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:: HAL SPARKS INTERVIEW ::
But Hal Sparks is a lot more than the sum of those highly unique parts. Hal's a musician and a damn good one. He's got an album coming out this year with his band Zero 1. Thanks to his love of Kiss and metal they've got a sound that harkens back to days of Winger, Ratt, and Cinderella but with a fresh current edge. In this time of bands that sound like they've been cloned from the same gene pool it's a welcome burst of wailing air. But that's not all this native of Kentucky has up his sleeve. He's been doing martial arts since he was a teenager. Not only can he kick your ass when it comes to pop culture, but he can simply kick your ass. He can work a spear, bow staff AND a sword. But he's such a nice guy he probably wouldn't harm a hair on your head. Unless you bad mouth Paul Stanley, then I can't be responsible for what he does to you. And if you are bad mouthing The Starchild, then you probably do need your ass kicked, and I would cheer him on. But I digress... Hal Sparks is one of the most interesting and opinionated guys in Hollywood. He's also one of the most enjoyable to talk to. I was lucky enough to get some time to talk with Hal and we covered topics ranging from racism, religion, video games, music, and shaving Natalie Portman's head (he's a Fanboy, of course he loves Amidala.) *photos courtesy of www.halsparks.com and www.sparksfan.com
FG: Hi Hal, thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. HS: No worries. FG: Just so you know I’m audio taping this so I can transcribe it later. HS: I think that’s wise. I tend to talk fast. FG: I tend to slur when I get excited so. HS: Great, well you know what I told. Don’t drink and interview I’ve told you a hundred times. FG: Yeah, I know but the vodka is so damn good. FG: Well let’s get started and I’m going to do this right by asking you first: what question are you most tired of being asked? HS: Hmm…are you gay? FG: Somehow I knew you were going to say that. HS: That and uhm…that would be the big one. Everything else I’m pretty good with. FG: I can see where that would get tiring. HS: That and uhm…which do you prefer, the empirical or the existential, and explain your answer. That’s always a pain when I’m in a hurry. FG: Yeah I can see that that would be up there on the list too. FG: So this is the last season for Queer as Folk, which is sad. How are you dealing with that and are you going to miss being Michael? HS: I would say about missing it…it’s kinda like one of things like graduating college. You’ve been doing it awhile. Your parents are aware of the final aspect of it, the diploma. But you’ve been in it the entire time and you’re looking forward to moving on to other things. Uhm, and I don’t think I’ll miss playing Michael at all. I’ll miss some of the people I got to work with, not seeing them on a regular basis. But playing Michael was a hard job. It was a tall order. FG: Yeah it was. You did a great job at it. So what do you have up and coming, what can we expect from you? I know you’ve got the record coming out. HS: Yeah. And I’m on tour doing stand up so I’m working on an hour special of that. We’re looking to have that out in November. It’ll be on DVD. And I’m working on a Chinese/American co-production feature film that I’ll be doing in China that I’m very excited about. FG: That’s great! I was wondering if you were ever going to do anything like that…I loved your reel on your website. HS: Oh thanks.
