Like and Love

"If the need to act is so strong it wakes you in the middle of the night, then stay with it."  - Frank Langella

There are things in life that we like. I mean, really really like.

These might be the things that we crave for comfort on a tough day, or hope to get for Christmas. Nectarines, tea, a new dress, a smartphone.

What lights you up?

These things we like might even be people that warm us or cheer us up or speed up our workday. The guy with a joke about everything, the friend who listens to our ideas. We really, really like them. We want them to sit near our cubicle and come to our happy hour. We want to hear what they think. Their presence is like a refreshing bath or breeze.

The things we really really like might even be activities - hiking, reading, writing, swimming. Things that revitalize us and strengthen our health.

Then there are those things that we love.

The distance between the things we love and the things we like is subtle and sometimes confusing, but it is a sudden and shockingly deep precipice nevertheless. One day we might wake up and realize that the thing we thought we only liked we actually love, or vice versa. And then it might turn into one of those sprinting-to-the-airport, buying-the-cheapest-ticket-to-anywhere-just-so-you-can-bolt-through-security-and-race-into-the-gate-and-declare-your-undying-love-over-the-speaker-system-and-embarrass-the-crap-out-of-everyone-but-end-up-passionately-making-out-and-not-caring-anymore movie situations. That crossroads moment when everything is silent around you but the cry of your heart. The "once you know you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start right now" kind of deal. (God I love When Harry Met Sally.)

But until that day, how the heck do you know?

Sometimes I can't tell the difference between the lands of like and love. I squint and scrutinize but blur the line, spill something on my map, and lose track of where the boundaries are. Like is like love, I say to myself. Like is love in a way, I say to myself.

I think myself in circles, spending a lot of silly time trying to understand my feelings about things, and develop feelings for my feelings, and try to feel my way back to knowing whether or not my feelings are feelings of like or feelings of love - or feelings in a different category entirely unrelated to like or love.

Feelings, WTF!

Or whether my feelings are really a factor at all?

The thing about love is you can't think yourself into it, out of it, or around it.

It is, or it isn't. Right?

The thing about love is that it's mysterious and nonsensical. It can appear and disappear sometimes, and sometimes it can be a permanent weight in a small corner of your heart. Sometimes it can easily be mistaken for something else, or not acknowledged at all. It can be the huge writing in the sky that helps us make a choice, or it can be the choice we don't want to make.

King Kong's feelings are clear.

Love makes us alive. Right until it we fall off the Empire State Building.

The reason I know that I love acting - not like it, but love it - is because I just KNOW. No thinking necessary.

Sometimes I toy with the idea of talking myself into liking acting and loving something else more, because loving acting is complicated. I sometimes want to love something that's easier to love. Something that's nicer to me.

But that's just ridiculous. Not to mention impossible. The heart wants what it wants. And what else would I do with my life for goodness' sake, make model planes? Grow a pea garden? Not there's anything wrong with those things. They're just wrong for me.

Tina knows EXACTLY what love has to do, has to do with it.

I remember my making-out-passionately at the crossroads moment with acting, when I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with it and I wanted the rest of my life to start RIGHT NOW. It was when I got the phone call that I was accepted into the Actors Studio Drama School, and felt for the first time that a life as a professional actor was ACTUALLY within my reach. I screamed so loud, and jumped around like such a crazy, I am sure I embarrassed everyone on the block. Or at least my brother. And it was amazing.

Today, Gentle Readers, I trust that you can also know what you love. And that you can have it.

You'll just...know...

Life and Happy Thoughts

I don't know about you guys, but the beginning of August has been a bit rough and tumble for me emotionally, and it's not just the heat-and-humidity-induced smell of the city that's getting to me. Two amazing men in my professional life passed away this month, one of them much too young in the prime of his life. Both spent their time inspiring other people and tirelessly throwing themselves into their passion for this industry. 

