A Song of Thanksgiving, Part 1: L.A. Jan

There is the family you are born into, and the family you choose. The lucky few find as much joy, comfort and solace in the former as they do the latter.

Me? With the exception of a slim few (you know who you are) I'm all about adoption.

Meet L.A. Jan.

Writing partner, oft-wet shoulder, best audience I've ever had, bar none. She will be the first to downplay her myriad abilities, protesting ignorance, stupidity and all manner of other ridiculousness. And then she will excuse herself to offer directions to the nice French lady who seems to be lost. In French. Which she taught herself in Paris...where she moved to live, on a whim, in her 20s.

Jan is a Jew from Kentucky, a real actress in a land of glassy-eyed posers, a bit of a kvetch, a constant source of light and delight and inspiration. You think I'm brave? Ha. In her 30s, this girl flew to Jamaica by herself to collect the remains of her fiancé, who'd been murdered at random whilst vacationing there. She fought her way back from a disease ten times more painful than mine, and progressive, to boot. When I countered her challenge to collaborate on a screenplay with a challenge to write a comic play about our diseases, she stepped up. Even after I added music.

She is the first to laugh at me, which drives me crazy. She is the first to laugh at herself, which always humbles me.

When I was in the hospital, too weak to fend for myself, too naive to know I needed to anyway, she was my advocate. Now that I am stronger, she has the grace to let me help her when she needs it. I stand in awe of her strength and courage and goodness every day of my life.

For this, I am truly thankful.

xxx c

P.S. All Frima and I want for Christmas is for you to quit smoking.

It's wonderful! It's horrible! It's...clarity!

This morning, I had the greatest audition I've had in months, MONTHS, I tell you! And while I'm bouncing off the walls, happy and buzzy like a good shot of joe makes me, I'm also terrified. Because this is the very same feeling I had over 10 years ago when I first stepped onstage at the Groundlings and realized that, for better or worse, I was going to have to let go of my crazy dreams of solvency and profit sharing forever to be a performer.

But it's an audition, right? I audition all the time, right? Well, yes, but not for this kind of commercial. This was a voiceover audition: that announcer, that omniscient commercial narrator, that cuddly fish/lion cub/faun that cavorts across the screen.

To want to be a voiceover actor is even crazier than to want to be an actor, which is already pretty damned crazy. Not only are voiceover actors the elite of the elite, but, echoing the shift in the on-camera world, "name" actors are now squeezing out the rank-and-file as the changing market adversely impacts their own ability to make a living.

Here's how crazy it is: almost 10 years ago, when Space Jam was released, while I had a multimillion dollar movie to serve as my reel, while I had a fucking toy of my character on the shelves of Targetâ„¢, I could not get an agent. Granted, the gig had been a fluke of circumstance, some greenscreen work I auditioned for and didn't get, still, they drew a cartoon character around me, animated it and spent a boatload of time and money getting it on the screen.

Not. Good. Enough.

Sigh...

When that 'thing' thrums inside you, it doesn't matter. You have to go for it, or forever regret it. What was once a thrilling one-off, something fun but easy to let go of, is now That Thing I Must Do Next.

Again: sigh...

Sometimes I think that life was much, much easier before I was so rudely awakened...

xxx
c

TAGS: voiceover+acting, voiceover, Space Jam, commercials, career+transition

She of LITTLE patience

For someone who is awfully sanguine about big things, totaling my car, losing vast sums of Monopolyâ„¢ money in the tech stock crash, watching the business I've made my living at for 22 years crumble before my eyes, I'm remarkably unskilled at dealing with the little things. 'Little' as in my downstairs neighbor, sole proprieter of a driving school, consistently hogging prime parkage in front of our building with his fleet of raggedy-ass Corollas, especially on street-cleaning day, when he has a coveted parking spot in the garage already.

'Little' as in loud talkers on cell phones in public places, people who jump into a newly-opened register line out of turn, and anyone who is STILL sending out emails about magical marzipan babies, free money from Microsoft and $250 Needless-Markup cookie recipes without checking Snopes first. (Sweet baby jesus, sometimes I wish they would slap a 5¢ tax on every email.)

Or, literally, little: as in '1/4"', the amount (I discovered this morning) that my printer, for whom I developed an elaborate series of electronic proofs and written instructions as a safeguard against this very nonsense, was off in trimming my latest design job, a ruinous disfigurement that neither the person who picked up the postcard nor any one of the dozens of people who have seen them since have even noticed.

There are some similarities amongst the things that seem to enrage me. Solipsism is a biggie (this means you, you yellow-ribbon-festooned-SUV-driving turd-mistress taking up two spots at the mall, the curb and, o, the irony, the gas pump); it actually angers me far more than outright selfishness. Having my meticulous regard for your time and effort met with carelessness sort of makes me wish (or not) I was licensed to pack heat, too.

But it's erratic, this flaming anger. So erratic that in my rare rested, grounded moments, I actually find it hi-larious in others (ha, ha! look how pissed you are that that old lady who can barely see over the steering wheel unintentionally cut you off!). Yes, I realize this points to my own pettiness. If you would like more pointers, I can put you in touch with my writing partner, any of my three sisters, or The BF, although we might have to defer that until the honeymoon is over and he is no longer besotted by the idea of free sex whenever he wants it.

On the other hand, why should you pester them, when I have in my possession a fine, WRITTEN example of my ungodly low threshold for behavior that doesn't fit my idea of exactly what should be happening at any given moment:

Last night, too tired to do any real work, I spent some time cleaning up the hard drive on my PowerBook. In a collection bucket from my first stab at GTD* two years ago, I found this passive/aggressive, stream-of-consciousness gem, apparently written on this same P-book on a crowded, cross-country flight:

ok, if a woman were sitting in that fucking seat, there is no fucking way she'd keep typing some stupid fucking pointless email to someone she totally didn't even need to be emailing. but mr i gotta have all the fucking room in the joint, mr Ima big pig and I don't care i get everythning I'm supposed to get and some of yours too is taking ALL THE MOTHER FUCKING ARMREST and room besides. this is such an i'm sure TYPICAL aggro jesus fucking christ what is it with MEN and their motherfucking sense of entitlement.

