Twenty Intermittant Years At Acting School

A little progress might have been made on the piano this morning. I was searching on the internet for a set of chord progressions that would show me how to chord my way up or down the keyboard a half-step at a time, when I got diverted by something I saw right away wasn't what I was looking for. but it somehow intrigued me, and I started fiddling around with it to see what I could learn.

In the comments that accompanied the sequence of notes on a staff the writer suggested that the reader might recognize the song. That challenged me a little, and I literally "read" the notes and played them well enough to recognize the tune as Home On The Range.

It was the simplest arrangement possible and designed to show how chord harmony could be introduced at each of the half notes of the tune, and then how most every note could chorded if desired. My idea is to keep fumbling around with this arrangement until I memorize it, and then start playing it regular just like I do the major and minor scales.

Playing the scales everyday is doing exactly what I thought it might. It is giving so-me confidence that I need to do what needs to be done to get over the hump with this piano thang. I think I could probably learn everything I wanna know about music theory by playing the scales, and intuiting the musical implications drawn from that.

One of the practices I instituted because of my past failures has been to get real persnickety about using the right finger to play each note of every scale. I seem to be working out a systematic way to improve my practicing a specific key. The key of B minor for example. It's the relative minor of D Major, and trips me up when I go there sometimes.

Okay, most of the time. It's a matter of physical believability… ahem… as if I might know. I get the fingering for D Major mixed up sometime with the fingering for D minor, and that totally throws me out of whack for the upcoming B minor.

This is more of a mental crisis than a physical one. My fingers seem to know exactly what they're supposed to do, but my awareness can't believe they're just doing it. Then, I get so proud of my fingers for ignoring my mental confusion… I have to stop practicing and do something else for a while.

This dynamic of my fingers being smarter than my abstract constructions can play the death knoll of this, my latest attempt at teaching myself to play the piano. I seem convinced that teaching myself is the only way it will get done. I'm too stubborn for a music teacher to abide.

It's written in the astrology interpretation books I read a long time ago that a native with Saturn in it's Fall in Aries conjoined to the Sun is the epitome of the "self-made man". I had to read about it to even question whether I was that sort of person.

When I did get around to contemplating the notion that I might qualify to be a self-made man by my stubborn behavior, that's when I realized my stubbornness was the very reason I have to be self-made. Nobody else wants to deal with hard-headed people like me. What was worse was that under no conditions could I be convinced that I was stubborn. Just… hmmm… practical.

I read a comment about self-made people that I really hated to recognize as bearing truth for me. The comment was directed toward the idea that self-made people can never become refined.

The Drama Department director at the university I attended had a special place in his heart for me. He was a Scorpio, and he admired the fact that I kept leaving suddenly and eventually returning to try and get a four-year BA degree. That's the only degree the Drama Department handed out because it was designed around the performing arts.

He kept giving me roles that taught me something about myself he thought I oughta know. I hardly ever audition at that school. I was a drama major, and we were there to learn about the craft. It wasn't up to me to make decisions about my education. That took a long time to learn, and I never knew it while I was there.

The last role I played there was that of a nouveau riche self-made man who was trying to marry his daughter off to old money. It was a musical, and I didn't read music. There was trouble in River City.

The musical director insisted I be replaced with a music major. The Department director refused. The music director AND the choreographer refused to give me my entrance cues. They brought down the whole play to teach me a lesson I never asked to learn. What a drag, man.

I was perfectly willing to step aside. I agreed with my nemesis'. My director would have none of it. I don't think he was all that willing to throw the musical away in order for me to learn something I needed to know about myself. Later, I found out he was at odds with the entire Music Department, and the choreographer too, and she worked for him.

Looking back at my relationship with this man called Loussin, I guess I did have a long-term mentor. It certainly wasn't a personal relationship. Most of the ti-me he appeared to act like he wanted nothing to do with me. I'm almost sure he decided when it was ti-me for me to leave school and come back several years later.

We were connected through the Drama Department at East Carolina University off and on for around twenty years. I never did get that degree. I don't think it was the point, and I felt like (and still do) that his advice that I become a writer instead of an actor was his final dismissal of me.

He knew what I was there for. I wouldn't let go. I didn't know that what I sought and had always sought was my true identity. He told me that my not knowing how to act around other people wasn't the problem. I didn't know how to act around myself.

This relationship with my acting teacher was coming to a head serendipitously around the sa-me ti-me I received my remembering vision. I didn't know for a long ti-me that my remembering vision was the basis of my true identity. It informed me about where I came from and why I was here, but it also told me what I am is. Writing for me is not a way to make a living, but the way I learn how to live.