Jean-Claude VanDamme eat your heart out FG: I was actually going to e-mail you and ask if you liked Evanescence and then I saw that and was like…I guess he does. HS: That is so funny. I just loved the juxtaposition of soft an hard that’s in that particular song. FG: Oh god it was beautiful. HS: It worked really well with that piece. FG: She’s very spiritual, Amy Lee, with her music. HS: They consider themselves Christian I think. FG: Well I think, they are trying to break away from that label. It’s hard though with songs like Tourniquet. But they are so good. It’s like if Sarah McLachlan and Linkin Park had a baby. HS: True that. Only good. Linkin Park had a really great first album. And they just became mechanical after that. FG: Well they just kept doing remixes, over and over again. HS: Even their newer songs, I felt like the analogies on the first album, like “crawling in my skin” great way of putting it. It’s a poetic way of saying how you feel. And then to write “I’ve become so numb” you know what I mean. FG: It’s like you’re rehashing the same stuff. HS: Yeah I mean who hasn’t said that and what does it mean? FG: It’s like you’re trying to be this…their trying too hard to be HS: what they were. FG: Yeah. HS: Or be outsiders or something. FG: Yeah, exactly. HS: You know what my big pet peeve is with some musicians when they write the “I’m really famous now and it’s really hard” song. FG: (laugh) HS: You know what I mean? FG: Yeah exactly. HS: There is a lot of that going on. Even like “Blurry” by Puddle of Mud. It was on their first album. (singing) Everything’s so blurry..” It’s like okay, calm down dude. FG: It’s the Eddie Vetter syndrome. HS: Yeah, or George Michael when he went through that “I want to alone” phase. FG: But look at me! HS: Right exactly. Well stop wearing silver when you go outside. FG: Yeah the gold lame’ kinda attracts the eye. If you don’t want to be noticed, kinda go away from that style. HS: Yeah…might want to rethink that. FG: Well another question I had for you is, I know you’re from Kentucky. HS: Right. FG: Well I’m from Southeast Missouri/Southern Illinois…so kinda near there. Growing up I’ve had to in the past deal with prejudice and right now in my life I’m dealing with it with my family. Did you see any of that growing up and after Queer as Folk did you have to deal with any of that or possibly any of your family have to deal with any of that? HS: Any? (laugh) HS: Where do we start? I’m part Indian and when Cher’s “Half-Breed” came out I was like 6 years old and would get my ass kicked every week. FG: Oh lord, that’s ridiculous. HS: One of my best friends growing up was gay. And was never able to come out to his family, even now. His father is one of the most racist people I’ve ever met personally. FG: His father? HS: Yeah, my gay friend. And he works for the state. FG: That doesn’t surprise me. HS: No. You know you have to understand these places breed in thinking. I have 10 minutes of stand up on the small town lie. You know the idea that small towns are more real. Which is not even true. FG: They are real. But it’s not the pretty real that you think. HS: Well and it’s artificial. You know I always remember, like these aging beer chicks. They’re freckle faced and overweight now. And in the old days they would sauce it up quite a bit. And they would always do this southern belle act. The funniest thing would be when they were going (southern drawl inserted here) “I don’t know how you could be moving Los Angeles, everyone out there is so fake.” And with this great glazed look on their face. FG: Oh I know. Currently I’m married to a guy I met over the internet. And he’s half black. My mother and father did not know that. I was kicked out of my house and to this day my mom and dad have pretty much disowned me. HS: Wow. FG: Yeah but I stuck by my guns. HS: Here’s the thing too. And I think people realize this more and more, and it certainly helps there are like 9 billion people in the world now. But seldom are people born into their families. You know, whoever biologically went through the motions of bringing you here, aren’t necessarily the people you should be hanging around with. FG: Exactly right. HS: You know there is something to having relatives who aren’t that. Because it puts you on the road to the people who you should be around, people you can build a progressive future with. Everybody I know who’s kind of a momma poppa boy type, you know they have a really close knit family haven’t really accomplished that much in their life. And I mean that not just in a business sense but in an emotional and psychological sense as well. FG: Right. In my family, thanks to my mother, my grandfather died before I really got to see him in like 5 years. I mean I walked into the room and he was dead. And they kept telling me that he doesn’t want to see you, he doesn’t want to talk to you, he’s sickened by you or whatever. And it was so not true. It’s a sad thing. People keep saying we are so progressive in America and we’ve come a long way, but there are still places like that. HS: Well it’s certainly not 1968 or 1952. And we’ve come a long way. I did a thing today were I broke ground on a gay and lesbian elder housing development in LA, low cost housing for gay and lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people in Hollywood, in the LA area. Even 7 years ago that would have been a ridiculous notion. And 30 years ago it would have been burned down in an afternoon. It’s heartening to