Have I Told You This Already? by Lauren Graham

Author:Lauren Graham [Graham, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Devastating news: Brad couldn’t make it. Could someone else grab the club soda?[*]

Skip Notes

* No chickens were harmed in the making of this essay.

Health Camps I Have Hated (Yet in Most Cases Returned To)

My first insight into what being a professional actor might really be like came during the summer of 1988, right after I graduated from college, when I was hired as an Equity apprentice at a regional theater in Michigan. We apprentices sang in the choruses of the musicals and worked in the box office and painted the fences and sewed costumes, all in return for points that contributed toward becoming a member of the theatrical union Actors’ Equity. Not only were we unpaid, but we paid a weekly sum to live in a room in the homes of the locals who’d agreed to take us on. The resident ensemble that played the leading roles was comprised of professional actors already in Actors’ Equity, brought in mainly from New York City. I’d never known a real working actor, and here I was alongside an entire company of them, many of whom had been on TV or on Broadway, and it was thrilling even to be in the same room with them and hear stories of shows they’d done and auditions they’d been on and generally what their lives were like. They were incredibly generous to us and welcomed our questions with candor. To me, working actors were naturally disciplined people who had figured out whatever the secret was to breaking through to the other side where you might not be rich, but at least you were doing what you loved and not paying fifty dollars a week for the privilege of being in the last row of the chorus of Oklahoma! at night and mopping the bathroom floor by day. I quickly learned their lives were more complicated than that.

For one thing, it seemed everyone was making sacrifices of a type I’d never considered. One morning we learned that one of the stars of the Equity company had booked a national tour of a popular Broadway musical. A year of work at least, guaranteed. What a thrill! But later that day I passed her on the pay phone, crying. As she hung up, she turned to me. “It’s just that we’ve had to postpone our honeymoon so many times already,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “But what can I do? I have to take it. It’s the lead.” One of the older actors told us that in order to be able to drink as much alcohol as he wanted at night, he ate nothing but fruit during the day. “I can get away with it,” he said, “because I’m a character man.” The two male actors who played most of the main roles were a couple, but outside of our theater pretended they weren’t because they worried it ruined something for the mostly female audience. “The price you pay for being a leading man,” one of them joked.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.