The Not "Quite" Skinny Enough, Pretty Enough, Talented Enough Actress.

Dr. Scholls is a Whore!

I would like to take a brief moment to put a curse on Dr. Scholls! He is expensive and full of LIES! I've been wearing heals at my Broadway promo job. Naturally I invested in some Dr. Scholls inserts my first day at work. First I bought the full length ones. While those helped my heels, the pads of my poor little feet were killing me by the end of the day. So, I went back to the drugstore and bought a pair of Dr. Scholls foot pettles for ladies. That worked ok on my foot pads but my heels killed after just 1 hour on the street! So I went back to the drug store and bought $10 heel pads. I put the heel pads in the shoes and the foot pettles in. The heel pads slip down to my arch and now that I've worn the foot pettles more than once they have become unsticky and move around the bottom part of my shoe! I'm so over this! Dr. Scholls owes me $50!!!! That money thieving WHORE!

Reality TV...ugh!

I’m not one of those actors that despise Reality TV because it takes jobs away from actors. The Biggest Loser is one of my favorite shows. I like to watch it on my Ipad while I’m running on the treadmill. If those morbidly obese people can turn themselves into personal training worthy bodies certainly I can lose 10 pounds!!! (You would THINK!) I used to like Survivor and Amazing Race as well. Survivor because I like watching city people that have literally never been in the wilderness learn how to cope and Amazing Race because I love to travel and long to go all over the world…but since I can’t, I live vicariously through the AR contestants. I pretty much adore every reality show on the Food Network! Iron Chef, Cupcake Wars, The Next Food Network Star, Challenge, Chopped, and the new Restaurant Impossible! I don’t even cook! I think the appeal to me is that they are all shows about people that persevere! And I cannot forget the travel channel! Samantha Brown is the most adorable blonde host! She travels everywhere and describes everything perfectly! I want to BE her! Anthony Bourdain is kind of obnoxious but smart! In No Reservations he travels to offbeat locations and talks about the food! I even like Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman, for although I would never eat any of that gross crap it’s fun to see how the other half live and eat! Of all these reality shows the one that I simply cannot stand is…drum roll….Jersey Shore. To be fair, I’ve only seen a totally of 10 minutes of the show (probably 1 minute at a time over 10 episodes) but I just don’t like it…and yesterday I found an even bigger reason to hate it! I was doing cattle call background work on a brand new show called Person of Interest. There were almost 100 background actors on set and I do not know what corner of the earth some of these monsters were dug up from but they were there! Including, I kid not, Snooky’s twin Sister. OK, obviously I don’t know if they were related but this girl was a real piece of work! She showed up to set with her mother! In the bathroom she was screaming that she needed a tampon and didn’t have one! Her mother was coddling her like something out of a Miss Teen Pageant USA Jonbenet Ramsey scenario! Then she announced to everyone in the bathroom that she was 21 but she went everywhere with her mom! She was tan to a point that her face was pealing off and her Jersey accent was thick and trashy! For deep exterior background work she refused to go to set because her “hair was a mess!” Oh yes, she whipped out the flat iron in holding! Then when she was filling out her voucher she couldn’t figure out what to write because “my agent got me this job!” I’m thinking to myself “honey, if your agent got you this non union $85 for 10 hours of background work then you seriously need a new agent.” The worst was at the end of the evening when they were checking out AFTRA members first. She cut to the front of the line and demanded to be checked out stat because she had to drive back to Jersey! The PA’s stared at her in disbelief! Her mom, who had sat around holding for the entire 12 hour day got in on the fight! Unbelievable! And then it occurred to me that shows like Jersey Shore made psycho’s like this famous! Please don’t support this people! It’s just not right! Take it from someone who experienced it first hand and ban the JS from your life! 

 

So Close Yet So Far Away!!!