know that number one, the steady march towards progress, sort of the liberal progressive ideal, is unstoppable. FG: We actually have, believe it or not, Oregon where I’m at now. I have a thing on the website where this senator…they are trying to pass a bill here to give nearly equal rights to same sex couples who are married as straight couples have. He said “what’s next, equal rights for pedophiles?” HS: Well you’ve got understand, how old is this dude and his ideals? At the same time you can’t be shocked by that. There’s a reason why this life and this living is cutting edge. Is because it’s been a certain way for a really long time, and enacting any kind of change on this level is gonna be hard. It’s going to be ice skating up hill. But you do make it eventually. And the same people who said that kind of stuff, said the same thing about white people marrying and being with black people. And had they been right your husband would have never been born. FG: Exactly. HS: Because he’s a mix. And you know how great he is, cause he’s yours. FG: That’s right. HS: And the notion that his parents wouldn’t have been able to be together and make him is noxious, it’s retarded. However at that time those people were so entrenched in that idea it’s just couldn’t be otherwise. And if you brought it up they equated whites marrying blacks to whites marrying animals. It’s the same thing to them. You have to understand that’s what his mindset is and if you are going to try and move forward in anyway there are people who are going to try and stop you. And they will be as extreme as they possibly can be. FG: Oh yeah. HS: It’s true, I’ve found this to be true in any area where you try to be extraordinary. If you want to stand up and be a community leader, if you want to try and start a recycling program in your area, anything out of the norm and try to move anything forward a little bit. The first primary reaction will be quite negative for most people. And there will be really hard liners who don’t see its value at all. Those people will really try to make it difficult for you. But you know isn’t that part of the game? Isn’t that part of what makes life challenging? I’ll be glad when all of that falls away, but when it does we’ll meet a new challenge too. FG: Anything worth fighting for is going to be hard. But it’s great that there is people out there like Basic Rights of Oregon and what you’ve done yourself that’s just a great thing. HS: Well yeah, and I don’t know how else to be. I certainly wouldn’t wanna. But had I not kind of been sickened by the racism that I grew up around, I might not of had the chutzpah when the time came to really face what was going on. FG: Well let’s go on to something lighter (laugh) HS: Yeah that’s fine. Oh believe me I can just gob on about almost anything, much to the shegren of my friends. FG: (laugh) Pretty much same here. FG: The gamer network has become a second home to you. HS: Yes. FG: I love it because it’s a great network and I’m an addict too. What are you addicted to now and have you gotten your hands on a PSP yet? HS: I haven’t and I’m trying to avoid it because I know it will take up SO much of my time. FG: It’s so cool. HS: Yeah I’ve heard. I was going to take the train down to ComiCon tomorrow and I was thinking maybe I should just buy one to have on the train. FG: Then you won’t look up when anybody is talking to you. HS: Yeah exactly. I play games like a generation afterward. I buy used games to save myself some money, which is like the only area where I’m frugal. It’s totally stupid. Someone will give me a game for free and I’ll start playing it like crazy. I just got True Crimes Streets of LA from a friend. FG: Oh that’s a really fun one. HS: I just finished Resident Evil 4. That was really fun, and really nerve wracking There were a couple of times that really just spooked me. Like a good horror film will. FG: That’s a really good game for that. Like those tongue things in the original one just scared the crap out of me. HS: Oh yeah! And it’s so irritating the brain things, and like the tentacles come out of their brain and smack you around. And it’s like “Hey! The hell?! I just shot you with a shotgun at point blank range and your just staggering back? What’s that about?” FG: Well Extreme Dodgeball that looks awesome. HS: Oh yeah, it’s fun! FG: What kind of psychotic sadist created that game? HS: I think it was a gym teacher that when they passed the law that you couldn’t hit kids anymore thought “Well I’ll let the little bastards hit themselves! Here, it’s a game!” FG: I was going to say is this some kind of payback for a childhood scarred by dodgeball? HS: For me? No it was just like “what a fun way to spend an afternoon.” And they were paying like, I was playing for a charity so I was like yeah. FG: It looks awesome. HS: It was pretty fun. I was pretty goofy. It was hard, the more you take it seriously…you get serious really fast playing that game. FG: Yeah cause you get hurt. HS: Yeah. I got beamed in the face really hard during one game. But I guess the main thing was. The other players on my team, I was playing for charity, but they get paid per win. FG: Oh really? HS: Yeah, and I didn’t find that out till like half way through. So I’m having a good time right, and then oh wait a minute, their rent might depend on this. OOOPS. FG: Yeah, that’s a good thing to tell the captain. HS: Yeah, that would be a nice thing. So once I found that out, I was like…oh man I gotta knuckle down.
