Lady M Day One: New Beginnings

At the advice of my therapist (a performer with a therapist? yes, i'm a cliche...) I join the millions of actor/singer blogs out there, and am glad to do it. I got on my old, long-abandoned blog tonight and tried to revive it, but my old email password has long been forgotten, so I begin anew. Which is just as well, since unlike my other blog which was more of your basic online journal, the purpose for this baby is to remind myself of my chosen profession.  Which I generally forget when I don't work, which lately has been pretty often. Unless you count auditions as work, which I think I will start doing, in which case I worked on Monday. Cool.  I got up, got dressed in a suit, commuted to an office, and read a teleprompter for a website training video. That sounds kind of like a job, right?  Even though I didn't get the job. :/  See the reason I forget?

I chose for my blog title the famous line from Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene in Shakespeare's Macbeth.  I was cast as Lady M during the spring of my junior year in the Actor Training Program at the University of Utah. I returned to school a bit later in life, because it took me a really long time to let myself go into acting wholeheartedly.  Macbeth was my first-ever Shakespearean play, and I got lucky enough to delve into this part of all parts after almost three years of rigorous acting training and all that it involves, and gave it all I had. That character, not surprisingly, remains with me somewhere inside, and I pull her out when I need to be reminded why I am in this difficult vocation. I will be forever and ever grateful I was given that chance to play that role. For better and (in some ways) worse, it was a life-changing experience.

During the run of Macbeth in April of 2011, my dad was diagnosed with Stage IV melanoma. He was admitted into the hospital on a Friday morning, and I had a show that night, and three more that weekend.  I mostly don't remember how I got through those shows, but I was also grateful to have the distraction of the play to absorb the shock of his diagnosis, which was grim indeed (he passed away 8 months later).  Looking back, I think I have been sleepwalking ever since. I don't know if you ever fully wake from the nightmare of losing a parent, especially to something as heinous as cancer.

My acting has not been the same since my dad died, and singing can be really painful too (my dad was an opera singer).  I have heard that grieving can take away a person's creativity, or at least their ability to access the creative part of the brain. I have worked and performed somewhat steadily since his death, but Macbeth was really the last play I was in where I felt that real excitement and passion for performance that got me to forsake my "normal" life and pursue a career in it. I don't know if I will ever regain that passion or love, but I guess keeping this blog is my attempt at connecting back with that part of myself that I lost along with my dad.

I really miss both of them.