Putting on the right act: front personalities and playing roles

Like normals but more, we try to learn a lot about how to act from movies and TV. (Which explains one then-friend's nasty remark seemingly out of nowhere at the time, "You watch far too much television!") So here are a couple of quotes from classic shows to start off this post:

Lou Grant: You know how you usually are?
Ted Baxter: Yeah?
Lou: Don't be that way!

Mindy: Just be yourself!™ (stock advice to normals that's only partly true)
Mork: (Huge smile and exaggerated handshake) Ee-spah!
Mindy: Put on an act.

People with AS have often been compared to aliens in their own cultures and because it's often true, we often love fish-out-of-water comedies like "Mork and Mindy." Anyway, normal and AS, we all do it: role-play our way through life, code-switching for different audiences. (One AS person told me he imagines he's in a movie.)

So, seeing how the normal kids play Starsky and Hutch or whatever, the AS person who doesn't know he has AS tries to do the same with the make-believe characters he identifies with. The trouble is if you don't know what the underlying problem is, it'll backfire. But if you do, it's a valuable coping skill, a talent like the Oscar-winning actors have. (For example Robert DeNiro's really the son of beatnik artists. He used to hang around the Mafia kids and imitate them to blend in. Guess what he's made a successful living at?)

I mention Bobby DeNiro because one of his change-of-pace roles has been one of my personas for 25 years: the seemingly straitlaced 1940s priest he played in True Confessions.

One reason it helps is most of the time your model shows how to act normally: not annoying AS stuff like talking at somebody about only one or two pet subjects.

So here are some types whom AS people have tried on or might like to. They're the resident intellectuals of their worlds, who talk "little professor" style like we do, and are by circumstances foreigners or at least outsiders.

Mr. Spock: the greatest TV sci-fi character ever invented. Unusual-looking; IQ off the charts and sounds it; and because he's half-alien from a people for whom emotions are unknown, he doesn't quite understand or accept his own or others' feelings.

Frasier Crane: Class, speaking in the clipped old Mid-Atlantic style Bill Buckley and George Plimpton had (almost a cultured English accent), smart and showing it off with his big words and cultural references... and he manages to pull it off, even outlasting the other Cheers characters on the air. You weren't supposed to like him at first but you did.

(The character's ex-wife, Lilith Sternin, seems to be an AS stereotype, as outwardly cold as Spock and with a flat robot-like voice that says lots of big words.)

Part of the trouble with trying to play a cool and collected type like these is besides "little professor," another aspect of the AS personality that sandbags us is... we have very short fuses, the tolerance for frustration of a toddler. We throw tantrums. Especially of course if we don't know about the AS. So you can literally be a genius but after the first meltdown you get treated like a five-year-old. Front personality shot to hell.

So... learn about the AS, develop a coping strategy for the frustration and you have a shot.