The dance is called the Big Bay Shuffle...



According to the pleasant-looking fellow who’s convinced four people to come up on stage to demonstrate, the dance originated in a small town in upstate Michigan; the movements consist of shuffling your feet in time to whatever music is blasting from an imaginary jukebox in a smoke-filled tavern — be it early Rolling Stones, Patsy Cline or Frank Sinatra — while holding one’s elbows and hands as if clutching two beers.

Within minutes, not only does the man strumming the guitar and laughing like crazy have the four “volunteers” sliding their feet in time to the tempo he’s set but the entire audience of a sold-out theatre has risen to their feet, clutching imaginary beers and chanting the refrain to a song that most have heard for the first time scant minutes ago.

Not bad for a guy reminiscing about a road trip that once took him to Big Bay and the Lumberjack Tavern. That he’s doing this successfully, audience grinning, is by itself a success but it’s a genuinely miserable rainy night. In the middle of Michigan. In the dead of winter. On a school night.

Welcome to the slightly surreal world of actor Jeff Daniels...

Actually, to even preface an introduction to Jeff Daniels with the title “actor” is perhaps a little misleading. Sure, Jeff Daniels is unarguably an actor—the blond, 6’3” thespian with the guy-next-door looks has close to fifty films to his credit—but he’s also an accomplished playwright, songwriter, satirist, musician and, according to the scene currently playing out on stage at the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Michigan, a bit of a puppeteer.

The “puppets” in this particular audience are scarcely complaining.

It’s a rare moment during the ninety-minute performance of “Jeff Daniels; Live and Unplugged” that the audience isn’t laughing out loud—some are actually laughing so hard they’re brushing tears from their face.

Those who’ve not seen or heard the 50-year-old performer in a venue other than their local movie theater or on video are perhaps surprised at his comedic timing and sense of humor—sly, dry and occasionally downright sarcastic—and, when not hamming it up on ridiculous lyrics á la Weird Al Yankovic, a singing voice that is surprisingly confident and melodic.

Still, if the gentleness that he brings to a tune about courting his wife of twenty-six years, Kathleen, on her parent’s front porch swing comes as a surprise to an audience once happy to simply equate Jeff Daniels with movies like “Dumb and Dumber,” “My Favorite Martian” and “101 Dalmatians,” Daniels won’t let them stray too far down the road of philosophy. He’ll happily poke fun at his own singing/songwriting abilities by crooning a little ditty titled “If William Shatner Can, I Can Too,” segue into a poignant and sometimes piercing song entitled “If You’re Comin’” with lyrics that question man’s humanity and faith during times of war and then bring the house down again, laughing, with “Recre-ational Vehicle.”

Daniels wrote the monologue, interestingly enough, about his own family’s experiences with an RV, well before landing the role in Columbia Pictures’ upcoming spring release entitled “RV.”

Starring opposite actor/comedian Robin Williams, Daniels plays an enthusiastic, even manic, RV aficionado who tutors Williams’ family in the fine points of living—and loving—life on the road.

The movie, due out April 28, is a comedy and, according to Daniels, not that different from some of his own experiences in an RV, first buying on a “trial” basis and then as a devotee.

“I used to go on golf trips where I’d rent an RV and, you know, twelve of us would go on some golf weekend thing,” Daniels reminisces, “and as an actor on movies you’re in RVs all the time on set. I did a couple of independent films in ’98, ’99 and 2000 here in Michigan so I just got an RV, a Dolphin, from Lloyd Bridges Traveland here in Chelsea and just bought it for a year to see if I was a ‘renter’ or a ‘buyer.’”

Turns out that Daniels was a ‘buyer’ and he has turned the first year of owning his original Dolphin into a song that not only riffs on his first long-distance trip with his family of five—he and Kathleen have three children, now ages 21, 18 and 15—but that goes into great detail and mention of the buying experience at Lloyd’s dealership.

The little town of Chelsea, Michigan, population 4,300, is where both Daniels and his wife grew up— both of their extended families continue to live in Chelsea—and he and Kathleen opted to raise their kids there as opposed to Hollywood. In fact, the Purple Rose Theatre where Daniels is performing over the Christmas holidays was founded by Daniels, named after his breakthrough film debut in Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo,” and with a fair number of locals in the audience tonight, the mention of Lloyd Bridges Traveland during Daniels’ performance of “Recreational Vehicle” brings out the small-town whooping that acknowledges a home-town boy staying true to his roots.

The monologue talks about Daniels’ original purchase of a vehicle boasting the ability to “...sleep six comfortably,” his wife’s subsequent insistence that they spend their inaugural night on the road in a Best Western, his leaving his wife behind unintentionally at a truck stop and the hilarious antics that followed as Daniels and the three kids turn around on an interstate twenty-eight miles down the road to go back and get her even as she is hitching a ride with a stranger and trying to chase them down. The story ends well— Kathleen’s ride provider turns out to be a safe, if wacky, theology student and the Daniels family reunites whole and in time to complete their vacation as a family “…all five of us holding hands in a chain for the rest of the vacation and with the running joke for the next few years being ‘where’s mom?’” he jokes.

Daniels’ first year of owning the Dolphin may have created grist for his monologue but at the end of the twelve months, he seriously upgraded.

