How It Began
Having announced the opening of "Daisy's Sacred Grove" with great pomp and fanfare, I then went on vacation for three weeks and left this blog to lie fallow. Sorry about the hiatus.

At any rate, here are three reasons why I love Australia:

1) Footrot Flats.
2) Space Food Sticks are still manufactured there.
3) David Wenham.

I first saw David in The Two Towers, and was impressed with his performance (albeit not so impressed with the changes to Faramir, though I understood the rationale behind it). Then I promptly forgot about the whole Lord of the Rings enterprise, and went about my business.

Several months later, I went to see Return of the King with a 103 degree fever singing in my ears. Sometime around the pyre scene, I realized I was in the presence of an incredible performance. (I may have been identifying overly much with the feverish Faramir, as he lay simmering on the screen without so much as an aspirin).

Long after the credits stopped rolling, David's emotional portrayal of the nearly-barbecued, less-favored younger son continued to haunt me. Back at home, I ripped the shrink wrap off my Two Towers Extended Edition and spent the rest of the week on the couch with a ginger-ale IV drip, marveling at the "Sons of the Steward" scene. Watching him swallow Denethor's abuse was like being punched in the stomach. The economy and subtlety of David's gestures and facial movements were just incredible.

This is going to sound incredibly stupid, but prior to then, I'd never particularly noticed acting as a craft before. I thought that, like many other endeavors in life, 90% of acting was memorizing lines and showing up on time. WRONG, wrong, wrong, wrong. So very wrong. Once the flu cleared up, I sought out David's other work (not easy to do outside his native Australia) and discovered that, apparently, there were dozens and dozens of different characters living inside this one guy. His presence drew attention to small things I'd never paid attention to before: timing, gestures, mannerisms, inflection. It was an astonishing revelation. I wanted to run out and grab people on the sidewalk and say "Look! ACTING!"

Hence the Dessicated Coconut website, my attempt at pamphleteering on David's behalf. It beats harrassing people at airports, anyway.

-- make_it_stop