Life is funny. Day to day I'm auditioning through the longest dry spell I've had so far in New York, simultaneously struggling to keep some perspective on why I'm still duking it out AND YET knowing with absolute certainty that there is nothing I want more than to act. I'm an actor, dammit. You don't really decide to be one. You just kinda are.

And so, August, I will begin my blogs in you with life filled happy thoughts. Because life is a gift. It can disappear startlingly fast. It can revive and rout the enemy with miraculous chance. It switches on a dime. And you know what? Life is great. Therefore, August, I will revel and rejoice in life. I will fill my brain with good thoughts from great people. Here are some I have commandeered:

"Life is too short to not have fun." - my Dad

"Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity." - Gilda Radner

"After each experience, you grow up, you get enriched with something, and you don't know how you're going to be in six months, you don't know what you're going to want, what you're going to need." - Audrey Tatou

"Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before." - Mae West

 

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The world owes you nothing. It was here first." - Mark Twain 

Get Serious

OK self. Let's have a chat.

What are you doing here? Are you hanging out and surviving, or are you living out a dream? Are you just another post-prosperity young American drifting through economic hardship, or are you gaining ground and advancing on our goal of acting in feature length films, TV, and Shakespeare? Are you letting life just happen to you, or are you going to be bright and brave and beautiful and grab the bull by the horns? Are you going to blow the smoke away and DO what you're here to DO?

Why do you live here again?

Let's be real: if you're just going to work a smattering of jobs in an attempt to pay your bills and not put your entire energy every day into your acting goals, you might as well not be in New York City. If I'm just living my life, I might as well live somewhere easier and prettier and wilder, with expanses of sky and water and space. Like Tahoe, Montana, Sicily, or Galway. Remember why you didn't go that route? Remember why you're here? There was a reason. A good one.

There's a good reason you don't live here. Yet.

You are an actor.

Remember the advice given to you by an older, more experienced actor: the beginning is slow, the beginning is hard, the beginning kind of sucks. You watch friends marry and buy houses and earn livable wages. You watch the comforts and pleasure of life that you've postponed going on and thriving in their merry dance around you, and you get jealous. You want things you don't have. You feel you've maybe made a bad trade, that maybe you should take a month off the acting stuff and try to save up for a motorcycle. If you're not careful, you get bitter. You covet. Your focus swings off track and you get bogged down in pursuing contrary purposes.

But there's an easy way to avoid this. Remember the wiser actor's advice: get to the middle. Don't wallow in the beginning. Push through. Push to the middle of your career, the part where you're a well oiled machine and a passionate doer of deeds, where you audition your face off and know who you are and know what you want. 

The middle, where you keep in focus at all times that you ARE doing what you came here to do, that you ARE an actor, that you ARE closing in on parts that are right for you. The middle, where you're making that true. The middle, where your married friends with houses are stuck with mortgages and car payments and office jobs and you are not. The middle, where you are free to go to do an amazing, epic, romantic, steamy film in Brazil with Joseph Gordon Levitt if you want. Heck you could even tell him what a crush you have on him over craft services one day. Just be like, "Hey Joe, it's me the other Joe - what's up? What? What's that you say? You like chewing on matches too? Ok, let's make babies. Or not. You know, we could just hang out and work on a film together and make brilliant acting choices too...if you want...either way..."

"Hey JGL. Looking forward to our movie."

This is the middle, where you will live the rest of your life.

Get serious, self. This isn't a brief experiment. You want this life. You want this topsy turvy acting career. In fact, there is little else you want at present. You are shaping your reality - so don't forget to be intentional. You are the man behind the curtain, so to speak. If your hand sags, the whole puppet stops. Get going. Don't stop. Never quit.

Remember who you are.

Remember why you're here.

Mufasa says: "Remember who you are!!!

One Thing A Day: Rest

They say you should do one thing a day for your career. Some days, I do as many as 10 things. Some days, I am uber productive, focused, relentless, passionate, and cut-throat. I submit resumes, shoot emails, make phone calls, have meetings. Some days, though, I feel like I don't manage to do even one thing. I'm trying to learn how to make every day count.

