Time and Change

The general consensus in this city seems to be that there is never enough time. Time is precious, costly, in high demand. If you asked any New Yorker-"$10,000 or an extra year of life-" I'm willing to bet they would take the year. For many reasons. A year to make the $10,000. A year more to spend with family. A year more to hike that mountain you've always wanted to. A year of old movies with a lover-or the chance to find love and hold it dear. So much can change in a year.
Change-now there's something that no amount of anything can purchase-and as life would have it, change only comes with Time. For the past two years time has seemed to slip through my fingers like sands in the hourglass. There just never seemed to be enough of it. Running from job to shoot to job to rehearsal to shoot back to the third job, so on and so forth.
Anyone that knows me knows that I've always been an ambitious person, I always will be. I work hard to support a career that I'm passionate about. And in this Industry, everyone has an opinion about me. I have the experience of a woman over sixty and the face of an eighteen year old girl. Well, that's great, but it doesn't do much for typecast. I was once told by the casting director for Californication: "You will never play the ditsy teen, or the sweet ingenue. You're too complex for that. If they ever made a re-make of American Beauty, you'd be perfect."
And then I played Medea. Go figure.
In my Industry people like boxes. Boxes are marketable-I get that. My box just happens to be very small-lets face it: Girl Interrupted, The Manson Girls, American Beauty-those roles appear once in  a blue moon. That's fine with me, I understand that. I'm willing to go with my market, and I'm willing to adapt to the changes that come with that-and I have played the young ingenue, recently, in a PSA.
What is upsetting is being lied to, and being leeched off of. I knew the dangers of this when I sought representation, when I agreed to take over administrative work on a four month project that went no where, when I dedicate my time to a company in service to my craft and it's art.
I tried to be wary, cautious, shrewd. It turned out to be extremely difficult. It's in my nature to think the best of people until they've proven otherwise. It's also in my nature to be extremely loyal. Unfortunately,  those two factors don't always serve you well in business-particularly the Entertainment business. I'm currently reading the Biography of Clara Bow, a girl very, very much like me. She did not have a happy beginning, did not have a happy career-though she was loved by everyone she worked with and her audience.
Her manager had an excellent perception of both Time and Change, and milked both Clara and the system for all it was worth. Clara, wanting to believe the best in him, happy to be working, was none the wiser. She had come from nothing-what right did she have to complain?
But she did. She did have that right, everyone around her-those closest to her-discouraged her. She should be happy that she had 'something', they said.
I thank God that with the Time that has passed from her time to mine, things have changed-marginally perhaps, but they have. There are not nearly as many pigs in the Industry as there were back then, but they still exist.  They still exist.
Everyone thinks that once you obtain representation, everything will be easy. Oh, were it that easy. Everything gets much more technical, and you start to learn how valuable your image and self worth are. If you're anything like me, that' a terrifying question to ask. How much are you worth to yourself, really? How much would you sell yourself for? What is it, out of thousands in this city, that you have to offer? When I finally learned that, and began making money from it, I found that most of the people that had had an opinion of me and advice for me-no longer had opinions and advice. They had defenses and excuses, because that's all there had been in the first place. They just knew how to present them well, and I had been very naive.
So what do I do? Do I skulk? Do I give up?
Well I think everyone knows I'm incapable of that.
So I rely on Time-once my competitor, now becoming a dear friend. Because Time has brought me change. Time has also given me that wondrous gift of wisdom. And with wisdom I am finding the strength and courage to seek new representation with a clear head and open eyes.
Time has also slowed for me-I'm seeing sunshine again, instead of a blur of light running from one place to the next. I'm seeing people instead of clients. I'm seeing someone's heart instead of a smiling face. I have love in my life.
Clara Bow ended happily married in Nevada (go figure) as a rancher, to a cowboy that later became Lieutenant Governor of Nevada. She had two boys with him. Will I end as she did? Who knows. At least we have one thing in common-our audience and the people we work with love us. And that, my friends, is priceless.