BWW Interviews: Jaston Williams Answers the Question, IS THERE LIFE AFTER LUBBOCK?

As Jaston Williams prepares for his show in Austin, I had a chance to speak with him about life in show business and growing up in Texas.

Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into this business.

The laugh line is that I didn't have any other marketable skills. I grew up in the pan handle of Texas and I wasn't a big guy. I think when you're small, your world of football and rodeo and all of that kind of stuff, you build up a sense of humor or you perish. I was the little guy who was always funny and made people laugh and of course the laughter was very addictive. It supported, this is what you can do. And I had some really great teachers who recognized that I might be an actor and even in a small small town. I had some teachers that saw that and they supported me and taught me and helped me, sent me off to summer camps for theater and stuff like that. By the time I was 16, I knew what I wanted to do. I had no idea how difficult it would be or what the odds were against it. I just knew I wanted to do it. You know, ignorance it a great guide sometimes. You don't know when to be afraid. And that's kinda the way I approached it. I just didn't know enough to be afraid. Being afraid can keep a lot of doors closed. In this business, if people sense you're afraid, they smell fear and they don't have time for it. I just chose not to be afraid and had a lot of good breaks and I'm still doing it. I'm the luckiest actor I know. I get to live in Texas and watch my cat kill squirrels in the back yard and have a nice laid back life and we're still in the middle of the business. It's wonderful.

Who were some of your role models when you were growing up?

Kids wanted to grow up to be a doctor or a dentist or the president of the United States; I always wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor. I just thought that she had it down. I loved Elizabeth Taylor as a child. I was always amazed by Jonathan Winters and I actually got to meet him later in life. He was an absolute genius and a huge heart. I think everybody saw that in him in spite of how crazy his comedy was. People always suspected that this big man had a big heart. And he did. Jonathan Winters was somebody who always appealed to me. But, I had the same kind of heroes that any kid in West Texas who goes to the movies. I loved Paul Newman, Lee Marvin, John Wayne until I became politically aware of things. I loved the great comedians. I loved Red Skelton on television. When I was growing up in the 50s and I was really young, there was a show on television called the Gary Moore Show. It was a variety show that came on every Monday night for an hour and that's where Carol Burnett made her television debut. And you would look at Carol Burnett comedy every week and I loved that. I grew up in an era when television was just getting unleashed on us. And frankly, there were only 2 or 3 channels but there was so much more on that was good than there is today, in my opinion. There was so much more that was worth watching. You had fewer choices and it was always better and you had this amazing [group] of actors and writers and performers in television a lot of whom had grown up in vaudeville or who had played the circuits. There was that comedian that was the sneezer and that was his whole thing. He always got in a real good sneeze in any routine and he's better than anybody else. Or you think of Joey Brown who would scream. One of my favorite shows for comedy was the Dick Van Dyke Show. You just never knew what kind of crazy character actor was going to turn up. You just never knew what kind of crazy character actor was going to walk through the door. And you had such a core of fine fine actors that knew each other so well and just played off of each other; just like water rolling off a duck. And then you would see some old crazy walk through the door with his french poodle and there you go. I was lucky to grow up when I did because you had lots of examples of great comic acting on television all the time every day.

What made you decide to stop doing the Tuna shows after all those years?

We did it for 30 years. It was 30 years of my life. I had someone come up to me last year and say, "I didn't see the last one." Well, I never saw Yule Brenner in the "King and I." I missed it. It was 30 years of a life and it was like any other 30 years of a life. It was marvelous and it was ecstatic and it was sad and it was tragic and boring. But, after 30 years...the secret to the Tuna plays was to help make it look like it's the easiest thing in the world to do but, it's actually very very hard. It's hard on you physically. It's hard on your voice. It's hard on your body. You would find yourself on a Wednesday morning after doing it for 29 years and you would think, "I'm in the press van and I'm up at 5:30 in the morning and I'm gonna go do 4 radio shows." I always enjoyed doing the radio shows but you're just tired. You just done it a lot and you're tired. You start to think too about things that you haven't done because you chose to do that. People loved the characters so much. I'll live with that 'til my dying day. We created American icons. I went to the doctor a couple of years ago and my feet were killing me. I could barely walk. He said, "You have tendentious from wearing high heels." I said, "Well, I've worn them for 30 years." He said, "I've never seen this particular type in a man." Also, I have a special needs child my partner and I adopted 9 years ago and he's reaching a place in his life; he's going to have to have major surgeries and we've always known that this was coming once he got older. That's all starting real soon. Frankly, I couldn't be on the road all the time. I could not commit to the kind of runs and feel like the parent that I needed to be for him. So the shows I'm doing now we go out for 4 days, 5 days, a weekend here, a weekend there. I'm doing some teaching at Texas Tech which I really love. It was the next logical step.

Tell us a little bit about IS THERE LIFE AFTER LUBBOCK.

