Spent this evening portraying a businesswoman across the big company's virtual conferencing screen. In my Trainer Terry gray pants suit and silk blouse (see blogs from months ago about the feature "In-World War")! I'm always so happy to be able to wear this outfit for a gig. All of us actors tonight wore our corporate best, but, truth be told - in corporate America, almost nobody really dresses anymore. Whatever you feel like wearing, it's cool.
We were a congenial group, performing in three separate or overlapping segments. The crew and director were smooth and quietly efficient. Some of us actually work for the company during the day, some us were sent over by the local casting agencies. As usual on these sets, and especially during a fine meal - yes Craft Services, you serve more than food - we all chatter on about our acting, our agents, the local scene for actors, comparing notes. The same story keeps coming up - agents are not sending many of their actors the work, the actors are getting it themselves. Some actors are still paying their agents commissions for work they, the actors, have found on their own!
Among the best people I met tonight were the guy who finagled his way into "Trauma TV" as a cop - he's AFTRA - and is now a local insider, and Larry, the handsome Asian-American actor with a great head of white hair who has been the poster boy for pharmacies for so long, when he meets a doctor, the doctor swears Larry is a pharmacist. Tonight Larry played a guy trying to sell me on a new phone system over the magic screen....we had a lot of fun. The director had us asking Larry a ton of questions, even though it seems this piece was shot MOS, so some of us asked him about the technicalities and pricing of his phones, while another new actor simply asked, "How was dinner tonight?" Whatever it takes to get a good reaction shot!
That new actor, he's from Mumbai, via a small village, and making the most of his short years in California. We had a chat about his impressions of the U S of A, and what it's like to have a 5-year-old son in school here versus there.
I also met a really fun actress who works full time as a performer and lives in the Bay Area...A trained dancer with big red curly shoulder length hair and projecting facial features over a petite dancer's frame, she has figured out how to live inexpensively and is not worrying so much about her expenses versus earning as an actor anymore, she said. Her mortgage nut in one of the East Bay towns one overlooks for environmental reasons is only $300 a month and she owns the condo. She was memorizing her lines for her next Sam Shepard play, right there, on the set, in a smart and sneaky way. Her corporate look prop? A binder. Inside it? The highlighted play.
I also met an estate lawyer. I told her all lawyers are actors and she didn't dispute the fact.
We were in the main fancy building - the one where visiting dignitaries get to play with the company toys and marvel at the future of the future. As we actors were leaving, several of us got lost...and it would have been fine to get lost in this surreality...except for the fact that our every move was being videotaped by top of the line hidden security cams, and our make-up was beginning to fade at 10 PM. We actors always want to look our best, ya know.
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