00:00Thank you all for coming on this very steamy and wonderful day to celebrate my great friend, Mr. Glenn Terman.
00:08We've all heard the saying, never meet your heroes, and we all know why.
00:13Because rarely, if ever, does the occasion line up with your expectations.
00:16Almost never does it surpass them.
00:19More often than not, you end up walking away from the anticipated moment dejected,
00:23cursing yourself, wishing you could forget about it and go back to that movie that you made in your head.
00:28The one with very different scenes and end credits.
00:30My advice, just don't do it.
00:33But before I get into that, let me roll back the clock about 50 years to 1975.
00:38I was 10 years old, and I was attending a brand new school in Denver.
00:43We'd moved there from Kansas City, Missouri, and I was experiencing culture shock of leaving behind my extended family
00:49and dropping into a suburban environment surrounded by very few people who looked like me.
00:54I was good at making friends, so I managed, but it was destabilizing.
00:59And one of the saving graces was a great teacher who formally introduced me to acting.
01:03I say formally because according to my parents, acting up and acting a fool was something I was already pretty good at.
01:12Theater was intoxicating.
01:13It was freeing.
01:14It allowed me to express myself, play in the sandbox with the fellow seekers of that thing that made the tuning forks go off in our bellies.
01:20Now, something else happened in 1975.
01:24A movie was released in theaters that I was surely too young to watch but sly enough to sneak into.
01:30It was populated by folks resembling the folks I just moved away from, and I was immediately intrigued by the movie's vibrancy, its energy, its authenticity.
01:38The movie was coolly high.
01:40And it was the first time I laid my eyes on my hero, Glenn Turman.
01:46Now, I could go on and on about his performance in the film, the nuance, the subtleties, the humor, the clear intellect, the cool, the assuredness, his sexiness, his vulnerability.
01:57But what knocked me completely over and burned itself into my memory banks forever is the moment Glenn's character, Preach, kneels over the beaten body of his friend, Cochise, as the L train barrels overhead, drowning out Preach's agonized cries for hell.
02:14The scene should be required viewing for all actors.
02:18Glenn conveyed such pain and heartache and loss in that moment that for me the rest of the world just melted away.
02:24I literally forgot I was sitting in the theater, and I was feeling instead the asphalt and the gravel that was digging into my knees as I knelt under those train tracks right next to him, mourning his dying friend, wishing I could turn back the clock and bring Cochise back to life.
02:40The moment is indelible.
02:42I watched the movie just the other day, tears flowing from my eyes all over again.
02:47You see, unbeknownst to Glenn, my hero had crystallized my path that day.
02:52I knew I wanted to move people in the very same way that Glenn had moved me, transport them to other worlds, set tuning forks off in their bellies that couldn't be ignored.
03:02In that moment, Glenn helped me to understand the empathetic power of acting, shape-shifting, transmuting yourself, disappearing into characters to dig at deeper truths that affect all of us.
03:14Glenn became my due north that day, and luckily some three decades and change later, he became my acting partner, my friend, a mentor, my TV show, as well as my surrogate father, and hopefully a future collaborator, let the circle be unbroken.
03:32So, I say to you again, be mindful, never, ever meet your heroes, unless, of course, somehow, someway, they turn out to be Mr. Glenn Terman.
