It seems impossible that my cohort is turning 50, and yet, there it is.

I’m sliding into it myself—just three years and change to go. Truth be told, I can’t wait: my 40s were so much better than my 30s, which were so much better than my 20s, which were so much better than my teens, I figure my 50s are going to rock the house.

Or, at the very least, that I’ll get another decade or two of yum before I hit the point of diminishing returns.

On the other hand, it’s a good thing I’ve some time. Half a century is a significant achievement, and calls for a marker of equal significance. I received one such tribute about a week ago, from my friend and former art director, Kevin Houlihan. He assembled 50 of the people he’d met along the way, from the godmother who held him at his baptism to a friend he met in a bar about a year ago, and asked us each to write a little something for a book he wanted to assemble about the people he’d met along the way.

Here’s the beauty part, though: instead of asking us to write about him, he asked us to write about ourselves. His point? That, as his wise and no-nonsense New Hampshire-bred father used to say, “You can tell a man by the company he keeps.” So Kevin sent each participant a series of questions designed to help us unearth what it was about us that had helped him learn about himself.

The result? A breathtaking compendium of musings, stories and yes, a little haranguing, that is universally appealing because of the specificity of approach. I’m forever parroting every English teacher I’ve ever had about the key to great writing lying in the detail of the personal truth one lays out there; maybe instead of yakking, I could just direct people to this book.

Unfortunately, it’s a private publishing of 50—one for each participant. There has been a groundswell of support for a more public release, but until that happens, you’ll just have to content yourself with one of my entries and imagine the rest. The question to me was what, if anything, did the various & sundry creative outlets for my expression have in common, and how did I continue to nurture my creativity.

It’s a wonderful question for anyone to ask of themselves, or of their loved ones; it’s a glorious question to be asked…

xxx
c

***

I have called my life many things in an attempt to get across the idea of what it’s been like to live it—to express the heart of my journey. One of my fave-raves, coined several years ago upon quitting my Hateful Advertising Career, was that I was “Living My Life Backwards”: going from a hyper-responsible, overachieving, 401K-building, condo-and-cat-owning twentysomething to a foolhardy, largely unemployed, dream-chasing thirtysomething. (And then a sex-crazed, metaphorically-old-purple-wearing-lady fortysomething.)

Not a bad quip—you know us copywriters, always with the handy quip—but somehow too…pithy. As Einstein said, Everything as simple as possible and no simpler, please. (As an aside, that’s where a lot of advertising and marketing goes off the rails: oversimplification. That, and too many objectives. But let’s not go down that bad path, shall we?)

I wish I had a pithy answer for my life’s work now—for what motivates me, for what the thread is. But I don’t. I have a long and boring story, which I’ll summarize here:

Many years ago, when The Groundlings Sunday Company pulled over and dumped my baby-actor soul by the side of the road to fend for itself, I thought I needed a theater company to call home. And so it was that I found myself standing on a stage in a tiny, back-alley theater in Santa Monica in front of an insane French woman (sorry—redundant), “auditioning” to be a paying member of her highly experimental theater company.

She let me perform my wildly inappropriate monologue, but it was clear that what she wanted to do was get to the Q&A.

“What would you do,” she called out from the dark, “eef I asked you to take off your pants, take off your shirt, take off your shoes and stand zere nakeed on ze stage?”

“Uh…ask you why?”

There was a long pause. Then, whether to out me as a poseur or to see if maybe, possibly she could salvage this ten minutes and put an extra $35/month in the theater’s coffers I don’t know, but she threw out another one:

“Why,” she called out again, “do you want to be an actress?”

No one had asked me this; I had not even asked myself about the why. Why does one throw away everything with no promise of a something down the road? Why does a sane, smart girl with a career and a title and a condo and a cat toss it all out the window for what younger and more talented people will tell you is one of the world’s worst career options?

I stood in on that dusty stage, lit from above, threw head back and my arms open wide and let whatever it was inside me that had been responsible for my irrational decision do the talking:

“To tell The Truth!!!”