The insane ramblings of a girl you'd really like to take home to mom, right? But wait, it gets better:

oh, this is so going into a screenplay.

Yesssss!

and it would be too hilarious, the me character getting angrier and angrier, the guy totally oblivious, writing his 10 fucking page email with 1000 word paragraphs that no one is gonna read--no FUCKING ONE, you LOSER! you big fat six-vodka-swilling loser!!! WTF???

In my defense, I must point to a certain self-awareness of my insane behavior. Additionally, I should interject at this point that approximately 95% of my family on Mom's side are either alcoholics, recovering alcoholics or married to alcoholics or recovering alcoholics, so juiceheads don't rate a whole lot of compassion from me. But back to our fascinating story, soon to be seen at a multiplex near you:

and in the movie/book/whatever, at the end he should even try to pick up on her. or no, she's irritated b/c he didn't. and she catalogues everything about him that she finds disgusting--the dry look haircut, the mock turtleneck, the fact that he TURNS OFF his laptop everytime he orders another one of his double vodkas. no, no--it has to be a book, a bridget jones type of chick lit book, this angry inner monologue that rages on. god what a turd. god how selfish. but you know, god, what an asshole SHE is for letting it get to her so much

Here's the worst of it: this is fully twelve months before I even thought about starting a blog, when the ONLY record of my thoughts was either squirreled away in a journal somewhere or nested deep within the folder trees of my various computers, and yet I know the reason I put that self-aware crap in there was to not look so bad to my public.

Oh, the shame.

Anyway, I've been grappling with what to do about this pettiness, this intolerance, this shameful, shameful aberration in my otherwise sterling character and I've decided that the only thing to do is out myself. To paraphrase the excellent Louis D. Brandeis quote I stumbled across in Freakonomics (review forthcoming), "Sunlight is a powerful motherfucking disinfectant."

So here I am, in all my ugly intolerance, petty nature admitted to all and emblazoned across the web (well, someone could pick it up) for all to see, like so much tatty underwear in the emergency room.

Fling your barbs, shovel on your scorn: I welcome the angry intervention of a thousand, nay, a hundred-hundred-thousand, souls if it means an end to the tyranny of pettiness.

By myself, I will not give an inch; with your help, maybe I can give that 1/4" that really matters.

xxx c

*GTD = Getting Things Done, a book and organizational system by demigod David Allen, which you can read all about on his website, Merlin Mann's website, or any one of a bajillion other similarly geek-worshipping websites.

TAGS: impatience, intolerance, solipsism, hacks

Quotation of the Day: "You Heard It Here Second" Edition

"Doing loads of homework? Drag city.

Studying with a new buddy? Funhampton!"

, from DailyCandy LA

Wherein our heroine learns to avoid the damned street entirely

My friend, Mary Ellen, and I go way back to my advertising days; she was one of the first people I met when I moved back to Chicago from New York, and I still make fun of how relentlessly and Midwesternly cheerful she was when she poked her head into my office for the first time to invite me to lunch.

She is still way too nice to remind me of what a dark and twisted troll I was, but 20 or so years later, she's simmered down, I've cheered up and we've met in a new middle ground. Our semi-/annual conversations have become important to both of us because we serve as touchstones for one another, showing how we've changed and where we might still need to. And, since Mary Ellen forsook advertising for psychotherapy instead of something idiotic like acting, it's basically like I get a 90-minute session free, or for the price of a phone call, which, since I switched to Vonage, is almost free. Ha, ha, Mary Ellen, I win!

Anyway, after the brief-but-requisite foray into the piteous state of national affairs, we launched into the more important topic of boys boys boys. Specifically, what we were doing with ours and how it all was going. (Mary Ellen and her husband have been together 15* years, during which timeI've divorced one guy and slagged around with a bunch of others, so there's always lots of touchstoning action there.)

I'm happy to report that things are tip-top back in Illinois; I'm guessing that by the way I natter on like a schoolgirl about The BF, everyone reading this knows things are hunky-dory here in sunny California. But it was not ever thus. Which got us to talking about two things: whether mileage logged**, solo or in tandem, is responsible for things going more smoothly or whether there really is a more-right-for-you type than those hilariously inappropriate jackasses you couldn't get enough of as a girl of 30 winters.

Here we sharply diverged, with Mary Ellen taking the highly uncharacteristic "life is short, life is shit/soon it will be over" viewpoint (i.e., there is no one type of person more right for us and relationships are, at their best, "a crucible, or cauldron, depending on the day" for personal development) and me staking out the cute boy – debilitating mental illness = reasonable shot at happiness position.

However, we both agreed on one thing: time do make the difference, both in knowing what is and is not tenable and speeding up the loosening of one's monkey-like grip on the latter. This is why I'm happy to be a craggy old crone of 44 rather than the juicy scoop of 20-something I once was. Also, I have excellent genes.

Mary Ellen even supplied the poem of the day: a lovely offering by one Portia Nelson, whom you may know better as Sister Berthe in the film version of The Sound of Music (or, for you 70's hipsters, the Law Office Receptionist in the only version Can't Stop the Music). I'm being glib, but I'm actually rather moved by Portia's story, having read up on her via her lovingly crafted website and read her poem, "Autobiography in Five (Short) Chapters" on the INS (yes, the INS) website. I guess self-actualization is a hot topic of discussion among potential immigrants to the U.S.

The poem is contained in There's A Hole In My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery, and is, apparently, quite as famous as any Von Trapp in its own right. The book (and contents) are copyrighted, so I can't but excerpt a bit here, but it resonated deeply with me, and I must needs share a stanza here, the one I got stuck in for a good 15 years:

2. I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I am in the same place.

But it isn't my fault.

Yeah, right.

On the one hand, where else could you be from ages 18 - 40?

On the other hand, let's hear it for 44.

xxx c

*Mary Ellen says it's actually closer to 11, but my position is if you make it past 10 years together in this farkakte world, you might as well call it 20.

