Creative Care Unit

Creative Car Unit Episode 2: “I’m The Face”

                The two most expressive parts of an actor’s physical instrument, especially if you’ve ever worked in films or television, are the Face and The Voice. If they’re working well, we can do our jobs.  If they’re damaged or broken, not so much. As performers, we tend to baby our instruments because our livelihood depends on it. To lose control of either their face or voice is every performers nightmare. I had the unfortunate luck to have problems with both my face and my voice within a year, and I’m still dealing with the consequence’s decades later. I’m Michael E. Russo, and we’ll talk about how all of that happened in this edition of the Creative Care Unit.

                Summer, 1984. I was living on Long Island with my parents and brother, having graduated from Berklee College of Music back in May. I’d taken a summer job at a place I’d worked for the past three summers before, just so I could get some income and try to figure out what to do next. The work itself wasn’t exactly taxing my mental capacity, so I had a lot of time to think things over. Here I was, a newly minted graduate from a prestigious college, and I had no idea about what to do next. My major at Berklee was Professional Music, which was as nebulous a track as you can imagine. I did get to take a lot of courses that interested me, but the end result was that I had no clear plan going forward. All I had was a question: OK, you’ve got this degree; now what?

The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to teach. I don’t like teaching, and frankly you have to have both a love of it and a happy knack for it so that you can succeed. I didn’t have either, so that wasn’t an option. I couldn’t imagine myself in a classroom, or even taking private students. The few times I’ve tried it over the years I realized that I had a lot to learn and that I had no patience for myself, let alone a student. Best if I not go there.

One thing I knew for sure: getting this degree wasn’t easy. My main instrument through my junior year was the trumpet , and I was miserable. I hated going down to the practice rooms to work on pieces, because they weren’t soundproof and I don’t like the idea of anybody listening to me trying to work out the bugs in a composition. This made my relationship with the private teachers I’d had less than fun. I went through three, and I can honestly say that I was not exactly the student that they were looking forward to seeing each week.

The ensembles that I had to play in weren’t any better. I’m not a jazz head, and the solos I blew were bland and unimaginative (though I did surprise a tenor player friend of mine once. He was in our room one day, and we had a Richie Cole record on. I was noodling quietly on the horn while he was talking. At one point, he fell silent, looked at me and told me that I’d just played what was on the record. My reaction was like “oh, OK.”).  Even in a big band, I didn’t feel a connection to the music. I was just not having any fun as a trumpet player, and I couldn’t see a future for myself playing the horn. So, in the middle of my junior year, I decided to change my main instrument to Voice.

This was not exactly and easy decision to make, however. I’d been playing the trumpet since 1971, and to tell my parents that I was going to become a singer instead…well, the looks on their faces told the story more eloquently than their words (I could practically see them doing the math, adding up the money spent on lessons and my horn). Still, they didn’t say no, and in the second semester I hung up the horn and became a singer.

The effect on me was immediate. I was more comfortable in a room full of singers than I ever was trying to play jazz. I could work on pieces in my room while playing guitar and no one except my roommates, who were doing their own thing, would be disturbed. I could sing the music I’d liked, which was rock, pop, Broadway, etc., and I didn’t have to scat solo once. Yes, indeed. MUCH happier.

Now the big thing that I had to do was cram all of my proficiency exams into a much shorter period of time than if I’d been a voice major right from the start, but otherwise it was a fun time. I’d gotten all of my requirements taken care of, and on May 19^th of 1984, I shook the hands of critic Leonard Feather and pianist Oscar Petersen as I received my Bachelors degree, my parents and girlfriend watching with pride.

Three months later, my face fell apart.

I think that I first noticed the paralysis at dinner one night, I can’t be sure. I might’ve noticed it at work. In any case I had no idea what was happening. I thought that I was having a stroke. My parents told me that it was Bell’s Palsy.

Bell’s Palsy? What’s that? I’d never heard of such a thing. I was in such a panic that my Dad took me down to the emergency room to have me checked out. The physician on duty, who looked at me as a minor annoyance to be dealt with so he could back to the really serious cases, took one look at me and said, “You’ve got Bell’s Palsy.”, and left. That was it. I had a name for what I had, but nothing else. Keep in mind that this was well before the internet, and information wasn’t exactly at one’s fingertips. I had no idea what this was all about, how you got it, how long it would last, anything. It wasn’t like every family had medical journals on their shelf that they could consult. I was scared. Imagine, if you will, siting in church and the first hymn starts playing. Now imagine that you’ve been singing hymns all of your life. This is part of who you are. Now imagine that your ability to articulate the words has been taken away, and your left unable to do what has come more naturally to you than anything else you’ve ever tried. Scared? Hell, I was TERRIFIED.

We did go see a doctor about this a few days later. The first thing I said to him was “I want my face back.” He explained to me what I had and what we could do to treat it. He told me what the medical community knew about Bell’s, which wasn’t much. Thirty plus years haven’t exactly added to the dearth of knowledge about the subject, which should make telling you pretty quick, so here goes.

