Worry

Dismal winter...

Thursday, February 10, 2005

I can't believe how much time has passed since I last posted here. So much has happened...

Mom ended up having two surgeries on her hip and pelvis... they put in a steel prosthetic pelvis piece to try and stabilize the hip joint, but the doctor didn't properly reinforce Mom's fragile pelvic bone. The screws they used to fix it in place didn't hold and Mom's pelvis started cracking under the prosthetic and the screws started working their way out. So they had to go BACK in there and use bone cement to try and build up her pelvis and re-attach the prosthetic. Her bones are so very brittle and fragile, and the doctor KNEW that. I guess he was under the impression that my mother would be content sitting for the rest of her life and not doing anything, like walk or take a shower... We're still wondering why he didn't do it right the first time. Or, for that matter, CALL HER BACK when she left a message in October of 2003 to tell him she was in terrible pain and she wanted him to take a look at it.

She spent 9-1/2 weeks in a dismal nursing facility. The food was awful, and they messed up her medication and it casued her to have seizures. They lost her clothing. She lost a lot of weight and went through some terrible depression; especially since her eyesight has deteriorated so badly since the blood vessel in her eye broke.

She had a laser treatment prior to the surgeries which was designed to seal the faulty blood vessel. Apparently, it did do that, and for a while it seemed as though the blood cloud in her eye was partially vaporized and it started to dissipate somewhat. But since then, her sight has migrated to a tiny sliver on the inside corner of her right eye and the rest of her sight is just a dark blob. Her left eye has been totally blind for several years. She can get around her house well enough, but she cannot read, watch TV, sign a check... she will probably never drive again, but she hasn't accepted that yet. She is still hoping that her sight will improve further, but that might not happen. It breaks my heart to hear her cling to hope when she very well may be disappointed.

I ended up going back & forth from LA to Colorado five times to help her while she was recuperating from her first surgery at home, and then help keep her spirits up and take care of her house and stuff while she was in the nursing home. My brother goes back & forth from his house two or three times a month. It's a 4-hour drive for him, but he's glad he can be there. I can't even begin to describe how grateful I am that he's there.

I haven't had time to really do or think about anything else for a while. I go to work and go home. The voiceover project was finally finished in September, and it seems to be a success... buzz is picking up about it, at least.

I've been doing some small theatre projects around town, and I managed to get a couple of commercial voiceovers while all of this was going on. One happened while I was with Mom and I had to find a recording facility in Colorado on very short notice. It ended up being a nice little job and I was paid before I even got back to LA.

Now I'm kind of in limbo, waiting to see if Mom will need anything. I call her every day just to see how she is. She sounds pretty good, although I'm worried because she's not getting out. Any number of her friends would be so happy to pick her up and take her to lunch or just visit, but she's so very self-conscious about her sight and her limitations I just wish she would realize that they don't care about any of that. They just want to see her. She's going to fade away if she doesn't resume at least a little of her social activities. She was a very vibrant and active person right up until her hip gave out, and to suddenly go into hiding like this is really making her depressed. Her mind doesnt seem as sharp as it used to be. It makes me worry.

Say a prayer for her, will you? If you believe in such things? If not, just send positive energy, okay?

Family Business

It's been a long time since I've posted... I've been extraordinarily busy with my day job and the voiceover sessions at night. Went to Vegas with my husband at the first of August for a business event of his. It was okay - nothing to write home about.

Today is my brother's 49th birthday. I have no idea what to get for him -- what do you get the guy that has nothing? He lives very simply (not by choice -- more by necessity). Maybe I'll get him a gift certificate to Trader Joe's. He can always use food.

The thing that's turned my world upside down, though, is Mom. She 's having some awful health issues, and I'm worried sick. About 15 years ago, she had a second hip replacement surgery on her right side. They put in a Titanium and Teflon ball joint attached to the long bone in her leg. It was a Godsend at the time and fixed what was a very painful issue.

Since then, she was diagnosed with AMD (Age-related Macular Degeneration - http://www.amd.org/). She went through several years of painful surgeries and needle-related treatments on the affected eye, but in the end, she completely lost her left eye to the disease.

Well, on August 8th, two things happened: The first was that her Titanium hip joint broke through the pelvic socket bone. They had not replaced that and she had been walking and shoveling the driveway and gardening on that hip for the past 15 years, and all the while, the metal ball joint was wearing away at the socket. She has an unbelievably high threshold of pain, and she occasionally complained about soreness, but the doctors said that it had to have been agonizing for at least the past five years.

The second thing that happened was a result of the first... The pain from that event caused a major spike in her blood pressure, which in turn caused a blood vessel to burst behind the retina of her remaining eye. She woke up the next morning unable to walk, and unable to see.

