grammar? i hardley know her

At an audition last week I ran into a cliche head on. I ran into the actor who says 'little'. It is their way of making themselves superior during their backhanded compliment.

AWSL: So what show are you doing right now?

Me: I am doing 'Show Title'.

AWSL: Oh, is 'Other Actor' in it? She is a good little actress.

Me: Actually she is normal size.

So maybe I did not say that last line. I was not wanting to stir the waters two seconds before having to read with this person. The conversation, which I tried to keep to a minimum, got worse.

AWSL: How are 'Show Title' rehearsals going?

Me: Good, thanks.

AWSL: How do you like playing that part?

Me: I love it.

AWSL: Is it coming easily?

Me: I am still figuring her out, but it is going well.

AWSL: Her? I hate it when actors refer to their characters in the third person. I never do it.

Me: Lets go over these sides again before we go back in.

I am not rehashing this to ruminate on her rudeness, but because I started wondering on the drive home, how else one thinks about a role they are playing. I remember reading on someone else's blog about actors discussing their characters in the third person (wish I could remember which blog), and I don't have a problem with folks who do not approach it that way; but the truth is that I do not know of a better way to articulate beat changes, intentions, history, and motivation when analyzing my character.

When I discuss any literature, I discuss the people in that story in the third person. Why would I change this when I am discussing a role in a play? I don't feel that it alienates me from my role to do so, it just gives me the ability to understand them better. I never judge a character I am playing, to do so would be the death of it. Is that what this actor feared? That in talking about it as a separate entity she would render it separate from her? Is there a venacular that I am ignorant of that gives actors a different vocabulary for delving into a role. I confess that while I have read about different acting methods, and trained in several of them, I have not encountered one yet that discourages references to your character in the third person.

I have, however, done many improv exercises playing roles where you switch to the first person. But at that point I am inhabiting the role. While in character it makes sense and feels right to use 'I'. But when I am discussing the role in the abstract, or dissecting it in a discussion, than it just seems odd.

I will continue to do what is comfortable to me, but I am curious as to the process of an actor who refuses to refer to their characters in the third person, or any director that does not want their actors to use that convention.

jill back from a tiny room

I have thought about her all the time since she was taken. Every time more bodies were found I held me breath thinking she would be among them. Her abduction stayed with me.

I cannot tell you the relief that I felt today at her release.

hmm hmm hmm - hmm hmm hmm

Ever have that day where you have a song stuck in your head and you want to hear it so badly and then you have to go to rehearsal and you keep humming it at every break until you get everyone else humming it and then you go to an audition and you are singing it in your head all the way until you walk in the room and you only stop humming it when doing the audition, but then it is back again before you even say your last 'thank you'; and then you're tired and driving home and the song just won't stop and then you turn on the radio, which you never listen to because you have an ipod, but the ipod is out of juice and lo and behold...

THE SONG STARTS RIGHT WHEN YOU TURN ON THE RADIO!

It exorcises the song from your brain. Hallelujah.

secrets of the universe do not come in manila envelopes

Fanaticism in any religious doctrine preys on the weakness in individuals. It preys on their insecurities, their loneliness and their inability to find direction.

This is why, although I come from a very open minded, and religiously mixed background, I find that I have a hard time reconciling sprituality with religion.

letting them know how it is

More chats with a small person.

Smaller: Why did VanGogh cut off his ear?

Me: Well I guess because he was sick in his head and when you are sick like that you may do strange things.

Smaller: What kind of strange things?

Me: Well the ear thing I suppose, or saying things that are weird, stuff like that.

Smaller: You mean like the weird stuff Mr. X says, is he sick in his head?

Me: No , he's just Republican.

Smaller: Ohhhh, I get it.

why they won't

Once again I am late in the game on talking about something. But here goes.

The fear of our government banning all abortions is a real one. I understand why many people believe that we are headed in that direction but let me tell you why I don't think we are.

When South Dakota banned all abortions unless the woman's life is in danger, it took an issue that politics and religion have been talking about in the abstract and brought it into reality. It brought it about during the time of impending election and during the time of new Supreme Court justices. The South Dakota legislature may have thought this was the perfect time to do it, but they could not have misjudged the climate more.

The Supreme Court's two new justices are appointees of our current president. Our current unpopular, warmongering, numbskull of a president. They are still however, judges. Yes, I am upset that it was Bush who got to nominate them instead of Clinton nominating someone I like more, but these judges will still be faced with the same legalities involved with trying to over turn Roe v. Wade. Precedent has been set. These judges are old enough to remember the times of coat hanger abortions, and they do not want to be the ones who force a 14 year old girl who was raped by her father to then give birth to a baby conceived from that violation.

Let's go on further to the Republican party as a whole. Republicans have used the abortion issue as a way to sway voters for many years. But now they are faced with entering an election cycle with an extremely unpopular president and the moderates that they picked up to win the last election will be making a mass exodus. If you want to see voter turn out, then lets tell the women of America that their right to choose is on the line. In actuality, it is always on the line, but they won't all vote until they are cornered.

Now take a worst case scenario. Roe v. Wade is overturned and South Dakota's law is made national. Fast forward to a victim of a brutal rape who becomes pregnant and then illegally gets an abortion and gets arrested. Imagine that woman's face plastered all over the newspapers. The media and the public will find this martyr; and anyone who voted to over turn Roe v. Wade will now be the devil. Or some young girl with an angel's face will die in an illegal botched procedure. It can happen. These thoughts will haunt any person who is running for office, and anyone who votes to ban abortions. The simple truth will force its way through. That you cannot commandeer a persons body for any purpose.

South Dakota has jump started an ugly machine that, while we all argued, had laid dormant for a long time. Like everything else under this current administration, South Dakota's law seeks to move us backwards as a nation and as a people. Instead of moving backwards in a woman's right to choose, education, human rights, poverty, economy, and peace; we need a leader to move us forward to a higher level of thinking and acceptance.

This all may be optimism on my part. I remember when I knew with certainty that there was no way this country would ever let Bush be president, and then I knew with certainty that this country would never elect Bush president. I was obviously wrong. Here's hoping I am right on this one.

marketing makes my ass twitch

Before the Oscars...













After the Oscars...



















Anyone else find this hysterical?

let the play happen and keep watching

It occurs to me that while everyone is busy debating the censorship of My Name is Rachel Corrie, that the show will make out better than it did before the issue arose.

Meanwhile things just keep getting worse and new diaries are being written everyday.

netflix and blockbuster don't get me

Does anyone out there know a place where I can rent indie movies and/or documentaries here in the DC area? I have several titles that I cannot find.

moment of procrastination

I am fairly cranky at the moment due to the absurd amount of work that has been coming my way lately. I need the work. I need the money that the work makes. It is a good thing to have these projects, but I feel like I am sinking into an abyss of photoshop, illustrator and sketch pads. There are little pieces of paper everywhere and the list of incomplete work is long.

I am, at this moment, so thankful I did not take that last show. This revitalizes the idea that everything happens for a reason.

Amidst the mess I actually surfaced with the thought today of Shakespeare's sister. The fictional sister, Judith, that Virginia Woolf conjures in A Room of One's Own. I was 18 when I first read her words and it was a light bulb moment for me. For a long time I could not read that particular passage without getting choked up. It still gets me sometimes.

Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter--indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager- a fat, looselipped man- guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting- no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted- you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows- at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so- who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?- killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
-Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own

Judith would be free to roam now, but this says something about artists. Yes, I am thankful for the work, but it muddles my brain and, I too, would rather be at the 'hub of the universe'.