death of his partner. A sleazy Wall Street guy. A mob boss. I don’t know why. As I was swimming, I kept thinking about how funny it would be to see you play any of those characters, and then about how weird it was that I was thinking about Bob Balaban in the pool. Then I went right back to thinking about how much I love the name “Bob Balaban,” and I tried to make up a song for a show starring you, called “Balaban!” or something.

“Balaban, Balaban,
Riding around in his caravan,
Doing the things that a short quiet guy with glasses and a thin-lipped smile can,
On the lam,
Eating Spam,
Kicking a can,
Balaban!”

This is, obviously, vaguely hijacked from Particle Man, , so I guess I’d have to call They Might Be Giants to see if that would be okay. I’m pretty sure they’d be down with it, aren’t you? I’m sure they love your work. I just Googled you and didn’t find any fan pages, so I guess I could get on that for you too. Except, it’s not like that. I don’t feel that way about you. I mean, I like you, but I don’t like you like you, you know? I envy your complete Balaban-ness. I just dig that you are who you are, and you’ve made a living of who you are, and that’s just great. You get up in the morning, look in the mirror while you’re brushing your teeth (I forgot to floss last night but I just have a feeling you’re very conscientious about that), and say in your carefully modulated, no-nonsense voice, “I am Balaban, and that’s all there is to it.” How do you do that? How do you just live in your Balaban skin, being your Balaban self?

While this entry is supposedly about you, it’s really about me. I know that. I know that. I was just thinking about you, Bob Balaban, in the pool last night. It has nothing to do with me at all.

Yours Truly,

Chiara


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