Collecting hats

In which our Diva is never quite sure where she picked them all up

On a shelf in my spare room closet, there are four hatboxes full of vintage hats, mostly from the 50s and 60s. A few belonged to my grandmother. Several more (and two of the hatboxes) came from a friends' parents' garage sale a few years ago. And there are a couple I honestly don't remember how I came by.

I seem to accumulate metaphorical hats in much the same way.

I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't love to have a higher proportion of gigs where I'm simply an actor.  Where I can give all my energy to showing up and playing my character, confident that all the other details are someone else's job and that someone else is doing it. But that's just not the career I get (at least so far), and mostly I'm okay with that.  Though occasionally I think I should have kept my big mouth shut before it uttered "I could..." *wry g*


Of course, if I haven't learned to do that by now, I don't think I'm going to. Way back in 1994, when arts organizations having websites was just a novelty, I put together the first one for Rosebriar Shakespeare Company, my second home for most of the ten years I lived in Columbus. A couple years later, I did the same for BalletMet Columbus, where my then-day-job was in an unrelated department of the admin office. Appropriately for a nationally-respected company, they've long since moved on to a far more sophisticated and professional site than I know how to design.

Which didn't stop me from opening my big mouth when Elgin Opera's need for an updated and integrated web presence became more obvious every time I tried to plug an event to my plugged-in social circle. Mind you, I can't complain about that one since (a) we got an infrastructure grant this year to pay me for it, and (b) at the end of a frustrating few months, I now know how to make Joomla do a number of things I didn't previously know how to make it do. Yay, knowledge!

For Scarlet X, I actually could have gotten away with just being an actor. And I could pretend that's what I'm doing, pretend it's a better-endowed project where a very small team isn't trying to do the work of a much bigger one. But you know what? They are, and they deserve credit for it. I'm not the only one stepping up to the hyphenate plate to make this thing happen. This weekend, that meant a bit of copywriting for the website (coming soon!) and promo materials, and discovering that capsule character descriptions (60 to 70ish words) are harder than they look. Still, I was here, I'm decent at slinging words around, and this way we're closer to having a website I can send you to. Everybody wins!

And then, every once in a while, a project happens because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool DIYer who can't keep her volunteering hand from shooting into the air. That would be Resonance, where my rather eccentric and eclectic mix of skills, interests, and thought processes happened to converge in just the right way at the right time to land me on a bus going some very cool places indeed. (About which I still can't really tell you anything, but there are a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff that will start bearing fruit soon. Promise!)

There are stories to tell, stories I believe in. And when they need more from me than just acting, they feel that much more mine, that much more like home. I'll take that trade.

Sorry, wrong redhead

In which our Diva was planning to blog about something else entirely today, but...

First, the good news: As mentioned in this Fangoria interview with director Mark Vadik, Cyrus: Mind of a Serial Killer will be the closing feature at the Atlanta Horror Film Festival on August 15.  There's a bit of a kicker in the fact that it'll be in a city where I'm going to be (for Dragon*Con) just three weeks later, but it's still pretty cool.

Google Alerts are really handy for letting me know about things like that article. Then there are the... less useful links it turns up.  On today's interwebz, pretty much as soon as you have an IMDb page, you start turning up on all kinds of goofball "celebrity" sites. The one with my horoscope and biorhythms and stuff is particularly entertaining. Mostly, though, they're clutter.

In any case, most of these things are automatically generated, including the ones that pull bits of text from various places -- say, random celebrity names and assorted porny keywords -- and splice them together into bogus metadata to lure you to a page and infect your machine with malware.  At first, I thought the link that had my name and "show her left tit" in the same sentence was one of those. Then I realized that (a) the sentence made sense, and (b) it was describing a particularly intense scene in Cyrus.  There's just one... no, actually, there are a number of problems with that. But the first one that sprang to mind was that I'm not in that scene.

The link checked out according to my virus-protection software, so I let curiosity get the better of me. And yep, it was exactly what it sounded like, to wit, a site (I trust you'll excuse me for not linking it) collecting video clips of nudity or near-nudity from assorted sources. (It's apparently the updates from a particular day, which I assume explains why it randomly runs the gamut from an actual porn star's artificially enhanced full toplessness to a few frames of a Doctor Who companion's upper thighs under her fluttering nightshirt.)

Now, we all know The Internet Is For Porn. I think about that every time I hear or read a comment from an actress about how she chooses whether to do nudity in a role. The most common litmus test is whether it's integral to the story.  (Which is perfectly reasonable, if unavoidably subjective. I'm not saying there's no such thing as a story that can't be told effectively without it, but I personally think they're rarer than people tend to think.)