Her eye had filled with blood, and she said all she could see was a bright red cloud. It has since turned into a large black cloud that covers the central part of her vision. All she can see is some slivers of color and movement on the outside corners of her eye. Her eye doctor said it's AMD, and there is some hope because they have developed new treatments that didn't exist several years ago when they were treating the first eye.

However, she has to go in and have the pelvic socket fixed. The doctors have manufactured a replacement hip socket and will have to cut away about a third of her pelvis and replace it with this prosthetic joint, using a cement made from bone powder to attach it to the remaining bone.

This surgery was scheduled for August 31st, but her eye doctor said that cannot happen. She would be receiving blood thinners during and after the surgery to help avoid clots, but those same blood thinners could completely destroy the already weakened blood vessels in her eye. So they want to do a new laser therapy treatment on her eye FIRST, before she goes in for the hip surgery.

In the meantime, she is battling deep depression, serious pain, and fear. She has been living on her own since my father passed away, and I think that it's been her ability to be independent that has kept her lively and happy. If she loses both her eyesight and her ability to walk at the same time, I don't think she'll be able to make it very far after that. She's been putting on a brave face, but I can hear the strain in her voice.

So I leave this Saturday to go be with her. I don't know how long I will be there, but I will stay with her as long as it takes. My husband will be remaining in LA to keep the home fires burning, and I have arranged with my day job to be able to access the computer system and other business tools in case I need to stay with Mom for several months.

What this will do to my voiceover career, I have no idea. But that isn't a concern right now. Right now, all I care about is Mom.

Out of the frying pan...

... into the Casting Office

So I'm doing it. I'm going to auditions and submitting things through Actors Access. I'm networking and going to organized schmooze events and all of that. I'm committed. I attend workshops and table reads to help me learn more about acting techniques. I pore over countless scripts and books of monologues and poetry, absorb Chekhov and Strindberg, practice regional dialects in the car on my way to and from my Blasted Day Job. Yesterday I auditioned for a role in a play that required an RP English accent.

And it felt good.

But I don't want to be one of 'those' actors that simply sends out the obligatory headshot & resume mailings into the Casting Director ether. I'd much rather make friends with various casting professionals and learn something useful from them about what they do and their processes. I've worked in the film industry for 16 years -- behind the scenes -- from a Production Manager to a PA and just about everything in between but I never got any exposure to the casting people. They were always in an undisclosed office space that was listed on the call sheet but nobody ever went there. I assume the writer's offices were next door, because nobody ever saw them, either.

I'm fascinated by how CD's come up with some of their more creative casting choices. I always wonder how they manage to find those unexpected nuggets of gold in a character actor that nobody's ever seen before (go see "The Terminal" -- the character of "Gupta Rajan" played by a little-known 84-year-old actor from India named Kumar Pallana is one of those rare nuggets); Or how they just KNOW to cast someone that seems at first glance to be completely out of place in a role that ends up glowing because the actor added something indefinable to the role that no other actor would have thought of. How do they do that? How do they know? Is it instinct, research... or just luck?

And as a long-time community theater actor, I am discovering for the first time about the Hollywood "system." I'm learning about the do's and don'ts of submitting, about the scams that get an actor to pay a $10 'class fee' to meet a casting professional... I'm trying to find a good showcase workshop in an ocean full of mediocre or truly bad ones, and trying to meet people in this unfamiliar end of the Hollywood community.

There are a lot of closed doors, and I don't want to become one of 'those' actors that over-mail, or become such a pain in the butt that nobody wants to hire them. But then again, I don't want to be so polite as to fall under the casting radar. My husband says I'm not pushy enough, but there has to be a way to get into the loop without losing my inherent sense of common courtesy and decorum.

If it were easy... I know, I know.

This morning I contacted AFTRA. I want to be listed in the Academy Players Directory, but an actor has to be union to get in there. I thought (apparently erroneously) that SAG and AFTRA were one and the same. The rules, no more "vouchers" (now it's a "point system") and the whole gauntlet that an actor has to run through in order to achieve SAG status confused me. "They" say you have to be a union actor. "They" don't tell you that it takes an act of God to get there. It's harder than ever. However, AFTRA has a different set of rules and entry requirements. But so far, I haven't been able to find anyone that really can tell me what's going on. I think everyone's confused.

"They" also say you need an agent. Okay, how does THAT work? Another obligatory mass-mailing of photos and resumes? And it's not as if agents don't already get several hundred of those a week. How does an actor keep from simply getting lost in the piles? How do you know an agent's a good one or a bad one? What kind of agent should I get? Should I have more than one? WHY do you need an agent?

I've been reading "Casting Q's" by Bonnie Gillespie, and I am learning about the various CD's likes and dislikes, but mostly I am learning that every casting person is very different. There is no one right or wrong way. What's right to one might completely put another off.

It's all quite overwhelming. But I am not one to give up because something is difficult. I really WANT this. I'm not looking to get famous. I simply want to be able to act full-time.

Life is far too short to work at something you can only tolerate.