**Intelligent, aware and awake mileage, that is. Just making it to age 170 is no guarantee that you will be any smarter than the average 12-year-old, and probably less smart if that 12-year-old has learned things like "don't stick your hand in there unless you're sure that thing is unplugged".

Photo by novon, used under a Creative Commons License

Sleep eludes me

It is Birthday Week here at my country house, a.k.a. The BF's pad. To celebrate Day 4 of it, I just sprinted downstairs with the trash while The BF snoozed away in bed, where all normal people who were up until 1am four nights in a row should be.

I see you people out there, with your fitness and your dog walking and I wonder: how do you do it? I mean, I used to do it; I did it for most of my life. If commercial work continues to dry up at this pace, I may well be doing it next year. But right now, I wonder how you do it? How do you get yourself in bed early enough to get yourself up at this hour? Who are all these people watching Letterman and Leno? How the hell do they drag their asses through a day of actual work on less than six hours of sleep? How do they get themselves to sleep, period?

The only way sleep happens for me anymore is if I run myself down to exhaustion. I've approached it with the past several days' activity, working on the weekends, running around to movies and events on school nights. And yet, I can't even nap. I mean, technically I have the time to nap, but when I lie down to take one, the three-year-old in me who doesn't want to miss any of the action takes over and bam!, I'm wide awake.

So the only thing to do is get up and work. (Don't kid yourself, blogging is work, just with really sucky pay and no health benefits.) Work yourself into tired. Write something really boring on your blog. Maybe find a Flickr photo to go with it. And occasionally, glance out the window at all the industrious people jogging and driving to jobs that actually do have health benefits and pretty soon (yawn) you start (yaaaaaawn) to...

Thanks, everyone. I think I can sleep now.

xxx
c

Flickr photo by maggie3000

Down came the hammer

You can't be cavalier about it, that's the lesson chronic illness teaches you about health.

Again. And again. And again.

I spent the first 41 years of my life powering through crisis; throw enough coffee/nicotine/man-hours at it, and there's no problem you can't solve. I've spent the last three unlearning those bad habits.

It was a sunny, crisp day here in L.A., and I had all kinds of ideas about how I was going to spend it.

I ended up spending most of it resting. And reading. And playing a little piano. And resting some more. Finally, I gave up all notions of productivity and headed over to The BF's for a little,

Well, there are some things that even tired people with chronic illnesses like to do.

I wanted to do a lot of things today that I didn't, including pour coffee on the problem. But the days of doing that are behind me.

Here's hoping there are some of those better days ahead of me.

xxx c

Photo of my (pink & healthy) colon taken in September, 2004

TAGS: chronic illness, health, colonoscopy

Never work with kids or animals

At the beginning of my commercial career, I worked a lot with semi-animate objects: the Jack-In-The-Box antenna ball (it chatted me up about the Sourdough Jack and checked out my ass in the tag); the Pets.com puppet (before the dot.com bust sent him skidding downwards into low-rent car insurance commercials); the Jolly Green Giant, way, waaaaaay back when (see left above).

In general, I get cast as the Quirky Chick or the Freaky Neighbor or the Funny Mom, which puts me in a lot of off-kilter situations; I'm the wife calmly sipping coffee as her kitchen is jacked up 25º on a hydraulic lift, or the skinny broad in the conga line, or the clueless Gap-casual mom singing "Polly Wolly Doodle" off-key as my (teenaged!) son bangs his head slowly against the back-seat window. I make fun of myself, willingly, joyously, to keep myself in expensive graphics software and even more expensive health insurance.

In other words, I have long since given up any foolish notions of my day job taking me to exotic locations with the Eiffel Tower or breathtaking waterfalls in the background and some soap-opera-looking love interest in the foreground; I go to Santa Clarita stages and parking lots in Gardena and work with fat, balding guys* (if I'm Gap-casual mom) or the usual wagon of carnival freaks (if I'm playing Office Lady or Wacko Next-Door-Neighbor Lady or other garden-variety, Everywoman type). More often than not, any time I spend in hair-&-makeup is to remove the bags under my eyes, if the director even wants that much done. On a shoot for a business product last year, I overheard one assistant wardrobe stylist say to another, "Oh, don't pull anything too cute; she's supposed to be from the Midwest."**

But yesterday, I hit rock bottom. Not only did I drive my own baggy-eyed self out to that glamour capital of the world, Pasadena, at 5am (on Sunday, people, the Lord's day, the day of rest), I did it to play a librarian, in no makeup, with a kid, a mouse, a snake, a kitten, a rabbit, a gecko***, a big flappy bird of some type AND (drumroll, please) a baby alligator.

Yes, a live, baby alligator. And I was standing between it and the rabbit, for scale and no residuals (it was a PSA).

And I did it willingly. Joyously.

For the insurance and the money, yes, but because I really do love it, working with smart, funny people, making a film (albeit a really short one to sell something), playing someone else.

Playing. I love to play. I love that my work is something I would do for free. It's why I potter around with two-cent design jobs and two-person shows and this here blog when I'm not dressed up in the frumpiest clothes the studio wardrobe departments have to offer: these ventures don't feel like work; they feel like play. I'm hoping I get lucky with them, too. I'm hoping that my electronic noodling will eventually turn into some kind of self-sustaining thing, and in turn lead me to the next weird hobby I didn't know I couldn't live without.

Because the greatest way there is to make a living is the way that doesn't feel like work at all, it feels like play.

Even when there are no carnivorous reptiles in sight.

xxx c

*Unless the commercial is for a food/beverage product, in which case there isn't a fat person in sight (Teamster portion of the crew excepting).

**This kind of behavior has really stepped up since I started checking the "40+" box. Maybe if I stop checking it, I'll go back to at least wanting to buy the wardrobe off the spot. I really miss those souvenir half-off khakis.

***The gecko worked in a different scene, so I did not actually meet the gecko, but I did meet the kid, the mouse (they poop a lot...tiny, little poops), the snake, the kitten, the rabbit, the big flappy bird, the baby alligator and a shitload of animal wranglers.

