Hey! I’m a Nepali movie star!

Not really. But this morning, as I was finishing my second cup of tea at breakfast, a Nepali man in a baseball cap and nylon windbreaker walked up to my table and asked if I was an American. When I said yes, he asked if I wanted to be in a Nepali film. A film? I asked. Yes, a film, he said. They needed a foreigner for “a little time” and he had apparently been wandering the streets trying to find the appropriate (and willing) foreigner. The unstated insinuation was that he was willing to settle for me.

Well, this was not a situation for which my pre-trip planning had prepared me, you know? Health and medical concerns, yes. Film making? No.

How long would you need me? I asked. My agenda for the day had not in any way been set, but it had never included working on a film. Not long, he said. Somehow I doubted that the American concept, even my own American concept of “not long” had anything more than an accidental similarity to the Nepali one.

But what the heck?

I said OK, what do I have to do? He told me to please, finish my breakfast, he would wait in the hotel lobby, and together we would go to the studio.

So I slurped the last of the tea, paid my bill and headed for the lobby. I followed Dayas—that’s his name—out into the street, and as we walked I tried to get some idea of just what sort of performance they were expecting here (my guess was not much), and also tried to learn something about this production company that apparently trolls for talent among foreign tourists.

But Dayas wasn’t exactly a fountain of information. So, I asked, is this a good foreigner or bad foreigner? Maybe good, maybe bad, he shrugged. Ah, that’s helpful, I thought, as we walked up to this tiny 100cc Honda motorcycle. One helmet was hanging from the handlebars, and it was the same one Dayas put on his head before he started the engine and gestured for me to get on.

Now, I just want you all to know that I did consider the fact that getting on the back of a motorcycle driven by a complete stranger and speeding off to an unknown destination through the crazed Kathmandu traffic without a helmet may not exactly fall in the benign portion of the risk scale. I did consider that.

But what the heck?

I straddled the back seat and the tiny bike’s rear forks bottomed out. You are a very heavy man, Dayas shouted at me over the whine of the single cylinder. Thanks a lot, Bud, I muttered back.

We pulled into the street and Dayas nimbly moved us along with the swarming traffic. That poor little engine was firing on all cylinder, but the roads were so potholed that Dayas and I zigzagged along at a snail’s pace. I will say though that I’ve never had a motorcycle ride quite like it.

After about five minutes we pulled into a driveway between two buildings, and once we had dismounted Dayas pointed to one of them and said it was the studio. It was a three-story cinderblock flat, just like almost every other building you see in Kathmandu. You know, the kind you see pancaked into a pile of rubble after an earthquake in this part of the world. And it didn’t exactly exude “studio.”

But after entering the building and going through a few doors, I was ushered into a dark room with six dim shapes huddled around a computer monitor. On the other side of the room was a big TV, and they were watching what appeared to me to be some sort of Nepali soap opera. Some guys in really bad suits were alternately menacing and then cajoling a girl to do something, probably not something nice.

I was introduced to the director (Jaybi Rai, Movie Producer/Director, his card read), and he explained that they wanted me to do some audio dubbing over a previously shot sequence. Damn, so no screen time! My dreams of Nepali stardom went up in smoke.

They cued up the sequence on their editing board connected to a Macintosh and showed me a clip with a slimy looking blond guy in a bad suit opening a briefcase and saying something in Nepali to another guy in a bad suit. They played it a few times and then told me exactly what they wanted me to say.

That’s when I realized that what they wanted me to say was to be said in Nepali. Well, that’s news, I thought. I mean, the clip’s audio was pretty bad and obviously had to be dubbed over, but why use an American to speak Nepali? My only guess is that they needed that authentic “foreign” accent.

They gave me a sheet of paper, and enunciating just the way some American tourists do when communicating with foreigners, told me what to say and asked me to just sort of write down phonetically what I thought I heard.

This is what I heard: Shaher Sahb, malai ramru kidney diera. Bachoum boh. Tesko lagi. Ta pailai yo extra cash.

So what am I saying? I asked. I mean, like, what is my character after in this scene? Where’s my arc? Well, it was explained to me that I was saying: Shaher Sahb (the other bad guy’s name), that was a great kidney! You saved my life. I brought you extra cash!

Aha! Apparently the slimy blond guy was one of those legendary American body parts scavengers, and he was probably after this poor girl’s kidneys.

Okay.

They let me practice it twice, pronounced my pronunciation perfect, and ushered me into another dark room with a microphone and one of those circular hoop thingies that you see in front of microphones on MTV when they show you rock stars dubbing in their track to We Are The World.

Over the headphones they asked me to read the lines. Ah, a sound level check, I figured. Then they asked me to do it again, only this time with an American accent on the words “extra cash.” Sure, I can do that. No problem. Acting, it’s like riding a bicycle.

OK, thank you, that was very good, the director announced, and Dayas came in the sound room and ushered me back into the studio. What? My fifteen minutes of fame is over in twenty seconds?

But sure enough, when they cued up the clip and played back my voice, I had pretty much managed to sync my lips, in a manner of speaking, to the slimy blond guy’s slimy lips. Everybody seemed very pleased with my work. You can call me One-Take Wood.

Then one of the guys in the room puts this little microphone to my face and tells me he’s from Radio Nepal, and would I mind doing a short interview?

Sure! What the heck?

So he asked me where, what, and how, thanked me profusely and told me I’d be on Nepali Radio this Saturday night. Hey, I could still be a star after all!

Unfortunately, I’ll be several days into the Tibet trek on Saturday, so I won’t be here when the offers start pouring in.

Anyway, that was that. Fame is fleeting. Dayas took me back to the hotel, and I spent the rest of the day wandering around some magnificent Buddhist stupas

And they were stupendous! Really!

But after my brief fling with stardom, well, they were kind of anticlimactic.