Call me a sucker, but every time I pass by a group of hopeful young people, with dreams in their eyes, it makes me so happy and a bit choked up. I was on my way to my usual internet cafe for work and saw a huge line of kids and teens in their best dance gear and their anxious parents, holding their headshots and resumes. I looked down the line and saw excitement, fear, hope, determination, anxiety and passion. The collective energy running down this line of America’s next dance star gave me chills. It is so important to have dreams, and to give them a fair shot. I wanted every single kid in that line to make it. If not this audition, the next one and the next one. They all deserve it.
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A Line of Dreams
12 JulOpportunity Breeds Opportunity
11 JulIt’s no coincidence that two amazing opportunities come my way at the very same time. I got an incredible job offer to direct budding actors in a high school Shakespeare Fall ’10 production and an audition for a beautiful and moving play, whose lead role seems like it was meant for me. I had my first interview for the job the same weekend I had the audition for the play. Both shows go up in October. And though one doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t do the other, it would be difficult. But, I haven’t signed anything for either so this is really all speculation. I could get both, I could get neither. I just found it interesting that both opportunities presented themselves at the same time and they both take place at the same time. Opportunity definitely breeds opportunity. It always feels like I’m either insanely busy juggling projects and jobs, or bored to tears bummed I have nothing going on.
Well, I hope I get both… because that could only mean MORE opportunities!
Oddest Audition Locations
28 JunLet’s say you have friends of friends who are actors. Maybe your boyfriend’s an actor. Maybe you’re an actor… Or, maybe, you’re “D: All of the above.”
I have heard of and/or experienced a number of really curious audition locations over the past year or so and thought I’d make a list of them:
- dance complex (for a movie audition that has nothing to do with dance)
- 3rd floor of the food court in a westfield shopping mall
- the recreation/common area of an apartment complex
- the media studies room in an elementary school
- random house in a random residential neighborhood (creepy… no, I did not go in)
- the gym at a high school located in a church (boy was I confused… and I don’t even submit for student films anymore!)
- the lobby of a casting office on a film lot (not the strangest, but still odd nonetheless)
My Inbox
21 Jun
With so few ways to really measure your successes and progress in this business, it’s important to celebrate all of the moments, big or small, which do in fact indicate that you are on your way… that you’re in the game… that you have a career.
I realized one of these moments today when I noticed that I had three emails in a row in my inbox that were from directors of different projects I am working on or was recently cast in (an indie low-budg feature, a short, and a webseries). It felt really good to see those three emails all together, this little screenshot of my progress. I gave myself a moment to take it in. To celebrate it. Yes, I am working on my career. Yes, I am castable. Yes, I am actually an actor!
It’s so important to pat yourself on the back every step of the way (because if you don’t, no one else will… people outside of this career path just ask “So what have you been in? Anything I’ve seen?” and everyone in it knows it doesn’t necessarily work that way). We don’t have a simple corporate ladder to climb, steady salary increases or fancy new job titles every few years. For us, it’s kind of all over the place so progress is hard to measure. We got to dig a little deeper. Today, it came in the form of my inbox.
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