Today I am pushing through my reflexive guilt and doing something very important for my career, something I hardly ever do, something that Americans generally probably suck at...

REST.

My one thing today is to rest. To take an actual weekend day. To sleep in. To watch a movie. To wear mismatching house clothes and not brush my hair. To have a skype date or talk on the phone with my mom. To hang out somewhere with friends maybe. Or, maybe, not do any of those things. Maybe do nothing. To rest for me means to reclaim space in my mind, declutter my soul, and touch the things that make me myself, dust them off, and let them shine again.

As a New Yorker and an extremely ambitious gal, it's hard for me to justify staying at home all day. The pace of the city and the drive of my heart's desires usually thump and pulse and propel me down my stairs and onto the streets. As much as I love sitting on my couch watching "Waiting for Superman," I feel like I'm missing things when I make myself rest. However, I think it's really important that I learn how to do this now in my 20s, before my film bookings and family things have me flying all over the world or whatever. Perhaps this rest is less for my career and more for my personal pleasure, but you know? I think those two things should intertwine. Resting not only makes me healthy, it makes me strong. It will allow me to hit the ground running.

I'm making rest part of my career strategy.

Making Things

Fiji fixes everything, right?

This week on my rollercoaster ride life as an actor, I've felt like I haven't made it. I've felt frustrated, tired, and discouraged more than once, and somewhere around Thursday night it seemed to me that I hadn't made much progress at all ever. I felt like I hadn't made good use of my year in New York so far. I felt like I hadn't made enough money, enough movies, enough of enough-ness to be enough. There was only one thing to do: move to Fiji and support myself by selling my hand-made shell necklaces.

By Sunday morning, Fiji seemed less lustrous as a feasible solution. Isn't there some saying about when the going gets tough, the tough get...you know...

I may have felt like the going had gotten past me without toughening me up or getting me going. I may have felt like "the tough" probably refers to somebody else, somebody who has made enough things or has simply made "it", clearly unlike my own state of un-made-ness. But, whatever my feelings might feel, the truth is I HAVE been making things: making space, making peace, making time, making art. I make kids learn everything from grammar to soccer in my day jobs. I make gourmet meals for myself and friends at home. I make sides come to life in auditions, and worlds appear out of monologues. I make theater productions from scratch sometimes, and sometimes I make my small contribution to larger, ancienter stories. I make tapes and lists and cards and mailings and contacts and friends. I make choices and merry and connections and magic. I make motion. I make stillness.

Once again this week, I am reminded that the voices in my head and my own swirling emotions aren't always the best way for me to look at my life and my work. Sometimes, it's not helpful to let myself feel my way through slow times or low thoughts. I have to remember objective reality and calm down, breathe, and go on making things. And as long as I'm making things, I have to remember that it is enough. And so am I. It's helpful to notice that what I can make, and what I have yet to make, are on course to intersect beautifully.

So I'd like to share with you something I've made - along with many other talented makers. It reminds me of what I've done, what I'm doing, and what I'm going to do. Go on making things, gentle reader! In our making things, we make the world.

Omerta

Or, A Love Letter to The Godfather

me, about to see The Godfather

Picture this scene: five-year-old me in pigtails and a frilly pink dress (dubbed the birthday cake dress due to it's resemblance to, well, a birthday cake), sprawled contentedly on the living room floor, playing with my barbie dolls. We're having a tea party, it's great, I'm doing all the voices and splitting up the imaginary cake into equal portions because that's what my mom does in real life. Then my Dad thunders in with a non-alcoholic beer and plate of pasta, takes up residence on the couch, and says, "Jeanne Joe, it's time you understood where you come from."

And how, you might wonder, does my Dad proceed to educate me about my origins? Fear not, it's not a disturbingly early talk about the birds and the bees. Actually it's somewhat more disturbing, in a totally different way, while also being completely endearing and one of my favorite memories of my Dad when I was little. What he does to help me understand where I come from is put a tape in the VCR.

