As a relative latecomer to the business, I rationalized that I didn’t have time to waste getting started professionally, but as the years pile on, it would have been fine.  (Yes, youth is wasted on the young.)  Even as it turns out that I’m doing better than most who do have degrees, it doesn’t change the basic idea here.

Well, the past is gone, and there’s little I can do.  But we should all always be studying.  The classroom has reawakened my instrument.  Whether any of this has transformed my skills is not for me to say, but I can attest to a booming confidence, and an eagerness to keep learning that had gone missing.  It has also left me a bit burnt out from trying to do too much, but one step at a time… I’ll find the balance.

The industry in New York and Los Angeles offers no shortage of places to study.  A little research will reveal some good places to get back to the ABC’s of the craft.  Do it.

Trust me on this one.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

The other day I was speaking with a well-known actor/writer/director I know.  He told me he’d been fired from his latest gig and that he, too, experienced a similar unceremonious handling of the affair.  He went to rehearsal, went back to his hotel, and found a message waiting for him.  Don’t come back.  Perhaps this is the way it’s done.  For an industry that craves pageantry, it’s a little discordant, but if we start in with the contradictions we’ll be here all day…

The impulse upon hearing you’ve been dumped, of course, is to believe that you somehow failed.  If you had done something differently, or had cozied up to the right people, maybe the axe would have been spared.  But there’s no explaining whimsy, and unless you’ve done something egregious, there is little logic at play.  Somebody, somehow, for whatever reason, didn’t think things were going well and decided to make a change, and you seemed like the best option.

I would like to see a study as to whether things improve after these firings.  It’s unquantifiable, I know, but still, somebody might be able to take an objective eye to the situation.  My guess is it’s a case of the more things change… But what do I know?

I’ll keep checking my messages.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

Granted, I work in film and television, where you can whisper your way through any performance, and I’m rarely called upon to make the guy at the end of the block hear me, but still… fundamentals are fundamentals, and I felt a fool.  So, months later, I have taken it upon myself to study voice.

And it is a marvelous experience.

No, I have not simply fallen in love with my mellifluous tones, but rather I’ve discovered something remarkable, and shockingly basic: there’s a whole new world for me to use in performance.  It’s as if I suddenly turned around and realized that the room I’m standing in is twice as big as I’d thought.  And very well decorated.

Who knew?  Actually, many people.  And many of them had told me this very thing for years.  Train your voice, and you will become a better actor.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I replied.  A good haircut and some teeth whitening trays are what’s really needed.  Just look around.

Well, that may be true for some, and true for a part of this industry, but it’s not where I want to live.  Or how I want to live.  I want a voice that can hit the back of the biggest halls, night after night.  Even if I never have to speak above a hush.

The journey continues.  For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

This week I was reminded of something I’d long thought of as silly when it comes to classes, and I couldn’t help but think of it as another chance to put my feelings about interpretive choice to the test.  Acting studios keep a mishmash of props around.  They’re typically in closets, or hidden behind a tattered curtain in the back of the room.  And actors presenting scenes haul them out to set the stage for their work.  A bench here, a ratty chair there, a wobbly desk over there, maybe some well-worn fake flowers beside a rotary phone and voila! you’ve got what is meant to be a country estate in the south of France.  Or a Brooklyn apartment circa 1962.  It’s all the same, really, and it always looks like a pawn shop.

I have always preferred not to dress my set in class.  Two chairs and a table is fine by me.  Ideally, it’s about the work being done by the performers, not whether they managed to use every last piece of wood found in a nearby alleyway.  If a teacher is critiquing your lack of set design, I would suggest moving on.  Anyway, I digress…

Now, the “full monty” set strikes could be one of two things.  It’s either very sad and pathetic – how can these poor, desperate actors not realize how absurd they look amongst GoodWill rejects – or it’s a testament to incredible powers of imagination – how amazing is it that these actors can believe that this is a real place, and get us to do the same.

I’m still mulling this one over.  I’ll get back to you in a couple of weeks after I present my first scene in more years than I care to count.  Besides, if you believe Shakespeare’s claim that “all the world’s a stage,” is any room, with its collection of things, really all that different?  I spent years with a study that looked increasingly like a garage sale… perhaps we are “merely players.”

But are we not also our own authors?  I see I still have much to learn…

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

Today I went back to class for the first time in a quite a while.  In a stinging twist of irony it was held in the same room where I first studied acting.  The musty scent of old furniture and well-worn set pieces filled the air, and tears came to my eyes.  I was transported back in time, filled with remembrances of a clueless young man who nevertheless knew that he wanted to inhabit this strange world of props and cues and was willing to scrape nickels together in order to do so.

I settled into my chair, and I was struck with a sudden realization.  I spent the better part of the last decade in Los Angeles.  When I arrived on the west coast, I had the great speeches of Eugene O’Neill memorized.  By the time I left, I thought TMZ was worthy of attention.  What had happened over time was obvious.  I had gone from matters of the inside to matters of the outside, and now, back in a basement in the West Village these many years later, I was returning to the inside.

Any success I’ve had has always come from concerning myself with the inside.  If the outside happened to follow, it was unintentional.  Perhaps for others it works the other way around.  But not for me, and I have to honor that.

And so the journey continues on apace.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for lunch, whatever that may mean.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

I barely looked up, thinking it was another of so many “shriekers,” those women so eager for attention that they feel incumbent to pierce the eardrums of all within a two block radius.  But my eye did catch a blur of a man racing for the door, and two others in pursuit.  In a flash, a tangle of bodies came to a crash at the doors.  Coffee went flying everywhere, and what had happened was now plain to see.  The first man had snatched a woman’s purse, and two good citizens went after him.

They wrestled the would-be thief to the ground as a security team came over.  Eventually the police even showed up, en masse, as they are wont to do.  I wasn’t able to see the rest of this show as I had by now made my way upstairs to be tortured by avant-garde drivel, but I kept thinking about the incident in the lobby.  (Anything to distract from what was happening on stage…)

One moment in particular jumped out at me.  A man to my left had turned to his friend, after the robber had been subdued, and said, “I saw it happening, but I thought, ‘I’m not touching that.’”

I hadn’t “touched it” either.  I was blocked by a glass partition which would have required me to leap over, action-hero style, and pray for a soft landing, and as the whole thing unfolded in seconds, there was no time to go around.  But I wondered if I would have “touched it” had there been an opportunity.

I’d like to think the answer is yes, but I can’t say for certain.  The two men who tackled the robber had long before made their decision about what they would do.  They had decided that even as unhappiness creeps into the happiest of places, they would fight to preserve the sanctuary.  I’ll never know what I would have done, but I’d like to think I can at least take something from the lesson.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.