All The World Is A Stage....

I went to see Accomplice LA last week which is an interactive scavenger hunt/theater piece that my friend Neil Patrick Harris was co-producing.

Neil loves this kind of stuff and after having seen the show on the streets of New York, he raved about it on Regis and Kelly and then decided to help produce the LA version of it in Hollywood.

Basically, you buy tickets to this show online and someone contacts you the day before and tells you the secret place to meet.

You then go with your group to unravel a mystery by tracing the clues you are given in a kind of connect the dots journey through Hollywood.

It is insanely fun and very cleverly strung together.




The idea is great, but the experience is even greater because what starts to arise is a feeling of paranoia and excitement as the lines between reality and art are blurred. Since part of the game is getting clues that lead to real people on the street and having to interact with them, as an “audience” member your seat disappears and suddenly all the world truly is a stage.

My experience was made even more surrealistic by the fact that some of my friends in the group are recognizable actors.

So while we were running around on the streets going from clue to clue trying to decipher if the person next to us was an actor in the play with information for us or just a pedestrian, the people on the street were looking back at us with just as much confusion and intrigue. It was hilarious and a total mind fuck. It reached its pinnacle when we were given a clue that took us all to a particular star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame where we were to find the person there who we needed to give a piece of paper to in order to get our next clue. But when we got there, there was only tourists walking briskly by and some homeless people.

Surely it wasn’t one of these homeless people who had our clue.

Or was it?

I eyed a particularly shady looking guy who seemed like he had a secret.

I decided to see. I walked up to him and asked him the designated question.

He immediately broke into a big, completely toothless smile and started moving towards me, delighted I had engaged him.

I backed away apologetically and the group laughed. We then took turns engaging some completely random people before finally finding our guy. That clue sent us into a store that sold scripts down the street.

As we were walking in, the entire window of the store was devoted to the new Star Trek movie and had a whole display case with pictures of the new Spock, Zack Quinto, who also happened to be right beside me in the group.

We didn’t know if it was part of a clue or a coincidence. Turns out, it was just a coincidence.

Life imitating art?




To top it all off, there was a section of the show that lead us to a cafe where an internet blogger/character named Perez Hyatt was supposed to give us our next clue. It was obviously a character based on the internet celebrity blogger/self-proclaimed Queen of All Media Perez Hilton.

The actor was hilarious and that section was super fun, but part of the fun was because we knew that the real Perez was in the group behind us.

He had called to ask Neil for tickets so he could take his family for his sister’s birthday.

Art imitating life or life imitating art?

All said and done, the show was great and we all had a lot of laughs and a lot of fun.

We hung out afterward with Perez Hilton and his family and the actor who portrayed him.

He put a blog about it on his site the next day.

I spent most of the time talking to Perez’s Cuban mother about her family and defecting from Cuba as a child and now adjusting to living in LA after living most of her life in Miami.

She was having a hard time with the adjustment, but obviously wanted to spend time with her children who now both live in Los Angeles.

I had been in Miami a few months ago having a similar conversation with another Cuban friend of mine’s mother.

Life imitating art?

Most people I know in entertainment try to steer clear of Perez because he can be verbally vicious. Some of his remarks really can affect people’s lives and careers. I have seen it happen. That being said, I think he is mostly just trying to be funny and really is just a super fan at heart and his intention is to promote the things he loves.

But you know what they say about good intentions....

The Much Music Awards took place in Canada on Sunday night.

The Black Eyed Peas were performing and Perez was presenting.

Fergie went up to Perez at one of the after parties asking why he was so angry at her on his site because she thought they were friends and were cool. Will.I.Am went up to him later, feeling that Perez upset Fergie, and demanded that Perez respect him and never mention their band on his site again. (On a side note, Will.I.Am is not a super respectful person himself. He parked his car illegally, and sometimes backwards, outside of my house in Beachwood Canyon for a year when he was dating my neighbor. He got a parking ticket roughly five days a week.)

Perez said he couldn’t promise that, that he didn’t respect him and then, inexplicably, called him a “fucking faggot.”

Perez argues on his site all the time for equal rights and respect for gay people while simultaneously trying to force people in the public eye out of the closet and using hateful slurs. TMZ immediately released video proof of Perez calling Will.I.Am a “fucking faggot” which prompted GLAAD to release this statement:

"We have reached out to Hilton and asked him to apologize for promoting this antigay slur, and we would ask media outlets to avoid repetition of the slur in their coverage of this story.

For someone in our own community to use it to attack another person by saying that it is, quote, 'The worst possible thing that thug would ever want to hear,' is incredibly dangerous.

It legitimizes use of a slur that is often linked to violence against our community. And it sends a message that it is OK to attempt to dehumanize people by exploiting antigay attitudes."

--GLAAD

Perez used to work as at GLAAD.

Art imitating life?

Perez left the club, but while waiting for his car outside, got sucker punched from behind. Apparently it was Will.I.Am.’s manager who did it.

The new single he performed that night at the show was called Boom, Boom, Pow.

Life imitating art?

Perez, getting a helping hand from Lady GaGa’s bodyguard, got taken away in a limo and immediately called 911 to report getting assaulted. When he was told by the Canadian police that they would try to get there to fill out a report, but that they were very busy, he took to Twitter to tweet for help.

People from all over the world began to call the police in Canada requesting help for Perez. Will.I.Am started get text messages from his friends saying that they heard he had punched Perez.

Will has his own twitteresque site called Dip and Dive and he had been sending out “dips” all night as to his goings on.

He used this as his alibi when he responded that he did not hit Perez claiming instead that it was a random fan who did it. Will.I.Am then got himself a twitter account just so he could “follow” Perez and claim his innocence there as well.

Tila Tequila and Miley Cyrus then twated in and gave their two cents. Sensing that they were going to have to take it up a notch, both Perez and Will.I.Am released video blogs telling (or in Perez’s case, crying) their side of the story.

They both mutually shamed each other:

“Shame on you, shame on your behavior, and that's just messed up.” - Will.I.Am.

“God is looking down on you and shaming you.” –Perez Hilton [to Will.I.Am via video blog] ...

Perez was genuinely upset, in shock and outraged. And he reminded everyone again and again that “violence is NEVER the answer.”

And he’s right.

In fact, Alice Walker said, “Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.”

Art imitating life or life imitating art?

I remember our whole group of friends being furious at Perez several years ago when he was trying to force Neil to comment publicly about his sexual orientation.

I remember several of us saying that someone needed to just “punch that guy in the face.”

But that was before I had spoken with his mother and heard her first person account of the American dream. That was before I knew that Neil coming out would be one of the best decisions he ever made. That was before Perez started putting charity causes in his blog for the ten million people that visit his site a day to grapple with the juxtaposition of these images of suffering children and rich artists. In short, that was before I saw all the dynamics of what makes Perez Hilton... Mario Lavenderia.

For better or worse, Perez is part of this entertainment machine that now operates via every possible social networking option available.

I took to facebook and I clicked on Mario Lavenderia’s page. He’s a “friend” of mine and I wrote on his wall: “I hope you are okay :( .”

And I do.

Perez is a super fan who has merged into the art like some kind of entertainment Singularity; I can’t even tell where the art ends anymore and the life begins.