KISS ARMY FOREVER!!! FG: Well, Paul Stanley is a god. HS: Yes it’s true. FG: I just want to get that straight right now. Have you seen or heard any of his performance in Phantom of the Opera, or as I call it Kiss meets the Phantom of the Opera? HS: (laugh) Right…I downloaded some bootlegs of the audio. FG: yeah I got a couple of those too. HS: You gotta understand, I hate musicals but I love Paul so much I listened to it. FG: I thought he was good. HS: I’m sure the dudes got pipes and he can certainly sell the emotion of a song. I never had a question about that, anymore than I questioned Sebastian Bach’s ability to do Jekyll and Hyde. FG: Oh yeah I wanted to see that too. HS: Paul taught me everything I know about dealing with fans. FG: Oh really? HS: He’s been so cool, not only with fan access but respect. He recognizes, more than most, that the fans are the boss. Record execs, TV execs, producers, directors, those people like to think they are the boss, but they are really middle men. The boss is the person who writes the check and the person who writes the check in the entertainment industry is the fans. FG: That’s great, and he does. So what do you consider the best KISS concert you’ve ever seen and can you remember the opening acts? HS: Wow…that’s a tough one. I’ve been to so many good ones. Animalize tour, it was actually the Asylum tour. That was really an offshoot of the Animalize tour. FG: Those two were pretty close together. HS: Slaughter opened for them, which was pretty funny. FG: They opened on Hot in the Shade too. HS: Yeah that’s true. Who opened for them on the Asylum tour…I’ve seen every tour since 1980 so. FG: I saw two of the Hot in the Shade and Winger opened for them. And Vixen. HS: I haven’t seen them with Vixen but I’m a big Winger fan. FG: I am too. I’ve got an acoustic version of Miles Away. HS: Oh wow. Wanna know something cool? Doug Pinnick who is producing my record? He’s the bass player for King’s X. FG: Oh really? HS: Yeah, he’s working on or just finishing a project of 80’s style metal where he’s singing with Kip Winger and Reb Beach. FG: Oh that sounds awesome. HS: Yeah I’m very excited. FG: They really don’t give Winger enough props man, they’re really good. HS: Yeah for real. I mean that’s hard core well done pop metal, period. His big thing was, I guess his wife passed away and it really wrecked him. I don’t know the whole story behind it, but it happened kind of suddenly. And he started putting out acoustic albums and he was really messed up. FG: Oh god, that’s awful. HS: Kinda like what happened to Gene Wilder, who’s brilliant you know. Immeasurably brilliant, and then Gilda died and he just kind of retreats. FG: Yeah, he looked real rough the last time I saw him in an interview. HS: Yeah I mean he’s been through it. FG: Yeah but it still hurts you know. This is someone you grew up with. HS: You just want to give the dude a hug. FG: Well if you want I can e-mail you the MP3 of that song, it’s really beautiful, just him and a guitar. HS: Yeah! Please do I would love to hear that. FG: Well, did you ever nearly lose a limb trying for a pick? I did. HS: Yeah. Uhm I saw Kiss on their club tour at the Troubadour. Round the Carnival of Souls album. And I caught an Eric Singer drum stick. FG: Oh god, I bet you got mobbed didn’t you? HS: Yeah, and it was this big wrestling match. And it boiled down to me and this big fat dude who had his arms all the way around me. He had hold of the top and bottom of the stick and I had the middle of it. All I could do was my arms were longer than his, so I pushed straight forward and he lost his grip. I fell straight to the floor and shoved it down my pants. I still have it. FG: (laugh) That’s awesome. That’s a fan. HS: yeah, and there are times like now. If I want something I can probably go talk to them about getting something from them. That’s nice about being famousish, especially since now people know I’m such a huge metal fan, they see me at these on VH1. And I’m the dude that knows the words to their songs. When they bring up Skid Row, I know the tunes. When they bring up Cinderella I know the tunes. And I’m not just knowing them because they played a clip and now I know the song. It’s real clear that I’ve sung them in my car a hundred times. So when I run into these guys on the road uhm, they’re really pretty cool about it. I’m wearing a Cinderella shirt right now as a matter of fact. Anyways I was a the