Rhymes with "sad"

I've alluded to some of the mishegoss this year that's contributed to my overall tension level, but (mostly) for legal reasons, I've avoided discussing what I'm sure has been the main culprit: the fallout from my father's death two years ago this week. Well, two years ago today, actually, but who's counting? I wasn't. Really. I swear. These things, these sad or scary or horrendous events, must be embedded in us on some cellular level. Because if you'd asked me right up until I started writing this why I was feeling so edgy, so crappy, so restless/listless/angry/frustrated/frightened, after an initial "I dunno"-type disclaimer I would have rattled off a huge list of badness, both real (money woes, work fears, lack of exercise) and imagined (talent flown the coop, ability to write a cohesive sentence AWOL, general pending doom).

But then I read Neil Kramer's delightful and funny and eloquent spilling of his first day "back" from full-time grieving of his own father's death and it shook something loose inside of me. Of course, my own spilling feels about as charming as vomit, but it must out, so here we are.

I had a complicated relationship with my father. I idolized him in many ways, and in many ways he was beyond worthy of it. Seriously. He was an extraordinarily generous man, both with his time and his money. I've lost count of the people I've met over the years who, upon confirming that I was my father's daughter, rattled on about how my father had gotten them this meeting or this job or this promotion. He was constantly flying around the country or on the phone, or flying around the country on the phone, getting things done.

And the money. After years of struggling, he was very successful in the last years of his life, and while he continued to live the same peanut-butter-and-boxer-shorts lifestyle he always had, everyone else reaped the benefit of his success. He supported his own parents in what some would call extravagent style for the last 15 years of their life, letting his proud father maintain the fiction that it was all a loan to be paid back at some later date. He paid for my mother's funeral when she died 10 years ago even though they despised each other, because he knew my sister and I couldn't afford it and didn't want to have to ask our grandmother (who could) to foot the bill. Don't get me started on my stepmother's expenditures; let's just say she wanted for nothing, and if she exercises even minimal restraint, will live out the rest of a very long life doing the same.

On the other hand...

Okay. Look. I know nobody's perfect. I knew it about my dad even when he was alive. I mean, let's face it: I'd both reached adulthood, middle-aged adulthood, and been shrunk (twice) by the time he died, a year ago today, at 70. I knew he was a workaholic; I knew he had avoidance issues. I knew we were never going to have the kind of relationship I would really have liked and worse, the kind that deep down, I sensed he would really have liked if he'd been strong/brave/weird enough try. I knew all of this because, self-exploration and shrinkage notwithstanding, I was...am...so very, very much like him, both physically (the Crohn's, the eczema, the big-nostriled honker) and temperamentally. Ask my ex-husband, he'll tell you. And he'd be right.

But after I got our family disease, I started making some unorthodox (for our family, anyway) choices, truth over fiction, time over power, love over money. I'd been paying lip service to The Path for years, but I'd finally decided to walk it. Ironically, embracing the part of me that wasn't like my father made it easier to accept the parts that were, and to love him for the real, live, flawed, loving human being that he was. Or at least, I thought it did, until he died and the proverbial other shoe dropped.

I can't get into the details of it yet because, as I mentioned earlier, there are a few legal loose ends that need tying up first. For now, let's just say that Dad wasn't as strong and brave and tough a man as we thought he was and that getting down with that truth isn't as easy as I thought it would be.

Let's also say that for as bewildered and angry and hurt as his death and the fallout from it have left me, they have also shown me that while I am my father's daughter, I am also my own person, and a much stronger, braver, tougher person than I realized.

Sad. Mad. Glad.

I miss you, Dad.

xxx c

TECHNORATI TAGS: family, death, eulogies,

Plus ca change...

While it's hard to believe, the first anniversary of communicatrix: the blog, is right around the corner. And, while TypePad has served me well for that year, for a couple of reasons I've been considering a move to blog publishing software + hosting situation.

First, cost: money continues to be an issue, and there are some savings to be realized by shifting to a DIY set-up, especially if I go with an open-source product like WordPress.

But second, and more important, really, is the feeling of personal satisfaction I think I might gain by flying solo. I like the idea of becoming a little more knowledgeable, a little more adept, a little more self-sufficient. I've read about the problems Wil has been going through updating MT, which scares me a bit, but really, in the end it's just a buncha words on a server. Not all of them especially memorable, really.

Anyway, if any of y'all still have the http://communicatrix.typepad.com address bookmarked (does anyone still use bookmarks since the advent of RSS?), best update to plain old http://www.communicatrix.com.

And stay tuned for fresh details...and perhaps, a fresh look to go with them.

xxx c

P.S. If any of the five of you have recommendations, pluses, cons, raves, rants, about your fave blogging software, by all means, consider your advice solicited.

Walking the walk

I remember reading somewhere that it takes three weeks to seed a habit. I think it takes a little less to fall out of one, like, say, a day...maybe two.

Back when I was recuperating from my big, traumatic Crohn's onset I got into the very good habit of walking every day: initially, to the end of the driveway and back; eventually, a full 2.5 mile circuit around the 'hood.

In addition to providing me with much-needed fresh-air and exercise, it became sort of a social event: I befriended the then-8-year-old twins, Nicola and Katerina (and their older sister, Rosa) months before I realized I knew their father through a mutual friend in the theater. I developed a passing acquaintance with Hector and Chassy, owners of both a hip hair salon and one of my favorite houses in the neighborhood, and got a mini-tour of the new backyard patio they'd just put in. I met sweet, crazy Dorothy and the 27 neighborhood cats she'd taken on feeding.

It also did wonders for my frame of mind. I like yoga, but I don't like yoga on someone else's schedule, and I have some problems with the Namaste Lifestyleâ„¢. I'm not good at sitting still, so regular meditation is out. I refuse to go to the gym when it's crowded, which basically leaves me a window of 1:30 - 3 every day. Plus I hate the gym.

With walking, all I have to do is strap on some shoes and I'm good to go. Add an iPod, or my brand new nano, a birthday gift from the wonderful BF, and I'm great to go. Walking is like low-tech EMDR for not-so-hard cases: the scenery engages your eyeballs, the tuneage engages your monkey mind and an hour later, you feel normal again.

