Something Scary #2: Saying Hello to Strangers

What I'm Afraid Of:

When I was a teenager I was horribly embarrassed to be around my mother when she would start talking to strangers in line at the super market, or on the street, or at the coffee shop, in short: everywhere. These days I really admire my mom's ability to strike up a conversation, and wish that I could do it too. There's something about talking to strangers that I find absolutely terrifying. Possible reasons:

1. I was told never to talk to strangers as a child.
2. The stranger might ignore me.
3. The stranger might reject me.
4. The stranger might think I'm stupid.
5. The stranger and I may having nothing to talk about.
6. The stranger may never shut up once they get started.
7. The stranger will think I'm rude.
8. The stranger may feel physically threatened by me trying to initiate conversation and scream at the top of their lungs.
9. I might remind the stranger of a buddy from 'Nam, they'll enter into a PTSD episode and stab me to death while screaming "Why Johnny, why?!"

Clearly, some of my fears are more rational than others. But some variation on at least one of them is what prevents me from saying hello.

What I Did That Scared Me:

On my walk home from work today, I committed to saying hello to everyone that I passed. It went pretty well. "Hello" became "Howdy" which became "How's it going" which led to "Did you just say 'Friday Night Blues'? No? Oh, sorry, that's the name of a dance event I go to."

However, there were some people I didn't say hello to, namely anyone who wasn't looking in my direction when I was passing (Reasons: #7, #8). So, not a smashing success, but more often than not I felt the fear but acted anyway.

Something Scary #1 was: Asking a Girl Out to Coffee

Taking Risks in Life

I read a great profile on Jeremy Renner in "Men's Health" of all places. Here's an excerpt:

"If you don't know who you are, how the hell are you going to be able to...?" Renner leaves the thought unfinished, but it would be easy to fill in the blank with a million possibilities, most of them more profound than becoming a movie star. "So I made a very conscious decision to be fearless, to live a life of fear-freeness. I decided to do something every day I was afraid of." Like?

"I swam with sharks," he says, recounting a scuba trip off California's southern coast. "I was terrified of sharks and I'm still terrified of sharks, but at least I was taking action--and not being squelched by something I don't know about."

It's pretty brilliant strategy for becoming a better actor if you ask me, although apparently the idea is nothing new:

Do one thing every day that scares you.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

It seems, that if one wants to play a character on the edge of madness, you must expand your threshold for risk. So I have unofficially undertaken the project of consciously doing things that scare me. I'll be cataloging this risk taking under the "Something Scary" tag.

#27 - #??: The Count Ends Not With a Bang, but a Whimper

It seems my goal of creating something every single day and posting the end-result to this blog has sputtered out a bit. It's not that I haven't been creating things; I have been. It's just this whole business of remembering what I've done, numbering them then posting something that's gotten me out of whack.

A Partial List of Creations Since I Last Posted:

• Screenplay w/ my Writing Partner
• Lyrics and Melody for The World's Worst Song
• Super Secret Christmas Gift(s)
• Prepared scene for Class
• Edited short film "Sesame Avenue"
• Attempted to Cover Radiohead's "Creep" on Ukulele
• Wrote monologue
• Revised monologue

I'm tempted to spend the next couple weeks strategizing and restart my count in 2011. Until then, rest assured: I will be acting daily.

Creations

#24 Groundlings Monologue and Screenplay with Partner
#25 Short Film Script
#26 Dance Class with Chryssie Whitehead

Okay, better to post something to try and keep track than lose track altogether.

How To Research a Part

As homework for my class at Margie Haber Studio, I was just given a 4-page scene from the pilot episode of a TV show set in the world of the FBI. My teacher, then asked the class how we planned to prepare. "Boil a lot of water, drink a lot of tea, and eventually get down to work?" I offered. She was not impressed. Instead, she offered up these ideas for learning what is involved in living the life of an FBI agent:

• Read a book on the FBI
• Read a crime blotter ( http://www.crimeblotter.org/map/ )
• Interrogate someone, about anything. "It's my understanding this market stocks papayas. Yet, I don't see any papayas."
• Investigate something. Try and put the pieces of a mystery together.
• Call your local FBI bureau, tell them you're preparing for a role, and ask if they have any PR people or agents who would be willing to answer your questions.

