Clear As The Tolling Bell......

When I was an actor, I used to enjoy going to the large 'cattle call' auditions; you got a chance to see old friends, catch up on the stories, listen to a few monologues (and steal what was good.....I mean, borrow!) and bask in the go-go-GO that is the callback audition.

Okay, it wasn't until I was pretty well down the road from the college life that I learned to like the 'cattle call'. I can even remember the moment: I was standing against a wall in this line of 25 actors, getting ready to be moved en masse into the first couple of rows of the theatre, so that we could not only stew in our own juices (at eight-f***ing-thirty on a Sunday morning, no less) but we were forced to watch all the other auditionees do their thing.

I was standing in this line, with what could only be described as the road company of the Bedlam Asylum, murmuring lines and singing to themselves as we made our way into the dark of the theatre.

And this thought ran through my head like Steve Prefontaine on the Juice: "F**k it."

And that became my mantra: "F**k it."

(By the way, I edit because I have nieces and nephews who read this stuff, and I don't want them to get the idea that I'm wild about cursing. I AM, by the way, just plain wild about cursing, but they don't need to know that. Oh, wait. SH*T!)

It was at that moment when I realized that I would have far more fun if I was just what I wanted to be, and not what I thought they expected me to be.

And off I went, to do a monologue about a one-legged man auditioning for the role of Tarzan.

And I killed.

And I pretty much improved my skills tenfold in that one moment of clarity.

I love moments like that.....I can remember another time, when I was playing Romeo.

(holds for laughs.)

Seriously.

We were blocking the balcony scene, and it wasn't working....the director was looking for something romantic, and I wasn't making it click. And this went on for quite some time, until in dramatic frustration (have we met?), I threw my script into the tenth row of the house.

As I watched the paper fall like...well, paper.....I realized the problem.

The problem was the pace.

The stupid bastard was in the garden of the house of his enemy, and would surely be killed in ghastly ways should he be caught, and the director had me being all mushy and junk like I had all the time in the world to close the deal with this ditzy dame.....

Ten minutes later, it was finished.

Moments of clarity.

I had them in art, all the time.

Pity, really, that I couldn't get that kind of clarity in my life.

Well, it ain't over yet.

As the great Messiah Donald Shimoda says, "what the Caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the Butterfly."