Recently Written

• I Wanna Do That
• They Want To See You Tomorrow at Ten
• A Healing?
• Powerful
• Ode to the Series
• Thank you, Ali McGraw
• So I guess… I’m an author.

Categories

• Life
• Love Bites
• Television Appearances
• The Actor
• The Author
• The Mother
• There Are Worse Things I Could Do

Archives

• October 2011
• July 2011
• July 2010
• June 2010

I Wanna Do That

Posted on | October 26, 2011 | 4 Comments

Quarter to midnight at Atrox Factory in Birmingham.  Four big guys shuffle on stage to take their picture with me. The one to my right has a soul patch, a huge mother of a diamond stud in his ear, and broken blood vessels turning the white of one eye crimson.

“How’d you get to be a movie star?” he asks.  “I wanna do that.”

I tell him I started out on stage, I went to “the Orient” and sang for the Armed Forces, right after I graduated high school, and then went to New York and did theatre, and that led to TV and then that led to movies. His eyes glaze over by the time I mention New York.  That’s not what he wants to hear.

“Well, I just wanna be on TV.  You make a lot of money, right?”

“You can,” I tell him, “but not so much anymore.  Not with so many shows being shot on tape, which falls under AFTRA and not SAG and doesn’t pay as well.  And with Low Budget and Ultra Low Budget film-making paying less than my kids make on a good night of baby-sitting.  And of course, you’ve got to be prepared for long periods of time in between jobs, where you’re not earning anything at all and you don’t know if you ever will again.”  His eyes stay glazed; this isn’t what he wants to hear either.

“I’ll bet those guys are Jersey Shore make a lot of money, don’t they?  I would, too, if I was on TV. Which do you like more – bein’ on TV or in the movies?”

“Oh, it really depends on the project.  You know, the script, and the character, and the people involved.  If they’re all good, then I like it, regardless of the medium.”  I’m not sure he’s paying attention at all.  He’s got his mind made up.

I don’t tell him about the parts I hate, like getting my agent’s call at 6:30 at night telling me I’ve got an audition at noon the next day, which means I’ve got to pay my eye doctor for the appointment I’m canceling, re-schedule my kids’ parent–teacher’s conference, miss their track meet, figure out what I’ve got to wear that’s right for the character, and call my hairdresser at home to ask if she’s got any time to squeeze me in, in case the character needs to look better than I’ll look if I do it myself.  Then I’ll have to study 7 pages of dialogue and pretty much memorize them because I don’t want to wear my glasses in the audition and I can’t read without them.

“Well, I just wanna be on TV.  It’s a lot of fun, right?”

You know what?   It’s the best job in the world.

They Want To See You Tomorrow at Ten

Posted on | October 9, 2011 | 1 Comment

My husband tells a story about two actors who were both up for the same role in a television series he was producing.  They were a similar type, equally talented, and had both given great auditions and were the only two actors being considered for the role.

The final decision was made by one studio executive who decided that since the first actor had done his company “a big favor” by appearing in and raising the ratings of several others shows they’d recently had on the air, they should hire the second actor instead.  “I’m sick of looking at him,” he said, of actor number one.

The television casting process is filled with vagaries like this. I tell this story in the hopes that it will help other actors understand they can’t take losing a job personally.  It doesn’t have to do with your talent.

If you’re there to audition, it’s because somebody — the casting director, your agent, maybe even the producer — already knows you’re talented enough to do the role.  And if you’ve prepared and made your acting choices and dealt with your nerves, and you’re happy that the audition you gave was the one you wanted to give, then it’s out of your hands. The final decision will be based on so many things other than your talent.

I’ve been in auditions where I was the only brunette, the only one in the room who weighed less than 175 lbs, the only one in the room who wasn’t in her 40s.  Those are the times when the casting decision all comes down to type.  When the producers aren’t sure which way to go with the character until they see someone who just seems “more right” for the role than everyone else.  Sometimes they want someone who’s recognizable, sometimes they want someone who’s not.

There are so many reasons why one actor gets cast instead of another and most of them are out of your control.  You can’t take it personally or you’ll make yourself crazy.  Take your satisfaction from giving a great audition and let the rest go.

A Healing?

