Vacation, all I ever wanted

I was on vacation last week, and it was great.  I barely touched my computer - in fact, I wouldn't have done so except nothing ever really stops when you're on vacation, and people keep sending you audition info and sides and asking you for work things, even when you just want to go lie down on the beach and stop thinking.

This week has been a rough re-entry.  Y'all.  Sometimes, even though I know it would drive me completely crazy to actually do this, I want to move home to the South.  It's home.  Racism and close-mindedness and poverty and all, it's still home, and it has a grandeur and a warmth and a rightness that's hard to deny.  It's just...I would go nuts.  What would I do, first of all, and how would I keep from going completely insane?

For a long time, I thought there was always the secret back door of academia.  That's the place to be, where people think for a living.  But as an artist, my recent experience with academia trying to make art was awkward and disappointing.  It's art, but it's art without purpose, it's art for the sake of seeing how to make art, and that's just not enough for me.  For me, art of any kind needs a use, whether it be usable by two people or millions.  The better art is usable by more, I believe, though I'm still road-testing that theory.

I think equally disappointing is the Hollywood version of "art" which gets quotes because I think much of that art is really commerce masquerading as art.  A lot of big splashy musicals aren't really "art" - they're entertainment, without question, but it's like consuming empty calories: it will fill you up but it won't give you any nutrients.

Now, to be fair, there is plenty of great art in South Carolina.  Some of it is even theatrical.  But theatre is on a very small scale, and not the kind of scale you can make a living on even if you've got great luck and are working a lot.  There just isn't enough work out there to sustain a working actor.  Mathematically, I mean, not philosophically.

So, if I were to move back to the South, I'm pretty sure I would be giving up on everything I love.  I might be able to work, but only as a hobby.  If there's one thing keeping me going this week after a great vacation, it's that I have two awesome auditions coming up.  And had a voiceover and print booking today, so I've even earned money in my chosen profession this week.  Since I'm teaching theatre this week, one can even make the argument that all the money I have earned this week is in my chosen profession.

Still, being home makes me wish there were a city in the South - a proper city, with theatres and film studios and voice-over production houses. Until that happens, I guess I'm relegated to visiting when I can.

Or I suppose someday I might get famous enough to live wherever I want and still get the work I want.

HAHAHAHAHA....yeah, maybe that'll happen.