Well, Hello Betty!

I love that social networking enables me to get in contact with people I've lost contact with over the years. Recently a young woman who is now somewhere around 30, and who I lost contact with just as she was graduating from high school, contacted me to say that she was coming into town from L.A. and wanted to get together. I'll call her Betty since I want to protect my friend's identity because she is an actress and I'd hate for a tabloid to ever pull out my blog and use it against her, plus I love the phrase "Hello, Betty!" (in the archaic sense, not the urban dictionary sense); so there you have a little walk inside my train of thought.


One of my exes is a middle-school teacher and Betty was a student who used to come hang out around our house. My ex seemed to attract kids who would find our address, show up on our doorstep, and become somewhat of a fixture. We didn't mind. We remembered what it was like to be in middle school and think your teachers were cool but your parents were not; plus they were a great source of reliable babysitters for our own small children who always "adopted" them into the family as pseudo-siblings. That, and we were keeping them off the streets since they would sometimes show up very late at night (and we'd quietly call their parents so no one was worried).


The kids we tended to attract were a little on the wild side (at age 15, Betty showed up with a tattoo that her parents had not authorized, but that's another story). We allowed these errant kids to try out whatever personalities they wanted to try out, without the judgement a family can vocalize. After high school, Betty ran off with a boyfriend to another state and I thought I wouldn't hear from her again; I certainly didn't expect to see her again and thought that I hadn't really had much of an impact on her.


She found me on social media through my son, who is now about the age she was when I last saw her. We electronically traded the basic events of our lives and then one day she sent me a message that she was coming to town and wanted to catch up in person, so we made arrangements to meet at a wine bar not too far from my house. It was kind of a trip to think about sitting down to have a couple glasses of wine with Betty. She was still a teenager in my mind, even though the math proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that she is old enough to drink.


Over the years she'd gone from being a gawky, hyperactive, pretty teenager to a poised and beautiful woman. That same kid was still lurking in there, but I was so proud of who she had turned into. She said that after I last saw her, she had gone to college to study theatre and had been living in Los Angeles for almost 10 years finding work acting and print modeling. She dumped the boyfriend (one of those toxic relationships we all seem to get into when we're that age) and finally had one that she thought was a "keeper". She talked about how much she loved her work but also shared her frustration with 'casting couch come-ons' and the craziness of L.A. She explained how agents and managers worked and shared that people said she was good but that she sometimes seemed to hold back in her auditions. She had developed a pretty thick skin, realizing that not being cast isn't usually personal but was fiercely determined to deal with that block. I shared my experience working with actors and some observations that seemed to ring true for her.


As the afternoon was turning to evening, my partner showed up and we continued to talk about actors and acting and an indy project that Betty was really excited about. She didn't want to hold back emotionally and not give the role everything it deserved. She also said that because the role was someone who had been a real person, people on the project were being very secretive about sharing information about the woman, who had died from some pretty destructive behavior.


I said that from my limited experience as a director, I've seen that actors can get sidetracked looking at what a person does rather than who they are, but that the key is to really look at what is going on with a person that can lead her to make the choices she makes. That's what makes a character multi-faceted, that's what will give the actor interesting choices, and that what makes an actor's performance riveting to an audience.


My partner suggested that Betty talk with the people on the project who knew the person she would be portraying, and explain that she was asking to know about the person because she wanted to honor her. I thought that was fantastic and diplomatic advice.


I told Betty that she had to be fearless and to give up worrying that someone would see a really great performance and decide that she, outside of the character, was crazy. She was a little afraid she might lose herself in the emotion of a role because she knew she could be a little high-strung. I said that it's about the training, because we are creatures of habit and routine (did I attend that recent workshop so I could give this advice?) and she's had a lot of training, so I knew that she could do it. She needed to trust her training. I said that she could protect herself and know going in that when the clock stops, it stops, and you shut Pandora's play box and go back to your life. I said it was important she remember that because I knew so many actors who didn't learn it (usually demonstrated when they fell in love with co-stars) to disastrous ends. And I also knew that Meryl Streep gets up in the morning and puts her trousers on like the rest of us and that she can shut that box, and if she can shut that box, so can Betty.


I described some of the ideas I'd been hearing and reading lately around fear and the difference between the fear when something is truly life-threatening and the fear when you've worked yourself up about something, and probably magnified it to be way larger than it really is. We talked about the power of the mind. Betty told me she knew that was true and that she'd quit smoking based on something I'd shared years ago when she was a teenager - how I'd quit smoking in my early twenties by responding to my cravings by telling myself over and over "you're a non-smoker and a non-smoker wouldn't want a cigarette" until I really didn't want another cigarette.

I was surprised. I had forgotten that I'd given her that advice. In fact, I'd forgotten that she had ever smoked, but when I think back on it, I think all of those kids did. I asked "did it work?" and she said "you don't see me smoking do you? Of course it did!" She said that she'd always appreciated my advice, something another of those wayward kids I have kept in contact with has told me on more than one occasion.

Five hours went by like five minutes. She gave me a great big hug and said we'd get together the next time she came to town and insisted my partner and I come to L.A. so she could show us around.

We hear so many things in life. What sticks, what slides off, what sinks in and what surfaces later? None of us can know. That's why it's important to be as honest as we can be and to usher into our lives those ideas and people who help us grow.