Act-O-Lab — Stephen Legawiec

Sometime in 1982 I received a letter from Mickey Rooney.

I don’t know how Mickey got my address. I was in grad school and not living at my New Jersey home, which is where the letter arrived. Seriously, how did he get my home address?

ALSO - How did Mickey know that I was a theatre guy? Yes, I had done a lot of theatre, but I had only one professional acting credit at the time. How did Mickey know to send this to me? This question will haunt me to my grave.

To be clear, it was not so much a letter, as a direct marketing piece. But it was not typeset at a printing house, it was created on a typewriter and xeroxed, as we used to say, onto plain white paper.

It was a solicitation to join the Mickey Rooney’s mail-order acting school, the Act-O-Lab.

I recently found this artifact in an old file. What follows are exact quotes from the piece, word-for-word, with capitalization and punctuation intact. I saved it because I thought that no one would believe that this incredible document existed if I didn’t show it to them. And apparently, I have been carrying this around for 40 years.

The phrase “Lab,” referring to theatre training, was first used prominently by the Actor’s Laboratory Theatre, from 1940-50. Its most recent celebrated usage was as the designation of Grotowski’s “Theatre of 13 Rows” in Opole, Poland in the late 1950s. Was Mickey using his theatre training title as an homage to Grotowski’s Polish Teatr Laboratorium? The mind reels. The letter goes on.

I could not argue with that.

Finally!

“Never before in all history.” That was for certain. I could not believe that I was holding a copy of this singular invitation in my hands.

The cassette tapes mentioned are not video tapes, by the way, so there are no moving images here. They are actually audio cassette tapes, as you will learn in the following.

This, for me, was the motherlode: photographs of Mickey demonstrating facial expressions and emotions. Yes, I imagined that we would get the standard emotions - anger, joy, fear, and sadness. That would be a cakewalk for someone like Mickey Rooney. But what else might we get? Testiness? Chagrin? Antipathy? Ennui? Alienation? I was fascinated!

Well, of course.

I do not believe that there were any local TV shows in New Jersey at the time that provided any entertainment. There were shows out of New York, which we were able to watch on Channels 5, 9, or 11 – three of the six TV stations available to us in 1982.

I subsequently kept a sharp eye out for these shows. Never heard of any. But to be fair, I could easily have missed them.

Trying to imagine that scenario. Not sure if it meant that mentioning being an Act-O-Lab graduate would secure you representation (or at least bump you to the top of the pile) at one of the major New York agencies. Or if it meant that, once represented, the agent would highlight your Act-O-Lab status in their cover letter to the theatre when responding to a breakdown. The word “magic” is strikingly potent here.

Time has borne out the bleak truth of that last statement.

What followed was the order form for the program, which cost $299.00. Adjusted for inflation, the course would now cost about $900. I did not tear off the order form and enroll - although I was dying to see Mickey’s training pictures and see what he had to say to me as part of his recorded audio lessons.

When I pulled this out of the file recently, seeing it through new eyes, it occurred to me for the first time that this might have been an elaborate prank, perpetrated on me by one of my friends. How indeed would Mickey get my home address? And to this day, I have never met another person who’s ever received this letter. And believe me, I have asked.

But, to my relief and joy, I quick google search turned up a long New York Times article (August 23, 1981) about Mickey Rooney’s business ventures, which mentions the infamous Act-O-Lab.

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/arts/the-zany-new-world-of-mickey-rooney.html

Yes!

As the lady once said:

O, Mickey you’re so fine. You’re so fine, you blow my mind, Hey Mickey.