Job v. Craft, This Artists' Advice to Her Young Daughter

On set as happy hiking family.

Yesterday was somewhat momentous.  It was the first time that you, Jeff and I all worked together on a shoot. It was the very first time either of you had actually worked on a set at all.  No one would ever have known this.  YOu are only four and took direction beautifully and repeatedly, and Jeff acted just like a pro even though he had no idea what it meant when he was directed to "brush the camera".  Fortunately, he's a good guesser.  We will be paid. Awesome. Ability to pay the bills is important and awesome, but most any vocation could accomplish this (and, frankly, with a lot more predictability and regularity).

So why do I spend the time/effort/money/heart it takes to be a quasi-working-actress when I know that going back to a "real" job would certainly mean a bigger house, better schools and newer cars? Is it the love of repeatedly walking and pointing on cue that keeps me here?  Hell to the no.  I'm grateful for the commercial work I've had this year.  I need income and industry needs business.  That's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about "why art?".  It's so much easier to have a job rather than a craft. Why bother?

Let me show you something. These are the real comments. These are not made-up people. 
These are real comments that were posted on-line after an article on domestic abuse.  Apparently, the women mistakenly thought they had found an advice forum where their questions would be answered.  I found them when I googled "restraining order, domestic violence, abuse" in preparation for a role I'll be playing tomorrow in a film short.  Just look at them.

"please. i really need help. i left with my daughter and i am pregnant with our second child. my husband didn't start in until his friend moved in with us. his friend and him constantly criticized me saying i was a whore and bad mother. now my husband is constantly harassing me and my family. he sent me some sweet e-mails telling me he wants me to come back home, but he has also sent some nasty e-mails trying to put guilt on me again. i really do love him and miss him, but i don't know if i should really go back or not. his brother is a deputy sheriff and had a doctor friend search my medical records on a daily basis. so now they know where i am. what do i do? i just want things to be the way they were before, when we were happy."

"Oh, I have been with the same man for 20 years. I have left and went to an Battered Shelter for Women. I stayed away for 2 months then we got back together after his mom died. We eventually moved to Chicago and gott married, but now that I have been diagnosised with lupus and decided to come back home it has been trouble. He has not hit me, but every Friday since one of his mistress died he drinks and drinks and drinks and say very mean and hurtful things. I am tired and I don't know how to leave because he will kill me or hurt me and my family. The children say he seems like he is bipolar but I can't help him. I really feel like handling things in a BAD WAY!!!!!!"

"I'm n a similar situation, I got to leave by the end of the mnth and I'm just nervous because I never been saying on my own at all ."

"I cant get out like these people as i sold my own home to go with him....im stuck.....depressed more after cancer scares and family illnesess. I was an Independant woman, full of life, now i have none and i dont even care now if i wake each day."

This is why the struggle to make a living at the craft of acting is worth it.  There is almost no more powerful medium than film or television. These women don't have a voice.  But when I am working, I do. If I am brave enough to let their story become my own for just a few days, and to fan away the concealing smoke of my own affluence/importance/appropriateness/normalcy so that anyone willing to look can peer inside my soul, then I have used my craft to its highest calling.  Live the story so transparently that other people see right through you to live it themselves. Stir somebody up.

This was actually a choice I made about 4 years ago, when you were born.  I had already been working in non-profit after quitting radio because I wanted to do something that mattered, not something that bought houses in Kawai for the CEO.  I was at a fork in the road and needed to make my next vocational move.  It came down to getting the certifications it would take to become a social worker or returning to the dormant desire to act professionally.  And, let's face it, that last one just sounds ridiculous when you're 37 and living in South Carolina.  Jeff left it to me, but thought I should go with what I loved most and would be happiest doing.  God left it to me, but repeatedly pointed out that, while the choice for social worker would be noble, if I was searching for the most noble option, the choice for actress is the more powerful platform to make the same point and less likely to suffer burnout after 5 years. Even though it sounded stupid, I chose acting.  I have not regretted it once.
Right now it's all small scale, but I feel a great responsibility to tell the stories God wants told, and to tell them well.  There are way too many "christian film" people out there turning out mediocre work that's mainly just judgemental rhetoric anyway. That's not what God wants to say to people. If you want to know what God says to the women who wrote the comments above, look up Isaiah 61.  And that's what He wants us to say. You don't have to say it outright.  You just have to be truthful in everything you do.  When you perform, open up all of who you are and the God in you will come out without you ever having to say a thing. He actually knows the women who made these comments and he knows the ones just like them who will watch my performance.   That's amazing to me.  My only job is to practice the craft of acting as impeccably and truthfully as I possibly can and to be a conduit for whatever needs to flow through.   How tragic that, out of laziness, I might show up under-prepared or distracted and miss the power of this opportunity.  Think about the recent films "Precious" and "The Blind Side".  Stories told, people moved, lives changed.  I want to be on my game at all times because I owe it to these real women to tell their stories right and make somebody listen. 

