Thursday. Spoon River - (no. 3) Nicholas Bindle. I was very pleased with it and so was T who went as far as calling it "excellent, clear and totally understood" (ah, shucks! - hey, there's going to be enough bad news in my career so I'm recording every good notice I get). 13 in class, mostly good and most of them work. One or two on the other hand, I believe are wasting their time, money and energy... oh, and they're kidding themselves by not rehearsing outside of class and by 'phoning in' their work. A couple of them still get the same notes they've been getting for months now and I think they're close to getting booted. The funny thing is that they'll still be head and shoulders above most other 'actors' in L.A. who don't even do anything approaching what they do! Rehearsing next week with two questions into the SR.
J is leaving class to 'work on other things'. Real shame, I've worked with him since beginning class and he's grown so much. A couple of us had it out with him after class. Turns out he's been going to class 4 times a week which is great if you have the time but he doesn't and he's seeing all the other things he wants to do in the industry and the time he doesn't have to do them. The simple thing would be to cut classes to two a week and make the time for the other things. You HAVE to train regularly but keep some balance in your life. Blimey, 4 times a week?! Yes, you can overkill your training too! The thing about training is that if you're not doing it, you will lose your 'edge' very very quickly and the most important things to realise is that there's no plateau, you won't stay at the level you've reached, you'll get worse almost immediately. Sounds daft? Nope, no so. Imagine you are a triathlete (I said, 'imagine'!), super fit and working out at the gym every day BUT then decided to sit on a sofa, immobile, for 8 hours a day in front of the TV without any exercise. How long would it take for your muscles to weaken and the fat to pile on. Pretty quickly, yet? Lose your rather marvelous figure, yes! Absolutely right!
Actively training actor MINUS the training = out of shape actor.
If you want to call yourself and actor AND be taken seriously, regardless of what else you have going on in your life or what else you're doing, you MUST be training regularly AND at a good school, not with a dilettante who studied under someone who studied under someone who once wrote a book on acting, sometime long ago. There's a few of those around too!
Anyhoo, I have an audition tomorrow for a well-known cable company, Cc. Still no feedback on the USPS callback. Heyho, that's par for the course.
The monkey is really flexing his personality, uncontrolled rage and slammed doors. Holy mackerel - you can almost see the growing pains popping out of his eyeballs! Poor fellah. We're putting our hard hats on and riding the storm out - it's going to be a long one!

Hey, poor old Pluto, demoted to a 'dwarf planet'. What will all the school kids do? Every single reference source - books, websites, charts, astronomers' brains, ALL of them out-of-date, overnight. Blimey, that's a biggie, innit!
Chatted to a chap who's producing a Halloween show at one of the SoCal (Southern California) theme parks for the next two months who's going to audition me for a rock act and 'presenter' for a send-up of a popular reality show... more info as it happens!!
Really really need to work on the short with Y who is getting more preggers by the minute! She wants to film next month and we still don't have it even half down! She tells me that she has a lot of material in her head which just need noting down and she's also starting nailing down locations. She's a hard worker, our Y! I have no doubt we'll get it done!