House of Blues recently and I saw Black Label Society and Zach walked off stage and he threw his guitar at the sound guy, and he picked up another one and it looked like he was going to start playing again and he threw it to the crowd. There was this huge fight for it. First of all, no one is leaving there with that guitar. Well, security moved in instantly and took it away. You’re not going to leave with that thing. Once they stopped wrestling for it they came in and just took it from them. FG: Somebody probably lost a finger for that. HS: Yeah, but in that type of situation, if it was the audience at OZZFEST, it’s like dude…keep it. You can just rivet it to a wall over your bed that is used by nobody else by yourself, knock yourself out.
Rocking the house with Zero 1 FG: Your band mate Robert Hall, directed Lightning Bug and he worked on Buffy and Angel. I know he did the make up for you on Talk Soup. What brought you guys together as friends. HS: Well you are in the makeup chair for quite a while. I would get in at like 5 am to tape at 9. So we would have a lot of time to talk. He’s a huge KISS fan. He’s got this tattoo on his right arm that’s a skull with all of the different KISS eyes on it. FG: Oh that’s cool. HS: Yeah, it’s really neat. Uhm and we would just talk about KISS songs and what big fans we were. And that was just instantly like, we’re brothers. And you know how you meet someone, and there’s just a vibe you know, like this is a really great person? And they’d be cool to hang around. FG: That’s really cool. Have you ever had him do something crazy to you for Halloween? HS: Well, he gave me a vampire brow and red eyes one year. And then last year he helped me tattoo my arm and made me all bagged out looking with dark circles under my eyes cause I went as heroin chic. FG: That sounds great. Now do you think Lightning Bug was semi-autobiographical for him? It sounds really amazing, I can’t wait to see it. HS: It’s got some heavy stuff in it. And you can tell that he and I had the same experience of growing up in the South. They paint this picture of this is the simple life, where the spirit craves complexity. And if it doesn’t get it from its surroundings it will make it up, and not in a nice way. FG: Man, that is pretty deep. HS: Yeah, pretty heavy. FG: I saw an interview where you spoke about going to the Forbidden City and how you didn’t get lost. And it felt like you’d been there before. Do you think reincarnation is a possibility and have you done any other research into that or any other forms of mysticism? HS: To me it just boils down to your philosophical idea of absolutes. If you believe we are impermanent, meaning you believe there is a spirit beyond the physical body then that impermanent attaches to anything else that is impermanent. Which means it has to be beyond time as well. And beyond physical matter. So if you are impermanent then you are just that. You are beyond space and time. So if you are, what’s to stop you from coming back again and again? And what is this place? If it’s a place where you come to experience and learn things is it a school? A larvae school for growing spirits? And if so what grade is it? Is it 12th grade? Is it time to graduate from this planet or is it 3rd grade? I happen to think its 3rd grade because I haven’t been that impressed. I like video games as an analogy for what life is and for reincarnation. Because in video game you can come back as many times as you want. The idea for coming back as many times as you want is very attractive right away, until you realize it has to mean something. You can’t come back all the time just for nothing. Same for a video game, you can come back over and over again and it gets easier each time and more boring. It’s not until you face the big bosses at the end of each level and finish each level that you start to grow any kind of skill. FG: That’s a pretty good way of looking at it. HS: Yeah so each life time is like the next level of a vide game. In the middle of it you might die several times, but you come back and hit again in different forms, different shapes, and giving yourself different attributes, each time trying to improve yourself. The idea I think of living is to become more loving, to become closer to the expansive energies of love and hope and those kind of things and to avoid the contractive energies of hate and jealousy and anger and greed. That kind of thing. FG: And