hello

just want to say hello and that I felt that just living is an art.I did play drums in a band in Zimbabwe,it was known as Rhodesia back then…..Worked as a roadie in Europe for some cool Groups,Pink Floyd,Who and others in the 70's and it showed me the effects of music on group conciousness….powerful stuff,getting 50.000 people to the same moment in time.I came to California and played again for a while,did some acting,now theres a world unto itself….Movies were tedious,but theatre was exciting and dangerous,I got complacent and forgot my lines,,,,,in Laguna at the playhouse in front of 400 people,now there is a rush!thank God for all the improv classes.lol….Now I feel that my water work is an art and I have the rest of my life to play with it.

Re: hello

Hey, waterheart! Great to have you here!
Lines are a tricky business. They come with practice. The more in the moment you are, the easier it is to forget them. The trick, for me, is threefold:
1) I memorize my lines EXACTLY as their written. There's clues to your character's mental workings in the smallest minutiae. The fact that they use a word differently than I would have… It gives a subtle difference in the meaning and that meaning reflects how they think and the difference between my thought process and theirs. It helps me begin to construct my character in an organic way, piece by tiny little piece.
2) I create an emotional life for myself that at that point in time those are the only words I could possibly say. There's no other choice to say anything different. This ties in a lot with the first method.
3) I memorize my lines without inflection, totally by rote. If I memorize lines with an inflection, it traps me in a line reading, effectively taking you out of the moment and into “autopilot.” The bad part about going into autopilot is that when your castmates do anything different it will throw you. Also, sometimes actors who fall into this autopilot-ness, will “wake up” and really begin to live that moment on stage. When they do, their lines fly out of their heads because their memory web has been destroyed.

Wow. I didn't mean to write a whole thing. I'm obviously hungry for the stage. It's been a month since my last performance, and I think I'm going through withdraw.

How was playing drums in Zimbabwe?