That reasoning is solid as far as it goes, but it only goes as far as you can rely on the story to remain intact. And these days, that's until about 24 hours after the pirated DVDs hit the streets of Bangkok or wherever. After that, congratulations! Your bits have almost certainly been yanked out of context and thrown up in sloppily-constructed virtual galleries for the convenience of any bored guy with an internet connection and a roll of toilet paper. Which is a very, very different transaction with the audience from the one you had in mind.

Thus it is that, in this particular instance, an actress who worked her ass off in an emotionally and physically exhausting role has one of its most disturbing moments amputated, its significance reduced to a glimpse of aureola. And, just to top it off, labeled with a caption identifying it as someone else entirely.

Funny thing -- Jill Sandmire was the one to note that there were four red-haired women among the principal cast: herself, Anne Marie Leighton, Patricia Belcher, and me.

Four quite distinct women, or so we concluded during that idle conversation between shot setups. But apparently we're interchangeable to some virtual voyeur who's only interested in our bits.

Stay classy, pal.

One night to get it right

In which our Diva climbs aboard yet another electronic bandwagon



The nifty little widget you see above is generated by IndieGoGo, a site where independent filmmakers can promote and get grass-roots support for their projects. This particular one leads to the page for One Night, the project I start shooting next week as Sheila the waitress.

If for some reason you don't see the nifty little widget above (I know not all browser settings are created equal, even if a lot of designers these days don't seem to!), click here and support independent film!

Houston, we have a reel

In which our Diva wails a number of Naughty Words at her computer for two weeks, but only one in the finished product

\o/

Keep on movin' movin'

In which our Diva has a scattering of Sunday morning thoughts

Busy week on tap -- a couple new auditions, and table read for Hell the King, the dark comedy short I'll be shooting in a couple weeks. I put a news item on my website, but hadn't gotten around to saying anything about it here. Every actress (especially if she's an old comics geek!) should get to play an Intrepid Reporter, and now I get mine. Her name is Tara Kyles, and she's on the scene with the latest as the minions of Satan go on strike. Can't wait to see how this one comes together!

Backstage at the Elgin Opera gala last weekend, one of the other choristers mentioned how impressed his wife was with my performance at a recent Festival of Singers night at Villa Verone. He quoted her as saying "There's something about the way she sings that just compels you to listen." Wow!! How often do we get a compliment like that? I wanted to throw my arms around her and hug her, if she'd been there in person. More importantly, though, how often do we remember the compliments? Something that gobsmacking, sure -- it instantly went into my arsenal of Amazing Things People Have Said To Me that I use as talismans when the negative mental soundtrack cranks up. But the most trivial stuff goes onto the negative soundtrack, while I have probably half a dozen talismans. They're powerful ones, crystal-clear memories of these amazing things people have said to me at various times, and their faces and the environment when they said them. But so many other wonderful little gifts are heard and accepted and don't go into the arsenal, except for a vague notion that "people said nice things." Maybe that's its own talisman, I don't know.

Still going great guns on That Other Stuff, still having fun. Even when software does not entirely cooperate. My reel is now edited, and I'm experimenting with the best ways to get it up online for all the world to see! And yeah, there's a little bit of quaking in the boots about that. In theatre, there's a finite number of people in a finite time frame who see your work and have an opinion about it. Put your acting not only on film/digital but on the Internet, and anyone could stumble by. There's not nearly as much quaking as excitement, though, because, hey, look! We live in a world where we can put our work in pixel form on the Internet for anyone who stumbles by, and how cool is that?

I had a small epiphany over in the comments on Sandra Joseph's blog this morning -- something that's been happening in my head for a while, but it crystallized in the process of putting it into words, which so often happens: I'm working on training myself out of saying "I should have done this years ago." I've been saying it a lot -- about moving to Chicago, about getting more seriously into film -- but the truth is I should be doing this now. That's the lesson of so many exciting things starting to bear fruit. (Incidentally, if you're not reading her, you have a hole in your positivity-generating blogosphere. She doesn't update terribly often, but it's always worth the wait. I was about to say I wish I'd gotten to know her better in college, but pursuant to the rest of this paragraph, the truth is we're meant to be reading and learning from one another now!)

In closing, I leave you with the single most awesome thing I have seen in weeks:

May we all share this much joy in what we do.

Under Construction

In which our Diva is in Career Development Mode

I always feel a little antsy when I don't have any Exciting News!! or Crunchy Process Goodness to post about.  Which is a bit silly, since it seems unlikely that anyone outside of my immediate social circle reads this blog anyway.   But hey, maybe you're reading this at some future point when I am That Chick From Those Movies and you followed some links out of curiosity.  Or maybe you're a fellow dreamer-and-doer who's stumbled across my meanderings and found a kindred spirit.  (If so, hey, shout out!  Support networks are made of win!)  Or maybe nobody's reading it at all, and that's okay too.

