Houston Day 667 - Union Status?

(Yet More) Thoughts on Actor-hood and Actors' Equity

I, and most other young actors I know, struggle with the question of when you get to call yourself an actor.  No one crosses you with a sword and says "I hereby dub thee a professional/working/good actor" (whatever adjective or benchmark it is you have set in your mind).  On the other side of the coin, no one pulls you aside and says "hey, buddy, you're obviously not going to get enough work, so you should quit now".  So it's all about setting your own goals, and getting good training, and pulling your self-confidence together to chart your own journey.

For me, since moving here, the desire to have some kind of validation has manifested itself into an obsession to join the union, Actors' Equity.  You can check out their website to see all the reasons why that's a good thing, not the least endearing of which is the Cantzen Shoe Fund, a bequest made by the late Conrad Cantzen to help out-of-work actors buy nice shoes to wear to auditions.  I've realised that for me, and for many others, the question on the audition form about union status has really become a status symbol in our minds.  I'm not yet a member of the union, and I haven't even yet earned any points in the Equity Membership Candidate program.  I am getting callbacks for a couple of the companies in Houston where you can earn such points, so I trust it's a matter of time and being ready for the right role turning up until I begin to be able to do that.  But recently I realised that even if I were offered union membership now I wouldn't take it because I'm not consistently getting union work, and it would prevent me from doing my current non-union job at Main Street Theater for Youth.  And Lucas, ever the wonderful, has been encouraging me to enjoy my current jobs (which I certainly do) without feeling like it somehow diminishes my goals.

I do want to be consistently getting union work, and I do want to be a member of Actors' Equity, BUT something cool happened today that let me know in another way that I am progressing.  When I was a teenager I took a master class at NIDA, and the actor teaching that course spoke about learning to love auditions, and knowing that you have developed a good dramatic technique when you can love that impromptu, terrifying, unrehearsed situation.  And this morning, I thought, "Gosh, I'm so busy right now I don't have much time to go to auditions.  Gee, I miss auditions."  (Yes, I was exactly that bizarrely colloquial in my thoughts.) And it reminded me how far I've come since my first auditions in Houston.  I have come to LOVE auditions*.

*Theater auditions.  Screen auditions still turn me into an embarrassed mess.

Houston Day 661 - Sondheim & Sorkin guide you through my life

Two Quotes Indicative of This Week 

"Listen, everybody, I'm afraid you didn't hear - or do you want to see a crazy lady fall apart in front of you?"

Click here to see a nice piece the Houston Chronicle wrote about us!

That's a line from Company, although kind of a line from my life right now.  Last week's heinous schedule (it got even worse since I wrote this post) got me sick, and with my asthma never really under control since we moved here I'm afraid of not getting better for a long time.  Soooo I'm freaking out, a little disproportionately, it must be admitted, about letting down the show (which opens this week, btw!), and about being a liability, other things along that line of reasoning.  Rational Amy is reading The Feeling Good Handbook right now, and learning how not to freak out quite so disproportionately.  Other reasons why that line is a line from my life is that the character's name is Amy, and the guy she's marrying is an awful lot like Lucas.

CJ: "Is the reason you guys didn't get married because her name would have been Lisa Sherborne-Seaborn?"
Sam: "Yes.  That's the reason."

As Lucas says, the sound in our house that indicates that I'm sick is a drum roll, followed by "Previously on The West Wing."  Two days of marathon watching are helping me rest (plus the fact that we're off Magic School Bus this week).  And I can tell I'm getting better, because I have the desire to cook, which only ever happens when I'm recovering from either the post-show blues or a bout of illness.  Plus my throat has stopped hurting and I haven't felt the need to vomit since Sunday.  Hurrah!

So we're all ok, I will be fine, the show will be great, and you will come and see it.  It's a real treat to be working with a brilliant director and brilliant designers and hardworking, fabulous actors on one of Sondheim's most famous pieces.  So, you know, come see it.