It was right, that Voice. (It always is, you know.) My whole life until then had been a quest to funnel The Truth as it is writ large somewhere in the cosmos into words and pictures that made sense down here. So I did it for awhile in advertising. And then in acting. And then in design. And now, with words, both on the blog and aloud, wherever someone will let me.

If I get off track, it gets me back on. If I need inspiration, I go back to the well.

The Truth.

I mean, come on—can that ever get old?

TOPICS: acting, art, creativity, truth.

This is Day 3 of a 21-day effort to see the good in what might, at first, look like an irredeemable drag. Its name comes from a classic bit of dialogue uttered by actor Kevin Bacon in the comedy classic of my generation, Animal House.

They say everyone gets fired from some job at some point in her life. Me? Hasn’t happened yet from a paying gig, but I feel like I got my at-bat (or “yer OUT!”) some 10 years ago, when I got the boot from the Groundlings Sunday Company.

For the uninitiated—those outside of that small, Hollywood/Chi-town/NYC sketch comedy triangle—let me explain: the Groundlings comedy improv troupe is basically a farm team for the majors. Today, with the proliferation of sketch and improv-based shows, there are lots of outlets, but back in my day, the Big Time meant SNL (for writers and actors) and network sitcoms (for writers.)

I didn’t know this going in. I was what you might call a rube, or a hayseed—I definitely fell off a turnip truck, and it was definitely five minutes ago. I found myself at the Groundlings by accident, and found myself whooshing my way up the ladder there even more by accident. Really. Yes, I was—am—funny. And a good (and prolific) writer. But the Sunday Company I found myself in was populated by the likes of the fastest and funniest—people who’d been at this acting/sketch/writing thing for 10 years, many with school training, to boot. Fully half of our graduating “class” found itself in the employ of NBC at SNL a mere six months after I got the boot. I remember; I signed over the rights to two of my sketches to my co-writer/performer who had gone on to the Majors from my sad little day job. I cried a lot those couple of lunch hours.

Hell, I cried a lot, period. No one—my husband, our friends, even fellow Sunday Co. members—could believe how upset I was over being fired from something that wasn’t a job—that didn’t pay a dime. But you see, this was more than a shot for me: this is where I was when I decided I really did want to be an actor, and my being there, a part of this august group of almost-professionals, was the proof that I’d have a chance at it. The person who made that fateful call telling me I didn’t make the cut might as well have told me I had pancreatic cancer: I spent the next six months alternating between crying and stoically awaiting my imminent death.

I’m still here, of course. And the reason I’m still here—that I ended up flourishing, that I learned how to really act and not just flail around on a stage for cheap laughs like the clueless wonder I was—is because I got the boot. I don’t give up, you see; I hang in there and hang in there and hang in there even after Them What Knows have fled for higher ground. If they hadn’t have booted me, I’d have stayed. Hell, I’d still be in grammar school if they’d have let it go on indefinitely. Not a fan of change, am I.

Being forced out also forced me to take a look at a few things: what was missing, what I wanted. What I felt. Funny, how long you can go without really asking yourself what you’re feeling.

Forced to consider that perhaps wig-and-glasses monkeyshines was not the be-all, end-all, I began to explore other aspects of performance. Slowly, painfully, I learned how to act. And then, ultimately, I learned that acting wasn’t particularly what I wanted. No matter—I needed to learn the acting part first, in order to grok it. No skipping steps.

I wish I could say I felt nothing but gratitude both for the opportunity and the result, but that would be a lie. It hurt. I hurt. I’m stubborn and pig-headed, qualities that trip me up as much as they get me through. So bad feelings die hard with me. I’ve been back to the theater to see lots of friends in other shows; I feel strange and ill at ease every time I cross the threshold.

It is not necessarily a bad thing. It is just a true thing.

And after all these years, the thing I know for sure above all is that if it is not the truth, it will not do for me.

So I thank you, anonymous Groundlings, for kicking me to the curb. That I have ultimately found so much happiness as a result makes me question who was responsible for the original feelings of unhappiness.

