Where in the World Is Marco Perella?
“I have a big fan base of five-to-ten-year-olds,” Austin actor Marco Perella confides in his new book Adventures of a No Name Actor (BloomsburyUSA, $24.95). “I get invited to speak at elementary schools and Cub Scout pack meetings. I’m a big draw at after-school library parties.” This is because Perella once played in “Rushin’ to the Bone,” an episode of Wishbone, the popular PBS series. Wishbone, for those of you who don’t tune into children’s series on public television, is a Jack Russell terrier who solves mysteries. In “Rushin’ to the Bone,” he is mistaken as the spokesdog for a Mr. MacPooch dog commercial, and since episodes of Wishbone are based on literary classics, Wishbone is smack-dab in the middle of a case of mistaken identity that hearkens back to Gogol‘s play The Inspector General. (Perella plays the artsy director of the Mr. MacPooch commercial.) When Perella shows up at these functions to speak to children about Wishbone, they invariably ask him how the producers get Wishbone to wear so many different costumes. He tells them, “It’s easy. They just reach down behind his ear and turn off the switch. Then he’s nice and still while they dress him.” That perverse humor runs throughout Adventures of a No Name Actor, in which Perella also relates that he had an agent in Dallas who would say “Don’t talk to me!” and “Why are you looking at me?!” when he tried to say hello to her. Perella discovered that when she talked to young actors, she said he had no talent: “According to reports, she relates an anecdote about one on my visits to her office. In her story I am talking to her and she decides to test my powers of observation by slowly sliding down in her chair, getting shorter and shorter behind her desk. She maintains that I never notice a thing. Therefore I’ll never make it as an actor. How was I to know she wasn’t being slowly sucked down the throat of a giant lizard under her desk? I wouldn’t want to interfere with something like that.”
“Who wants to read another book by some rich, famous, successful actor?” asks Molly Ivins, a friend of Perella’s, in her foreword to the book. “Especially when we can hear from Marco Perella. He’s un-rich, un-famous and perfectly hilarious. Besides, he wrote this book himself.” Ivins and Perella will be at BookPeople on Tuesday, June 12, at 7pm… Enter your 2,500-word or less short story in our Tenth Annual Short Story Contest — details on page 38… Journalist Ted Conover, who wanted to write about life inside America’s penal system but was denied access so he temporarily became a prison guard instead, will discuss his book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, which is just out in paperback, on Wednesday, June 13, at 7pm at BookPeople… Literacy Austin‘s 12th annual book sale, BookFest 2001, will be held June 8-10 at Northcross Mall. There’s an Early Bird sale on Friday evening from 4-9pm; for $10, customers will have first access to 100,000 new and gently used books at bargain prices. The regular sale, Saturday from 9am-9pm and Sunday, noon-6pm, is $2 admission. BookFest raises 20-25% of the yearly operating budget for Literacy Austin. See Arts listings for more information… Writing on the Air, a production of the Writers’ League of Texas Radio Collective, features an interview with Larry McMurtry this Saturday, June 9, at 4pm on KOOP 91.7FM.
This article appears in June 8 • 2001.