Ready to Play a Role

The world doesn’t deserve to last much longer. What we’ve done is just awful, pollution and crime and all this stuff. I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life. But the air is bad, and it’s just all around pretty much dirty. I want to live near Seattle, it’s so neat. Maybe in a small town. Civilized but small, where restaurants stay open till 9 o’clock.

I don’t want to be rich, not really. I just want to have a nice lifestyle, maybe living in a civilized but quiet place, and have a wife and two kids, at least. I would hate to be an only child.

Maybe the people I respect most are teachers. Without them, the world would be dumb. And without a garbage man, the world would be stinky. Without plumbers, the world would be bone dry.

I want to be an actor. I’ve just been inspired by television. And I know a lot of actors. The person who does Garfield’s voice, Lorenzo Music, he and my dad are good friends. I have an agent, and I’ve gone on three or four auditions. One was for a toy commercial for these little bubble things. You put them in water and they turn into aliens and robots and stuff. I haven’t gotten any callbacks yet.

I was Puck in the school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The play is about Theseus and Hippolyta, or something like that, and they were going to get married. I go around putting love juice on the wrong person’s eyes. Shakespeare is still kind of hard to understand. But it was so fun, probably the funnest part I’ll ever play. The first show wasn’t so good. Lysander missed the mat, but they just kept on going. I missed a line, but I made up something. And the bell was going to ring in a minute. I had the best part. I got the last line in the whole play. “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended. That you have but slumber’d here, while these visions did appear. . . .”

I’m very small (4-foot-7). There’s some advantages and some disadvantages. You can sit in your locker but not be stuffed. Sometimes I’m tired and I need to sit down. You can crawl through people’s legs easily. But there’s a lot of disadvantages, like girls. I can’t reach a lot of stuff. And I get picked on a lot.

About two months ago me and my two friends and some girls were walking about a half-block from school, and four guys came up behind us. One of them had a big stick, like a cane, and he said, “Check their pockets.” My friends had their bus passes stolen. I kept on walking. I didn’t want to get beat up. I hid behind this bush so they couldn’t see me--another advantage of being small.

I have a lot of friends at school, because last year I was run over by a truck and dragged while I was crossing the street on my bike. I broke my ankle and my hand, two surgeries. There were a lot of rumors at school--”This kid got shot in a drive-by.” “He hit a car and flew 70 feet.” People just kind of knew me from then on.

There’s gangs and stuff at school, a lot of fights. But I get along with almost everybody. In seventh grade, you’re a “scrub,” and you’re pretty much disrespected. You know what a “noogie” is? It’s like you give somebody a noogie on top of their head. Sometimes people take quarters between their fingers and scrub on your head like hard. It hurts. The eighth-graders are “toilet washers.” A few years ago the ninth-graders used to stick the toilet washers’ heads in the toilets and flush. Ninth-graders are “janitors.” They’re kings of the school.

I’m not shy, but I have allergies a lot. I sneeze a lot, especially in the morning. It’s sort of embarrassing.

If I don’t become an actor, I want to be a geologist, or an archeologist. I love rocks. And I just like exploring stuff. Science is the worst. I might pull off a D. The first class, I thought it was a joke, like this was lab work for 40-year-olds in white coats. We just did an experiment where we mixed chemicals and stuff and made ice cream. It was really cool. One girl put the salt inside the ice cream. It didn’t get to total ice cream. It got to, like, a smoothie.

I get into a lot of trouble, and I’ll get grounded for a few weeks. My parents are really cautious about me. I’d rather they be overprotective than under-protective. My dad and I go to ballgames, movies, out to dinner. He’s a lot cooler and calmer on weekends because he doesn’t have to deal with work. They’ve been married for 21 years. They’re very happy.

Ramsay Davila

His good friends call him Bud or Buddy or, lately, Puck, the role he played in a school Shakespeare production.

It seems to fit. He is small in size, with a good sense of fun. The youngest of four children, 13-year-old Ramsay lives with his father, Ralph, a newsstand owner and magazine distributor, and his mother, Luzita, in a modest home in the Hancock Park area.

Ramsay is among the Anglo minority at John Burroughs Junior High, where Latinos, blacks and Asian-Americans make up about 80% of the student body.

His grades tend to be somewhat uneven. In drama, he gets A’s but, he predicts, in science “I might pull off a D.” He likes soccer, baseball, basketball and tennis, and is a Boy Scout and a rock hound. He also collects posters of Porsches, his favorite car.

Ramsay wants to be an actor. His favorite movie? “Terminator 2.” He’s seen it five times.