Karma

I am a great believer in “What goes around comes around…” Otherwise known as karma.

Send something good out into the universe, and something good will come back at ya. I’m also big on cycles of life…If you start at one point, life will go the full circle around the clock face, and you’ll come right back to where you started.

So. there’s a major movie being shot in the next town over, practically my backyard. They are having auditions. It’s my day off. Why not “go for it”?

The thing is…way before I ever thought about acting as  a true life goal, I went to an acting audition: IN THE SAME DAMN VENUE, in which I auditioned today. I’ve been trying to remember when, and as nearly as I can remember, that was 2004. It is a “little theatre”, and there is a small stage, and back in 2004, I was so bad, So Bad, it was funny.

If I had let that experience frighten me, I would never have tried again. But, I thought about what I did wrong, and how I should have approached things, and…by my next audition in 2005, I went in and nailed it.

It was 2006 before we got an actual gig on a movie, and I don’t know when it became “acceptable” (to me, in my own mind) to say, that this, too, was one of my life goals. I want to act. I am going to “go for it!”

So, life rolled around to, today. And I am in the same venue where my adult acting career…started(?).

I’m older now. More experienced. I know a whale of a lot more about filmmaking, producing, acting, etc, than I ever did back then.

What will come of today’s audition? Who knows? There are so many factors, it’s impossible to calculate. Just as an example. Think of one word:

Hello.

Now. You are on a stage, and you are auditioning. The lights are on you. You are “on the spot”.  How many different ‘ways’ can you ‘play’ that one word? 10? 100? 1000? There are way more than 1000 ways to play it. What choice do you make? What are they looking for?

What attitude do you project? Is your character on stage what you want her to be? What about when you are ‘meeting people’. In just a short amount of time, you need to project that you are competent, professional, pleasant to get along with, work well with others, take direction well, calm, cool, comfortable, take-charge, put-the-people-in-the-palm-of-your-hand….good at your job. You may have less than a minute to get all that across.

So, you have to sell it, on 2 levels: the character, and yourself.

I was in that room for perhaps less than four minutes. Was I on? Yep.

Did I project who I needed to be? Yep.

Is it what they wanted? Who knows?

Acting is a passive game.

But am I gonna sit by the phone and wait for them to call?

Hell, no!

I got too much work to do! 🙂