I Am What I Am by John Barrowman (white hot kiss .TXT) 📕

things struck me as being creepy and weird about having this reptile cage in the toilet at this zoo.8

First of all – and I know this is completely irrational – I didn’t want to pee in front of this reptile. He looked big enough to be able to get up on his four stumpy legs and climb out of the cage. When I was in middle school, one of my science teachers kept a variety of reptiles in her classroom and one day, when we all sat down, she had one dangling from the tip of her finger. While she’d been feeding it, Dr Pepper (I think its name was9) had latched itself onto the end of her finger. She told the class not to pay any attention to Dr Pepper hanging there and eventually he’d get bored and drop off. She told the class that the more she tried to force Dr Pepper to release her finger, the tighter he pinched. I was never a very strong student in the sciences, but if I’d been taught more often by teachers who had reptiles hanging from their body parts, I may have been a better one. In the end, she had to leave the classroom before the bell rang because she noticed her finger was swelling and turning blue. I stepped into that bathroom and had a sudden flash of that teacher’s finger when I started to unzip my fly. Can you blame me for not wanting to pee anymore?

Secondly, when families paid their admission fee to the zoo, did they all have to crowd into this smelly space if they wanted to see the iguana?

Back outside, while I was looking for someone from the crew, wanting to ask if there was a toilet more acceptable for human use available – like in one of the other cages – I noticed a restaurant across the street. For the rest of that day and the morning of the next, any time I wanted to pee, I’d get in my car and drive across the freeway to the diner.10

I was given the script to review for a few minutes before beginning. Since I was mostly filming intro links, most of what had been written was puns and animal jokes. Given the state of the place, I wanted to write my own introduction.

‘Good morning! John Barrowman here, working in a pigsty, picking up shit, and generally hanging out with animals.’11

When filming started later that morning, my first segment was with a friendly, well-behaved skunk (well-behaved mainly because the poor thing’s stink had been removed). This was followed by a scene with a snake – a snake that I had to wear around my neck for part of the link.

I’m not really afraid of any animals; cautious and respectful of some of them, but not afraid. The snake weighed heavy on my shoulders and by the time the handler – remember the kid of about twelve? – had finished explaining to me what to do to stop it crushing my windpipe, I was breathing heavily and wondering why I’d never paid attention to the old cliché about working with children and animals.

Between every segment we filmed, I wanted to shower. The whole place was filthy and run-down. At one point, when I was dashing to my car to take a toilet break, I noticed that all the kids from the camp were actually cleaning the animal cages. To make matters worse, it had started to drizzle, and the caged monkeys hadn’t stopped screaming since lunch12 was served. I think the monkeys were planning a coup.

By the end of the first day of filming, I’d lost my sense of humour along with my appetite, and I was thinking seriously about becoming a vegetarian.

I can count on one hand the number of times during my career in theatre and in television when I’ve lost my temper on set with producers or directors. The end of that first day of shooting Animals at Work was one of them. I pulled the location manager aside and told him I wanted a trailer with running water and a clean toilet. In other words, a place to go where I wasn’t at risk from catching cholera or Ebola fever.

He said he’d see what he could do. He wasn’t sure there was money in the budget, so if he could get Basil Fawlty’s permission, would I be willing to use the main house as my dressing room if they couldn’t get a trailer?

I’ve never been one who believes life is full of compromises. I don’t think it is. I think life is full of choices.13 I told the location manager that I’d try the main house, but if it didn’t meet even minimum health standards – and when I said minimum, I meant not sharing the bathroom with a frickin’ anaconda – I wanted a trailer.

The next day, I showed up at the main house. From the outside, the house looked as if you might find Heidi and her grandfather inside, but once I crossed the threshold, I decided that this house could easily have been the inspiration for H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau. The place smelled like wet fur and faeces. The living room – where my make-up artist had been set up – was decorated like a jungle palace, with marble columns competing with huge palm fronds and stuffed animal carcasses. To top it all off, there was a puddle of pee on the tiled floor right next to my make-up chair.

My trailer arrived at lunchtime.

The rest of the shoot was fairly uneventful – until the director asked me to wander among the llamas for the final segment link. The llamas were hanging out at the far end of the property as if they didn’t want to have anything to do with the rest of the place.14

As the shoot had gradually moved further into the zoo’s acreage, instead of sitting under a tent in the cold