I WANT TO BE AN ACTOR!

So you want to be an actor! More than a dozen years in my youth, memorizing monologues, standing alone on a stage in the Spotlight! and saying lines to air, with expression. Keeping my fingers crossed that I look the right age, am the right height, have the right voice. Hoping my schedule will permit availability. You wonder if all of it is worth it as you waited (in those days) for the phone call that said "you're in" or the letter -- yes the letter -- thanking you for auditioning and, yes, you will be kept in a file.

The roar of the crowd, the applause, the silence when you pull a dramatic note out of the air and it works -- those are some of the artistic realities that keep a performer going day-in and day-out as they dance, prance, laugh, cry and stand on a stage.

When I started peforming as a high school kid in the community theatre world of Twin Cities sixties theatre, there was little in the way of film. We had videotape and television, but the few "future" film students were at Marshall University High School, the backrooms of the University of Minnesota Fine Arts Building, or shooting Super-8 at Film in the Cities with hopes that their efforts warranted being blown up to 16mm.

So theater, in Minnesota, was the actors medium. It thrived. Experiemental, guerilla, improv, lab productions, readings, the latest from Joe Papp in New York, musical dinner theatre, outdoor Shakespeare, Renaissance bits-and-pieces, street antics, plus the dream of the spotlight of bigtime Guthrie glory.

You wanted to act, you did it on stage, on street corners, in parks, on makeshift stages, in converted churches,

All the world is a stage and all the people merely players!