Teaching Hurts

Teaching Hurts
Originally uploaded by AdiaMichelle

Apparently I was slapping my thighs too vigorously during a warm-up game today. I think I was trying to make up for the lack of energy in the kids.

Simon Callow's words, my thoughts

On a message board I sometimes read, someone posted an article from the New York Times about five actors in New York City. It was a bit depressing. Four out of the five generally made less than $25,000 a year. In New York. Well, the article fomented much discussion, of course. Scary to some of us, encouraging to others - in respect to those who had decided to give acting their all, no matter how difficult or unrewarding it was - but all agreed that it was the reality of the profession.

Somehow the discussion turned to books written on that very subject, and one of those books is called Being An Actor, by Simon Callow. If you've seen Four Weddings and A Funeral, Simon Callow plays Gareth. He's an extremely talented actor, but he didn't start out that way, as I learned after I picked up his book from the library.

I don't know if this has ever happened to anyone else, but I feel that I'm reading exactly the right book at exactly the right time. (And I have my local library to thank for it! KEEP LIBRARIES OPEN! ahem.) He has a way of writing out his thoughts that rings clear and true with me. He writes of his discoveries and experiences and reminds me of details about the technique of acting that I had forgotten. His chapter on unemployment...oh, his chapter on unemployment! I don't know whether he went through many, many drafts before the final product, but everything he says in his chapter on unemployment I have felt in the last year and a half. An excerpt:

With every further day of unemployment, you feel less and less like an actor. If you go to the theatre, you feel remote from the people on the stage. If they're not very good, you rage inside at the injustice; if they are good, you feel hopeless: yes indeed, you have every reason to be unemployed, how can you compete with that? Although you comfort yourself that acting is like riding a bike and you don't forget how to do it, you get increasingly anxious about your capacity...

He nails those destructive thoughts right to the wall. But that's the beauty: knowing that someone else, someone extremely talented, has had those thoughts and that, yes, he did work again and did very well, is comforting. And it fills me with hope because it means that one day I will be up again. It may be down right now, but it will be up again. It's a roller coaster, but there's no shame in choosing this particular roller coaster. And for right now, I'm going to keep riding.

Here's what I've been trying to communicate.

Maybe I should have gone to accounting school...