I am now a paid actor!

I left work around noon and jumped in my rented Chevy Cobalt; nice car. It's amazing how much easier it is getting somewhere when you're in a car that actually runs! I stopped for lunch at the Sonic in St. Cloud. I just HAD to. I got up to Orlando about two hours early. I drove around finding the studio and getting the lay of the land' chances are I'll be spending lots of time in this next of the woods in the future.

Hmmm......two hours and time it kill. What ever would I do.....



So I sat in the House of Blues sipping the beer which was doing its job of "greasing the pipes". I had tried going to Universal's City Walk, since it was closer and I had never been there but those cheap bastards wanted $9 for parking. It could wait for another time. I'm sure I got some weird looks as I walked around Downtown Disney practicing my lines. Here was this long haired, bearded guy walking around muttering in a deep, gutteral Britich accent.

I made it to the studio on time just as the director drove up to the building. Five other actors showed up and we all lived the primal law of performing; hurry up and wait. Each actor had to go in to the recording studio and record each of his lines. Each time we did three takes of each line as the director, audio tech and two other students sat in the control room and judged our work. As each of the other actors took their turns I fought fatigue and the comfort of the couch in the lobby doing all I could to stay awake. I guess adrenalin takes you only so far.

Finally I was led into the small closet like studio. I was used to these surroundings from my days in radio but and the door closed behind me I felt a new push from my adrenal gland and a fleeting worry of just how good I was going to be rushed over me. I had never before even come close to suffering from stage fright, but for some reason, this was taking on a whole new dimension.

Was this really going to be a new step towards a new direction in my life?

Was I up to it?

I decided to put that out of my mind and focus on what I was there to do. "Suck it up", as we say in my family.



We ran through all of the lines for my character and I did feel as I was hitting on all cylinders. We even did some "outtakes" which should be hilarious. The director and I agreed that the character should be done with a British accent, but the producer wanted to hear the character with a plain, deep voice. We tried a few lines but the director cut me off saying that I had sold it so well with the accent that anything else just didn't work. He also had me do one other voice part which may or may not get used. Then he allowed me to do some other voices which he was going to forward to me for use in a demo reel for future work. He was also talking about using me for some upcoming projects for the school and the guy who ran the recording studio seemed impressed with my work.

This was so much different that any of my work in radio; even straight commercial work. All that work was either rambling to myself about music and reading off que cards or reading straight from advertising copy. This was acting. I was creating a character. There was a different thought process in place. When I was doing commercials, the emphasis was on getting the wording right and making sure the message of the ad was getting across. This time I was thinking about who I was and what I was doing in the scene. The beauty of this was I had the comic right there beside the script and could easily visualize what the character was doing.

There was one moment when I gave a line a certain read and the director asked me to do it differently. When I explained my motivation behind it, he stopped, looked at the comic and came back in total agreement with my take on the scene.

Damn it, I was creating! That was an unbelievable feeling.

We finished up about 10:30 and I hit the road for home. Fatigue set in again as the road seemed to float a little, so I stopped for a cat nap at one of the rest areas. It was on this ride home that I finally began to realize that I really had become an actor. I had just been paid professionally to do what I had always wanted to do. I've made some calls to AFTRA, the Union for TV and Radio Actors, to check into joining. I will savor the day I can meet up with my pal George Takei and shake hands with him as a colleague as well as a friend.

The target date for the project is the class graduation in December. I will post a link to the film when it is ready. For now it's back to my cubicle and hope for the promotion for which I interviewed a few days ago. At least, I still have that as the tried and true "something to fall back on" my mother always talked about.