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Background

A boy tags along with his stepbrother to a casting session.

To his surprise, he is selected to do background work as an extra on a children’s show.

An assistant director sees something in the boy and begins giving him acting books as he’s never acted before. Later he offers tips on how to stand out from the crowd.

Eventually the boy becomes a regular on other children’s shows, gets a few small movies, is cast in a small but memorable part of a Quentin Tarantino movie, does some theater in Los Angeles before begin chosen to act opposite Denzel Washington in a Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh.…


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Grace

Several months ago, I was listening to Marc Maron interview Glenn Close for his podcast. It was fascinating on many levels — for example, who knew that the actress was raised in a religious cult? 

One story, in particular, has stuck with me. As a young address, Close was an understudy looking to make her Broadway debut. One particular Saturday, the director, Hal Prince, told her that he was thinking of letting the leading lady go and was going to make his decision after the matinee. …


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Wisdom from William Shakespeare and Marc Maron

The irony of self-knowledge is that to gain it, you need to look outside of yourself. Recently I noticed that tucked inside the word acknowledgement are three smaller words – a + knowledge + me.

Yet science shows that we are wired not to see the broader context of our lives. While confirmed by modern research the sentiment goes back at least to the days of Shakespeare – who wrote in Julius Caesar:

Lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.…


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