I’ve been back in the Wild, Wild West Coast, the City of Fallen Angels, that horrendous epicenter of civilization, Los Angeles, for 6 weeks now. And I’ve morphed, changed, become someone I hardly recognize. No, I didn’t get the tempting implants, nor have I become a yoga teacher or received a career enhancing lobotomy. But strange things have happened to my body and my mind. One of the most bizarre is:

I’ve forgotten how old I am.

I mean it. When you lie about your age on a day to day basis, especially when not defaulting to a preprogrammed number but simply spouting out the 2 digits the person in front of you most needs to hear, and every day unsought advice on “your look” and “your MO” flies out of every mouth you encounter, your brain pushes all the information together and you get to a state where you no longer know who you are, much less when you were born. Ok, whoa. I’m getting all wacky on you with runons. But that’s what it’s like here.

Let’s not even go to the “you’ve got a great look” and “you’re a _____ type” just yet. Let’s just talk about age. Read the rest of this entry »

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When I started the drama program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I was placed in the Stella Adler Conservatory. Run by Stella’s previously heroin-addicted grandson and staffed by an assorted array hippies and uber-talented oddballs, my first step into those classrooms was the moment I realized I was definitely not in the midwest anymore. This place was my OZ.

Along with scene study, improv, and voice training, we had a class in our schedule titled “Movement.” Were we going to be taught how MOVE?? I’d been moving around pretty decently for 18 years so I figured I could ace this class. I was wrong. As a part of this “Movement” class, we all had to line up in rows and then begin putting our bodies in a series of utterly bizarre postures that sometimes ended with my head in another students butt. We weren’t really “moving” so much, so I thought “This is a sham!” But oddly, after just holding our bodies still in weird arrangements on the floor, I would be sweating and my muscles burning. After this torture series, the class would then begin studying body expressions and how to move about on stage. I never knew the name of this torture series we began with, or that it even had one. Till a couple of years later I took a class outside of the school that was exactly the same, and titled:

YOGA. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dear friends, I have some very exciting news. My career has just hit a new level. I now join the ranks of Annoying Cell Phone Guy and the Fandango Puppets in a new medium of comic entertainment: Pre-Show Movie Theatre Commercials. Now do you not only have to be on time to catch the coming attractions, but you need to get there an extra 10 minutes early to see me convincing the masses to use MOVIETICKETS.COM. (Don’t get mad at me, you know you love them. And it’s not my fault every bit of media real estate is used to advertise.)

Yes, I’m in a commericial that plays in the theaters. For those of you actors wondering if Annoying Cell Phone Guy made as many bazillions as the newly rich commercial actors on network television, the answer is no. There are no residuals for this. It’s a day-rate as well as “we’ll put ya on the big screen!” compensation.

The spot is about a superhero (the “fastest man alive” no less) on a date with a girl (ME.) My character is unimpressed, and I order the movietickets online using my blackberry faster than he can whiz back and forth to the theater. How clever! Read the rest of this entry »

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Crying on the Subway. No atonement ritual is more wholly and instantly fulfilling. Confession, Yum Kippur, not even the Lemonade Cleanse can purge the devil as effectively as the moment you let out that soft yelp and the buckets of tears that follow while moving unsteadily at 60 mph on the subway track, surrounded by strangers who don’t even notice. Sometimes the experience changes (for the worse) when they do. No matter how well intentioned that woman was who wrote you a poem about the beauty of life and handed it to you before she exited at her stop, it’s the experience of letting out every raw emotion without a single care, or even a thought really, for vanity. Of feeling perfectly comfortable and ALONE, as though you were in your bathtub, while you are in fact, in commute. It’s a treat we only get in the big cities, and I wonder if the tubes of Paris and London offer as satisfying a service, with their cushioned seats and emotional restraint probably making it rare, and less visceral.

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A year and a half ago, I went through an actor’s rite of passage that is terrifying, cruel and compulsory. My first trip to Los Angeles.

Growing up in America in the 1980s, I grew up thinking that Russians were little red people who ate their children. Living and working as an actor in New York for 8 and half years, I’ve since acquired a similar prejudice; that Los Angeles is a vile pit of filth, where all the women are lobotomized, talent is never appreciated, bullets fly past if you make eye contact, and the casting directors are ACTUAL WOLVES who tell you your fat then try to bite off your cellulite after forcing you to get breast implants.

Needless to say, I was a bit scared.

But, I went on my trip with a great attitude. I had decided that since I’ve yet to meet a Russian who was cannibalistic and the color red, that my preconceptions of LA were probably false as well. I ran out of Burbank airport at 10am PST, smiling ear to ear and excitedly taking in all that was around me. Sunshine! Mountains! A blond with fake tits in a velour tracksuit! I’VE ARRIVED!!

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Hello, dear readers. Let me apologize for the lateness of this entry. I aim to submit my weekly drivel every Wednesday, but this past week I was on a shoot. “Oh shooting!” I can hear you exclaim. “Then lateness is perfectly understandable, as you were working, pursuing your dreams, and furthering your career! Good for you! We can certainly wait.” Thank you, but not exactly. I was shooting an industrial for a pharmaceutical company, a video that will only be watched by medical students, in which I play a mental patient. Seriously. It’s one of my highest earning gigs to date.

Yes, some of my most lucrative acting gigs have come from the production facilities at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. They’ve hired me three times for such gigs, I guess cause I’m so damn good at it. The first time Dr Ramirez called me, he was needing an actor over the age of 18 who looks young enough to play a schizophrenic teenager. Nutjobs are a specialty of mine, so I was very excited for the opportunity to showcase my skills at lunacy.

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Wow, you people really loved the boob post. Who knew you were so easy to entertain? Well, to keep everyone happy, I’ll stay on topic this week. This story only relates to the entertainment industry in that I discovered it through research of a play I’m working on. And it’s about a tremendously hard working woman. Enjoy.

The play I’m performing in is about airline stewardesses from the 70s. The director has been meeting with a real flight attendant from the era who now does training for new “stews.” From the 1930s through the 70s, stewardesses were sex symbols. Your job back then was to almost be a stand in for the businessmen’s wives/mistresses. You had to be thin, pretty, and know how to prepare and serve a four-course gourmet meal. Times have certainly changed.

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To Implant?
I have a boob fetish. A pair of jugs will never pass my sight without a full inspection and lightening speed calculation of the percentage of the body fat and arm circumference of the female who owns them, in comparison to size of aforementioned jugs, in order to determine the likelihood of them being real. Yeah, I guess I’m jealous. One time in the Bikram Yoga locker room, a pretty girl of asian decent, skinnier than myself (I’m what one person referred to as “nearly invisible”) took off her sweaty tanktop and revealed a pair of bazookas so perfect and round and perky, it took every bit of willpower to stop myself from poking them and asking “Where on earth did you get those done!!”

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Hello readers, and welcome to my blog. This journal will be chronicling the experiences of an aspiring actress. Let’s begin the epic with a tale of humiliation: my worst audition experience of all time. It can only go up from here.

One time, and I AM NOT KIDDING, I peed my pants before an audition. No, I wasn’t a little kid. This was 3 years ago.

I had a UTI: Urinary Tract Infection. A fun one, let me tell ya! When you have to pee, your bladder feels like it’s being poked with thousands of little needles. I would double over in pain sometimes. Once you pee it’s fine, but it’s the moments leading up to relief where you really feel like your insides are being eaten by acid. (FYI, this is not an std. It’s a bacterial infection. Just wanted to set that straight. Remember girls to pee after whoopie.)

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