Practicing Patience

Practicing Patience

This last week I had to be patient, and I’m not really the most patient person in the world. I like to be doing things, and it’s hard for me to just sit and wait. I spent about 36 hours over 3 days just sitting and waiting. I used the time to write some of these episodes, and edit some past programs, but mostly it was just sitting around. That’s one of the great things about teaching. If I’m not talking to the class, I could be walking around the class checking on how the students are doing. There are always papers to score and record, and getting ready for my next class is always lots of work. I need to admit I am a very bad student. I can’t really sit for extended periods of time, especially if I’m supposed to be listening to someone else. I can usually keep myself busy if I need to, but sitting around isn’t my favorite. I do quite a bit of acting in movies and commercials, and those two activities take lots of patience. The shooting day is 12 hours long, and you are required to stay in the immediate area. For some commercials I’ve done, I’ve waiting 10 hours to do a 30 second piece, and then had to wait around for a couple more hours. The longest television shoot I’ve been to lasted 18 hours. I didn’t really do anything that day for the first 12 hours. Camera work of any kind seems to take forever. The camera is set up, and the set is dressed. The lights are focused and adjusted, then adjusted some more. Stand-ins get to have the cameras focused on them so the real actors can keep studying their lines, and then the lights are adjusted some more. This is all for one shot, or one particular view of the scene, and for reverse shots, reaction shots and establishing shots, just repeat all of this over and over all day long. One of my favorite phrases to hear after working on a scene for what seems forever is “moving on”. That means the next scene is about to be set up. For actors that means go sit somewhere for an hour and we’ll call you when we’re ready. I’ve been in about 20 movies and probably 30 commercials. The good news about shooting with video or film is the day usually ends, and you don’t have to keep doing the same thing day after day. I’ve also been in about 60 stage productions, which means as an actor you get to go to rehearsal day after day and do the same thing over and over again. Since I’m not a full-time professional stage actor, most of my rehearsals take place at night after a long day at work. My least favorite patience inducing necessity in stage productions is blocking, which means, “You stand here and move here.” Then after everyone knows where they are going to stand and where they are going to move, you get to rehearse it a few times. Rehearsals then continue two, three or four times a week for a month, or two, or three. If it’s a musical, I get to torture the music director as they try to figure out how to get me to sing the right notes. Then you rehearse the songs a bunch, too. We won’t talk about how frustrating I am to choreographers. At the end the process is to make a bunch of people dancing and singing on the stage look like everything is happening quite spontaneously. In the end, it is a rewarding process since when the show starts it’s fun to perform. Of course in most shows you can’t always be on stage, so there are times when you have to be patient and wait for the next part. I’ve tried to think of a show where I have had to be the most patient. It was probably when I was playing a corpse in “The Devil and Daniel Webster”. We were the dead jury who had to listen to a trial about Jabez Stone. Daniel Webster was defending him against the devil, and we had to stand and listen to the trial for 30 minutes. I was standing on a ladder the whole time and my insteps really hurt by the end of the trial. I patiently waited for 30 minutes to say “guilty” and then exit the stage and pull the rubber pieces off my face. I was glad we only had to perform three or four times. All of this practicing patience has made me more patient. But I still have a ways to go. But as Benjamin Franklin said, “He that can have patience can have what he will.” Got patience?

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