I was doing a guest spot on a tv show this week, and every few hours or so my part got smaller due to time restraints.  This is the nature of these things, and I don’t take personal offense.  Only once in my life has a guest role gotten bigger, and that was a somewhat alarming experience.  In that case, after my first day, I got home and was sent “new pages,” which generally involves some minor tweaking of lines and stage direction, but what arrived was a three page monologue, wherein I basically explained the entire episode.  (So much for “show, don’t tell,” but there you have it.)

But this week I watched my once interesting role be reduced to a guy running around hallways and shouting something every now and then.  It would have been very easy to get pissed off, or sulk, or worry about how I would come off when the show airs, and these thoughts certainly passed through my head.  But over lunch, something happened.  One of the stand-ins came over and asked if he could sit with me.  Naturally, I said yes.  He was a good-natured guy, articulate and curious.

He started asking for advice.  What followed was a fairly profound conversation about taking action and the emotional roller-coaster that is an actor’s life.  And over the course of our conversation, I recognized that I had a choice to make.  My thick, addled brain woke up to the fact that this guy was looking at me like somebody he aspires to be, an idea that had been drowned in feelings of disappointment not five minutes prior.  Perspective, perspective, perspective…

The afternoon crawled on apace, and every passing hour made it clearer that still more of my role would be lost.  There was mild talk of having me come back another day to finish the work, but that was dismissed, which actually suited my schedule better anyway.

I look around the set.  I had previously worked with the 1st Ad, the sound department, the camera department and some of the PA’s.  I was dressed in a beautiful suit.  In a couple of weeks I would be paid handsomely for my time, whether it was used to its full extent or not, and I could then afford to pursue my career on my terms.  The show itself would come and go like a winter’s breeze and nothing more.  What to focus on suddenly seemed so simple.  Feelings of letdown disappeared.  If anything, they were replaced by a certain glee that every overtime hour spent wondering if we were going to shoot my scenes was, in fact, contributing to my “new laptop” fund.

Eventually they sent me home with a handshake and a mild apology.  It wasn’t necessary.  They had given me so much.

Yet another Mineralava Musing…

As I lay in bed last night I was struck with an idea for a book.  As with all ideas that visit in the wee hours, it was sheer brilliance.  So, as any great person does, I got to work on it right away, in my head, in bed.  Getting up would have been such a bother, and surely such a stroke of genius would stay with me until morning.  Didn’t Melville write “Moby Dick” twice?  And didn’t Joyce write “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” after tossing “Stephen Hero” into the fire?  Greatness stays with you.  Best to stay warm.

The punch line should be, of course, that I can’t remember the book.  Except that’s not true.  I do remember it, and while it’s not destined to be a classic of English literature, it’s not completely terrible.  The real trouble is something else.  In the middle of the night, I started writing the introduction to my future best-seller (it’s non-fiction) and it was rather beautiful, at least according to me, at 3 am.  But when I hit the keyboard this morning and started tapping away, I had no idea where to begin.  Or rather, I knew what to say, just not how to say it.  I was missing the voice that had sung to me so sweetly in the night.

Sing in me, muse…

As any artist knows, some times you just have to forge ahead, produce garbage, and figure it out later.  And so I did.  But every few minutes I would stop, start over, and start again.  In a completely different voice.  One version was witty, another was intellectual, another aggressive, another still was, well, I don’t know what that one was, but it will never be shared.  All of which led me to the inevitable question: Do I even have a voice?

I would like to think the answer is yes, that I sound like me, whether witty, intellectual, aggressive or that other thing, but isn’t the point to have one voice?  Perhaps it’s the actor inside, skilled in switching from character to character, but I was suddenly concerned that in my pursuit of chameleonic qualities that I’d lost… me.  The irony being, of course, that we pursue the arts to find ourselves, or at least to work out some horrible neurosis, but had the road just taken another unforeseen twist?  I thought I’d already done the work.  What happened to all that self-discovery?  All those hours of meditation?  All those books and podcasts I’d consumed?

I stopped writing for a minute.  If there’s a punch line, this is it: the book was about… you guessed it… finding yourself.

But wait, there’s more.

Punch line number two: I did.

(You might have to sit with that one for a few minutes.)

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

Karl Malden was once asked about being a “Method Actor.”  Presumably the question was asked of him because he was a member of The Actor’s Studio, which had produced a system of training and preparation based on the idea that an actor must dig deep into his psyche to produce “real” emotions.  Malden replied that his method was “whatever worked.”  This is my belief as well.  There is no one way, and over the years I’ve developed my own method of creating characters that can involve research in the library, choosing music to listen to, wearing certain shoes, copying somebody else’s body language, whatever.  I’m happy to toss in the kitchen sink if I think it will help.  I don’t feel any allegiance to any one school of thought.