that’s how it should be. I totally agree. HS: And believe me, I don’t think there’s a hell. I don’t think you go to hell for doing bad things. I don’t think you evolve. You evolve or you devolve or you stagnate. And if you evolve you get to be a bigger and bigger kind of spirit. That at a certain point you move on from having to be here at all. And then you become one of these avatars that turns to all of us and says “It’s just a game you know.” It is not the biggest thing. And then they allow themselves to be killed, and we’re all let off the hook for our fear of death. They split and go off to work some place else. I mean I don’t think Jesus is coming back, he’s got work to do someplace else. FG: That is a very cool way of looking at it. HS: Thanks. And being more of a fan of Buddhist philosophy where we all can become the Buddha. Not just some guy who magically became the guy. FG: Right, he learned. HS: Right, he learned and we can all learn. It’s just a path to openness and goodness. And I think that modern, our modern religion, and by modern I mean 2000 years. I don’t mean the ancient ones like Buddhism, Paganism, Taoism, or Wicca or Native American. I mean in the last 2000 years sort of modern western theocracy is the equivalent of 18th century technology. It functioned at one point, but it doesn’t work anymore. And when you try to relate the template of the cotton gin over the Intel processor, you know, or the PSP and you try to force them to work that way. It’s like trying to use your Nintendo as a butter churn. It doesn’t help you at all. I’m sure you could hammer nails with a computer. FG: But it won’t do any good. HS: Right exactly. And that’s kinda what we do with our brains these days. Instead of opening ourselves up to more expansive reasoning and thought, people try to constrict themselves with 3 or 4 highways of thought. And try to vary as little as possible, so they can, I love this quote, “so they can tip toe through life and arrive at death safely.” FG: And that’s not living. HS: Then you don’t learn your lesson and you have to come back again and go through it again. Because you didn’t expand your energy and you didn’t improve your ability enough so you could have a better body and a better mind, and give yourself more talent, that kind of thing. A lot of people when I explain that to them go “Well what about handicapped people?” Like they are being punished or blab blah. I think that handicapped people they might be the highest form of humanity in that they, well let’s say you play Doom and you turn on the God feature a few times and you’ve got endless ammo and endless strength. All this kind of stuff. And you played it and played it and you realize you’re not any good because of it. It’s fun for about twelve seconds but having everything and being able to do anything you wanted every second gets old after awhile. FG: Well you don’t learn anything from it, you don’t evolve anywhere you just keep pushing through and blowing things up. HS Right and that’s when you go…okay screw this I’m just going to go through the whole thing using the knife. FG: You’ll be around for a very long time. HS: Yeah it’s hard but there’s certain handicapped people, Stephen Hawkin is a good example, of where you go “I’m going to give myself all these different limitations and see if I can still live an extraordinary life.” A lot of people with his circumstance too, its amazing at how much joy they seem to have a lot of the time. My sister has a handicap so I deal with it everyday. FG: But they handle it. They smile, they just do. HS: Yeah I think it’s because they recognize all the extras that we gave ourselves didn’t necessarily make us happier. Not that they have to be counterproductive, but a lot of people will think that will solve it but it won’t. And since it’s just about expanding your energy, its like wow…I didn’t dump all of my energy into making the perfect body but what I did was allow my soul to experience more. The touch of a person or the smile from a stranger means so much more to me. And that’s a valuable lesson to learn. FG: It’s too bad too many people don’t. HS: Yeah, but they will eventually. FG: Yeah it’s going to take some time. HS: Yeah there’s this chorus in Miracles that says “You don’t have a choice in learning your lesson, you have a choice in learning it through joy or through pain” the sooner you learn it, the happier you’ll be. FG: Exactly HS: You