Well, not really. But you get the idea…

xxx
c

TOPICS: 21 day salutes, acting, Groundlings, thank you sir may i have another.

I’m bad! I’m nationwide!

Well, not really, but thanks to my good friend, Matt North, I’m the newest columnist at LACasting.com (a division of Casting Networks, Inc., and the main actor submission service used for commercial auditioners), where the first installment of my monthly column on All Things Acting is up for anyone who wants to see it.

September’s topic? “Client-Proof Tape” (or, “How not to be a complete jackass at your audition”).

Enjoy!

xxx
c

TOPICS: acting, communicatrix, Shameless plugs.

Today I auditioned for a spot I’d really like to book. The part is funny, the casting director is smart (meaning, the spots he casts are low in cheese factor) and—imagine—I could use the money.

Casting directors often give a group explanation prior to a string of individual auditions to save time and so we don’t stink up their tapes with super-creative, actor-y input. Today, after reiterating his usual acting directive, “Very small, very real, very ‘film’”—a directive which I now hear in some form from nearly every casting director on nearly every call, leaving me to wonder why there is still so much bad, over-the-top acting in commercials—this casting director drove the point home by letting drop that the director of this particular spot also directed Junebug. The implication being, if you know Junebug, you know what we’re looking for and if you don’t, you’re going to give a bad, over-the-top performance which we will waste no time in erasing from our tape.

Now, I have not, in fact, seen Junebug, but I am familiar with the vernacular the CD was tossing out. You see, I like to keep up with my worlds colliding, so I happen to know that Junebug was directed by one Phil Morrison, with whom I worked on a series of Wheaties commercials which I wrote in my previous incarnation as an advertising copywriter.

Normally, this ain’t no big thang. That life was long, long ago, and most people’s memories don’t extend that far, especially when it comes to remembering the copywriter, who is slightly less important than an apple box on a commercial set. In fact, we’re seen as so inconsequential, we’re frequently not invited to the shoot at all: I wrote a Gatorade commercial shot by the notorious Joe Pytka, but was subsequently hired as an actor on a couple of his commercials. Of course, I was not in attendance at the former and saw no reason to bring up the connection at either of the latter, so it really didn’t take much to fly under the radar.

The Wheaties commercials, however, were a slightly bigger deal. There were lots of verbal shenanigans in my tricky little scripts, so I was actually consulted on this or that more than once. Plus the spots starred Michael Jordan! Michael Effin’* Jordan!!! This was a huge break for the then-very-young Phil, whom we found via some groovy interstitials he’d done for MTV. Plus…Michael Effin’ Jordan! Surely Phil would remember every minute detail of that week we spent together on a Chicago soundstage, I thought.

That is, I thought until I uncovered this commemorative photo of me**, MJ, and an assortment of client-side and agency dorks:

Now not only am I certain Phil Morrison will not know me from Adam, I am also sorely tempted to submit myself to that Oprah show where they’re looking for people who look better today than they did 10 years ago.

Because (a) I am pretty sure I’m fugly enough in my high-waisted, reverse-fit jeans to win a free trip back to Chicago and (b) if they give me two round-trip tickets, maybe I can convince The BF not to break up with me for revealing my shame…

xxx
c

*And if his middle name isn’t “effin’”, I’d like suggest right now that he change it; my god, could he have a more appropriate middle name?

**If you can’t find me in the group, I would be the one on second from the left, doing my impersonation of a really unattractive lesbian. Good at it, aren’t I?

UPDATE: Link to larger sizes of my fugliosity at Flickr, here.

TOPICS: acting, Advertising, celebrity, commercials, communicatrix, DDB Needham, Michael Jordan, Phil Morrison, Wheaties.

I am just waiting for the day I get a casting breakdown specifying, “Unnatural, awkward talent only. Must be over-the-top with no ability at all to respond in the moment. Or dead. Dead would be good. Dead, with really, really bad comic timing.”

TOPICS: acting, auditions, commercials, Los Angeles, Rants.