Friday, October 25, 2013

Grief

For the few of you who occasionally check my blog, my absence has been a long one. I've been in no mood to post my ruminations, opinions, or point of view. Ten months into 2013 I can say unequivocally, it's been a bad year. I lost my father in July. He was 91, a veteran journalist and columnist, who passed through the first subtle, then pronounced, stages of dementia over the last decade. Another member of my family has been in steady decline for the past few years. Not due to health reasons, but a far more complicated affliction that offers no easy answers. Both of these events have plunged me into a state of bereavement that shows little sign of letting up.

The best book I've read on the subject of grief is "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. I read it after my mother died eleven years ago. I recently reread it just before my father made his exit, unaware of the timing, about to confront the same theme again. One of the most telling details in the book is Didion's inability to get rid of her deceased husband's shoes, because he will need them when he "comes back." We're often irrational when we lose a loved one. Or we maintain a stoic posture. We drift through the days feeling robbed, despite one indisputable fact: as Jim Morrison said, "No one gets out of here alive."

These losses force us to face our own mortality. I look at my sons and wonder how they will "handle" me when I'm old. I feel pressure to accomplish certain goals because I'm not getting any younger. I'm grieving for two generations: my dad's, with his stellar record of WWII service and innumerable professional achievements. And my children's: a world where communication is breaking down (everyone staring at their various screens), where the idea that they will find gainful employment is tenuous, where their country's government is hopelessly dysfunctional.

I submit such depressing commentary only to explain why this Edgy Blogger has been MIA for so long. Maybe some readers will think it a sob fest, self-pitying and indulgent. But for anyone who's dealt with or is dealing with this state, perhaps it's nice to know you are not alone.      

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Auditioning

Tomorrow I have an important audition. Unlike the typical process of strutting your stuff for a particular theater, this one is a mega-event: thirty Atlanta companies represented in one place, three-hundred actors vying for attention. Each actor has a total of two and a half minutes to show the casting people what they've got. In most cases, that means two contrasting monologues (one comedic, one dramatic) and sixteen to twenty bars of a song, if they can sing. Two minutes thirty seconds isn't much time, but Ethel Barrymore once said that if an actor is good, one minute is enough. If an actor is not, it's too long. She had a point. Once an actor opens his mouth it's clear very quickly whether or not he has the chops.

Since the age of fourteen, I've been to a gazillion auditions. Some have been grand, like the time a director stopped me in mid-song and told the assembled waiting competitors, "That's exactly the voice I'm looking for." I got the part and sang the then-top-forty hit, "Day by Day" in "Godspell." On another occasion I auditioned for a major company in a large city. The two auditors, one wearing a backwards baseball cap, were about fifteen years younger than I. They greeted me with a bored hello. Once I began my pieces I couldn't help picking up their vibes; they looked at me quizzically, like I was from outer space. Many auditors are friendly and seem genuinely happy to see you. Others, like those rude ones, seem perturbed you even walked into the room. It runs the gamut.

Like any other practice, I do better in these situations when I've been performing frequently. I faced a roomful of metro D.C. theaters just days after finishing a season of summer stock. I was lucky to follow a woman who did an overwrought monologue, complete with crocodile tears. My one-minute zany selection brought the house down. I got eight callbacks. Much of the time, for a lot of actors, the audition leads nowhere. You rehearse long hours at home for very little, if any, return. You're not the right type, you're too old or too young, too tall or too short, thin when they want heavy, heavy when they want skinny. Frustration abounds: you know you did a damn good job, you're perfect for the part, they give you great feedback, but you still come up empty.

Rejection is, as everyone knows, germane to the pursuit of a career in show business. An actor has to accept the terms of the deal (85% unemployment, a constant for as long as I can remember) and resolve to do better the next time, to keep at it, never give up. The same is true for writers. The old saw about Hemingway papering the walls of a room in his house with rejection slips (or was it Fitzgerald? Faulkner?) isn't a myth, to my knowledge. It comes with the territory, which is why writers tell would-be authors, "If there's anything else you can do, do it." They're warning you of the stark facts---that the likelihood of getting published is slim to none, at least until you're really adept at the craft and find a suitable home (publishing house, literary review or journal) for your work. (Or you write cheesy books about vampires, zombies or the same tired love story recycled over and over.)  

I have the misfortune to be both an actor and a writer, which must make me some kind of masochist. I think the reason I stay with it is that while the payoff may be elusive, when you hit the mark, it's glorious. Tomorrow, even if I do my best, it's entirely possible that nothing will come of my time and effort. I'm used to it. I'm like the pessimist who says, I'll assume the worst and if something good happens I'll be pleasantly surprised. I never had a choice. I knew I wanted to be an actress from the age of five. I began writing at eleven. No, you'll never see me on the Red Carpet, at the Globes, Emmys, Grammys or Oscars. But I'll keep on trying to crack these professions because I have to. It is, as those sage men and women of letters or the theater will tell you, a compulsion.