Zone Issues

Today was very scary. It was the first day of a 2-part "Acting for the Camera" workshop I decided to take at the Creative Alliance. The only acting I have ever done, ever, was in my initial trailer for Charm City. That experience wasn't as scary as I thought it would be, and was kinda fun, but that is largely due to Sean being such a great director, and also I had been writing and rewriting all the dialogue for the last 2 years, so I knew the material inside-out. Today was nothing like that.

The class is taught by Steve Yeager, and one of the reasons I signed up for it is because I have heard his name a lot in certain circles, and I always see him attending or speaking at film festivals and such. Wednesday evening I got an email from him saying I needed to prepare a 2-minute monologue for class on Saturday. I couldn't get anywhere near that on Thursday because we were filming our last (if there is a God) day of pick-ups for Juju. I was meeting up with friends late afternoon on Friday, so that gave me only a couple hours to find or write something and commit it to memory.

At first I was going to do a bit from the movie "Beautiful Girls", when Rosie O'Donnell's character reads her guy friends the riot act about fantasizing about silicone-filled Playboy models and not giving "real" women a chance. It's a good little speech, funny but true, and a movie moment that sticks in my head, so why not? I found the monologue of it online very easily and had it down pretty quickly. Something was bugging me about it, though.

I ran it by Eric via email, he thought it was okay but used the word "feminist". Hmm. Nothing wrong with being a feminist, but those sorts of rants do turn off a lot of people, and I didn't want anyone tuning out due to the content, even if the context was funny.

So I dug a little deeper in my video collection, much of which is old Silver Screen stuff, and I wanted something more contemporary so it would feel more natural. I saw my VHS tape of "Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean." I love this movie, so much so that I also at some point bought the play script of it. I dug that up, too, and started flipping through it to see if there was anything I could use. I found the part where Sissy (played by Cher), the busty and boisterous sexpot of the group, comes clean about a secret that she has managed to keep for three years - she had to have a double-masectomy, and her husband that she liked to brag on so much left her in the aftermath.

I liked this one better for a lot of reasons. Once I started thinking about delivering my monologue from the side of the Director or Casting Agent, the "Beautiful Girls" piece just wasn't good enough. First off, I found it too easily, which to me says it is used a lot. When I attended the Stonehenge auditions (searching for cast for Charm City) in May, there were some monologues that I saw 5 or 6 times that day! When you do that, to me at least it says that you didn't put a lot of thought into your choice, you chose something safe, and you only end up having the casting agent (consciously or subconsciously) compare you against the other people who had the same monologue. And if you weren't the one who did it best, sianora.

Secondly, it didn't have much depth, and no range. Just straight up sarcastic comedy. While the "Jimmy Dean" piece started off with Sissy being very strong, a little angry even, then dissolving in her own vulnerability, but finally coming out on top and being able to laugh about it. It is really hard to find something that packs all that into 2 or 3 minutes! I ran it by Eric, and he liked this one better, too. "People like stories about boobs," he said. "Even when they're sad ."

I searched online and couldn't find it anywhere, so I copied the text from the script myself and got to work on it. I got it down in time for Happy Hour, and woke up this morning reciting it before I got out of bed, and over and over in the shower. I was as set as I was going to be.
So of course we didn't do monologues today. Seemed only one other person in the class got the memo. Oh, well. No biggie. Good practice for memorization.

There are several reasons why I decided to take this class. First off was the opportunity to work with Steve Yeager. Secondly, I felt it would help me with my directing to get the actors point of view (POV, for those of you looking to pick up the movie lingo :) ). Thirdly, I wanted just another taste of the acting thing for kicks, but mostly I took this class to push myself out of my comfort zone, which it surely did.

In almost any situation I am as cool as a cucumber, and in general I feel there's "nothing I can't handle". But my Achilles Heel has always been and continues to be public speaking, and I am determined to get over that.

Day One did push me, a lot. The first exercise we did is what Steve referred to as a "personalization". Just talking directly to the camera for 2 minutes, telling a personal (true) story about something that affected or changed your life. My classmates had some compelling stories, from drug addiction to first loves to near-death experiences. I talked about my father's death. I'll tell you what I told the camera.

My Dad died five years ago, of pancreatic cancer, at the ripe old age of 56. I was able to spend the last five weeks of his life with him. I was often trapped in his little two-room house in Florida, alone, for much of that time. I didn't have a car and relied on my brother to drive me back and forth to the hospice after he got off work every day. The house wasn't walking distance from anywhere, so all I could do all day was eat spaghetti and watch movies and football until my brother came to get me . I got so bored that I cleaned every square inch of the house. And in every drawer, in the closets and cupboards, manila envelopes in his filing cabinets and shoeboxes in his closet, I found Camel Cash - little "dollars" they used to put in every pack of Camel cigarettes. My Dad was a 2-pack a day guy.

I organized and counted them - eight THOUSAND dollars of Camel Cash. That is 160,000 cigarettes. At the hospice I asked, "Daddy, why do you have all this Camel Cash? Why haven't you traded it in?" Dad had gotten things like pool cues, leather jackets, ashtrays over the years by saving up these things. He said, "They started giving bigger prizes. I almost have enough saved for a trip to Vegas."

Of course, Dad never got to take that trip, because the cigarettes killed him first.

At this point in my personalization, both my voice and I were shaking and it was touch and go as to whether or not I would actually cry. But I wrapped it up.

I can't tell you how angry that makes me. But it made me more determined to live my life, the way I had already been living it, the way I will always live it: I don't wait for rainy days. I make things happen. I don't wait for things to happen to me. I make them happen.

That sentiment has everything to do with filmmaking.

Through the whole process of making Charm City, even when I was winging it, I was still in the driver's seat, and I had some great people around me as my safety net, so I was never completely at a loss. Outside of my comfort zone now and then, but nothing like today, standing alone in front of that camera. My voice was not just shaking because I was telling a sad story. I was just a big bundle of nerves.

When I finished my story, Steve stepped from behind the camera to put an arm around me and ask me if I was okay. So I think I did a decent job of being vulnerable. That is not the hard part to me, though. I'll talk about my Dad all day long and I don't care if I cry in front of people when I do. What is really hard for me is to do something in front of people, something that I don't know, and am not good at. THAT, to me, is being vulnerable. We did another exercise where we had to memorize a sort of "public service announcement". That was SO much harder, to me, than just telling a story that I knew. Mine was a "Vote Pro-Choice" commercial, and instead of saying "Hundreds of thousands of women have suffered the dangers of back alley abortions," I kept saying, "Hundreds of thousands of women have suffered the dangers of back YARD abortions." Like it's something you'd do at the neighborhood barbeque. Sheesh.

I felt very hot, like my face was turning very red, and my voice, to me, sounded as shaky as it had on the first test. But when Steve played back our bits to us, I was surprised to see that it didn't look nearly as bad as it FELT. I can't say that it was fun (though I am hoping that by next week it will be), but it served its purpose. I'm determined to conquer this thing.