Just tell the story God gives you, Eden.  Use your open doors for what is most important. Each of us is given special gifts and interests.  Some do not make much sense to other people.  Who cares?   Only God knows your potential.  Don't let people who base decisions on fear and call it "responsibility" lead you to an unfulfilling life that was never part of your design.  Be brave.  Expend the effort it takes to blaze the trail you know is yours.

How I Got My Flip-Flop Back

Today, on a whim, the dog and I packed up and went to a beautiful section of beach that looks just like a set from Survivor...palm trees, brush, alligator tracks. You heard me.  Welcome to South Carolina, where alligators have been sighted swimming the beaches mere yards from toddlers splashing in their swimmies.

I'm happy to say that Sailor and I did not find an alligator, but we did find some funny trash: two tallboy Budweiser cans and a single flip-flop.  I took several photos of some drunk person's litter to go along with the ones of the lighthouse.  My guess was that some guy wandered down to this isolated beach area to chill out after work and have a cocktail (or tallboy, as the case may be).  Finding the tallboys to be more potent than he realized (having failed to consider his slight build and infrequent drinking), he finds himself buzzy and in bad need of a Port-o-Let.  There is none. He wanders close to the nearby brush to shake the dew (you know). Meanwhile, the sun is setting.  Dusk.  Feeding time.  --This is where you should start feeling that anxious "Paranormal" vibe. --  Already beginning to reconsider his choice of untamed and isolated locations, he hears a rustle and runs to collect his belongings and get a start on the half-mile hike back to the car.  After all, the path is paved, but tall, heavy brush lines both sides and there is no electric light at all.   He quickly chugs the last of the tallboy, trips on a stray palm frond, loses a flip-flop, gropes around for the flip-flop briefly before abandoning it as he flees to safety.  Beer-buzzed, half shoeless, eaten up with mosquito bites, blind and jumping at every rustle from the brush, it's a long and annoying trot to the car.  This scenario amused me, so I took a photo.

After much picture-taking of lighthouses and dead wood, I took another unrelated photo.  Only after seeing it through the viewfinder did I realize how much these three palm trees resembled the three crosses you usually see displayed in churches at Easter. When I stood back, I noticed that these three palms were standing on a mountain of brush just above the littered cans and lost flip-flop. How metaphorical.

When I hear Jesus say, "come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest" or the Statue of Liberty's call to the "huddled masses",  I picture hard-working, dark-wool-wearing families who eat lots of potatoes and are unfortunately infringed upon through no fault of their own.  There's a sense of nobility and struggle, an innocence about these downtrodden victims.  Yes.  Jesus calls them. He also calls the stupid and the stubborn, like me.

Our crime doesn't have to be outrageous and we don't have to be innocent.    He could have said, "come to me, ye who have littered a pristine beach with empty beer cans and lost your stupid shoe. You irresponsible and shoeless idiot, I have your flip-flop." That was the gist of what I heard when he called me.  I haven't done anything dramatic like endure incest or kill a family by careening my car into a mini-van. I've made pretty average mistakes that pile up into mountains of big old hot messes. Sometimes I just get sick of myself.  I love this song by the amazing Matthew Sweet, "I'm sick of myself when I look at you, something that's beautiful and true; in a world that's ugly and a lie, it's hard to even want to try...".  Sick of myself. Yes.  I was. Sick of everyone else, too. Sometimes I still am.  The good news is that now I know where my do-over is coming from. Jesus climbed up my hot mess mountain, got the crap beaten out of him, died a torturous death and came back from the dead three days later bringing my freedom back like a fireman bringing a baby out of a burning building. that's why they call them "baby Christians" and say "be born again".  It's all new, a complete do-over.   I got my stupid flip-flop back.  Everything I lost, he gave it back.

Leslie V.

p.s.  Faith is the most important facet of my life, so it's fitting that the first blog would explain exactly that, but this won't be a blog about only that.

Welcome to the World, Little Blog

Hello.

So this is the beginning of my blogging.  The first one ever.  I feel like I should take a photo of me here writing the very first little baby blog.  Will it grow up to throw plush toys at me and ask if it can have a new mommy?  Or will it whisper sweetly that I am, indeed, the smartest, prettiest mommy in my office/guest room?  Or will it give me a place to put all those random observations without posting 12 to 14 statuses on Facebook per day? Yes, it will...to at least one of those.   So here's to the first!

I can't promise what you're going to get here except for a little bit of the real me on a daily basis.  I've been meaning to keep little letters to my daughter so that someday she'll know that I was a vibrant, thinking, messy, funny, dreaming, calorie-counting person beyond the snack fetcher and occasional emotional melt-downer with whom she is accustomed.  So we're going to keep to my usual quirky observations about the world around me.  Oh, and when I began the creation of this I was delighted to find that I can provide links from items I might mention to Amazon and if you then click and buy, I get commission.  Woot!  So I would be stupid not to link occasionally, so if you want to click, do so, but don't think I'm trying to sell you. If nothing else, you'll find my words to be genuine.

Okay, so I had some interesting thoughts about flip-flops at the beach today....first blog coming up.

Leslie V.