It's the Pictures That Got Small

Yesterday I filmed a training video for the state LCB that will be shown to everyone and their mother in need of a server-of-libation license in the small wonder. Paid gig. Fun premise. Great script. Nice people.

Yesterday I realized that I am getting too old for this shit.

I rolled in on time (the only one) for the 12-hour shoot after a restless three-hour nap after a 12-hour whirlwind trip to NYC. The 8 a.m. call was for hair and makeup so I wasn't too worried about the extra bags under my peepers or my unstyled 'do. The script was a loose, amusing set of vignettes designed to clue potential bartenders and cater-waiters on how not to overserve one-too-many patrons at whatever local watering hole said barkeeps sought employment. My role was loosely defined as there were a few very specific parts (a silly British gent, a sunburned bro) and the rest were one-note stereotypes (angry working woman, nerdy just-turned legal dude) and I was told there would be a lot of opportunity for improv and fun. I was game. I was excited.

The company producing the piece has some good work under their collective belts. I felt confident that though this was scheduled as a fairly long shoot that it would be efficient. I don't define an 8 a.m. call for hair and make-up to mean you-have-time-first-one-here, so-go-get-your-own-coffee-and-later-breakfast, and actual-hair-and-makeup-will-occur-in-the-neighborhood-of-noon as efficient, personally, but then I am old-school.

Turns out, a little too old school. My shift in the chair resulted in making me look about 60 years old and possibly also a crack addict, which was not to be covered in the video. I am not sure what the young-ins in charge knew from tending bar. I am not even sure they were collectively old enough to be served at a bar in the first place, so this could account for the notion that making the older folks acting in the piece--especially the ladies, and by "older" I mean over 30--appear to be takes on a future LiLo mugshot for a 2048 DUI arrest was a good way to train drink-pourers to cut us off, since anyone looking the way we did would probably not be able to order a drink if ordering required being conscious. The men did not fare especially better from their stints in the chair, but in art as in life even the most metro of men don't tend to work with much more than they have got in terms of make-up and hair enhancements. In other words, some added dark shadows might make them look a tad ghoulish but essentially they look the same just with strange inexplicable zombie eyes. Which you don't tend to see in reality when bar-hopping--in my experience the gals (and guys) about town tend to begin the night looking their best and depending on the level of "overservice" may end up looking their worst. Point is, you start off with good intentions. The styling team for this shoot believed starting off with cruel intentions was a more realistic way of going about things.

Full disclosure, I am pretty vain. As I get older, I find I become vain about different aspects of myself, but also looser about my vanity. Age does bring confidence, and experience renders one perspective. To look at pictures I know bugged me 20 years ago makes me roll my eyes now, to think wow, I thought I looked bad then and how dumb to have worried over that when now I see how great I looked that day. Silly vanity, lesson learned, less Evil Queen and more clueless Snow White going forward, shall we? And this is just regular life lessons. When it comes to those learned upon the wicked stage (or green screen) I have different vanities, but similar experiences. I am fairly open to looking the part, particularly when the part is worth the effort. I have looked really great in some stuff. i have looked really bad in others. I regret none of it, not once.

So all that said, I had no "part" here, and I certainly wasn't under the impression that I would be playing Martha in Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? on this fine spring Monday. I was led to believe I would be "acting drunk" and that hair and make-up for film purposes would happen to me prior to the one-liners I would be fed throughout the day. Had I thought about it at all, I would have pegged the "look" to be some smeared lipstick, maybe some smudged mascara. Look-close-and-see-the-illusion-of-sobriety-belying-the-tiny-clues-on-her-face. I spend a great deal of my time in restaurants and clubs by trade, and I am well aware what drunk folk look like in these parts.

As an actor, I believe that my job in any piece is to create a person who might really exist in an alternate reality from my own. She looks like me, but something is off. She acts like I would act in this version of my life. Had this piece been called "Intervention", sure, make me look like a frowsy hooker drinking iodine to get high and then show that as a sobering PSA about the unhidden dangers of medicine cabinet contents in American homes. But this piece was ostensibly using humor to point out the inconsistencies of over-indulgers on a regular Saturday night, not a docu-drama about barflies at that bar no one goes into because it looks so shady.