The most important thing to know about Bell’s Palsy is that it’s caused by a virus, and like any other virus, there’s nothing you can take to get rid of it. You just have to let it run its course. It usually goes away in a few days or so. The virus causes the seventh cranial nerve to shut down, which causes the face to sag and droop. In my particular case, I could feel the effects from the corner of my right eye down through my cheek to the base of my neck. If I tense up my face and neck, looking like a lizard in defensive mode, you can see how uneven my right side is compared to my left.

The odd thing in my case was that I’d gotten this at 22. Most of the time you find Bell’s in older people, whose resistance to disease is lower than younger folks. When people would comment “But you’re so young!”, it hurt a little more than they intended.

So where does this come from, I asked the doctor? We don’t know was the answer. How did I get it? We don’t know that, either (I was waiting for him to tell me that I’d gotten it from a toilet seat). The one thing that we could theorize on was that my tonsils were compromised. I’d had four strep throats over my last year in college, and my tonsils were quite large at that point. This probably made me more susceptible to all kinds of viruses, including Bell’s Palsy. Granted, this was wild speculation on my part, and it still is, but since I didn’t have another explanation, this one would have to do.

Treatment was pretty straight forward. Since we couldn’t hit the virus with any kind of medication to make it magically disappear, all we could do was to try and mitigate the effects. To keep my face from sagging any further, I used tape to keep my right cheek up. I slept with an eye patch at night, because I couldn’t close my right eye fully, and we didn’t want to have damage to the eye on top of everything else. I would massage the area as often as possible, trying to keep the muscles supple.

Part of the treatment involved stimulating the nerves on that side of my face, which weren’t receiving electrical impulses from the brain. To do this, I’d gotten a small battery-operated device that looked like an old-style oil can. It had a square pad attached to a wire, which attached to the round body of the device, and had what looked like a spout with a pad on the other end. You wet the pad and have it touch your back. You then took the other end, touched it to a particular spot on your face and hit the switch. The circuit having been completed, the particular muscle on you face that was being touched by the spout would contract, making you look like you had a muscle tic. I’d do this in various spots of the affected area, and it seemed to help. I even went to a physical therapist who did the same thing to me with a much more sophisticated version of my home gear (I only went once, though. The reason why is a story for another episode).

Brief aside: years later I’d seen that same kind of device, as well as others like it, being marketed as a tool to give you a facelift. If you’re thinking about getting one for those purposes, don’t. They don’t work in that capacity. My device kept my face from losing any more muscle tone, but it didn’t make me look any younger. You’re better off wasting your money at the cosmetics counter.

Aside form that, you want to avoid things that could weaken the muscles further. The Physical Therapist had three recommendations for me: 1) don’t do drugs (not a problem in my case. The drug culture never had any appeal for me), 2) don’t drink (THAT was a problem. I wasn’t a heavy drinker, but I do like having a beer, scotch, etc.), and I’ll save #3 for a future episode about bedside manner and some of the weird stuff the medical community has said to me over the years. Boy, have I got a list for you…

Eventually, the virus went away and most of my face returned to normal. Having the disease as young as I did proved to be a real advantage. I can get through the day without drooling, and my articulation is pretty good (you be the judge). I can’t really play trumpet anymore, however. When I tried to as part of my therapy (something that wasn’t the doctor’s idea), my right eye would close up, which made me look as if I was winking at the music. Worse, the right corner of my mouth had a slow leak, which made the same sound that you get when you’re putting an inner tube in water to find a hole in it (you younger listeners will have to trust me on this one). The effects were less pronounced if I was playing baritone horn, though, so I started doing that. I can now play the trumpet without the side noises, but my tone isn’t great and my pitch is wobbly at best. I went from sounding a bit like Miles Davis to sounding like Chet Baker on a bender. I only haul the horn out if I’m trying to write something, like the theme to this podcast.

The only times I really feel the effects are when I’m drunk, tired or cold. In fact, the only time my face really failed me was when I was a stand-in on a Vanity Fair cover that Annie Liebovitz was shooting. We were on a tugboat in the middle of New York Harbor, it was February and it was bitter cold. It was so cold that the right side of my face shut down. It. Would. Not. Budge. In between setups, I ran into the cabin of the tug, put my face right up to the heater and deeply massaged the area for all it was worth. I apologized to Annie, telling her what had happened, and she was pretty cool with it.

Once the Bell’s Palsy was dealt with, the next question was: what are we gonna do about those tonsils which are about the size of golf balls? The answer was…something I’ll talk about in my next episode. My face is starting to feel a little tired, and I could use a bit of rest right about now. 

Uh-oh. Time to act like an announcer. Roll the credits!

Support for this podcast is made possible by my long-suffering Wife (who lets me do this), copious amounts of caffeinated beverages and listeners like yourselves. If you’ve enjoyed this program, please like our Facebook page, which has links to our transcripts of the show blog and links for you to make a donation to keep this show going. 

Creative Care Unit is recorded in The Danger Room Studios of Glimmer Productions, located in the heart of Bucks County, PA. I’m Michael E. Russo. We’ll see you next time, and until then, stay well.