Like most things that are good for me but require me to actually remove myself from my computer/TV command station, it takes some psyching up even to do something as low-impact as walking. And, much like the way people who feel better after taking their medication decide they no longer need the medication because they feel so great, it's all too easy to stop once I've started.

But also-also, the threat of public humiliation can be a great motivator. So I'm laying it out in light and pixels right now: I'm walking, for at least a half-hour every day until October 12th, three weeks from now, and long enough to seed the habit.

There. I've talked the talk.

Now, for the hard part...

xxx
c

TAGS: walking, resolutions, exercise, meditation

I don't miss you

As you may have guessed from the previous post, I've finally taken on item #8 on my to-do list: "organize photos."

Only along with the photos, I'm turning up some far more interesting items, like letters from my first summer at camp. And most of this stuff I didn't know existed anymore, much less remembered. It's like my own version of Found magazine, happening right here in my living room.

I'm probably the last of my line, so unless I get really famous in the next year or so, before the Armaggedon forces us back into caves, this is it: the five of you (along with a few lookyloos on Flickr) will be the last people to lay eyes on this stuff.

Part of me wants to do something with it: write a book about it or sell it off in some crazy way on eBay or write a book about how I sold it off in some crazy way on eBay. Most of me, however, wants to set a torch to the lot. You'd never know it to look at my neatly labeled file folders (in their corresponding neatly-ordered hanging files) but I'm not a finisher. Which is bad, since as the last of my line I've become the repository for over a hundred years' worth of family crap, and my ancestors were all packrats. Some of it is kind of cool, like these goofy letters or the expired his-'n'-her passports of my grandparents or the series of Polaroids at Benihana, where we always pretended it was someone's birthday so we could get the chefs to sing to us in Japanese and take our picture.

But most of it is, quite frankly, crap of the sort that weighs one down. For every cool snap of Mom & Dad tooling along in a boat on Lake Michigan some lake outside of Beaumont, TX, looking like Jack & Jackie, there are stacks upon stacks of badly framed, blurry shots of unidentified long-forgotten family members. For every fab snap of Mom holding her giant pudding, there are a contact sheet's worth, make that four contact sheets' worth, of culled shots. What do I do with ten yellowed, decaying copies of me in a rabbit fur coat with Linda, one of the nursing students who served as babysitter over the years, when I don't really even want one of them? Do I try to track Linda down, see if she's remembers me, strike up a correspondence? Or do I pitch the lot into the recycle bin and move on?

For the time being, I think I'll shift my sludge onto the giant electronic scrapbook that is the Interweb. I'll spare y'alls the worst of it; I see no reason why you'd care about my mother's report cards. All 12 of them. Plus college.

But as much as I'm annoyed and stirred up and dragged down by the emotional sinkholes piled up on my floor, I can't just throw them all out.

I might miss them.

xxx
c

TAGS: memorabilia, snapshots, photos, clutter

You win some, you lose some

Today's good news: the very talented people for whom I shot this finally locked in cast and secured financing and location, officially moving their feature from pre-production to in production.

The bad news? In true Hollywood fashion, the part I was supposed to be playing went to the location owner's girlfriend.

First disclaimer: I'm not really railing about the unfairness of it all, at least, not much. For starters, I'm told she's eminently qualified, with a bona-fide resumé to back her up. And I'm sure were the roles reversed (no pun intended), I'd have no moral qualms about taking the gig. Next, it's a small part, not the kind that makes careers or piles of money. Truthfully, I'd forgotten about the gig until my friend who called to break the good/bad news to me this afternoon, and I know he felt worse about it than I did.

At least, at first.

It's been a difficult year, career-wise. Thankfully, I'll make my insurance (SAG requires its members to earn a minimum amount working union jobs over a 12-month period in order to qualify), but in a year where my expenses were much higher than usual, my bookings were much lighter and the spots that did air, paid little. I got outgraded on one, a nice euphemism for cut the hell out of the thing, and none of them are paying the Big Money that most civilians seem to think commercial actors make (and, in fact, that we used to make, at least sometimes, in richer times with less media fragmentation).

So I'm living on savings, making money kind of an issue. But the other difficult thing has been the sharp drop-off in actual acting and creating that I've been involved in. I made a conscious decision a few years back to stop pursuing theatrical (film and TV) work, as the rate of return for my efforts had become deeply unsatisfying. For other reasons, some health-related, some personal and some completely random, I've basically stopped doing theater as well. My writing partner has had to take money work that basically makes her unavailable for working on our stuff, so the musical incarnation of #1 & #2 is no further along than it was at the start of the year.

As it gets harder and harder to land fewer and fewer jobs, I've thought seriously about dropping out of acting entirely, or at least, letting go of the notion until the competition thins a bit and I can play old ladies. And it's not just because I'm in a strange no-man's-land (pun sort-of intended), category-wise. I find myself uninspired by acting classes and happy to write...or design, or cook dinner, for that matter. As the old adage goes, if you don't have to act, don't.

I'm hoping that this is just me transitioning into the next incarnation of Colleen, Front and Center. Maybe it's really about me tiring of working for other people, the latest in a long series of moves to call my own shots. After all, I'm blogging online rather than journaling privately; it's hardly like I've lost the desire to get up in front of people and do stuff. (Unlike my retirement from copywriting, when I really and truly had, in the words of my old art director, lost the will to advertise.)

The thing is, it still hurts to lose the gig, even if it never really was mine to begin with. I know it's something I'll have to make my peace with, especially if I continue to make choices that put myself out there. And no matter what losses I sustain, since getting sick it's been much easier to clock my head a few degrees to the right and to see how much I have to be grateful for.

And there's always the idea that losing this opportunity makes me available for a better, cooler one.

But still, I want the job.

Or at least the opportunity to turn it down.

xxx
c

What lies behind blogjam

Having signed on to this writing-out-loud thing just prior to the blogging bubble bursting, I'm still relatively new to its attendant ups and downs (and techie widgety time sinkholes), but I've already experienced that thing known as blogging burnout, several times, to my great chagrin.