I know what I look like. I know I have good days and bad days. I know lack of rest, a hormonal break-out aftermath face, and a make-up free early morning call do not me at my best make. I also know that I am not 25, when such paltry considerations just made me look poetically waify for a few hours. But what struck me after I exited the styling station and checked my visage in my camera selfie is that I was, for the first time, being targeted for being of a certain age, and a female of a certain age at that. As I pointed out earlier, the men (who varied in age from 30s to 50s) were given little thrift, some powder to blot out shine and some slight ruddiness or dark circles. They didn't look good but they didn't look bad. The looked appropriately funny-drunk-enhanced so they could do what they were hired to do, which is ACT a little over-drunk while out on the town. Their enhancements were designed to enhance their behavior. The women were made to look exceedingly bad. Bad hair, zits not only uncovered but actually enhanced (which makes one look less in need of Proactiv than in need of quarantine for measles), extreme saddlebags painted on, no blush but Rudolph noses, etc. We looked less like ladies who three-too-many-martinied lunch and more like sad, desperate alcoholics who had been overindulging since utero. The amusing vignettes become less amusing and entirely cringe-worthy when you can't see the acting for the makeunders.

By contrast, the gal playing the server was done up like prom night - perfect hair, perfect make-up. It did not escape me that she was 15-20 years younger than the rest of us. It all made me sad, and kind of pissed off.

As actresses, we are defined by how we look. It's no secret that it's a really tough industry, even in the microcosm where we ply our profession. But even here our faces, our bodies, are what gets us in the door and in part keeps us there. Our talents and training and abilities play a part, sure. But in an industry where being too blonde or too dark or too fat or too thin or too butch or too girly defines you before you even get a chance to open your mouth, you can only hope you look okay enough to get a chance to show how your abilities can transform your first-impression appearance. And it doesn't always work out that way, not by a long shot. But hey, you choose it. Even if it kind of chose you, you decide what you want to do with it. And you are getting work, so don't complain, right?

A healthy self-awareness of our attributes is vital to working this system, and even that isn't always successful. Recently a friend of mine got some buzz slash notoriety for social media posts of boudoir photos celebrating her 40th birthday. The camps fell into pretty even divides, the you-go-girl side and the you-ain't-all-that-white-privilege-non-mom side. It was fascinating and not unexpected that it went down that way. But she was proving some point, at least. Sure I am older, sure I am genetically predisposed to rock a decent body at this allegedly scary age without a ton of effort on my part, sure there will be haters but also who the fuck cares cause this is me, and what I look like in good light and good get-ups so shut up anti-women world, cause age really ain't nothing but a number. It took guts and it took narcissism. But that is her job. And she is advertising herself by controlling the message. Which is also her job.

I once spent an evening looking like an asshole in a Norma Desmond get-up at a fundraiser. I didn't even get paid (didn't know that at the time FYI, but that is s tale for another blog) to walk around making hideous grimaces and having no hairline and wearing so much exaggerated make-up I made RuPaul look like an amateur by way of contouring know-how. But the look was part of the performance, and every bit of it enhanced mine. It was about showcasing a character. It wasn't designed as a snap judgement to stick my tired face in a box called "middle age" and for no real reason (i.e. part to play) make it look as hideous as humanly possible. To thy own self be true, and all that, and I truthfully know how bad I can look after a bout with flu, or a weekend of hard partying, or an all-nighter. But playing a part loosely defined as "drunk-enough-to-become-a-potential-liability-for-a-server-but-deceivingly-may-not-appear-terribly-intoxicated" did not equate being made to look, and subsequently feel, the way I did when I left that chair.

And now, footage of me looking like the ugliest, oldest alkie in the tri-state area and beyond is being edited to be played out all over social media and in staff lounges and local tv. I didn't get to do work that made me proud to compensate. I got to spend most of 12 hours looking like that while sitting to the side doing crossword puzzles and feeling like the biggest reveal to come out of this gig was that I am looked at and judged by this particular company not as a decent-looking woman of a certain age but as an unattractively aging throwaway. My sole consolation (besides the paycheck which I better be getting) is that I was not alone in this feeling yesterday. But really that is cold comfort.

I wonder what the ethics are here. To introduce ethics into a conversation about the most narcissistic profession we have is perhaps a lost battle at its core. But I am going to soldier on. I have learned that I am my own commodity, and as such I need to protect that commodity. I am pretty careful in some respects about my choices, especially in light of the social media whirlwind we live in nowadays. I am fairly loose in a lot of ways, partially for the same reasons. My experience on this particular shoot made me super-reflective (duh) and curious as to what the preferred way to deal best should have been. Okay, so it was a gig. I knew enough going in, by my standards, to agree to it. My expectations were clearly unmet on a few levels. But what should I have done? Every course of action seemed destined only to gain myself a difficult reputation, which you don't want in a small town with limited opportunities, and I don't want as a general rule in any version of this industry or my life. And again - nice people! good work! paid work!

