Go! And never darken my towels again!

So I recently got into the show Mad Men. Originally because I wanted to see how it addressed advertising in the 60s, but then of course got caught up in the stories and the excellent acting and all the goodness is has to offer. A major theme of the show, and a thing said explicitly in one episode, is to make your own life. As I haphazardly found myself in the 'real world' of acting, it's something I think about a lot.

Let me reiterate, if only to myself, that I had no intention of being an actor right away. I hoped it would happen at some point, but it was not my goal upon leaving college to start my award-winning career as an incomparable actor. It just sort of worked out that the people who called back were the people who wanted me to be an actor.

The other day I shot a 'corporate video.' A corporate video is a thing companies use to inform their employees about rules or strategies or guidelines or whatever. I have no idea what this one was about, closest I could figure it was about remembering a company's mission statement.

Anyway, during the shoot I tried so hard to focus on being professional and trying to be “corporate” and it just sort of worked out that the crew I was working with were my kind of people and I could be myself more than I thought I could. But despite that I kept thinking about how really, this stuff is just not my stuff. Of course, we starving artists go where the money is to pay the rent and sacrifice the artistic integrity and our passion to make ends meet, but in trying to see what’s really out there I have found that…that stuff is just not me. I don’t mind a gig here and there, but that will not be my career, if I had my druthers.

So it raises this question in me of “well if I’m uncomfortable doing something that isn’t what I ‘do’ anyway, am I really that good of an actor?” but then I have think WAIT no. By saying that, I just dismissed and trivialized my loves of commedia and clown and physical comedy and all that as illegitimate, a fight I’ve been fighting ever since I discovered it. and I guess at Hampshire everyone felt like they were fighting the man and doing something alternative and it just happened that my alternative was contrary to theirs but not seen as illegitimate. Apparently in this “real world” people reference, the average working actor just doesn’t do that. All these method-stanislavsky folks are getting all the work because they were taught to the test; they learned how to make a career for themselves by learning what was already out there. And might I say, all the people that identify as those kinds of actors are really boring people. No thank you.

And then that brings us back to this idea of ‘authenticity as an actor.’ The more it sits with me the more it doesn’t make sense. So I channel the work I did in Italy where I was asked to dredge up terrible memories and I made comic situations where I should have been serious and I kicked myself for it, for hiding when I should have been pouring myself out in a vial because that would’ve been authentic acting, that would have been real emotion. But then maybe I achieved that authenticity because in my mind real emotion isn’t what I put out onstage, I leave my real emotions for my private time and I put on a good show that gives the audience a good laugh. Maybe that was authentic.

So you know, I am a good actor. I love what I do when I get the chance to do it and I want to create more opportunities for people like me who don’t have to do stupid corporate videos to make money. And I should be really grateful that I got a gig like blue lou, even if we only do a handful of shows ever. Because that is doing what I love and I get paid for it.