Profiles in courage

I know I still owe you final thoughts on background work but I need to pause this week to muse on an important subject: creating your own opportunities.

As professional actors we must wait to be chosen.  We can train and be the best we can be, we can hone our audition skills, we can be business savvy and have lots of influential connections; we can, in short, put ourselves in the strongest possible position to compete successfully.  But even then we are still competing– we are not in charge of our own destinies.  We await being chosen.

Unless, of course, we take matters into our own hands.  This is much easier said than done.  I honestly don’t even recommend it for most folks during the early stages of a career.  One stands a very real danger of losing focus on professional development for the sake of a pursuit that has a very slim chance of providing any meaningful advancement.  But for those that have the discipline and the extra skills and talents necessary to self-produce an exciting new dimension becomes available to them.

I am enormously pleased to report that a regular reader of this blog has written a remarkable play that has been optioned by a producer as an independent film.  She will be featured in this film.  At a reading of the play I attended earlier this week I watched afterwards as a very good talent agent invited  her to meet with him to discuss representation.

She is an incredible young woman.  She has worked very hard, taken a risk, turned a heartbreak into something marvelously beautiful and artistically potent and is now able to enjoy the fruits of her labor.  I salute her and hold her up as an example, for myself and for you.  Sometimes we must reach deep within ourselves and lay everything on the line if we are to break through to the next level.