Now this may seem a little preposterous, but I don't think I've ever done preparation for a role in this way before. I tend to just read the script a lot and build up a world imaginatively. Which, now that I think about it, seems like a pretty good way to create a performance that's not grounded in reality.

Whenever I get despondent about acting as a career choice, I'm usually able to re-motivate myself with the promise that acting is a way to experience all that life has to offer. I can be a policeman one day, a fireman the next, a schoolteacher, a doctor, a recluse, a roustabout - basically I'm paid to explore all of my childhood fantasies and I'm never forced to give up one in order to be another (forgot to mention: Astronaut!). But the fact of the matter is, it's been a hollow promise. I really haven't done much in the way of really exploring those other lives.

So my challenge to myself, and to other actors out there, is to: dare to live the life of the character.

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So what is it like to be an FBI agent?
Some preliminary investigation (one made-for-tv documentary and some web searching) on what's involved in being an agent has turned up:

• To be an FBI agent, you need a 4year degree and at least 3 years professional experience.
• Agents are haunted by unsolved cases for basically their entire lives.
• Agents undergo extensive training that simulates emergencies just in case one ever occurs, sometime you'll simulate something for years before you actually encounter it.
• Agents work incredibly long hours, get little vacation time, and are paid government wages.
• Working for the FBI gives most agents an incredible sense of purpose; your work has meaning. (This is the bit I'm most excited about playing)
• There is an acceptance that there will be another terrorist attack, and there is an accute fear that they won't have done all they can to prevent it.
• Agents often have to be hyper-vigilant in situations where nothing bad ever actually happens nor was going to happen (putting together security plans for big sports matches, etc).
• Working as an FBI agent often involves less action than working as a regional police officer, but it offers the promise of working on some of the largest and most important cases in the States.
• You might get the opportunity to work in beautiful foreign locales.

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Oh, and Creation #23 was a cold-reading from an episode of Law & Order. I haven't acted across from someone else in about a month, so once I got through the fear and anxiety of being rusty, it felt really good to be back in the swing of things.

#21 & #22: Acting and the Edge of Madness

Creation #22: A Rumination
An actor friend of mine often rails against what he calls "safe" actors. A safe actor is one who does a lot of homework, has a pretty clear sense of how the scene should go, and delivers a consistent totally usable performance. When thrown into a scene with little time to prepare, they deliver a very restrained performance. In my mind being a safe actor isn't a horrible thing, Harrison Ford once said that on days where he doesn't feel in it, he does "as little as possible," capitalizing on the Kuleshov Effect.

Then there are the... bold actors? The unpredictable? The risk-takers. The dynamic, charismatic, cornered animals of the acting world. When I think about my favorite film-acting performances, they came from risk-taking actors, often early in their careers. Some Examples:

Robert De Niro in "Taxi Driver"

Daniel Day Lewis in "There Will Be Blood"

Dustin Hoffman in "Midnight Cowboy" or "The Graduate"

Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight"

If there's one thing I most enjoy about these performances, it's the sense that in the next moment anything could happen. These are actors existing on, what at least appears to be: the edge of madness. And if you hear anything about their process, you wouldn't be faulted for thinking that at times they've tipped over the edge.

If you look at recent efforts from De Niro and Hoffman, it seems that at some point they lost their edge. Their performances are still charismatic and enjoyable, but they no longer seem wholly unpredictable. Comparing early interviews with more recent ones, they also appear to have mellowed as people. I'd much rather have a beer with De Niro in his 60's than De Niro in his 20's.

The question, at least for myself is: Is is possible to lead a safe, happy, sane, restrained, pleasant life and still turn in a compelling performance that hints at a life on the edge?

Creation #21: A (Micro) Adventure

Okay, while not technically a creation, I feel like it counts as my homework for the day as it explores the question posed above. This was a recent status update "In a possibly ongoing experiment in risking rejection I asked a stranger out to coffee. 30sec of conversation later, I desperately wished the person had refused."

Yes, my version of living dangerously is asking someone on a totally innocuous coffee date. I get a similar jump in heart-rate when I write a strongly worded email that I never send. I suspect that if there is a correlation between an unpredictable life and an unpredictable performance, I've got a lot more growing to do.