Posted on | July 27, 2011 | No Comments

If you’ve read my memoir (There Are Worse Things I Could Do) you know about my friend Dennis Adams.  The chapter is entitled The Healer.  That’s what he is, what he does for a living.  He travels the world teaching metaphysics and self-healing; healing people along the way.  I met him a year after my marriage to John Carpenter ended, when the only thing keeping me from major depression was taking care of our baby boy, Cody.

Dennis did a healing on me the week after we met.  Up until today, I’ve never known quite what to believe about his abilities to heal, but I do know that my depression lifted almost immediately and I was freed of the pain and sense of failure I’d been suffering.  That seemed like a healing to me.

Years later he worked on one of my relatives whose knees were giving her trouble.  She swears the pain disappeared after he laid his hands on her.

So last week, after suffering from two weeks of pressure and pain in my bladder which could not be traced to an infection and was not responding to pain medication, I went to see Dennis in northern California.  It was a trip I had planned months before this problem arose, just because I wanted to catch up with old friends, and maybe a little because I wanted to be in his energy and talk a bit about his brand of spirituality.  Whatever the reason, since I was there and I was in pain, he offered to do a healing on me.

I didn’t expect much. I certainly didn’t expect the spasms to go away, or the pain.  When he started working, placing his hands on my legs and abdomen and stripping the energy out and away, he asked if I felt any difference.  The pain wasn’t gone, but I didn’t want to insult him by saying so, so I said maybe it was a little less, it was hard to tell.

He finished the healing, telling me I wouldn’t feel the full effect for 72 hours.  I thanked him, gave him a hug good-bye, and got in the car to drive back to Sacramento where I was staying.

A half hour later I had no more pain.  No pressure, no spasms.  That was the end of them.  They haven’t returned.

So it would be ingenuous for me to continue to say I don’t know what to believe about Dennis’s abilities to heal.  I had pain, he worked on me, the pain went away.  I believe it was his work that did the trick.

Powerful

Posted on | July 11, 2010 | 3 Comments

I wonder if most people have a book they’ve read that has had such an influence on them that it changed the way they lived their lives.  I’m not talking about the Bible or the Qur’an or the Torah, I asking about books we weren’t raised with.  Books we’ve stumbled upon on our own that had a lifelong impact on us.

For me, there were two, which led to an exploration of others of their kind, but which remain the lynchpin of my growth.

Parent Effectiveness Training by Dr. Thomas Gordon taught me how to communicate, not just with my son who was 4 years old when I first read it, but across the board, with everyone in my life.  I didn’t use it for the child rearing techniques it espoused but for the communication techniques instead.  It taught me how to listen, how to respond in a way that encourages further communication, and how to understand what was being said back to me.  I later went on to study the techniques in Non-Violent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg, but it was P.E.T. which has always stayed with me.

And Shakti Gawain’s Living in the Light. I read it the year after my marriage ended – an experience I had always thought I wouldn’t survive – and it gave me a philosophy I’ve relied on ever since.

So life is good.  Pretty joyful most of the time.  And a lot of that is because I read the right books (for me) at the right time.  Ah, the power of the written word.



Ode to the Series

Posted on | July 1, 2010 | 2 Comments

The first series books I remember reading were Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion. I didn’t know they were classified as series books at the time ( I was only 7 when I started) I just knew that when I finished the first one, there was another one about the very same people – or in this case, horse – and I wanted to keep reading. And I did, the first thirteen of them at least, until boys came along and teen-age angst set in and Ayn Rand and Lawrence Ferlinghetti replaced The Black Stallion’s Sulky Colt on my bookshelf.

And then it wasn’t until I was in my late-twenties that I discovered there were series books for adults. My good friend Tom Atkins (who I just included as a character in my upcoming novel Love Bites) loaned me a “Spenser” novel and I was hooked. And delighted to find out that Robert B. Parker had written, at that time, not one book with Spenser as the lead character but several. He would go on to write a total of 40 and then add to that the Jesse Stone series, the Sunny Randall series, and more. I was hooked. On Spencer and on series novels, most of them detective novels or legal thrillers or medical mysteries, all of them having one thing in common: a recurring lead character.

These guys, and in some cases girls, (Julie Smith’s Skip Langdon and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone) are as well-known to me as members of my family and I enjoy being in their company just as much. I go into withdrawal without Jack Reacher, Lucas Davenport, Virgil Flowers, Elvis Cole, Doc Ford, Myron Bolitar, and a whole bunch of others. I wouldn’t recognize most A-list Hollywood actors at a party, but I’d know John Sandford and Henning Mankell in a flash.

