Auditioning

I've been working on a theatre piece that is about auditioning, and have thus been going to auditions as kind of a detective, noticing everything that I feel and see during each experience. Today I had a major audition, the kind people prepare for intensely, and I myself had been preparing with my scene partner for several months. Here's what important auditions look like:

We, the actors, arrive extremely early. We've probably been up since before the sun came up that morning.

All around you, you see actors stretching out their tongues, expanding their rib cages, rolling down their spines, talking to imaginary people, listening to their ipods, etc. We are nervous, we are excited, we are scared, we are experiencing strange bowel movements.

There are uncomfortable chairs everywhere. Some sit, some stand. No one talks. If they do, it is in a whisper. There is an unspoken rule about respecting other people's space.

If any regular non-actor people walk in, everyone knows, because those people are never sensitive to what is going on around them and usually say something really loud and inappropriate. They are quickly escorted out. The actors are relieved, we do not want to remember that an outside world exists right now.

In most auditions, there are always the actors who don't care, or who pretend not to care, and are supposedly not nervous. They sit around reading novels or answering emails on their iphones. I didn't see any of those today. What we were doing was important, on some level, to everyone. The building itself demanded respect, and we complied.

In the twenty minutes before the audition, the pair about to go up gets some space alone. It is hard to talk about anything. Some prayers are said. Intellectually we could probably talk ourselves out of our nerves. We know this is not exactly a life-and-death situation. But only an actor knows what the minutes before an audition are like. Rational thought gets buried somewhere out in Kentucky and we are alone with our emotions. Even if we don't want what we're auditioning for that bad, we know one thing for sure: We do not want to fail. No actor is okay with sucking. No matter who or what it's for, we want to do well. We want to honor our character, our talent, our dream.

Someone comes in and tells us it's time. We are escorted to the room, which in today's case was a real theatre. Our hearts are pounding so hard we are certain everyone can hear it. We feel our stomachs wanting to run to the bathroom and get us out of there.

We walk on the stage, which is brightly lit. The "people in charge" are hidden in the darkness of the audience. We see only their silhouettes. They do not speak, they do not make a single noise. We wonder if they're real people out there.

And we begin, usually before we're actually ready to begin, because we don't think we'll ever be ready to begin, and we know we might throw up if we wait another second.

We do it. We either sink or fly, it's hard to tell. An audition is rarely our shining moment. We just accept whatever happens, we hope we didn't suck, we hope our talent came across, we hope we touched the people in the dark safe seats of the audience.

And then, as we exit, there is a sudden sense of loss. Months of work and preparation, hours of nerves and excitement, and it's all over in five minutes. We leave our darling characters, our precious work, our loud nerves, all behind. We are empty.

Maybe we go out for coffee after and talk about it. Maybe we just each go our separate ways. The rest of the day is a daze.

And then, we wait. Who knows for how long. We wait to know if we got it or not. It won't mean as much as the audition itself, usually. Sometimes though, it can feel like our lives depend on getting it.

There is nothing quite comparable to auditioning. As I write this I know that anyone who is not an actor can not understand it, and I search for a parallel, but can not find one. Maybe you can imagine wanting something really badly, and then being taken to court to prove how much you want it, and having to then stand in front of people you can't see and don't know who will judge whether you are worthy of it. And you only have five minutes. When the clock accuses 4:59 minutes, you can prepare yourself to hear a curt, "Thank you." And then you have to walk away, and wait for a letter to tell you if you met those people's expectations or not. I'm sure you're thinking "Only a crazy person would voluntarily choose this life!" Yes, well. We think that too.

I hate it when people tell me I have to develop a thick skin when it comes to auditioning. I have to detach myself from wanting it. I have to see how insignificant those five minutes are in comparison to what my whole career will look like in the end. Do they think I don't know that? It makes me want to laugh. As if I could flip a switch in my heart that makes me not care. As if it were possible to love this a little less.