Brace yourself. That tape is The Godfather.

Now, I'm not sure that going to therapy for the rest of my life would ever fully unwind the twisty ball of mental, emotional, and spiritual ramifications from this experience. Piecing together "where you come from" with a) the Mafia and b) one of the greatest movies of all time was so overwhelming that it left me at first just wondering if the film was where my Dad got the idea to use orange rinds to make toy scary teeth. My Dad was always using orange rinds to make toy scary teeth. Then I pushed past that thought and started wondering about the bigger question of whether my Dad was not REALLY a retired bus driver and poker player. We did have an awful lot of antique furniture, and some nice paintings...and I knew my great-grandmother had ran away from her family in Sicily for some reason...but, that's neither here nor there. What's important is that I was five. And that I've proven, later in life, that my Dad really is a retired bus driver and not a wise guy.

Following the logical chain of Luca Brasi's strangulation in the St. George hotel to the mattresses, thinking about what's so progressive about having a German Conciglieri, or trying to understand why the baker wouldn't take his daughter's rape case to the police are things your average five year old probably hasn't pondered. But I sure did. After the tape finished rolling and I woke up my Dad (no reflection on the film), my main question was..."Daddy, what's wrong with Fredo?"But right after that, my question was, "So why is loyalty and silence so important to us?"

what's his DEAL!?!

I think of my early exposure to The Godfather and it's presentation as "my culture" as one of the chief things that distinguishes my brain from other peoples' brains - because I took it utterly seriously. My Dad did everything in his power to help me believe this separation and to solemnly receive life lessons from it. Maybe because I grew up so far away from my other Italian relatives, Dad was determined to instill in me a sense of our history, my people, our characteristics, and our values. He wanted me to understand the world he grew up around back in Brooklyn and where certain feelings and impulses might come from. The Godfather was one of his favorite tools. To this day, whilst giving me his fatherly wisdom, he'll say things like, "That's Godfather 101, kid, don't forget it." I even read and underlined the novel by Mario Puzo, searching for my and my Dad's reflections in the stories of my people.

The only problem is...I'm not in the mafia...so...

You can probably see my problem. Going through life believing I'm a part of The Godfather has been problematic in diverse amusing and surprising ways. Mostly, applying the law of omerta has been confusing for me. Omerta is the code of silence, of loyalty, of non-cooperation with outsiders. It's why you go to jail for a crime you didn't commit rather than ratting out someone else. It's why Michael calmly renounced Satan, becoming godfather to his sister's kids, whilst arranging to have her husband whacked. It all makes logical sense on the streets, BUT, how am I supposed to do it without going crazy? Obviously cops are the enemy, but the whole "Don't let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking" thing can really only be applied in my case to EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD. Right? So...no one can be trusted. That's the only possible way to do it...since I'm not in the mafia...

I love them so much.

I say all of this to explain the mistrustful mental underpinnings I've recently begun to become aware of in myself. Omerta is somewhat damaging to artistic honesty and interpersonal openness. If you trust no one and never break a personal code of silence...how can you really tell good stories? Or even trust yourself? Or, beyond that, if I continue to go through life with this unspoken assumption of omerta, imagining myself in some operatic conclusion of ancient Sicilian origins, misapplying it willy nilly to everyone I meet and automatically regarding the universe with mistrust, how can I really experience joy? Or faith? Or freedom? Or learn to receive?

