Throwing Bones

My first time writing here. Scott set this up for me. Thank you, Scott.

Heath Ledger was found dead in his apartment today. It is terrible. He was so fantastic to watch. He should have been around for many more years.

We went to Happy Days at BAM (http://bam.org) tonight. Fiona Shaw is so incredibly intelligent and inventive and just… gets it. Amazing. We stuck around afterwards and saw her for a moment - our friend Josh works at BAM and took us backstage. I took a class with her at BADA in 1999. On Beckett, actually. I shook her hand and mentioned the class. She asked if I was still acting. I said I was “fighting the battle”. Silly thing to say. She said “New York is so unstructured. And there are so many actors.” I agreed. She asked me if I thought there were too many, and I said I didn’t mind that there were so many actors, just that so many of them weren’t working. That’s the demoralizing part. And she said, looking at me with her searching, intelligent eyes, “Well, keep at it. You have to be doing it, you know? You have to be acting.” And I thought, yes, you do have to be acting. Because if you’re not acting, you’re not acting. And that seems a useless thing to say, and stupidly obvious, but it is the absolute truth. And I haven’t been, really, acting. I’ve done this and that. Here and there. But you have to be doing it, all the time, to be an actor, don’t you. And that’s the part I’m going to fix. I’m going to be an actor. You can either be good at it and act, or be bad, and go do something else. But you can’t (as Scott said) sit in your apartment being an awesome actor. Then you’re not an actor.

I got the following from a man I’ve worked for in New York on and off since I arrived:

The graduate with a science degree asks, “Why does it work?”
The graduate with an engineering degree asks, “How does it work?”
The graduate with an accounting degree asks, “How much will it cost?”
The graduate with an arts degree asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

Which is funny, because I’ve worked for him in a restaurant, serving fries. I think he honestly wanted to make me laugh. And maybe, think about my life. Or something. And I have a hunch he thought I might realize the futility of my artistic hopes. But it just depressed me a little, and then I was mad, and now I’m trying to form a plan to prove him wrong. I won’t be asking anyone if they want fries with anything.