In the last year I’ve added another piece to the preparation repertoire, and it involves feeling out the character in daily life, being him as I go about life as usual.  How would he stand in line at the DuaneRead?  How would he swipe his MetroCard?  These actions may be unlikely to ever show up on screen, but it gives me something to do as I amble around from stop to stop, and it can be helpful to get the guy in my bones so he’s on automatic recall when it comes time to shoot, allowing me to concentrate on the more interesting aspects of the character, namely why he’s doing what he’s doing and saying what he’s saying.

As a firm believer that there’s always something to do in an acting career – I like to think that while 90% of the business is beyond my control, I can at least maximize the 10% that’s mine – I’ve taken to using my time between stops to try out characters.  It can be as simple as a walk, or wearing a suit even when there’s no need, just to see what it feels like.  It could be chewing gum.

Last week I was at a voice-over audition.  The lobby was crowded, and they were running late.  I eventually found a quiet spot to read the copy in the form of a large utility closet.  Once satisfied I knew what I was doing I opted to stay there rather than head back out for idle chatter.  And I decided to start working on something.  A friend of mine in LA has a bobbing, twitchy, physicality I’ve always found fascinating, and I’m sure I can use it someday, possibly soon.  So I started being him, as best I could, making up a story to tell and feeling it out.

As fate would have it, I had my back to the door, and somebody opened it, and suddenly I was on display, walking in small circles like a crazed pigeon, talking to myself.  When I turned around, a few people were just staring at me with a mix of confusion and concern.  I looked back at them, took a breath, and in perhaps my greatest acting moment, I stayed in character, grabbed my bag and strutted back out to the lobby.

Hey, whatever works.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

The original “apology” was written for Socrates.  After he was found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens with this crazy little thing called curiosity, his student Plato decided to speak up.  Socrates wanted people to push the boundaries of human knowledge, to question, and by extension, I believe, to feel.  If his was a a sin punishable by death, then everybody that works for a tabloid should be shot out of a canon into a sea of molten lava, to be rained on by anvils.  But what’s lost in Plato’s apology for Socrates, called “The Apologia Socratis,” is that it wasn’t an apology at all.  The Greek word, in fact, is closer in meaning to “defense” than what we think of today as the modern mea culpa, where we prostrate at the feet of those we’ve offended and beg forgiveness.  Either way, I’m not sure either approach is ideal, but we work with what we’ve got.

I’m an actor.  I don’t like talking about it too much with people I don’t know since I fear the inevitable barrage of questions related to my incidental dealings with people far more famous than I, but mostly I don’t like talking about it because I either feel I have to apologize for what I do, or that I have to defend it.  Actors have long been considered a half-step above prostitutes, so to a degree it’s understandable.  And hey, I know we’re not always the brightest bunch.  We’re not.  We’re often a bit stupid, getting by on our looks or charms or sex appeal until it fades into wrinkles, desperation and a fifth story walkup at age 80, hoping that new headshot will turn things around.

Yesterday I was having tea with a friend and she told me a story I know all too well.  She was introduced to somebody as an actor, the person then looked at her funny, and she felt the need to qualify it by saying, “No, I’m a working actor,” which she is.  But why should we in the arts have to apologize or defend?  You’d never hear, “No, I’m a working dentist,” or “I’m a working systems analyst.”  We in the arts do it to ourselves, of course.  Our fears and insecurities – I’m working today, but will I be working tomorrow? does anybody like me?  is this thing on? – take center stage and we nervously stake a claim to our calling, hoping nobody will notice that we’ve chosen to jump from the plane before checking to see if we’re actually wearing a parachute.

But what I find puzzling is that this is a symbiotic relationship.  The world needs artists.  The world desperately wants artists.  Everywhere.  All the time.  Actors, dancers, painters, musicians, designers, architects, you name it.  Without artists we’d all be living in gray boxes, wearing gray clothes, staring at gray walls, reading nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing.  Perhaps we’d all have a greater appreciation for nature, the greatest artist of them all, but other than that, there would be very little by way of inspiration.

So to the people who look down their noses and feel a superiority or pity at meeting an artist, consider thanking us.  Thank us for giving you everything from the song that gets you to strut down the boulevard to the shirt that makes you feel sexy on a Friday night to the novel that helped you understand your mother.  That’s what we do, and it may serve a greater function than figuring out how to squeeze another dime from the poor.  And to the actor who feels like she has to show her demo reel at every introduction, hold your head high.  You’re in a profession that makes people feel something.  If anybody should be defending themselves and apologizing, it’s the people that killed Socrates.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.