As my friend Deema described it, after a day like today we feel like we've been hit by a truck. And, I added, peed on afterwards. How to cope? Well, I ate a tiramisu the size of my butt. Went to yoga. Took a long hot shower. Blogged about it. And now I'll go to bed.

And tomorrow I'll wake up feeling somewhat distant from the whole experience, have some coffee, and go about my day.

And when I'm ready, when I feel strong, or perhaps desperate, again, I'll submit myself for more auditions. It's what I do, after all.

And we wonder why actors are all crazy.

The Wicked Pattern

The first time I fell in love I was about 6. I went to visit my aunt in L.A. one summer, and she had a friend, and that friend had kids, and one of those kids was my age, and that kid who was my age was a boy, and that boy was the most beautiful perfect thing I had ever seen in my short life, and within instants I knew he would be my husband.

His name was Jamie.

Since the only training I had been given in regards to love came from disney movies, I was certain that the feeling would be mutual and that we would kiss and live happily ever after. I don't remember how long we played for or what games we even played before I declared my undying love to him. I proceeded to close my eyes like they did in the movies and wait for him to kiss me. Well, no such thing happened. Instead, he ran like the wind. I obviously had no idea what was happening, so I tried following him around for a while, but he just kept running away from me. Eventually he went away for good, my summer vacation ended, I went back home to Brazil, and for the next three years littered every single paper I could find with Larissa loves Jamie encompassed by red hearts.

Since that was my first experience with love, it became my definition of love. And once we define how we believe something to be, it tends to happen just that way, over and over again, until many years later we find that we're in therapy wondering, over and over again, why we keep declaring our love to men who then proceed to run away, and why we then obsess over it for the next three years. Fascinating, isn't it. One would think we'd catch on to it sooner- I mean, really, how many times do we have to do something before we realize it's a destructive pattern and we're bringing it on ourselves???

So here I am, 18 years after Little Jamie, and if we do the math (I literally just got out a calculator to do the math), it would mean I went through this 6 more times. Well, guess what. I made a list (yes, I did), and there were 6 post-Jamie's in the past 18 years. Not as neatly, some didn't take up three years of my life (thank god), and I was a normal high-schooler who had a new crush every week and dated guys I didn't like and all that, but in the end, the pattern of declaring my love (or what I understood to be love at any given time) to a boy/man, watching him run away from me, and holding on to him for much-longer-than-would-be-understandable-afterwards repeated itself exactly 6 times in 18 years.

Now, I'm pretty obsessed with myself and my life. I've kept diaries since before I could spell the word diary. I write down everything I do, feel, see, hear, and think. I love therapy. I love anything called self-help. I'm an actress. And look, I started a blog, which is basically a structured diary for the public with an added analysis of whatever I write about. I even called it "LARISSA THINKS A LOT." You get the idea.

And yet. Somehow, I have only realized all of this right now. All these years, instead of asking myself, "Why am I wasting my time with someone who doesn't want my love?" and "Why am I not the one who runs away when he doesn't return my love," I always, repeatedly, asked myself, "Why doesn't he love me?" and, worse even, "What can I change about me so that he will love me?"

It feels really sad and pathetic to look back on all the time and love I wasted on people who didn't want it. But it also feels good to "catch it". It always feels pretty good to catch a pattern, actually. Catching it means I'm conscious of it, and being conscious of it means I now have a choice about it. I may not have a choice over who I love, or even how their rejection affects me, but I do see that I may have a choice over how I go about dealing with the situation.

So Jamie and his clan didn't want me and I tried and tried and tried to win their hearts anyway. Okay. Clearly, that didn't work out too well. And it took me 18 years to learn from the same mistake. At least I'm 24, not 74. I actually have time to do something about it.

I don't have a nice conclusion for this post, yet, since it's a new discovery and all, but I do hope that in the future I can blog about this again, and it may include some experiences with mutual, respectful love. And I can say this for now: I'm kicking this wicked little pattern out, and my heart is really excited about the possibility of letting someone in who can return its devotion, and then letting go of those who can't.