Houston Day 650 - Lucas is Wonderful

More Reasons Why My Husband is Awesome

Despite not being in theatre, not only does he know what a stumble-through is, he knows that when it comes at the end of a long and less-than-stellar day, his wife needs a little extra love.  Look what I came home to last night.

P.S.  Readers of Rachel Held Evans' A Year of Biblical Womanhood appreciate how P31 I am being now.

Houston Day 642 - life right now

A Typical Day

...is a little crazy.  I am joining the ranks of Houston actors who work multiple shows at once.  This is a typical day at the moment.

6am - alarm goes off.  Lucas and I are trying a little trick to help us feel more connected to each other, which is spending four minutes at four points in the day focusing on nothing but each other.  The first point is supposed to be as soon as we wake up, which is very challenging and neither of us are very awake.  Or if we are, we're not very pleased about it.

7am - call time at Main Street Theater.  Get in the tour van with stage manager and five other actors.  Do hair (wig prep) and makeup in the van.  One of the lovely things about touring with a stage manager (which I didn't have in my tour job in Australia) is that they drive, and I can zone out.

9am - one or two shows at an elementary school.  Contemplate fabulous patent-leather bright-red high heels and quell voice in back of brain that says it's too early in the morning for such shoes.  Don said shoes and wig and become Ms Frizzle.  "Have you heard of our teacher, Ms Frizzle?....the Magic School Bus...come with us on our bus and we'll learn about it....tiny stuff matters....the way it could be (imagine the world you're determined to see)...going green....our wonderful world!" (See, you just got your own little private performance right there.)

11am - on a high from performance, get out of costume, throw hat on to cover wig hair, reload van, hop back in it, still laughing and joking with other cast members, and drive away.  At some point, my body comes down from that high and I get cold, tired and ravenously hungry.  Laughing and joking peters out.

noon - get back home.  Spend the next few hours in a daze.  I'm not entirely sure what it is I do in the afternoon.  Go over music for Company rehearsal? Theoretically, yes.  Work on writing/casting/preparing Hope Stone Kids show? Theoretically, yes.  Sleeping, binge eating and watching The West Wing? Definitely, yes.

5pm - teach weekly class at Hope Stone.

6pm - begin the trek out to Texas Repertory Theatre in Houston's famous traffic.

7pm - rehearsal at Tex Rep for Company by Stephen Sondheim.  Enjoy but also get frustrated by the challenge of such difficult music, with a bunch of actors (myself included) who find it very hard to remember that the world is not all about us, and that therefore my comments/questions/jokes about every single bar of music is possibly not as useful to a congenial rehearsal atmosphere as we think it should be.

midnight - get home, go to bed.  Find it difficult to sleep with the opening bars of Company so loud in my head I think Lucas must be calling me Bobby.

I am so grateful for the opportunities I have to work in Houston (getting paid to do Sondheim? Whaaaa-?), but right now am finding it difficult to manage said workload! I'm not the only person in Company to also be working a kids' show during the day, and in fact I'm not even the only person in Company to also be in Magic School Bus.  And that other person somehow manages to work at a costume shop in the afternoons.  And have fabulous hair while he does it.  Damn you, Zack.
Lucas has been challenging me recently to be more present and not always focused on the next task, because it takes away my enjoyment of each moment, and also makes him feel like I don't value time with him.  I will make this work, or alternatively just be in a daze until Company closes in April.  See you all then!

Houston Day 633 - Feliz anniversario!

Magic School Bus opened today! We had a great show for a great audience, with only tiny mistakes to remind us we're alive.  I remembered that one of the beauties about kids' theatre is that there's an audience there that you can play directly to and have some fun with.  Ms Frizzle's first entrance was marked by applause, which of course set me in a good mood for the rest of the show!

Beautiful Colorado!

Lucas in Boulder (literally)

We continued our tradition of taking turns surprising each other with anniversary holidays this year, with me taking Lucas to Boulder, Colorado.  We flew to Denver and then drove to Boulder, and ate and drink delicious things, and hiked (very slowly) up a mountain, and wandered around Boulder's lovely shops and bookstores.  And Lucas gave me a fabulous present, which was.....he's organised for us to take Spanish lessons together! We start this Saturday! Feliz anniversario!