We want people to feel like they are just sitting in our living room. Joe Ely and I and Jo Carol Pierce will be in the version of it that we do in Austin, all grew up in and around Lubbock as did many amazing artists and writers and troubadours, poets and hysterically funny psychopaths. There have been books written about why are all these talented people come out of Lubbock. There are all these different theories about how it happens. I like to say the people start out in Lubbock and come to Austin and get addicted to trees. They see all these trees and they can't believe. Much of the Austin music scene and frankly the art scene is fed by people from Lubbock or people from the Texas pan handle or people from far west Texas. There's an abundance of personality and there's plenty of time to work on your craft. And nature is not friendly; it's not a great place to hang outside, so you stay inside and work on your craft. And Joe Ely and I and Jo Carol Pierce have hung out together for years and tell stories and laugh. We would go out to Joe's house and build a campfire and sit around the campfire and people would tell stories that would just make you cry with laughter. And I thought, "We need to put this onstage." So, it's a very free form evening. We have certain things that we know we're going to do, certain pieces of material that I'm gonna perform, certain songs that Joe's gonna perform, certain things that Jo Carol's gonna do and at the same time there's that absolute freedom. The show starts to go in another direction or a story takes you somewhere else, we go there. It's kind of like a talk show almost. We're up there. We're asking each other questions, we're telling stories; we're inviting questions and contributions from the audience. We tell people we want them to wear house shoes and drink long necks and just relax into it. Jo Carol is my favorite writer. I don't know whose perspective and whose humor I respect more as a writer. And Joe is a screaming genius. He sits there with that guitar and starts singing "Dallas" or "The Crazy Lemon" or whatever; it blows your mind. He's truly a renaissance man and he's kind of a shy guy. People don't know that about him. We get onstage and we start talking and the stories start coming out and it's hysterical. It's a very loving experience among us up there. We love being up there. We love telling the stories and we love sharing them. And we hope that once it's over people will understand more about us and like I said, at the end we open it up and the audience, they can get involved. Ask a question, tell a story, bring something up. We want it to work in that way where it can just turn in any direction it wants to go kind of like the weather in Lubbock. I've written a whole piece in this that I'm really proud of and I'm finishing it up today. What we talk about in the play, we talk about the weather and we talk about the crazy people and we talk about the churches and we talk about honky tonks. We figure those 4 subjects we can get 2 hours out of that easily. But, the weather out there is such a thing and I've written this piece about tornado season, how to behave, the do's and don'ts of survival during tornado season. The first big don't is don't ever scream, "We're all gonna die." That always causes trouble. We have such a delightful time with this and again like I said we want people to feel it's just like being in their home and coming home and listening to people talk. We draw people who are interested in the Tuna stuff. We draw people who are interested in rock and roll and music and just Texans in general. And then of course there are some Texans around here who grew up out there or who experienced that. And those of us who grew up in the pan handle we just kind of have a natural understanding among ourselves with certain aspects of culture. We can get together in a room and the stories start and it only gets crazier. [Someone] was just telling the story about this crazy boy that he took on tour with him who was there to sell t-shirts and he had such a big heart and he also had a big thirst. He'd drink a whole lot of beer and give all the t-shirts away. He kept talking about this guy and finally he kept saying his first name and I said, "What was his last name?" And he told me and I said, "Oh, my God, I was in Boy Scouts with him." We were really misbehaving Boy Scouts. It made total sense that Jackie would go from being one of the worst Boy Scouts in the history of the organization to the guy who gives away all the t-shirts for free. Joe has this story; one of my favorite stories is that he had an uncle out there that made a whole lot of money. He was a big time farmer and his uncle would never drink out of the same glass twice. He was superstitious about it and he had an airplane with a bar in the front seat of the airplane. Joe said he would knock back a shot of whiskey and open the window and throw a glass out going 85 miles an hour. I said, "Well, it's that Lubbock spirit. What can I say?" You just don't find that everywhere.

What do you like to do in your free time besides watch the cat kill the squirrels?

This cat showed up at our house a couple of months ago and she's a wonderful cat. She was totally feral. We gave her trout one night and she is in my lap all the time now. She's a tough cat. This backyard is hers. We named her Jamie Rodriguez and we said she's like one of those Westside girls in San Antonio. She's a real nice girl but she's not afraid to fight. Jamie rules our house.

I'm constantly writing. I have 4 one man shows that I'm taking out. I'm working on a novel that's set in the Texas pan handle in 1968. I'm teaching writing at Texas Tech in the theater department. I go in for a week, 2 weeks at a time and work with specific writers. I'm going to be the narrator for a performance of the Houston Ballet this spring. I'm all over the place. Just because Tuna has stopped doesn't mean anything has slowed down. I don't go out for 6 months at a time now. My son is getting ready to cranial facial surgery and that's coming up in about a month and we're gonna be real close to home taking care of him. He's amazing. We took him out of China and he's an amazing spirit. I tell people I did my retirement when I was young and now I'm doing all of the responsible things in my older age. I think probably everybody's better off for it.

IS THERE LIFE AFTER LUBBOCK? plays at the Paramount Theatre for one night only, Saturday, November 9, 2013 at 8pm. Tickets on sale now at AustinTheatre.org, by calling (512) 474-1221 or in person at the Paramount Theatre Box Office.