Yesterday I had a callback for a small childrens theater touring company. The pay was pretty low and it would have been a lot of hard work...but I wanted this gig! The callback was 5 hours long and the producer kept cutting people throughout. We started with 12 girls at the callback and by the time I was one of 3, I was pretty much bonding with the rest of the men (it was a 4 male/1 female cast) and deciding how we would save money by trippling up on our sleeping arrangements and eating at Subway! I was getting ready to cold read again when the monitor came out of the room and told me "Thanks but you can go now" with that pitiful look on her face! I currently have plenty of great things going on for me in NYC but it would have been so wonderful to have booked a tour so soon after my college graduation! It would have been great to play the LADY OF THE LAKE in KING ARTHUR AND THE MAGIC SWORD. I would be mimicking my dear friend Sheryl Beth Silvers who is working on the same themed show with Missoula Childrens Theater Company. I would have been able to tell my headshot photographer that I booked the very first audition I went out for with her headshot! I would have been able to travel. I would have been able to work on my craft. I would have built a close knit new family with a cast of 5 + two production people. I would have grown more self confidence. But instead I put the name of this blog into action by not "quite" being good enough.

My New Job

I got a new job. Today is only my third day working with the company but so far I am feeling like I've hit the jackpot of jobs and am counting my blessings. The company I work for highers actors to promote shows around the Times Square Area. It's a demanding job in a sense that we don't just hand out flyers, we are in a character dancing around continuously. It takes a lot of energy and the heat right now in Times Square is unbearable. Yesterday I worked a six hour shift and after being in the hot sun for a few hours and feeling quite exhausted and miserable I asked myself-"Are you any worse off than you were at the Olive Garden?" The answer is NO! While i was hot and miserable and probably suffering from heat stroke, this job is oceans better than working at the OG. It's probably 100 degrees in the OG kitchen. No dealing with hideous customers, no salad refills, no carring heavy trays over my head, no working out on Long Island. In addition, I can pretty much make my schedule for this job...sometimes the day of! I simply text when I went to pick up a shift! So far I've gotten every shift I desire! The pay is excellent as well! I am feeling so relieved now. No more waiting tables. No more relying solely on inconsistant background work, no more missing auditions! I've found my perfect parttime acting job! Knock on Wood!

BAD AUDITION DAY!

Yuck! Today was a bad audition day! It was a Disney Singing Audition and I was #67. I think some leading factors in having a crappy audition today were: #1 Lack of sleep. #2 Knowing no one in the holding room and having no one to talk to. #3 Having no place to really warm up full on. 

By the time I went in the room I had been listening to girls around me talk about all the tours or other cruises they had just come off. I attempt to keep in my own little space when I'm entarougeless but the headphones have to come off at some point in order to hear what's going on. Hearing how other girls have done all this work recently I find extremely intimidating being that I am so out of practice. On the line outside the audition room my heart started pounding. I could hear beautiful sounds coming through the door and I didn't want to be the joke of the group! I practiced all the breathing/calming relaxation exercies I knew but nothing helped. When your heart is pounding through your chest, even long held out breaths turn shaky! That's exactly how my song went! Shaky! I sang 16 bars from the song Dear Friend from the show She Loves Me. It is a very light/legit song....nonetheless I put absolutely NO power behind it. I couldn't catch my breath and support myself. My lower notes came out crackily and my high notes came out wobbly. My jaw shook heavily as I sang and I was so disgusted with what was coming out of my mouth I couldn't even ACT the damn song! 

Bad Audition Day.

Evolution of a Lamb.

Since I wasn't learning how to "act" in college I was grateful when I met my boyfriend in October and started dating him seriously in February. Gary is an accomplished actor filled with great advice and ideas. He's won a ton of awards, appeared in over 300 Equity productions, and has done numerous commercial and television gigs. What I love most about him is that despite the fact that he's so talented and gifted he doesn't put himself above me! He always takes my suggestions seriously and we "play" a lot with different characters and songs. When I first met him I was creeping him on the internet and I came across this video:

 

WELL.....I loved it! I thought it was so funny! Once we started dating we did one together for fun!

 

The video took less than a minute to make but I realized it was the most I had really "performed" in almost a year. So we kept making them! They are silly and stupid but serve as exercises for me! Here are the rest....in order!

 

 

 

 

Scheduling!!!!!

