Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts by Courtney Hamilton Page A

And the answer, of course, was that none of them would. As I learned later, Genie’s theater school philosophy was “we give you the desire, and you find the technique.” And unfortunately, none of them found it.
    In addition to the fact that few of them learned any technique, Genie actively discouraged his students from getting work in the entertainment industry by letting people know that they were “sellouts” for working in that materialistic world. The few students who did get work because they were too pretty not to be noticed by agents were punished by being thrown out of the program. In retrospect, these were the only students who ended up with careers in the industry. The rest became the word processors, waiters, and retail clerks of the world.
    The irony of the situation was that while Genie actively discouraged his students from seeking work in the “plastic of tinsel town,” he, and the rest of the faculty, were all over it. I remember watching TV and seeing a strange guy in a non-verbal role as a bailiff on some network Lawyer/‌Police show and thinking, “Hmmm, there must have been something to that clam training, because that was Genie.” Or, while sitting in a bar, you’d catch a few seconds of some TV show and realize that the tubby waitress on the screen who just served coffee and maybe uttered the line “Non-fat latte, extra foam,” was the world renowned expert on “Emotion through African Masks” who had been teaching at your school for 15 years. It was funny: the prestigious theater faculty of the school who had their books, theories, and New York or Chicago theater experience were the day players of the entertainment industry. And if you looked quickly and didn’t turn your head, you could find them choking out lines like “Here’s your drink,” or “Your order’s up.”
    Sometime after Genie’s theater book,
I Experience It Therefore I Am It,
was published and the theater school went to some festival in New York where it proceeded to lose its accreditation, I heard that Genie had decided to “create productions” with the most Hollywood of all creatures. As it turned out, one of his former students from the ice age of his teaching days in the Midwest had become an enormous television star, creating such a hit that he would forever be remembered for this one particular character. After a lifetime of staging
Waiting for Godot
with 18-year-olds fresh off the bus from Wisconsin and at best, making a mid-five-figure income, it must have done something to him to see his former student with no possibility of an economic problem for the next three generations. That’s when Genie decided that Hollywood, after everything was said and done, was not looking too bad after all. And so he hung up his suspenders and sweatpants.
    It was around this time that our paths began to cross a little bit. I think that I began to catch glimmers of him running around in the trendy restaurants where I was forced to go to satisfy my clients after their first big deal came through. Later, I would see him at all of the premieres. Not long after that, I discovered that he and his production company were being represented by the most aggressive agency in town, an agency that had been thought to control the entertainment industry in the early ’90s.
    The most startling moment came when I started getting phone calls from the Stepford D- (D for Development) Girls at his production company. They wanted to go to lunch with me to find out more about my clients and how we could do business together.
    “Do business together?” I asked one of them named “Autumn” who called to introduce herself. “You work for the Jon Gene Jenny who wrote
I Experience It Therefore I Am It
?”
    “That was a previous lifetime. Jon Gene…”
    “Genie…”
    “Jon Gene just got a first look deal.”
    “Ugh…”
    “What?”
    “Oh.”
    Over the course of a decade Genie, alias “Jon Gene,” had learned the ropes of the