A couple of weeks ago, I joined some actor friends for a birthday celebration at a wine bar. It’s the kind of wine bar I had read about, but not yet visited, and I was very excited when we arrived and discovered this was that cool place where the waitress would trade our credit card for a swipe card and a glass, then give us full access to the dozens of wines hooked up to “pour meters.” Picture it: bottles all lined up and ready to sample. Price per pour posted above each bottle. Just pop in your little swipe card, place your glass under the nozzle of the wine you’d like to try, hit the button, and there you have it! Wine you probably couldn’t afford to buy by the glass, right there in a generous sip for you to sample. Awesome.

Of course, I’m pretty simple, as wine goes. I know what I like and I like it a lot. So as soon as I tasted the one white and one red I liked best, I kept going back to those, rather than sampling more. I know. Boring. Totally not in keeping with the spirit of the place. It’s all about sampling and trying out new flavors, determining what’s the best fit for your palate and getting educated about tastes you might otherwise never experience. Ah well… I like what I like: a nice, buttery Chardonnay and a rich, smoky Zinfandel.

Um… so what does this have to do with acting? Ah! Quite a bit, actually. I was chatting with my actor friends about various bits of advice they’d been given at assorted workshops and in classes and at networking functions over the years. Actors had been hearing things like, “You’ll never get cast on that show. You’re not the right type for it,” or, “You should always wear jeans and a T-shirt. And probably flats, since you’re so tall,” or, “Always list directors in the third column of your resumé, never production companies.” And I found myself bristling at the absolutes. The rules. The musts. The “this is the way it is” of it all.

So, in “this is the way it is” fashion, I declared, “Look, anytime someone starts talking about rules and absolutes in this business, add, ‘in my opinion’ to the end of the rule and take away what works, leave behind what doesn’t.” (And then I said, “Yes, I just said that as an absolute. As a rule. I appreciate the irony.”) On Tuesday, I joined fellow casting directors, managers, and agents on a panel for Harvard and UC Irvine MFAs, in a “here’s what to expect if you move to LA after graduation” event I’ve been a part of for five years now. One of the panelists brilliantly said — about advice and absolutes and rules — “Eat the fish, spit out the bones.” Love it. The analogy I kept coming up with was, “Shower in the words. Don’t bathe in them.” The image of just letting what someone says wash over you vs. sitting and stewing in those “truths” for an hour worked for me.

But what worked even better was what came up when I was brainstorming this week’s column with an actor friend over lunch. We talked about the shower vs. bath analogy. We talked about the fish and the bones. She suggested maybe advice is like wine and some is made up from a single type of grape while others are blends. And then it hit me! The wine bar. Advice is in each of those bottles — dozens of them all lined up and ready for you to sample. You get a swipe card and a glass and it’s up to you which nozzle you visit. If you find advice you like hearing, stuff that rings true for you, information that — when you test it out in the real world — actually works, that’s a good bottle for you.

But I don’t encourage anyone to drink only from one bottle. This is that trap of being in any one class for too many years, not exploring what other coaches could contribute to your craft. It’s the staying with an agent or manager years after you both know you’ve outgrown the firm, because the comfort of the “known” is so sweet. It’s using the same headshot for a decade because, “Well, it works!” Sure. Lots of things will “work” without being the optimal choice. Two Buck Chuck is a fine wine. It’ll “work.” Ferrari-Carano does it better. Much better. Perhaps some other bit of advice is worth sampling, now and then.

While we all have our favorites, isn’t there something fun about being in a restaurant, asking for your favorite, being told they don’t have that, but that such-and-such vineyard makes a very similar wine if you’d like to try it out, and then finding that it’s excellent and a great option to remember for next time? Whenever you hear the wonderful advice of a single person — especially when it’s spoken as if Hollywood Law — remember that there is no Hollywood Law. If there were, believe me, someone — ahem — would’ve written that book, would’ve sold a bazillion copies, and would be writing this week’s column from her private island.

Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!

Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/001016.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.