I live in a place where tourists stop every day. Just this morning, after taking Keith to the airport before the sun came up, I decided to travel back along the Lake Hollywood route, which allows me to get as close as vehicularly possible to the Hollywood sign. As I rounded the curve and came up underneath the H, glowing against the faint light of the oddly bright crescent moon, I thought, “I could just park here and watch this all day long.”
Later in the morning, I ran errands that, during the weekend I’d bitched about not completing on Friday. As I waited at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine for the light to change, watching pedestrians stopping to photograph stars on the Walk of Fame beneath them, I thought, “I could just park here and watch this all day long.”
This afternoon, I received a call from a casting director, asking me to come to his class at UCLA next week and speak to the students, talk with him about the class, make some plans for structuring my own curriculum, and such. I then received an email from another casting director, thanking me for helping her with a particular project she’s working on. Then I watched Bravo’s “The It Factor” and saw actors going into casting sessions with casting directors I’ve interviewed. I thought, “I like this life. What I do is cool.”
I got an email from an actress who wanted to thank me for the advice I’d given her that has now led to her increased confidence in her audition situations. I told her that she’s the one who has to go do the hard work. All I have are ideas and theories and experiences that worked for me. I can share those. And I can wish her well. The rest is up to her.
What’s my point?
Well, it’s really easy to forget the love of the day-to-day sometimes. I hear that I’m lucky to be able to do what I love for a living. I really don’t think luck has anything to do with it. I busted my ass to get to live the way I do, and it’s been a series of hard choices that have cost me some close relationships in the process. And, in the big scheme of things, I don’t really mind.
Even when my day is composed of nothing “Hollywood” (when I go for a walk in my neighborhood and forget to look up at the sign), I still manage to find a patch of clover or some pretty little flower that thinks it’s Spring, and I stop, and think, “I could just park here and watch this all day long.”
And not take any of it for granted.