As any blogger knows, on occasion offline life intervenes, making blogging difficult. Sometimes the magnitude of a very blogworthy event is stultifying. Sometimes, well, sometimes it seems like there's just nothing going on.

Seems like.

Writer/actor/producer Shane Nickerson has an excellent and brave post up at Nickerblog about Blogjam, those times when yeah, there's something going on and yeah, if you did even a little poking around the thing that was going on (and the 47 things behind it) would bubble right up to the surface but nah, there's no way you're gonna tell anyone, much less everyone, what it is. In it, he ascribes his recent struggle with Blogjam to his current albeit quietly raging conflict with desire vs. reality. As in, I have the desire to be/do/have x and that's not really what's happening, at least, not in the way I'd like it to.

He wrote about acting, which is something I can and probably should address in a blog post at some point, but with such specificity that, of course, it manifested as something universal. Who among us doesn't have a deep, deep (and sometimes dark) secret we carry around, whose weight and density become ever greater and more burdensome even as our ability to access it grows weaker and weaker? Who wouldn't rather let life intervene in a million daily ways, rather than undergo the painful excavation of this truth, not to mention the irksome reality of it sitting around our mental living rooms, tatty and dirt-covered, reminding us of our shame?

Okay, maybe that's a little overwrought. What do you expect? After all, part of my secret dream is to be an actor, okay, a much-beloved oracle-pundit. The desire to yak the truth out loud in front of people (and to be much-beloved for it) cuts across a few job descriptions.

And yes, it's a wee bit frivolous (not to mention guilt-inducing) to ponder on such things when there is so much very big, very real, very horrible news all around us about people and things that need our immediate, physical attention.

But Shane's post, and, hopefully, this one, is a good reminder not to let too much time roll by. Yes, try to maintain a sense of proportion, but also please tend to yourself. Put on your oxygen mask, or make sure its readily accessible, before you attempt to assist the passenger in the seat next to you.

Because you either deal with the truth or it will come back somehow, someway. Either you will wind up in the hospital, 20 lbs underweight with blood pouring out of your intestines or you'll get the c-a-n-c-e-r or you'll you'll find yourself, at 88 years old, sitting at your kitchen table with your grandchild, tears pouring down your face as you finally acknowledge, out loud, that if you had it to do all over, Colleen, you would have done it all differently.

I have seen too many loved ones die with their truths unrecognized. Note that I'm not saying their dreams unrealized: who knows if Gramps could have directed pictures or Mom could have been a movie star or if Dad could have been a singing cowboy? There wasn't much call for singing cowboys after 1938. Actually, there wasn't much call for singing cowboys ever, but I'd guarantee you dollars-to-donuts that Dad would have died, and probably lived, a much happier man if he'd gotten down with that truth.

So by all means, let's keep sending checks to rebuild and fighting for democracy and reducing/reusing/recycling. But let's also stay in touch with what that kid from New Hampshire in all of us came out to Los Angeles to do, or what he really wants to do now. Because not acknowledging what's really going on in ourselves, whatever fear or desire or strange bugaboo haunts us, is the first step on the road to isolation from everyone and everything around us.

It's not easy. Sometimes, it's not even simple. Often, it might even feel frivolous. But it is so, so necessary if we're going to make this any kind of a world to hand over to the next shift.

xxx
c

TECHNORATI TAGS: blogjam, Shane Nickerson, nickerblog, self-actualization

Happy Birthday, Lily!

With fierce EstroFest love and a glass of good bourbon raised high in your name,

xxx
c

In Memory of the Late, Great Elaine Gloria Gottschall

Three years ago today, I met my friend, Lily, each in our respective pairs of dark glasses, to see the guilty-pleasure, chick flick, Blue Crush; it was the last movie I was well enough to see in a theater for four months.

Four days later, I was admitted via the emergency room to Cedars Sinai, due mainly to a collaboration of genius trickery on the part of my sainted sister, Liz, and my brand new G.I. doctor, Graham Woolf, who the day before had looked over the results of a colonoscopy done seven months before by a colleague, a highly-respected colorectal surgeon at Cedars, and informed me, for the first time, that I had Crohn's disease.

How bad was it? I weighed 90 lbs. after they slapped an I/V on me and dumped in two liters of fluid. I was shitting upwards of 20x/day. I had been running fevers for weeks, many of them in excess of 100º, four over 104º. The night before my admittance, my temperature shot up so high, 104.4º, I had to lower myself into a tub of cold water to bring down the fever; Tylenolâ„¢ wouldn't put a dent in it. I was mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted, so much so that I stayed in the hospital 11 days (for those of you lucky enough to have avoided it, an almost unheard-of amount of time in this day and age).

I got a little bit better during my stay. They managed to get break the fever, probably thanks to the bottomless cocktail of antibiotics and prednisone they had me on. The two pints of blood I'd shat out of my ass had been replaced, and the bleeding, at least, the heavy bleeding, had stopped. But despite the unbelievable quantities of food I was ingesting, double breakfasts, lunches and dinners, supplemented by matzoh ball soup and turkey sandwiches from Jerry's Deli smuggled in by friends and associates, I could not get the scale to move.

At the end of that 11-day stretch, I was given a choice: I could stay at the hospital over the weekend, let them continue to observe me, hope that my shit count dropped and my weight improved and go on a much more aggressive round of drug therapy the following Monday if it didn't; or I could go home and see if I got any better there.

I went home with a case of Similacâ„¢ my sister and I picked up for me at the drugstore and a copy of Elaine Gloria Gottschall's Breaking the Vicious Cycle; by the next day, I'd dumped the Similacâ„¢ down the drain and gone on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) to eliminate my Crohn's.

Elaine Gottschall wasn't a big, noisy hero. She never set out to change the lives of thousands of people with inflammatory bowel diseases. She was just a mom desperate to help her very sick daughter. But after seeing the remarkable recovery Judy made on the grain-free, lactose-free, sucrose-free diet Dr. Sidney Valentine Haas suggested, Elaine went back to school at the age of 47, earning degrees in biology, nutritional biochemistry and cellular biology so that she could learn the science behind the diet and make sure that the diet did not die with Dr. Haas.

