not first, but strangest

            The job I’m writing about was not my first, but it was my strangest. This article is adapted and expanded from a story that originally appeared in the Oakland Tribune on Aug. 20, 1989. For our series on First Jobs, see here and here and here.

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      “No, that’s not right. You’ve got to shake it a little more.” The director was explaining to me that my hips were not achieving the “normal” rotation. Or to put it another way, I had to learn to move my butt in a more pronounced manner when I walked. 

      When I heard about the acting job I figured that my real shot at stardom had finally come. So, what if the role required some partial nudity? So, what if I had to sell my body, sort of, to be up there on the screen? 

      This was the mid-’70s, a time when morals were looser, and anyway, I desperately needed some bucks to supplement my meager fellowship as a graduate student in American history. Besides, my parents would never see the movie. And to be totally honest, the possibility of being “discovered” did offer some intriguing fantasy alternatives to the professor-I-was-being-trained-to-be. (I didn’t become a professor after all, but that’s another story.) 

      Well, I never did achieve fame or fortune—or even notoriety, for that matter, but I did help train hundreds of future medical students on the treatment of lower back pain. 

      My job, it turned out, was playing “the patient” in a Stanford Medical School student training film. As second banana in “Lower Back Pains,” I didn’t have any speaking lines, but I sure got to emote a lot. 

      My co-star (“the doctor”) was a honcho at the medical school, and he wanted to have his work recorded for posterity (or was it posteriority?). I was his foil, his raison d’etre. 

      I had to demonstrate a normal gait—this is when I was told that my hips didn’t sway enough when I walked. Then I had to show how differently someone walked when his back hurt. 

      I grimaced. I creaked. I had trouble getting up from a reclining position. 

      In short, I was great. 

      After my success in “Lower Back Pains” I went on to a brief, but successful, career playing an ulcer patient and a person suffering from heart palpitations. 

      Each week, I would be examined by med students learning how to conduct oral and physical exams. Each session was videotaped so that the students could go over their work afterwards with their teacher. The students knew I was cooperating with the program, but they didn’t know that I was making it all up. 

      My performance as an ulcer patient was, if I say so myself, nearly perfect (and peptic). I blended the tale about the sharp pains I was supposedly getting in my abdomen with the true story of my studying for grad school oral exams. Very plausible, right? And during the physical exam, when a med student pressed down on my abdomen, I emitted a very loud and pained “Ow, that hurts!” 

      Frankly, I’ve seen actors win Emmy Awards for less persuasive work. 

      Now, before you can say that “Kramer’s gonorrhea” came first, and that the Stanford Medical School and I were merely copying a “Seinfeld” episode, you would be wrong. Yes, Kramer (Michael Richards) and his pal Mickey (Danny Woodburn) did, memorably, play fake patients at a New York medical school. And Kramer was quite upset that the disease he had to fake was a sexually transmitted one. But the “Seinfeld” episode in question didn’t first air until the show’s ninth, and final, season, in March 1998—more than eight years after my article appeared. 

      The irony of it all is that now, many years after my short acting career ended, I am myself suffering from both lower back pain and A-fib– but no ulcer, at least. And unlike Kramer, I have never had gonorrhea. 

      But perhaps my performance in “Lower Back Pain” still exists, floating around in the ether of the Internet or YouTube. If it did, maybe I could learn something useful about treatment, or at least marvel at the acting career I might have had. 

      Bruce Dancis spent 18 years as the Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Sacramento Bee, where he also wrote a syndicated column about DVDs. During a long career in journalism, he served as an editor at the Daily Californian, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Mother Jones, M.I. (Musicians’ Industry) Magazine and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote about politics, history, movies and rock music for these publications, as well as for Rolling Stone’s Record, In These Times, Guitar Player, Keyboard, the East Bay Voice and San Francisco magazine. In the late ‘60s, he was the lead singer in the Ithaca, New York-based rock band Titanic, and was the editor of the SDS-affiliated magazine, The First Issue. He is the author of “Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War” (2014, Cornell University Press) and appears in the documentary film “The Boys Who Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War” (2020).

      He lives in Cardiff, CA, and Putnam Valley, NY.