The Waiting Part

(Hey, let me start out by saying I hit almost $25 worth of ad clicks for this past week, so...thanks!)

Just got back a short time ago from dinner at Jen and Molly's place in North Hollywood (Jen was going with her boyfriend to the Magic Castle, and looked like a million bucks. Which, to be honest, made me feel a little horny and a little heartsick at the same time, since I've had a crush on her for the past couple years. But anyway...).

A number of people had stories to tell about auditions and callbacks, and even about getting some honest-to-goodness work.

I'm happy to say that my reaction to hearing about other people having auditions and booking jobs, while my career is an arid wasteland, has gotten a little more...sophisticated over the years.

For instance, I don't wish those people dead anymore.

This is progress.

And I don't call their talent into question (All of the people in question are talented enough that they should be in the position of going out and booking jobs).

I don't begrudge them their success. I just want to play too.

But to put a more positive spin on things, at least this suggests The Great Slowdown Of 2008 might be easing up. So while I'm not going out right now, there's renewed hope that I will this week, or next, or soon.

But I do feel like I have to acknowledge a certain reality - I'm running into something that was one of the main reasons I avoided "walking this path" for 20-odd years; I'm as talented as any, and more talented than most, but I'm an odd-looking duck.

A really odd-looking duck.

And that being the case, I'm going to have a harder time getting cast in a lot of things, while watching a lot of people no more talented than I am going out a lot more, and getting further, faster, than I'm going to.

I knew that going in.

Add that reality to my relatively advanced age, and you have a couple of pretty formidable challenges to success.

But that said, I'm not the first ugly guy to ever come out to Hollywood, and I'm not the first guy to start a career in middle-age - Other talented folks have done it as well. They've faced the same challenges I have, and they've succeeded.

And so will I.
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All That Jazz is one of my favorite movies.

Early in the movie, we see "Joe Gideon" - the Bob Fosse character played by Roy Scheider - high in the air, on a tightrope.

Then we hear him, in voiceover, quoting tightrope walker Karl Wallenda (Who had died maybe a year before the film began production) - "To be on the wire is life. The rest is waiting."

Then we see him, in slow motion, falling off the wire - symbolizing, with sledgehammer subtlety, that the movie we're about to see will be the tightrope act of Gideon/Fosse's drinking, drugging, cheating, workaholic life coming to an end.

"To be on the wire is life. The rest is waiting."

When I first heard that line in the theater, back in 1979, I knew exactly what he meant.

I feel that way about acting. Always have.

Still do.

It used to seem romantic.

Now it seems like a problem