I was in the middle of taking a Japanese final when my teacher announced, in halting English, that Robert B. Parker had died. We both broke down and cried.

Thank you, Ali McGraw

Posted on | June 23, 2010 | No Comments

I’ve never met Ali McGraw, but I’d like to thank her for the impact she’s had on the last ten years of my life.

Her career in films began while I was still struggling to get work on Broadway, back in 1968, and by the time she hit big with Love Story, I was doing Fiddler on the Roof, working on stage every night and not going to the movies a lot.  I didn’t see Love Story – I tend to stay away from movies I know will make me cry.  I probably saw The Getaway, it’s my kind of film, but I don’t remember much about it.  And I read Good-bye, Columbus, which led directly to my losing my virginity, but I never saw her performance in it.

So it wasn’t her work as an actress that affected me.  It was her ability to write.

I read her autobiography Moving Pictures in 1995 when it first came out.  It may not have been the first autobiography I ever read that wasn’t written in the classic soup-to-nuts, often dry and most often boring “I was born in 1938 in a little town in … and my parents were Fred and Ethel bla bla bla  from a little town in…”, but it was the first to make an impression on me.  She wrote like we were in the room together, having a conversation.  She was all over the map with what she had to say and she said it in such a captivating way that for the first time in my life I thought, “This is how I could write if ever I were going to.  Now I understand.”

I guess, in a way, she gave me my “voice” – which is such a hackneyed term I hate to use it, but explains exactly what I took away from reading Moving Pictures. It wasn’t until five years later that I began to put what I’d learned from her into use.   The first thing I did when I signed the contract to write There Are Worse Things I Could Do was reread Ms. McGraw’s book.   I wanted the stories I was going to tell to be interesting not because of the stories themselves, but because of the way they were told.  If I succeeded at all, I owe a huge thank you to Ali McGraw.

I hope she has herself on Google Alert to receive it.  And I do hope she writes another book.

So I guess… I’m an author.

Posted on | June 17, 2010 | 15 Comments

My third book is coming out this summer and I realize I still haven’t come to terms with the fact that I’m an author.  All my life I’ve been a performer – an actress, a singer, a dancer, even a talk show host – but never in the wildest dreams of my first 50 years did I ever imagine I would write something that other people would read.  I still can’t quite get over it.

And it’s all because I lost my best friend to breast cancer.

I met Suzanne Petit in 1988, on the first day of pre-school for my son, Cody, and her son, Rhett.  We became fast friends and eventually, best friends, as did our boys.  Not two days ever went by that we didn’t talk on the phone or spend some time together.

When she died in 1998, a lot of joy drained out of my life.

Then in 2000, on the first day of pre-school for my younger boys, I met a woman who looked just like Suzanne.  She looked so much like Suzanne that when I saw her, I blanched.  “Are you okay?” she asked.  “Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry.  You just look so much like a friend of mine that I was taken aback.”  “Oh,” she asked, “what’s her name?”

“You wouldn’t know her.  Her name was Suzanne Petit and she was a film editor.  She died of breast cancer two years ago.   She was my best friend.”  “Well,” said the woman, “I’m a film editor and I had breast cancer.  We could be best friends.”

It was such a bizarre conversation, I asked her out for lunch.  I’m sure unconsciously I was hoping she could replace the void in my life left by Suzanne’s passing.  After all, they could have been twins.

What I think now is that Suzanne sent her to me just for that one afternoon when we had lunch together.  Because it was during that lunch that she told me about a class she had attended that was peopled with actors who wanted to learn to write.

I was 55 years old and I had never heard of a writing class.  Oh, I knew you could study writing in college, but I figured that was to learn grammar and sentence structure.  I didn’t think you could “learn” to write.  You were either born with Stephen King’s gift or you weren’t.  But as soon as Suzanne’s doppelganger mentioned this class, I knew I had to attend.  I actually felt as though Suzanne’s spirit was hovering above me with her hands on my back, pushing me out of the chair and home to the phone to call the teacher to sign up.

Which I did.  And those classes led to my first book There Are Worse Things I Could Do which ended up on the L.A. Times best seller list and gave birth to the next one, Vampyres of Hollywood, which led to the sequel Love Bites, coming out this summer.  So I guess… I’m an author.  I’d better get used to it.