To be, or not to be

Posted 8/21/12

My son is looking for his life. At 27, he is already an experienced filmmaker, director, writer, cinematographer, editor. As a freelancer his income is sporadic and meager. It is increased only …

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To be, or not to be

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My son is looking for his life. At 27, he is already an experienced filmmaker, director, writer, cinematographer, editor. As a freelancer his income is sporadic and meager. It is increased only slightly by a teaching job at a film school. His father slips him $20s. We pay his rent and his overdue utility bills. When his shoes need repair, I take him to the cobbler and pre-pay the bill.

He knows this worries me. Our funds are not without end. We get older.

He has never had a real job—the kind I had from age 14 on. My high school summers were often spent wearing high heels and stockings while traipsing to mid-town to work as a receptionist. Later, I worked the switchboard (remember switchboards?) at a publishing company, was a payroll clerk in a nursing home, a bartender and a retail clerk, all before I was 26. I didn’t particularly like any of these jobs. First, I liked making money, then I had to. I didn’t feel fulfilled. I didn’t even know what that meant.

I had wanted to be an actor. All I knew about acting as a profession was that if you were exceptional and lucky you could be famous. If you weren’t famous, you might be poor like my father and have to move to Wilkes-Barre, PA and scrounge for food. (There were extenuating circumstances but I didn’t know that then. It was a child’s view. Words seep in and become a world-view.) Anyway, I didn’t want to be famous—I wanted to act.

Eventually I went to a college that would teach me how to be an actor. I already had some experience in community theater in Greenwich Village. (My inner-city high school didn’t put on plays. They didn’t dare gather too many of us together at one time.) What I learned at college was valuable, but it enforced the idea that if you were exceptional and lucky, you could be famous. Nobody taught us the business of being an actor. They taught us the craft and the repertoire, not how to survive and thrive.

My son acted a bit in high school. He was always easy to look at and he could sing—a theatre teacher’s dream. Seeing him as El Gallo in “The Fantastiks,” we saw a part of him he didn’t display outside the family home. There we had been privy to his dead-on impressions of Christopher Walken and Sean Connery, and enthralled by his ability to embody the movements of a Tyrannasaurus rex. But he was not a social performer. His public demeanor was always self-effacing, low-volume, not center-stage like his sister.

People change. People grow. He was recently cast in a new play at a theatre next-door to LaMama in the East Village. He didn’t seek to be cast as much as fall into the role when a director he knows saw his impression of Jeff Goldblum and decided he should play Mercutio in a modern play about Romeo and Juliet in the afterlife. Go figure.

He says now that he realizes he likes every aspect of performing. It’s something I learned only a few years ago. There are things you are good at, things you can earn money doing and then there are things you do well and you love doing. You will endure any discomfort to do it.

What do I tell him, knowing what I know? I don’t tell him to be cautious of ending up in Wilkes-Barre like his grandfather. I tell him to get some training and a head-shot, put his resume on backstage.com and go to every audition he can, if only for the experience of auditioning. After all, we’re not broke yet.

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