So here were my choices. Walk out because this wasn't what I thought I was signing up for? Complained nonstop (and my fellow actors and I commiserated muchly amongst ourselves with our level of dissatisfaction)? Pulled the busy director aside and asked for some clarity on my role here, or expressed dissatisfaction with this look, the process? Demand to be re-made-up to my satisfaction? Accept that maybe I was overreacting to how bad I looked and/or felt? Accept that I am not as good-looking or young-looking as I thought I was? Accept that maybe I am those things but younger hotter models have edged me out of that ring? Embrace looking awful for no discernible reason and throw myself into the little performance opportunities afforded me? Go back in time and spend a week prepping to look as perfectly lovely as possible when I showed up to thus negate any chance of being taken to be the ugly one deserving of the worst make-up job? Suck it up and be cheerful and joke about the look, or suck it up and act as though I was fine with how i looked because it didn't occur to me that it was bad?

To have done none of these things, expect to suggest at one point that perhaps starting at 60 without showing 0 wasn't the best for any of us on this shoot, makes me wonder if I did a poor job of protecting my sole asset - me. I was so not ready for my close-up, but I got one. And if you are hoping to get hired at Applebee's in the near future, I apologize in advance for the added insult of having to see me at my beyond-worst, without knowing the toll that took on my self-esteem.

Paltrow Productions

Running a small theater company these days (maybe all days since the days of The Globe, if Shakespeare In Love is to be believed, and I believe everything about that film, including the now-quaint notion that Gwyneth Paltrow was once delightful) is akin to wondering why one is at a certain age still single.

Being perpetually without a mate, it's an incessant question-answer session with your therapist brain. You look good. You work out. You have a decent career. You have loads of friends, and interests, and a great dog you walk to the park dutifully every Saturday morning hoping to find yourself in a meet-cute situation that will inevitably lead to rom-com hijinks and a triumphant traipse down the aisle. You are open to encounters with your preferred sex, be it online or on the karaoke circuit or as the obligatory non-plus-une at a wedding or in line at the grocery. You read advice columns in the glossy magazines at the doctor's office, you take advice from well-meaning friends, family, and casual acquaintances, you advise yourself late at night with book and beer in hand--all the while wondering, how is it is that you, whose dance card is always full, whom everyone and their mother insists you are good and smart and funny and handsome and talented and nurturing and just an all-around Goop-style catch sans the snobbery, remain consciously uncoupled?

Being perpetually without full houses during a run, it's an incessant back-and-forth conversation with everyone. You put on a good show. You cast people with talent to light up the stage, and more talented folk to aim those lights. You have 20 years of experience perfecting what makes your productions stand out in a crowd. You have built up an audience, you vary your content to suit all kinds, you tirelessly pursue rights for the next-big regional thing that will catapult your troupe into a happily-ever-after of sold-out houses and supersized donations and a company that isn't just about numbers but about living the good theatrical life. You willingly embrace new works and old chestnuts, deconstructing them to breathe artistic life into great works. You educate yourself on similar models, you study and learn from colleagues and patrons and supporters, you explore at cast parties and in front of the laptop post-run, you post and you hashtag and you chat it up at every opportunity--all the while musing, how is it that your company, which works its collective fanny off to engage, contribute, and discover, which everyone buzzes about season after season as being fun and interesting and hard-working and respected, why is this particular production not being enjoyed by the masses?

You have had good relationships with lovers and audiences alike. Like Gwynnie you have garnered high praise and broken hearts and lost your own, you have put your foot in your mouth and you have staged just the right comeback, you have reinvented yourself to suit yourself and then to suit someone elses, you have come out on top in terms of running the show on your own terms, critics be damned. It feels good to age into yourself, to be good in your own glowing skin, to enjoy your own company and your carefully collected best mates from over the years, to be honest about the work it takes to have this body and this body of work. But the hook is this: that niggling ticking following you everywhere you go in your own home, annoyed and confused and ultimately hapless in your efforts to find that sweet spot of success. The sliding doors of choices made, the what ifs, the unapologetic stance yet behind-the-facade worry over is this the right thing, was that the wrong decision, when can you just sit back for one night (or nine) and exhale in the glee that comes with hard-won success in life and in art?

Maybe it's the vegan-unfriendly references to meatloaf stroganoff. Who the hell knows.