On our hike we visited a very old, very Little-House-on-the-Prairie, abandoned log cabin!

Houston Day 620 - financially better off?

A Financial Comparison Between Texas and Victoria

So I've come to a conclusion, based on some bad maths and a drive through East Texas this last weekend.  I think the average Victorian (that's my home state in Australia, for all you Yankee readers) is wealthier than your average Texan.

I've suspected this for a while.  As in Melbourne, there are a range of areas and a range of people who live in them, with varying amounts of money.  The poorest neighborhoods in Houston look a lot worse to my eyes than the poorest suburbs in Melbourne.  Is it just that Americans really know how to build ugly and boring towns and/or that having grown up in Australia I prefer the aesthetics of Melbourne? Because my drive through a different neighborhood last week, where I couldn't find the building I was teaching in for ages because barely any buildings were put together enough to have a street number, might suggest otherwise.

There seem to be so many more
abandoned houses in Houston than back home:
evidence that the GFC hit this country harder than Australia

We personally enjoy a lot more money here than we did back home, mostly thanks to an ExxonMobil salary.  And we're not alone - Houston has a lot of wealthy people and a lot of industry money and I've commented before on how that means a lot more money in the arts.

A typical house in River Oaks,
one of Houston's wealthiest neighborhoods

This subject came up again in my thoughts as Leslie and I were driving home through East Texas after an audition in Kilgore.  I noticed a surprising amount of abandoned or smashed-up houses and asked Leslie if that was normal for country towns.  She said yes, but that the houses further off the main roads would be nicer.
So I did some research.  Now we're getting into some areas that I am not naturally very switched-on about, like the difference between the average and the median, how to factor in the exchange rate, tax, etc.  But I tried.  And it seems to me that while the cost of living in Australia is astronomically higher than in the USA, you're still financially better off being an Australian resident (the kind that gets access to Medicare) than an American one, unless you're the kind of American resident that moved there to get an excellent, above-average job.
Add to that the factor that college loans and healthcare are a far greater financial burden on Americans than they are on most Australians, and I think my hunch is correct.  Anyone wanting to do the maths themselves (please, you'll do it much better than I) can look at these websites:
Texan Census
Cost of Living Comparison
Median Income in Australia
Melbourne's Worst Suburbs
A Guide to Houston Neighborhoods
Something Quite Complicated from the Australian Treasury About Tax

Houston Day 615 - Australia Day

Happy Australia Day/Happy Survival Day! Like everyone's favorite Aussie, I still call Australia home.  (What's that? ... You mean Peter Allen has not always been our historically-and-still-sometimes-very-homophobic-nation's favorite ambassador? Well, strike a light.)

I do still call Australia home, and the homesickness levels have been pretty high after returning home from our trip home.  Yes, my emotions are exactly as confused as that sounds.  Being in rehearsal this week has definitely helped.  My brain is totally fried after only three days of learning new choreography for Magic School Bus.  We ran my solo number toward the end of rehearsal today and one of the runs involved me doing the cute hip-shimmy choreography, opening my mouth to sing and then just laughing my head off because my brain froze up and couldn't remember the words.  I've been wondering why I'm so mentally tired and realising that while the aforementioned homesickness is probably not helping, part of it is not having done a musical for six months.  The director made a comment today about me being a musical theatre actress (as opposed to a straight theatre actress) and my consequent supposed ability to speak dialogue and dance at the same time....we'll see, Andrew.  We'll see.

After rehearsal I treated myself to some sweetened condensed milk and a read of A Year of Biblical Womanhood, which I'm reading for the Zeteo book club.  Brilliant book.  In particular, it has reclaimed Proverbs 31 for me into something I can read without feeling guilty or unwomanly.  Check out her blog where she touches on it here.  And then tonight I am cooking and cleaning the car and packing for my road trip to Kilgore, TX, where there's a whole lot of nothing, but an excellent Shakespeare Festival.  I think they should employ me, and I'm going to do my darnedest to convince them of that in my audition.