John Astin, the actor who played "Gomez" in "The Addams Family" TV show during the 1960's once described how, as a young starving actor he survived living in one of New York city's worst crime ridden neighborhoods without ever getting bothered.
He said that when he was on the street, he would try (and apparently managed) to look crazier than anyone else on the street.
The right body language will protect you.
When my wife and I first moved into the So Cal town where we currently have lived now for the past 23 years, John Astin came up to us one night when we were walking around downtown and invited us to go to a Buddhist meeting he was attending at a friend's house. He just came right up to us out of the blue, and introduced himself. My wife, a TV nut, recognized him right away, and readily agreed to go along cuz we were naive, fresh out of small-town Iowa, and easily impressed by anything resembling celebrity. He could have been John Astin the Axe Murderer for all I knew. Anyway, we went to John's Buddhist meeting at a condo near where we were shopping, and there were about 15 or so other people there, chanting and kneeling and Renge Kyo-ing away cheerfully. And John basically spent about 15 minutes on his knees in front of us trying to convince us that our way to salvation was by becoming Buddhists. I allowed as how that we were adequately salvated already, and that we had managed to escape our imprisonment in Iowa by being perfectly good Presbyterians and didn't need any further help from him and his Buddhist pals. We parted friends and never saw each other again, thankfully.
I don't know why exactly I related that story except that bws48's post dredged it out of the back drawer of my memory.
Previous Topic
Index
