You know you want to move forward. But you don’t know what to do. You know (sort of) what you want. But you don’t know how to get it. Time to take steps. My favorite question to ask myself is, “If I did know what to do next, what would it be?” Calm down, get quiet, and listen. Your Wise Self will have an answer for you, and it will be a good one. In any case, taking some sort of reasonable action will get the ball rolling. My path for getting into show business was anything but smooth and sure. It was as bumpy as rocky road ice cream, and I felt like I didn’t have a clue how to proceed. But I did, as you’ll read below. And so do you.
Please enjoy your next excerpt from
by Kristi Lynn Davis
After The Wizard of Oz ended, I got more serious about show business and decided to take steps to move my career forward. Step #1: It was clear I would benefit from finding a voice teacher. I figured that by the time I was thirty-five, I could have ten years of voice lessons under my belt and possibly become a singer. Plus, if I wanted to get anywhere in this business of entertainment, I needed to be able to sing for auditions. My boyfriend Adam, who loved connecting people, knew some local women who sang in an all-female quartet called “The Fabulous Earrings.” One of the women in the group, Marcia, was also a voice teacher. Perfect.
My first lesson with Marcia was unnerving, because I was still self-conscious about singing solo in front of someone. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” I asked myself and then answered myself right away: “I could make unpleasant sounds, and she’d know my singing stinks.” I decided I could live with that. Using the same karaoke cassette tape of James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” that I used for Funny Girl, I pathetically, meekly, eked out the lyrics atop the background music. I was relieved when it was over. ”Okay, so you can see where I’m starting from,” I said. She nodded. So began my vocal training.
Marcia was a pretty, single woman in her forties who dressed in comfy, worn beach clothes and wore her wavy, blond hair long and natural. She played the acoustic guitar to accompany me except when she plunked out scales on her small, portable keyboard. Singing with the guitar was heavenly. We’d do Linda Ronstadt songs, Bonnie Raitt, and Janis Joplin. Her hippy/folksy bent was not exactly ideal for musical theatre coaching, but if I lived near her now, I’d still want to sing with her.
My lessons were held in La Jolla in Marcia’s small studio apartment built atop the garage of a large house that she watched over while its owners were out of town. Her apartment had windows running the entire length of the back, which overlooked the ocean. I would sing while gazing out at the waves coming into shore. The room had a tiny bathroom and a little kitchenette where a mini coffee maker was always brewing in case I wanted a cup. Her sleeping area was a bed-sized loft, reachable by ladder. A small TV sat on a shelf, but I doubt Marcia watched it much, because it had a sign taped across the screen announcing “twenty-four hours notice needed for lesson cancellations.” I’m not sure the set was even functional. Sometimes she had a vase with a few flowers sitting on the counter. At other times, her sewing machine would be out, so she could stitch costumes for her quartet. Besides teaching voice lessons and performing with The Fabulous Earrings for private parties and shopping mall celebrations, she played guitar and sang standard, tropical vacation repertoire at oceanside restaurants. In the winter, her large family convened at a California ski resort where she would sing in the chalet to pay for her vacation. Her life seemed so serenely simple. Marcia herself took lessons from a famous teacher all the way up in Los Angeles and would come back and share the skills she had learned with me. Thanks to Marcia, my singing improved by leaps and bounds. I cherished my weekly lessons with her.
Step #2: Update my photos. A new showbiz friend of mine recommended a good, local photographer for professional, theatrical headshots.
Step #3: Get an agent. Isn’t that what entertainers do? It would sound so cool to say, “My agent this and my agent that.” But where would I find an agent? I grabbed the Yellow Pages, located one of the few legitimate talent agencies in San Diego, and bravely called the number.
Surprising to me, joining the agency was a piece of cake–no audition, no rigorous resume examination, no screening for super model status. They didn’t seem particularly selective; I think they took anyone with professional photos. I just had to bring in a healthy supply of headshots for them to add to the towering stacks covering the floors of their cramped, tiny rooms. I really didn’t know what to expect of an agent, but what did I have to lose? Apparently, about 15% a gig, that’s what. They gave me agency address labels to stick on my headshots in place of my personal address. I now had “representation!”
My first agency job was serving as an “extra” in the movie Mr. Jones starring none other than the incredibly debonair Richard Gere and alluring Lena Olin. I was eager to find out what it was like to be on a movie set. How were the scenes filmed? How did the director work with the actors? Did acting look like something I was capable of doing? More importantly, what did a sexy superstar look like in person?
Lucky for me, the movie industry was filming more and more movies in San Diego as they were saturating L.A. locations. I also heard that the Los Angelenos were sick and tired of being regularly inconvenienced by movie studios and their recurring demands to close off streets for filming. As a result, this particular scene was being filmed in front of the San Diego County Courthouse. My agent instructed me to dress like a lawyer, meaning to wear a skirt suit and high heels.
As did all the other extras, I spent the day outside in the sun with the “Second A.D.” (assistant director) and “Third A.D.”—a young man and woman who wore headsets and shuffled us around like cattle herders. “Okay, when I cue you, you four walk across the sidewalk to the other side of the building and wait there,” the Second A.D. said. We’d hear the “snap” of the clapboard and the “Take 10!” Then it was “Back to one!” which meant back to our starting position. The harried A.D.s were constantly running to shove real pedestrians, as opposed to the hired movie extra pedestrians, out of the way or to stop traffic or stop something that was going to ruin the shot. As a consequence, sometimes we had to repeat the same moves over and over and over again: “Take 11! Back to one!” “Take 12! Back to one!” “Take 13! Back to one!” It was like a real-life version of pressing rewind on your DVD remote and then pressing play…rewind…play….rewind…play.
As extras, we were treated more like props than people. I felt subservient and powerless, but I actually had the ability to spoil the shot, thereby wasting time, thereby costing the movie copious amounts of money. Feeling rebellious after hours of slave labor, I was tempted to do cartwheels instead of my quick-paced lawyer stride but decided I wasn’t ready to give up showbiz just yet.
Most of the time, I stood way out in the boondocks waiting for something to happen. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. I kept watching for Richard Gere but was so far from the action that I needed binoculars to see the stars for any positive identification. At one point I got close enough to see the directors and “their people.” They actually sat on directors’ chairs labeled with their names, just like in the movies. Cool. Later in the day, the extras were all abuzz exclaiming, “There’s Richard Gere!” I turned in time to gaze upon his famous pepper-gray hair. He was extremely handsome. I craned my neck to hear what was going on in the scene and to decipher the directions given by the director, but, alas, I couldn’t hear much. While certainly fascinating to witness the workings of a movie set, it was also a long day, which got boring very quickly. Especially since we did a whole lot more standing around waiting than we did acting. By definition, we were extra. What did I expect?
As luck would have it, I got called a second time to film for Mr. Jones, this time in Mission Beach at a casual, little restaurant not far from the ocean. My big acting assignment was to be a restaurant patron who would stir some fake coffee at a table and try not to attract attention. “Pretend you are conversing or eating or drinking but don’t stand out and pull focus away from the stars,” ordered one of the A.D.s. This was a little more fun, because I was right in the heart of the scene and could watch the action. But did I really think my lot in life was to feign beverage mixing while remaining unnoticeable?
The best part of the job was, by far, the free food. A food trailer that the actors and crew referred to as “craft services” provided a selection of drinks, fruit, yogurt, bagels, muffins, and more as well as an extensive, short-order, hot menu. I wasn’t getting real acting experience, but I certainly was well fed.
Trust that you know what the next step is. You don’t have to figure out the entire route to your dreams, just take the next, logical step. Thanks for reading.
Cartwheel on,
Kristi
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