I've been trying to make a living and support my "art" solely on background work for the time being, but this past week has been most UNsuccessful! I had a great job Monday night...but since then...nothing at all! By Saturday night I hadn't booked anything for Monday so I decided to schedule a job interview for Monday afternoon. Today I get an email offering me background work for Monday. It's now too late to reschedule this job interview which I clearly need to be going to and I'm out $200! Fab! Trying to coordinate jobs and making a decent amount of money with auditions...is killing me! I once worked at a coffee shop with this guy who was a commercial actor. He had 3 jobs. I asked him how he managed to work everything out with auditioning and acting. He told me that somehow, things just always seemed to work out for him, and that he felt like the universe had his back. His auditions always ended up on his days off, or after a shift. I need a little bit of universe action on my side because I've been going crazy trying to organize my life around auditioning! Crazy! 

I'm back....sort of!

Yesterday I went to my first musical theater audition in quite some time. It was pretty uneventful. It was for an equity production of Camelot at the John Engelman Theatre out on Long Island. Although it was an open call...I got the feeling they really weren't interested in non equity women. They cut our audition down to 8 bars and didn't call any of us back. I started singing my 8 bars on the wrong key but quickly switched up and in the end...felt OK about what I did. My boyfriend, Gary, came with me for moral support and we struck up a conversation with 2 girls next to us in the waiting room. One girl had just graduated form AMDA (American Musical and Dramatic Academy) and the other was on a temporary leave of absence from the same school. They both talked about how much they loved the school and what an amazing experience it was. I'm jealous of people that obtained quality musical theater training because mine was such a joke. I was drooling with envy until, on the line to get into the audition room, the monitor told one of the girls that she would have to cut her resume to fit her headshot. Meaning, that her resume was stapled to the back of her headshot and not trimmed down. A big NO NO in the professional world of performing. I couldn't believe that someone who went to AMDA did not know that basic rule. After she had cut her resume to fit, I heard her singing through the door. She had a lovely voice but I wonder how many people she had turned off in previous auditions with her unprofessional resume? 

All I Ever Needed Was The Music And The Mirror???

I took my first dance class in a long time yesterday. It wasn’t a “real” dance class, meaning it was cardio dance and at my local Long Island Equinox as opposed to a studio in the city. Nevertheless, like a “real” class, the teacher teaches a combination which we perfect throughout the class. There is less warm up and more repetition in a gym dance class. Also, there is less teacher “critiquing” and more doing because the purpose is for cardio and not technique. The teacher was really good and taught a nice easy level but long jazz/hip hop combination. Being that it was the first dance class I’ve had in quite some time I thought I would be flying! But…I got bored of the combination very quickly and found myself marking it half the time. Also, I had minimal drive to perfect it. There were a few parts where we were on the ground, or throwing our bodies one way or another. After all the injuries I’ve acquired over the years I get no joy out of throwing my body all over the place. In fact, I felt like I had whiplash at one point!  I ended up leaving the class 5 minutes early when she announced that we would be doing the combo 3 more times. I just…didn’t want to do it. Now I’m worried that I lost my passion for dance! I hope that the reason I did not enjoy myself was due to the style. I’ve never been a big “hip hop” person. Also, throughout class my goal as a dancer has been to get the combo perfectly in order to impress the teacher and get feedback. In a gym atmosphere, the teacher does not care about perfection. It’s solely about the exercise.  Well, ballet and musical theater dance were always my loves. In ballet everything is turned out and graceful. In Musical Theater dance, you can really perform! I’m not throwing in the dancing towel just yet! I m on a mission to find a great advanced beginning ballet and musical theater dance class!

 

Homemade Musical Theater Demo Reel.

I've been putting it off for awhile now but I finally made up a little musical theater demo reel to use for online casting calls. There are two shows that I did in college (musical reviews) that I would really like to have included, but I do not have the video copy yet...despite the fact that it says in my school course catologue upon completion we would be given a DVD of our work! Thanks again for nothing Five Towns College. Anyway, I included some of my more favorite clips from the past few years while keeping it short. I actually really love editing and wouldn't mind getting into that for a living while pursuing acting....of course that's probably another $20,000.00 in school fee's that I will never be able to come up with. Anyway, it's not the best, but it's something. Thoughts?