Long after things were better, after her daughter was well, after she'd written the book, after there was a strong support network for the SCD on- and offline, Elaine continued to stay active in the SCD community, talking to newbies via the Long Island Listserv and answering emails, phone calls and faxes. In her last years, Elaine devoted most of her limited time on the SCD/Autism site, working with parents who had their kids on the stricter SCD (prevailing wisdom in that community has kids on the GF/CF diet).

There's no money in food, as we say on the SCD List, so the drug companies stay away and the medical community remains skeptical of the curative powers inherent in Right Diet. But a few doctors here and there are willing to think outside the box, thank you, Dr. Haas, and a few people are brave and selfless enough to upend their lives to ease the pain and suffering of others.

According to an e-mail I received last evening, Elaine Gottschall died peacefully on September 5th, 2005, her immediate family by her side.

Her extended family mourns her passing from a little farther off. And once the mourning is over, let's hope we celebrate her legacy by carrying on the good work she began almost 50 years ago.

xxx
c

Photo of Elaine Gottschall courtesy of PecanBread.com, ©2005

How to kill a crab

I've been cranky lately. Maybe it's too much caffeine; maybe it's too much to do (and no impetus to do it). But I'm getting that weird, itchy, short-fused feeling that happens either when I'm due for a trip out of town (which I am) or I'm in transition (which I am) or I've overloaded my circuits (which...well, you get it).

I notice it in traffic and in my dealings with calmer, more even-keeled people. I practically freaked my friend, Mark, right out of his flip-flops today when I sailed into his house like a bat on speed, hurling various items from my shoulder to various corners of the room, and announced that we would have to REALLY just have the meeting QUICK QUICK QUICK because I was spending too much time on meetings and not enough time in between getting the work done.

As if the meetings were the problem. As if the real problem wasn't me, stuck between wanting to do too much and wanting to do nothing at all, afeard of hunkering down and doing anything. Stuck between a commercial acting career I'm not ready to let go of and the whatever-comes-next that I'm not quite ready to commit to. Stuck, stuck, stuck. Crabby, crabby, crabby.

So this afternoon, I was stuck at an audition. No, really: I'd promised, so I couldn't back out. And it was a callback, for one of the five remaining products that still advertises on national network television, so Scrooge McColleen wouldn't let me back out even if Hooky-Mama Colleen wanted to. And I had nothing to entertain me but a notebook where I could either sort through the lists of things I'd not done or make more lists of the things I probably wouldn't get around to doing. And they were running an hour late. I was S-T-U-C-K. (And crab, well, you know.)

When they finally called in my little group, it was clear the crew on the other side of the camera, the ad folks, the producer, the director, had been there awhile. To their credit, they tried gamely to look interested, but really, how many ways are there to stare at a candy bar? We can't have been that compelling. So the chick with the lines did her schtick and was fine and the rest of us were fine and we did it a few times and it was all fine fine fine and then the director had me do the lines and I was fine and we all politely said "thank you" and filed out and I had that weird sort of desire that sometimes overtakes me after a frustrating hour and a half of audtioning to rip off all my clothes and run into traffic waving my arms and spouting gibberish...or something equally antisocial and inappropriate and tension-relieving. Only I didn't, I just mumbled something to the nice actress who was leaving with me and tried to either walk faster or slower so I could walk alone.

But the nice actress, let's call her "Michelle", since that was her name, hung with me, doing the post-audition chit-chatty, de-briefy stuff that makes me crazy under the best of circumstances. And my brain is railing against the fake positivism and fake humility and fake camaraderie until finally she blurted out, "You were fucking hilarious in that last take." Well, maybe she didn't say "fucking"; maybe she used another, nicer adjective or maybe she just was emphatic. But she was emphatic, and, I swear, genuine; I actually looked at her to see if it was for real or that bullshitty, chit-chatty, de-briefy kind of faux compliment. And then she said a few more nice things, and we got in our cars and drove away.

And it occurred to me that yeah, I was...um...a little crabby today and perhaps disinclined to see the good in things. That perhaps stress had put me in a less-than-cheery mood and had made me a little antisocial. Still, there was enough truth and positivism in Michelle to shake me out of my crabbiness for a moment, to remind me that yeah, I was positive much of the time and it was genuine and dammit, it was also a helluva lot easier of an attitude to live with.

So, Michelle, regardless of what happens with me and my income and my health insurance for 2006, I hope you get that part. Because your attitude after waiting in a cramped room full of actors for an hour was a lot, lot better than mine and I think that should be rewarded. And also because...well...dammit, your take was fucking excellent, too. I was just too much of a crab to note it.

As for me? Well, I hope I get it, too...or something else, when my crab-O-meter dies down a bit. But mainly, I hope I remember next time to really & truly enjoy the next time. Because until I do the next thing, I want to do the thing I am doing all the way...

xxx
c

Hi, diddle-e-dee...

I had one of those colossally bad auditions yesterday. The kind where from the moment you walk into the room, not only can you feel it's not going your way, it would throw up on your shoes and slam the door in your face if it could. And where by the time you slate your name for the guy taping the proceedings, you can no longer tell what you hate more: advertising, America, or yourself, for thinking this might actually be a reasonable way for a grown person to make a living. To be honest, I was pretty sure it was a lost cause when I went to sign in. Because in addition to there being pages and pages of ladies there before me, (a) no one else had checked the 40+ box (I still pass, but usually I'm with a few other old hags who also pass) and (b) many, many ladies (sorry, girls) had checked the "first audition" box.*

But I digress. Because the fugly nugget I really wanted to talk about was my WRONG CHOICE.

