An actor's life is full of busy times and slow times, ups and downs. When you're busy it feels like you're always running to catch up. When it's slow, it feels like you'll never work again. The hardest part is finding a way to maintain momentum during the slow periods.
A few short weeks ago, it seemed like I didn't have time to breathe. I had two shoots in two days, one for a Kickstarter campaign and one for a film. Then I did an internal shoot for Best Buy. And that same week, I had four on camera auditions and four voiceover auditions. Plus work. Then, last week, I opened the show Unsung with Sidekick Theatre. And then I went to New York City.
The view from the highest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere, One World Trade Center
New York is exhausting in its own way, but going to New York allowed me a few days to not pursue anything. A few days where I wasn't chasing anything...no auditions, no work, no networking. Okay, one voiceover audition, but nothing too taxing. I wandered the city. I saw some shows, and I visited some friends. But mostly, I had free space to walk and think and dream.
And in that space, as I walked the city, I found that something was pursuing me.
In the vacuum left by leaving my daily life behind, ideas came flooding into the void, filling the space usually occupied by my day job, auditions, and working on other people's projects.
Ideas began to find me. They beckoned from alleyways. They called from the tops of skyscrapers. They lured me into the Ramble, in the form of birdsong and flower. They peeked out from windows and then ducked when I turned my head to the peripheral movement. Sometimes they'd whisper in my ear from behind, and I'd turn to find them gone, but be left with the merest impression of what they'd tried to impart.
USS Maine National Monument at Columbus Circle (modeled by artist model Audrey Munson, my current muse)
Before I left on my trip, I was already writing one show for the fringe Festival, and another show idea had come to me, and begged to be written. A story whose home was New York. And arriving in the heart of New York, I found I had left another idea, one from a long time ago, that I had abandoned not knowing how to help it be born. We were reunited in a subway station, amid the pungent smells, the crush of human life, and the constant motion of the city, like two old friends being brought back together by fate.
Hello, old friend. Shall we pick up where we left off? I'm ready...
Union Square, George Washington. Not pictured: All the people playing chess
Sky's the limit! (One World Trade Center from the street)