The lack of Crunchy Process Goodness makes me antsier than the lack of Exciting News!!, because I'm very much a believer in the notion that an actor should always be doing some kind of acting, be it performance-oriented or training or whatever.  I've done several film auditions lately, but that's pretty much it -- on the craft side.

What I've mostly been doing instead (around the mortgage-and-groceries-driven reality of Office of Doom)  is That Other Stuff most of us hate.

I knew long before I started reading casting director Bonnie Gillespie's fantastic weekly Column "The Actor's Voice" that the self-promotion portion of an actor's job never stops.  But man, it's  nice to have that weekly kick in the pants of "So do it already!!"  To that end, I made a commitment at the turn of 2009: No auditioning for theatre until I have my website and representation ducks in a row.  The goal was to get the site up and submissions out to two or three agents before the end of January, and then maybe think about committing to three or four months of rehearsals and performances.  Because, whatever my intentions at the outset, That Other Stuff just never ever gets done during a show process.  Ever.

The funny thing is, once I got going, I've actually had a great time, and might even make that goal.   It helps that I have a rather broad DIY streak anyway, but darned if it hasn't also just been fun.  I finally swallowed my "only hand-coded HTML will do!" geek-girl pride, accepted that I'm not going to get around to learning to build CSS from scratch in the foreseeable future, and went down the dark path of canned Joomla! templates.  And the results aren't half bad, if I do say so myself.  There's plenty more to do, of course, but for starters, it made me finally write a proper PR bio (have I mentioned I hate writing bios?), with the side effect of having said bio punching up my IMDb page too.

I still have lots of theatre photos to scan in, but for now there's a sampling of the fabulous ones Ken Beach took at the final dress for Dracula.  Probably most time-consuming was going through many hundreds of shots from three photo shoots for the "Publicity" folder.  Which is arguably the most frivolous area of the site.  But y'know, when you're not a big star or model material, and you have a documentedly problematic relationship with still photos of yourself?  It's a nice shot of confidence to not only have, but have put together yourself, a decently professional, polished presentation of some really cool ones!  Shoutouts to photographers Todd Jackson, David Grelck, and Mike Smith, with thanks for making that possible by actually asking me to pose for them!  (Also glad that, unlike my outdated HTML, my Photoshop skills have stayed in good form.  Never underestimate the importance of cropping and color correction in the digital age.) 

Still on the agenda: Editing reel material and authoring a suitably professional DVD, so it's ready to send out to agents and casting agents when they ask for it.  (Which requires me to get resumes and cover letters out to them first, which is happening THIS WEEK.  You saw it here first -- don't be afraid to hold me to it, even if we've never met!)  This is helped by the prompt receipt of my copy of a recent student film by Devan McGrath, who gets a thumbs-up shoutout for professional communication, a fun but efficient set, and did I mention actually sending copies to actors, all in refreshing defiance of every horror story you've ever heard about working in student films.  :: blows kisses to Mal Corazon compadres ::  Watch for clips from that and The Cancer Jean on my website, my Actors Access profile, and assorted other places I should have had video up ages ago.

Dreaming-and-doing actors?  We don't have the money.  We gotta MAKE the time.  Do it.  You will not be sorry.

I've moved! Except I haven't really.

Yesterday I got around to taking advantage of GoogleApps, and switched my wiliqueen.com webmail over to the Gmail system. I've been using the wiliqueen@ Gmail account for everything for nearly four years now, with the valerie@wiliqueen addy forwarding to it. Now I've just reversed that, so nobody should notice any difference unless you're particularly observant and see that everything will be coming now with the reply-to as the latter. But I'm posting this just in case anyone encounters any hiccups.

Importing all my archived mail via POP was easy as pie, but four years' worth? Took all day and well into the night. %-} Man, do I send and receive a lot of email.

I know I've been a bit scarce lately; June is bustin' out all over. I got slots for about half the general season auditions I put in for, which isn't too bad. One down (Marriott), two to go (New World Rep and Adventure Stage Chicago), plus New Leaf sent out an email saying they're booked up but will try to squeeze in walk-ins if you want to give it a shot.

I will NOT send a resume to Bailiwick and try to convince them I can squeeze understudying Tell Me On A Sunday in around my other projects. Not.

Today I have the terrible burden of hitting thrift and fabric stores for Shrew, World of Faeries, and Polaris purposes. Woe, woe is me! *dramatic hand-to-forehead* (If I'm not back by midnight, send in the rescue dogs...)