Sometimes, you see, in a commercial audition (and that's pretty much my gig, these days) there isn't much call for you to do your classical comedic monologue or even to interact with the other "talent". Sometimes, they just want to see the real you...or rather, the real you in a close room full of tired ad people and bowls of cheap snacks. On these occasions, your auditors often fall back on the commercial "howdy-do", a "what's your favorite color?" or "tell me about your favorite holiday" type of question. Today it was our dream rockstar/actorboy love crush.

Girl One talked about her boyfriend...for five minutes. Girl Two talked about something we all promised wouldn't leave the room...for four minutes.

I was dead. I like unusual guys. I can no longer lie. I told them it was a tossup between (fetishistic choice) Frank Langella in The 12 Chairs or...Ric Ocasek. (What can I say? I'm a geek. A trip to SIGGRAPH gets me hot, fer criminy.) A (long) heartbeat of stunned silence, followed by 15 seconds of repulsed probing, aaaaaand...you're out!

I'm sorry, but Ric Ocasek is hot, I'm almost 44 and I have lost the will to fabricate.

This was not my commercial. This was not my commercial. This was not,

Dammit. It was just me they didn't like...

xxx c

*This would be a good opportunity to outline the Twin Truths of the Commercial Callback:

1. If you are called back for a spot and when you show up, there are any actors in your category there on a first call, you will not book the job, you have the Taint.*

2. If you are called back for a spot and when you show up, every actor from the first call is there, you do not want to book the job, they are clueless.

TAGS: acting, commercials, auditions

The Daily Cosmic Shoutout

It should be no surprise to regular readers of the communicatrix that I'm a big fan of things woo-woo. Of course, I'm also a product of a heap-load of book-learnin', two atheist grandparents and have spent a lot of time around skeptics, so I haven't quite drunk the Kool-Aid, at least, not full-strength. Basically, I'd characterize my relationship to the wooX2 as one of cautious optimism, much like my relationship to alcohol and my daily horoscope. Anyway, I'm knee-deep in a serious newage-y book right now, which I've blogged about here, of all places, already. It's called Creating Money; it's written by two people channeling a spirit. Yes, I know that's nuts; no, I don't care. It's a good (if snoreburgerly earnest) book, full of good, sound advice, even if it's Dr. Laura channeling Casper the Friendly Motherfucking Ghost.

There's woo-woo recipes for actually attracting money, but I'm not a chanter or a meditator. In fact, having read the bulk of the book, I'm not even sure I need to be worrying about creating money so much as I need to identify what it is that makes me think I need so much of it in the first place. I like my life; hell, I love it...all of it, my home, my crazy hodge-podge of jobs, my sister, my boyfriend, my prodigious pile of Stuff.

Hence my decision to institute in public what I've been in and out of the habit of doing in private: say thanks. Thanks for my health, my car, my amazing collection of friends. Thanks for my orangey-red toenail polish and the twenty complete and perfect digits with/upon which I apply it. Thanks for my Q-Tips. Thanks for finding them on sale. Thanks for frequent flyer miles, Sunday coupons and the 99¢ store.

You get the drill.

So starting today, every day, I'm thanking the cosmos, the Big Gal, the All-That-Is for my stuff. Sarah Ban Breathnach, who wrote a really nifty book on learning to appreciate the small stuff, suggests five items per day, and since Oprah dug on it (her favorite book of 1996!!), it must be right.

Since I want to launch this mother with a bang, I'm doing a fancy, Flickr! list to start with. I may do other groovy, list-y things like my friend, Michael Nobbs; I may have days where I can barely drag myself to the computer to type out the five things. Some of the posts may be on the snarky side; some may be revoltingly earnest. My goal is five things per day, every day, out loud & proud (except in those rare cases where I really, truly have no internet access, and then I'll take it offline).

Don't know how long it will last; long enough to seed the gratitude habit, I hope.

And with that, I thank you for playing along...

xxx c

UPDATE: Partly in reaction to current events of late and partly because I don't want weeks to pass when the only thing people see on c-trix is a thank you sign and cryptic lists full of seemingly random stuff, I've moved the DCSo to another site. Go or don't. Peace, out.

TECHNORATI TAGS: Sarah Ban Breathnach, gratitude, blessings, thanks

I'm not drunk, I'm just resting

Dear Readers,

Whew! This place sure does look dusty, huh? And kind of empty and stuff, too. Oh, well. Why don't we all just think of it as "broken-in", like some gross polyester shirt where the sweaty smell is totally burned into the fibers and gets released when you get a little warm under the arms but that you can't get rid of because (a) it smells fine right after you wash it so this time for sure you got the stink out and (b) even if you didn't, it's the only thing you have to wear when they ask for Casual Business Attire?

I know, I know, it's my fault. I got a little distracted by my glamorous, "real" world life doing stuff like "grocery shopping" and "cleaning" and "working" for certain "people" who shall remain nameless but produce a certain well-known theater festival in Scotland where apparently they have nothing better to do than drink a lot of local product and fire off insulting emails to American graphic designers.

Well, that's part of it anyway. Truth is, this here blogging is hard work sometimes, and every so often, the communicatrix just needs a little "me" time to do something rejuvenating, not to mention a little R&R with The BF like spending five days in 110º weather to shoot footage for his reel and driving down to Long Beach during rush hour to buy patio furniture from some desperate guy we found on Craig's List and drinking lots of tequila and passing out on the patio furniture helping The BF clean out his entire house.

But now the tequila is gone I am rested and refreshed and ready to jump back into things. Once more into the breach, dear friends, right? (Hahaha! I just made an obscure English war reference! Take that, stupid Scottish people!)

Anyway, the communicatrix has puh-lenty of interesting news and stuff in store for both of you, so don't forget to tune in to see all that cool news and stuff. Like for instance some, um, work-type stuff. And some...idea-y type stuff, too. And a bunch of other...things. And stuff.

So come back, okay?

Guys?

Okay?

xxx
c

*$175 for the attractive five-piece wrought-iron set you see here, including umbrella and petunias! $175?!? I mean, come on, you'd pay that for the umbrella alone! Kiss my ass, Wal-Mart! Power to the people!**

**This reminds me of my second-favorite joke: What's green and rusts if you leave it out in the rain? Paddy O'Furniture!