Hurry Up and Relax

All you young performers out there--i'm talking to all you guys finishing up college or grad school and thinking about/moving to New York/LA to begin your careers...GET TO IT!

There's about a 10 year curve to "master" any profession you may choose (somebody famous said that righ?), and that doesn't exclude the arts. So pick NY or LA, pick theater or film or television but start working at it. Start auditioning, start studying in NY/LA, start meeting casting directors, start building the foundation of your career in your cells.

Because it takes time. It takes time and luck and hard work and change and money and a whole lot of joy, pain, fear, and love for a casting director to BELIEVE in you. To know that you are capalbe and experienced enough to carry a $15million musical or a $20 million dollar pilot or $30 million dollar film. It takes years.

You will audition thousands of time for hundreds if not thousands of people over the years. You will model, you will do voice overs, you will do commercials, you will do readings, workshops, favors, concerts, benefits, plays, musicals, soaps, tv, student films, films, industrials...you will write, you will direct, you will produce, you will style, you will coach...

You will cry, laugh, celebrate, whine, seek guidance, ...this is life no matter what profession you're in. But for some reason people think in showbiz, you just show up and overnight you're famous. Well Katherine Heigl's been acting since she was a kid and Morgan Freeman didn't have a regular film career until he was 50 (after 20 years in the business). So sure, there's a chance you could be the next Tom Cruise. But what if you're the next Morgan Freeman?

Ordinary Death

Anyone catch the final episode of John Adams on HBO this weekend? I thought it was, at times, brilliant. And I experienced one of those blissfully rare moments when art informs, educates, and enlightens. This particular episode put death in perspective for me.

I've always struggled to grasp death as a reality. It's part of life, yes, but it's also part of human nature to struggle with the concept of death. I've found it odd and terribly sad finally reaching an age when you begin to understand it; when grandparents push into their 80's and start dealing with "the end" every day, and you realize they're as alive as you are just old, tired, unable to keep up, keep at it anymore.

Death is terrifying. It's surreal.

And yet in this episode, death is ordinary. Two brilliant extraordinary men (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson) who inspired, willed, and created our democracy and free world simply grow old, and die. I'm not doing justice to the beauty of their deaths as portrayed on screen, but my point is that for the first time I got it--I understood the idea that death is something we all face. It's inevitable. It's ordinary.

By watching the deaths of of the most extraordinary men in our world's history I felt calm. I realized,

No matter how ambitious we are, no matter how much we achieve, no matter how strong willed and determined to make change, to better ourselves and others--no matter how extraordinary we may be, from John Adams to Barack Obama, we will all die an ordinary death.

It puts things in perspective. It slows things down a bit yes?