I Can Buy Myself Flowers!

Partner in my own scene for hours!

AI invented that language. This is appropriately nonsensical and absent of humans...

Sweet baby Jesus lord of the rings, what an adventure this menopause is, y’all!

Just an unadulterated delight to feel a mindboink of existential proportions during this TIME when everything’s CHANGED.

Ahhh, there was a golden age in Hollywood when I could effectively audition for a casting office on a studio lot then be asked to return a few hours later that same day to walk in a room with the producers to audition a second time with the director in the room giving me fun and thoughtful adjustments. When I think about that period in my life of being around industry professionals IN PERSON, I feel like I am waxing poetic about talkies and the good old studio system! Hilarious to think it was just a simpler era of building relationships in Tinsel Town and being seen and working out certain muscles together required to secure a spot.

I had an audition yesterday and didn’t have a scene partner in this new normal of “self-taping” instead of meeting face to face. So I used some recommended “app” where I recorded all the cue lines and “acted” by myself to my camera opposite my own disembodied voice. When I tell you I bordered a psychotic break a total of five times, I mean I wondered if even the late, great Robin Williams would have thought partnering with a smart phone voice of himself in an empty room would be crazy-making? He probably would have just spoken the other lines in real time in different voices. And booked the role.

Auditioning has evolved. Everything has evolved. Tell ya what hasn’t, though.

Men are in charge.

This is anecdotal but I could do a more scientific experiment if I knew how to science and still get the same damn, stubborn result. I grabbed the last five auditions for which I was requested to submit a tape. Of the 26 executive producers listed on these projects (4 were TV series and one was a feature film), 2 were women. Only. Two.

This inequity in the entertainment industry quite simply: blows hard times a million out of a whale’s blowhole. Also, it’s not a revelation for me to be pointing this out. Everyone knows it, everyone openly talks about it being a fact of life like a J.D. Vance after a school shooting, and the gendered inequity of who gets to make and tell the stories remains rigidly in the hands of this patriarchal content loop.

But I have been thinking more deeply about my personal alteration in mindset during this era of change in my own life. I still love acting and our currently broke-down entertainment industry, and I have always suspected my best years are ahead of me (exhibit A: Olivia damn Colman, bitches!) There’s a phenomenon that has come with this “stage” I have entered which is feeling a little sorry the men I encounter do not really get to experience a huge transition on how society views them as they round the bend into middle age.

I was told all my life one day, as a woman, I would become “invisible.” Weirdly I feel the most visible to myself and able to notify others of the false narratives they impose on me because of ingrained attitudes they have trouble seeing past. Do the men in my life get to find a whole new empowered self after a certain age? I hope for them, they do.

No matter how one identifies, there is worth in every person’s story. And, hopefully SOON, when it is women who make up the bulk of executive producers, we will be vigilant about “seeing” all people. Including middle aged men.

Even if those dudes are acting alone, with only themselves as their scene partner.