To David Barker, Sanford Meisner and Acting Teachers Everywhere

I always wanted to act. When I was four and had no training, my father used to admit that I was talented by comparing me to Sarah Bernhardt, the famous melodramatic
actress, and never in a good way.  When I was ten, we lived on the foot of a mountain in a desolate desert where not even the jackrabbits feigned interest in my abilities. Desperate, I wrote a letter to the TV station asking how a child might become an actress. They wrote back, saying that usually successful child actors had stage moms who got them lessons, dragged them to auditions, taught them to suck in their chubby little cheeks just so, and spent all of the money they made, leaving them broke, broken-spirited and strung out on some substance or another in a wasteland of has-beens.

Well, I didn't have a stage mom, and although the path did not sound as glorious as I had imagined, I wasn't deterred. My dream kept percolating inside of me through the years. It wouldn't die. One day in college, I realized that being a psych major wasn't for me. I mean, all the psych professors rode bicycles, had hair that stood up on end, and pants that were five inches too short (in preparation for the infamous Arizona 100 year floods, I suppose.) So I stood there, woke up, screamed in realization, and went running off to the theatre department to change my major. Oh - wait - where's the theatre department? That way? Got it.

Now, there is something diabolically weird about wanting to be an actor. It is like you are admitting that you think that you are so interesting that other people should want to watch you. It means that you think that you not only have talent, but are worthy of saying words written by people like Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Sophocles and Willie the Shake. It means you either have a huge ego, or are so needy that you want to be famous so that millions of people can love you.  When you think about it in that distant kind of way, it means you might be pretty f#d up. But, naaaaugh, who needs to overanalyze it like that?

Well, in order to become an actor at Arizona State University, it was an unwritten (or maybe it was written somewhere in your program of study) rule that you would have to take the Theatre Performance 494 Study Class with David Barker. To me, David Barker was scary. He wasn't  huge and burly, he was just intense. Really intense, like an actor. He was one of those actors that you could not mistake for being a waiter or car salesman. He WAS an actor. In spite of feeling intimidated, I still knew I had talent. I wanted to take Meisner with David Barker, but that didn't mean that I was not quaking in my Birkenstocks (it's 110 out, nobody wore boots.)

At the same time I was taking Meisner, some strange things were happening in my  body. I was working at the grocery store three graveyard shifts per week, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Mesiner class was on Monday afternoon. Directing class was on Monday morning.  There were only four hours between getting off of work and getting up for class. It apparently wasn't long enough because when I would get up, I couldn't move my legs. They were so stiff that they refused to work. Even after hours of moving around, they ached and burned with pins and needles shooting through so painfully that I couldn't hide the discomfort. I tried, but it showed.

My face had also taken on this new, healthy-looking glow that had changed my olive complexion to what seemed to be peaches and cream. I had grown up looking dead, so I knew that looking alive was a highly abnormal condition. I went to a specialist who told me I was fat, and if I lost 20 pounds, I would feel better and might even look more dead again. And for this, he charged $300 bucks.

It was midterms, and David Barker called me into a private conference. It was there that he lowered the bomb. "You have a lack of energy," he pronounced." I don't think you have what it takes to be an actor."

"No, Mr. Barker. I am an actor. I can feel it deep in my bones. But it's the other stuff I feel in my bones..." How do you tell David I. for Intense Barker that you can't really feel your legs, and when you do, what you feel is unbearable pain? How do you give this man an excuse? Not that it wasn't true, but even true things are excuses when it comes to either you are doing it or you are not.  I was not. I went home, and I cried, and to make matters worse, I got cast in a damned Tennessee Williams play again for my Meisner scene study. I cried about that, too. I was not a worthy actress, and all I could ever get cast in were Tennessee Williams plays. Ever.

The woman who was playing my mom in that scene from The Glass Menagerie was named Judy, and as we got to talking, I told her about my legs. She understood. She told me she had been through it so badly that she had been in a wheelchair. She even went to the Mayo Clinic, and they told her she was too skinny or something. $450 bucks. Really, it was called fibromyalgia, and for me, it was the early stages of Systemic Lupus Erythamatosis.

To make a long story short (er), I had some great acting breakthroughs in that Meisner class. There were a few times I even made David Barker laugh, like when I couldn't get the cake out of the pan, and when I did set the crumbled mess free, my next move was to cut it into layers. Someone eventually told me that they took the class a few years later and he was using my story as an example of  finally "getting it." I knew it was true because I never told the cake story in much detail, and here I was, having it told to me.

It's been a darned long time since I took Meisner with David Barker at ASU. Yet now, when I act (and I do), I remember my lessons from that class, and there were many.
Here they are:

1. You must believe in yourself.

2. It really helps when others believe in you, too.

3. You cannot give up, even if you can't feel your legs.

4. If you have the true emotion going inside of you, the rest will come.

5. Thank God David Barker had unrelentless high expectations, even if it seemed scary at the time, because it made me dig down and find what I was made of.

and finally:

6. Follow your heart (even if it is the only one that thinks you're an actor.)

Sanford Meisner, by the way, was not in the best of health either, yet he was a phenomenal acting teacher. Thank you, David Barker, for bringing him to me in your own intense way, because it is something that I have kept with me for all of these years. Knowing Meisner sets people apart here in Hollywood. Knowing Barker made me prove myself. We'll just call it , "Barker teaches acting and life."


For more on David Barker, go to http://www.davidbarker.org/