How Did That Happen?

Eleven years ago, on April 20th, 1999, I was a regular 8th grader, going about my business as usual, hopping from class to class, half-daydreaming, half-present. I expected nothing from that day, as I expected nothing from any day at school. I was certainly not prepared for the announcement I would hear at my algebra class right before lunch. A news report had just been distributed to all the teachers at my school, a news report so dreadful it paralyzed my otherwise perfectly-in-control-math-geek teacher. She stood before our class, not knowing how to deliver the news. We, even at 13, instinctively knew something was wrong. We sat in silence and waited. Finally, she started saying, "It seems like there was a mass..." and her voice started breaking. She took a deep breath and then started again, "There was a massacre at a high school in Colorado today. It looks like some students got some guns and... " Her voice trailed off again as her eyes got watery. The class was stunned into silence. We sat there and said nothing for a while. Then we started asking questions. We wanted to know everything. And once all the facts were given to us, we sat in silence again.

We were silent for days.

For some reason, it hit me really hard. I watched and read every news coverage on the story. The images and stories imprinted themselves in my heart. I had no connection to any of those kids or to that high school in Littleton, Colorado- I had never even been to Colorado- but I was deeply disturbed and forever changed by that tragedy. I searched- I am still searching- for the answer to the most-asked question, "How did that happen?" How did those young boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, with their whole lives ahead of them, get to the point of such despair that they decided to buy guns, walk into school with them one day, and shoot their classmates, then themselves. Twelve students and one teacher were killed, and many were injured permanently. I wanted to know who they were, I wanted to know how they had been raised, I wanted to know more about the culture they had grown up in and what their high-school experiences had been like. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to understand.

I sought to understand what I, or anyone else, could never really understand. But there was something about them that I did understand, and that I would grow to understand even more deeply as I had my own high-school experiences. I had good parents, I had a great relationship with my brother, I had friends, I went to a high school that provided counseling and support, and I had my love for theatre to get me through any rough teenage times. But I also understood what it was like to feel like you did not belong. I knew what it was like to know you would never be the most popular person in your high-school, not even close, and to have to pretend, every day, that you didn't care. I had friends, close good dear friends, but I knew what it was like to secretly wish I had more friends, which would mean that more people liked me. I knew what it was like to feel invisible, at home and at school, and to never feel like what was important to me was important to anyone in charge. I knew what it was like to be terribly, dreadfully, unbearably lonely. And I could imagine magnifying those circumstances: never feeling like I could talk to my own parents, living in a town where nothing ever happened, where maybe I wasn't even invited to uneventful basement parties, going to a school where there were no subjects that interested me in any capacity, having only one friend- and I'm sure the list could go on. And although I can't understand the boys murdering their classmates and then killing themselves, I can start to understand their need for a violent gesture, their need to be seen, and their deep, desperate need to get out of their lives.

I am still obsessed with the Columbine shootings. I can't even write about it right now without shaking. I can't do much about it, I can't even do much about understanding it and answering the question "How did that happen?". But I can remember it. And I do. Eleven years have gone by and most people don't think about it anymore. April 20th comes and goes. Columbine high-school was closed today, and a few articles were written. Some students there still think about it, still wonder, still go to school with ghosts. And the families of the murdered teenagers still remember this day when they lost a piece of themselves. I can't imagine what Eric and Dylan's parents do on this day, what they do with their lives, how they have managed to get on.

And I, who never had any connection to anyone at Columbine, spend my day thinking about it. Not only thinking about the tragedy and mourning the losses, but also still wondering what propelled it. Wondering who Eric and Dylan really were. Wondering if it really could have been prevented by simply making guns less available, or some other explanation that was thrown at us by the media. Wondering who's to blame. Wondering if we've learned from it. And lastly, wondering, perhaps forever and to no avail, how it happened.

April 20th, 2010. Columbine, your victims are remembered.

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