Acting Can Be A Lonely Job

Especially when you're not being paid for it. And, it's true, money can't buy friendship, or love, but at least when you're paid for it you can walk away and know you're taking something tangible home with you.

Wait...what?...that's true of every human endeavor? Oh, pishsaw!

I suppose most of my fellow thespians have 'a life' to go home to, (well, yippee) and I suppose I'm pretty damned sure I don't, judging from the loneliness I feel after the rehearsal is over.

It's a loneliness born from not being able to discuss the deeper details and ramifications of what the play is about and why we're breaking our asses to bother with it in the first place.

A good while ago I began to notice how strange it is that the characters in whatever show we're doing know each other infinitely better than the actors in the production ever will.

Acting does seem to be a quite unnatural art form; pretending you're someone else for and hour and a damn half. God, what was I thinking?

I'm rather convinced it's a personal problem of my own. If or when I actually have a significant other to come home to to bitch about rehearsal, I'm sure everything will be fine. Or not.

In the final analysis it's me I come home to, I mean in'nit? And that's mostly just fine, since that's the human condition. Actually, the whole animal kingdom condition, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes...even as I write, animals of every stripe are steadfastly or otherwise coping and dealing with timeless hierarchical red tape...and loneliness...and much worse.

Gosh...suddenly what's happening in my own tiny world is rendered ridiculously insignificant, faced with the larger universe unfolding all around me.


Never mind.

.

Small Town Friday Night

I'm in rehearsals for a play right now. It's called Dead City. It was written by a thirty-three year old playwright named Sheila Callaghan. She's a New Yorker and this play is about New York. That's her in the cemetery picture.

More to the point, it's the portrayal of a 'banal' day in the life of a fictional woman named Samantha Blossom, based ever so cannily on a fictional character named Leopold Bloom from another work of fiction called Ulysses by a guy named James Joyce, who, in about 1918, based his own adaptation on the original story of Ulysses by Homer. Yeah, that Homer...the The Iliad guy.

So, like...hilarity ensues, n'stuff.

Dead City was first produced in New York in 2006, then in Chicago, also in 2006.

I better be good, that's all I know. I better not be a faker. I better not be phonin' it in. I better be rested and ready and whatever it takes to transport a viewer somewhere she or he couldn't be if they stayed home and sat on their own couch contemplating their own mortality instead of the fictional mortality I go out of my way for five nights a week until opening and then about three times a week.

Like I care. I do care, but...like I can afford to care. Which, as it so happens, I can.

"But that's not what I wanted to tell you, what I wanted to tell you is..."

About four hours ago I went to see The Bluesville Drifters at The Thirsty Ear on West Third Avenue in the Grandview part of Columbus Ohio.

Tim Browning, the lead singer and fellow Dead City cast member, invited our cast a few nights ago; I was the only one who showed-up. I was hoping a few more of us would, but no.

Tim is an honest actor with whom it is simply a pleasure to work.

I could go on, so I won't, except to say:

Google "The rest is silence."

The Us We Used To Know

I used to draw a lot. Pencil, pen, ink, that sort of thing. Of course, I was in school then and they made me draw. But I wanted to do it and I was good at it. These days I feel as though there's no time for drawing. But I know that's not true; it's more the case that I should start drawing again and, this time, not stop.

When I was younger I took my 'artistic' abilities for granted. I used to think that drawing was something I could do later in life when other options were no longer available to me. Well, that time has more than arrived. Life seems to speed-up when you're at the late end of it looking back. Most of those tomorrows are yesterdays now, and I have to remind myself that if I'm ever going to get around to painting and drawing anything, the time is now.

When we're young, life is about all the things we're going to do. When we're older, it tends to be about all the things we never got around to doing. And that's most of the things on the list, since life demands that we carve that list down to a managable few. And that's if we're lucky. If we're not lucky, life just pretty much cancels out anything we originally had in mind and replaces it with a bunch of things we never counted on in the first place.

First Entry...Like, Ever.

Golly. Here I am. It's almost 3:am here in Columbus, Ohio. More than before, that means it's almost time to read myself to sleep. Or review and recite the lines I'm still learning for a play that opens on April 10th.

Blog or not, this entry is gonna be short. Wednesday (today) I take ye old hour-and-a-half long bus trip to Gahanna, then sit in a MacDonalds for another 40 minutes or so, waiting for rehearsal at 7:30pm. I'm not only used to it now, I've actually structured the time somewhat, and grown somewhat accustomed to the drill. Still, it's a lot of time to do not much but read and drink coffee.

I'm calling this blog 'Not Entirely There' because I'm pretty sure I'm not quite really entirely here anymore. I remember being entirely here in my pre-thirties. Now...not so much. I guess (and have been told) the post-fifties are a time of adjusting to not being entirely here and learning to enjoy it. Paul Simon had it right in his lyrics, "the nearer your destination, the more you're slip-sliding away."

But fret not, fellow soon-to-be not entirely here either-ers! All is well. As far as I know.


And what do I know?


g'night