Don't get me wrong here - I'm not kicking out The Godfather from my personal culture. It's in my blood and (by now) my subconscious. It's life lessons are ENDLESS and beautiful. From "Leave the gun, take the canoli" to "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse," there are priceless gems and moments of self-recognition for any Italian or cool person of any kind. It illustrates for me ways of understanding the wrenching pain of betrayal, the justice of long-term consequences, the randomness and senselessness of violence, the power of family, the undying beauty of true love. I will always make meatballs when I am sad and give the death-stare to anyone who buys pre-canned tomato sauce. What I hope to surpass, though, in my personal and professional walk, is omerta. I'm determined to learn to open my heart and learn to trust. To give people the benefit of the doubt once in a while. (Once, though, probably not twice.) I'm determined to unlearn thinking of the universe as a hostile enemy and regard it as a platform for blessing. After all, I'm not in the mafia or the 1950s. I don't have to be silent.

my big fat Italian movie family

Learning to share life with others has been an amazing journey for me and has really magnified my life recently - it's kept me encouraged and plugged in as an actor, helped me to see myself and others more clearly, and kept me growing as a person. Also, it's helped me realize just how powerful, formative, and lasting the effect of excellent filmmaking can be. Here I am, still reacting to The Godfather, all these years later. I love that a film could become a part of my culture, that a film could be a way for my Dad to communicate with me, that a film could inspire a post from me to you. It's magic. Thanks for letting me share so much with all of you, gentle readers, through this blog!

Feelings

I'm so tired. I'm capable of anything.

I still love you. I never want to see you again.

I'm rusty. I'm talented.

I can't stop thinking. My brain is a blank.

I'm still so young. Life is going too fast.

My career has barely started. I've done so many great projects already, and tackled some awesome roles. 

I'm an idiot for not knowing that film lingo. One should always be learning - humility comes before honor. 

There isn't enough time for me to prepare. I am capable of bringing my training, presence, joy, and personality to anything if I concentrate and breathe.

I'm doing it already. Where I want my path to go seems so far away.

I want to hide. I want to perform. 

I'm lonely and alone. "I am human, and therefore nothing human is foreign to me." Art unites me to the world.

My feelings sometimes have episodes of schizofrenia; they and their opposites race around my solar-plexis simultaneously, not mutually exclusive, all true, all clamoring and jabbering and dressed up like triplets at their quinceañera. I'm a little bit country AND a little bit rock and roll. I'm one of those egotistical cocky actors AND one of those needy insecure actors. How can one individual person contain such a galaxy of burning, glaring, overlapping noise - and the white noise machine to cancel it all out? How can I possibly make sense of my impulses onstage when offstage my wires are all crossed? (And there's no cool 1940s Rosie the Riveter kind of chick as operating the board, patiently answering and transferring calls). And, not to panic, but how can I stay in the game for another 10 years if after 2 my emotions are already going cray-cray?

I'm not necessarily advocating the Pollyanna anecdote for all dark, overwhelmed, or low-energy feelings - and many of my fellow artists know that when your natural voice needs to be freed and it ain't happy, you just have to let it growl.

Clicking my heels has never brought me magically home, so what I'm attempting to practice lately as an actress and as a human is thankfulness. If a song comes on when I'm in the shower than reminds me of a sad memory, instead of bemoaning the fact that I still have feelings stirred I try to say, "Thank you. Thank you that my heart has that in it." If I see something weird happen on the subway platform I say, "Thank you, universe, for entertaining and surprising me constantly." If my feelings get all twisty and emo on me, I say, "Well thanks for your opinions, guys. Just know I'm not letting any of you be in charge right now." If I run around like a crazy person all day in 90 degree heat with no time to eat meals or finish an audition tape, I say, "...." Well. I'm trying to think of something to be thankful for about that one.

I have lots of feelings. And no feelings. And both are true, and both are ok. What I'm realizing about my acting career is that my feelings are riding the roller coaster curves too, and that the best thing I can do for myself at any given time is to not judge my own feelings. They're there, like my body or the floor or outer space. Judging might be fun for me as a hobby once in a while, but it won't effect any change over whatever I'm judging. I can say, "Sun, you are too hot." But it doesn't stop being hot. I'm not going to judge my feelings anymore. Rather, I strive to notice them, mark them, experience them, and then - dammit - use them in my acting.