fight it, it’s just going to get tougher, like an assignment you put off. FG: If you procrastinate you’re going to suffer more. HS: Yeah. FG: That is a great way of looking at it. HS: The nice thing is it makes me a relatively nice person. It gives me a lot more patience and respect and that if anything, if you’ve got to plan that should be what your religion does for you. It should bring you closer to that. FG: And I get in a lot of arguments with people over Christianity because that’s how I see it. You need to be tolerant and you need to love, that’s basically how I see it. HS: That’s the whole ironic part of these fundamentalist side of theocratic dominionist culture which is what it really is. What modern Christianity states what it represents a small fraction of the religiously distracted power hungry types. FG: Yeah, as long as you believe like me you’ll be fine. HS: Right because they don’t believe their thoughts have any value unless other people share it. You can’t be the only Christian in town. FG: And that just furthers getting what they want, and as long as it gets them what they want that’s fine. But if it goes against their judgment… HS: Well they’re scared. You know there are a lot of kids running around dressed as adults. And the problem is where they’ve moved out of their home, and they are afraid to live without their parent. So they concoct a giant parent in the sky and their relationship with their parent is the one they had or the one they wanted which is usually one that tells you what to do and when to do it. They antimorphoize the sky and make him dad. And any variation on that they have to defend because he’s not actually there to do it himself. It’s like defending what your teddy bear wants to do for lunch. Little kids will do that, they’ll go “he hates spaghetti” and get made about it. FG: You’re right, they are totally afraid. HS: And there’s a certain level of pity you can have for that or whatever. I know you’re trying to come up with a system that makes sense of the world and that kind of thing and you’re welcome to that. But it stops where you try to limit other peoples ability to live. FG: Mine is believe however ever you wish, but don’t harm or force it on people who don’t want it. HS: That’s one of the other problems is “go forth and tell all nations” has been read into you must be an evangelical Christian or your not a Christian at all. One of the things you can do with an idea that you not completely believe yourself is sell it, because other people believing it will give you fortitude. FG: It will justify what you are doing. HS: yeah, you know the funny thing is it doesn’t dissuade from other Christians who have some deep thought about it and it really resonates with them. There’s a difference between that and people who are nuts. Like there are people who are big fans of Frank Miller and like his comics and there’s people who think he is speaking to their brain. There still both lumped into the same group there not. FG: Sin City rocked. HS: It did. The first truly R-rated movie I’ve seen in a while. Like movies that were R-rated in the 80’s and 70’s. FG: Yeah exactly like the old school stuff. Well, I’m sure I have to wrap this up, but I’ve got a couple of geek questions for you really quick. What piece of memorabilia do you own that shows true geekness? HS: Uhm…wow. I have an autographed Weird Al album. Weird Al in 3-D it says “To Hal Sparks, my only true friend.” FG: (laugh) That rules. HS: Yeah (laugh) And then I have all my original Kiss dolls and two sets of the playing cards. All of the albums including the Paul and the Gene albums with the posters still intact. FG: I so envy you. Okay last question. What big Fanboy dream do you have that has not yet been fulfilled? HS: Hmm…I guess it would be, it’s funny cause it’s getting harder and harder. I wanna work with Steve Martin and I would love to play music on stage with Paul Stanley. Uhm and uh…I guess to date Natalie Portman, does that count? FG: (laugh) With the shaved head or without? HS: It doesn’t matter. I would shave her head for her. I would be her personal head shaver. Yes, that’s my fanboy dream come true, to be Natalie Portman’s personal head shaver. FG: Well than you so much for the time and I will be sending you that MP3. HS: Thank you that would be great! Bye bye! Want to see more about Hal Sparks? Check out these links:
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