“I own a 1998 Gulfstream Tour Master, and we do not,” Daniels admonishes, grinning, “call it an RV. We call it a bus and if you refer to it as an RV we stop the bus and make you get out and walk around it (laughs) and then allow you to get back in. It has airbrakes (Daniels mimics the sound of airbrakes) and it’s a big, big deal.”

That Daniels understands the importance of timing, both dramatic and comedic, and can shift deftly between drama and comedy shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s watched the versatile performer slide seamlessly between family-friendly films like “Fly Away Home,” “Pleasantville,” and “Trial and Error” to the pain and drama of “Good Night and Good Luck” and “The Squid and the Whale.” Daniels’ dark portrayal of a fading writer in “The Squid and the Whale” won him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor and the Hollywood rumor mill is buzzing about his being a dark-horse candidate for a Best Actor Oscar nomination for the same role.

Daniels seems nonplussed by both the Golden Globe nomination and the buzz about an Oscar nomination. “Kathleen and I are enjoying the buzz,” he acknowledges, “and we’ll have fun with it as long as it lasts but you never know in this business and it is what it is. We have a life that’s in the business and a life that’s here, completely outside of the business.”

That ‘here’ is Chelsea and while he and Kathleen keep a small apartment in New York (“…an old, 2-bedroom 64-step walk-up, thank you very much. No ‘eastside” for this guy,” he jokes) for his work needs (“…and Kathleen’s shopping needs. She’s a power shopper.”) they don’t anticipate moving to New York, even part-time, until all three of the kids are grown.

Daniels grew up in Chelsea, but, after leaving Michigan at age 20 to join the Circle Repertory Theatre in New York, he explains, “... I also grew up in New York, at least artistically. I spent ten years in New York, the most over-caffeinated city in the world but it’s where I go to relaxwhere I can exhale. I can relax more in New York than I can in the Bahamas.”

“This (Chelsea) is great for the kids,” Daniels continues, “and, you know, when our youngest graduates from high school I can spend more time in New York and still have a theater company and family here. The Midwest will still be home…but New York is where I exhale. I need therapy (laughs) but then I’d have no career.”

Another place Daniels exhales is while on the road in his Travel Master.

“You know, there’s something very Zen about it. For example, Kathleen and I went from Michigan to Vancouver last May to shoot ‘RV’ and so a week before (the trip) I tell the RV (production folks) ‘don’t fly me out, Kathleen and I are going to drive’ and they went ‘WHAT?’ but we’re already on the road! I love sleeping in truck stops, I love pulling in behind some convenience store.”

When teased about his enthusiasm over truck stops, Daniels just laughs. “I like to think of it as eccentric. You know, you’ve got John Travolta flying Boeing 727s, you’ve got Tom Cruise flying his private jet…the last thing we need, in my opinion, is another actor in the sky. So, better that I do something that I’m trained to do (and) I’ve been trained to drive (grins) for thirty years or whatever. So I love it. The journey becomes as important, if not more so, than the destination. That’s what I’ve learned from the RV thing.”

Whether to St. Louis and back or to a youth baseball tournament and back, “it’s all about the journey,” Daniels continues. “Sleeping in truck stops, pulling in between the semi (truck) guys, walking up to guys you don’t know from Edmonton and going ‘what you haulin’?’ I get off on that!”

Daniels scoffs at the stereotype of going from Wal-Mart parking lot to Wal-Mart parking lot. “No, won’t do that. Truck stop to truck stop. RV parks….love those RV parks. Moses Lake, Washington? Love it. Stop here, stay the night, it’s great. You just plug in, and, I don’t know, there’s an independent, self-contained (sense of) you don’t need anybody else.”

Although Daniels admits that he’s fairly careful about introducing himself at an RV park simply because of an actor’s “recognition factor” he also immediately adds “…but I will say that when I do get recognized there’s a kind of respect, a kind of appreciation, you know, RVer to RVer, that happens in an RV park. I don’t make this stuff up (laughs) you know. And when you pull in, you hit your airbrakes. If you have airbrakes, you make sure everybody hears them.”

Daniels strums his guitar a bit more, tells some amusing stories about “ultimate tailgate parties” on the bus at his kids’ hockey games, jokes about letting his wife drive the bus (“she drove it for half an hour once. In South Dakota, nice and flat. It was about all I could handle”) and only smirks when asked about gas mileage.

“I have no idea. It’s a diesel, it lasts a long time (and) I can drive all day on a big tank. That’s not the point,” he grins, “and if you’re worried about that you shouldn’t get one, right?”

But, in keeping with Daniels’ apparent fondness for switching gears between the serious and the light-hearted, he begins talking some more about the “exhale” he experiences when on the road.

“It’s the white noise, the ‘hmmmmmm’ of the road, it’s like a metronome. I know a screenwriter, Gary Ross who wrote ‘Pleasantville,’ who said to me ‘you know, when I get stuck on a script, I go out and drive and it’s the white noise of the road that will unlock it.’ It’s a kind of meditation, vehicular meditation. And you just drive and in a way there’s something psychological about leaving whatever you were stuck on or whatever’s bothering you behind and you keep going on. You’re driving to the answer; you’re driving to the truth.

Or whatever (laughs) but it’s true. I have a notepad next to me. I probably wrote three or four songs, just jotting down notes, going through North Dakota once.”

Did he pull over to make the notes?

“No. God, no! That’s for amateurs.”