Dreams, Dreams, Downey Jr.

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The past few weeks I’ve been making jumps towards making my dreams come true, I also got new glasses, which is a big deal, because they are like — part of your face. They are like my old ones, but a different color. My favorite ice cream flavor is french vanilla. I swear I am interesting!

I was playing one of my favorite games yesterday with a new friend and we ended up walking all the way to Santa Monica. The game is called “Robert Downey Jr’s House” and we walk through the residential streets of Venice and guess which house is his #coolhobbies.  In my head, his house is one of the modern art-looking ones that stick out from the beach houses. Sort of like how RDJ’s face sticks out from most other faces. He also just doesn’t seem like a beach house brohini to me. If the house has a ringer/buzzer/intercom thing we ring and say “Mr. Downey Jr.?” and it never is. We could probably just Google his address, but that’s zero fun. Also, feel free to comment your opinion. Would he be Mr. Downey or Mr. Downey Jr.? I feel like Mr. Downey just doesn’t sound right, like RDJ would say “no, that’s my father” and be totally charming about it.

If there is one thing that halfheartedly (and perhaps half creepily) looking for RDJ ‘s house does, it’s make you hungry. My friend is newish to town, so we decided to go to the OG Hot Dog on a Stick. Unfortunately our wallets and accounts were pretty much on E, and there is just something really sad about being in your mid-20s and sharing a corn dog. Made extra sad by this  tie-dye-clad street performer/singer/songwriter who was just awful and not self-aware about it playing right next to us. So basically, shoutout to McDonald’s for being cheap and for me being able to justify my meal me there to myself by playing the artist card. Also, the delicious coffee card. The only downside of McDs being that Mr. Downey Jr. (Mr. Downey?) would never be there. His face would also stick out a lot at McDonald’s. He fancy.

Also, I have a show tonight in the Del Close Theatre at 7pm at iO West and I joined instagram! My username is: ashleyjillian. Looking for cool people to follow on there!! Hope your weekends were awesome :)

The Undertaker

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The Undertaker

Rushing up to the undertaker’s office, I am hoping to see some rusted old-fashioned medical tools.

With a hand on the door, I notice an old man with an overweight golden retriever and an oversized cowboy hat.

“The undertaker died” he said in his gravelly voice.

I summon a nervous pity laugh, and wait for the second half of the joke.

“The memorial service was lovely, we held it about two weeks ago.”

Awkward.

Surprising Yourself

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Hi, my name is Ashley, and I love validation. Let’s not front, almost all of us vie for validation in some manner, and it’s totally fascinating, but I am also totally trying to wean myself off it.

There are nerdy boys vying for validation from prom queens, interns in cheap suits vying for validation from men in expensive ones, writers vying for validation with book deals and Facebook fans.

Show me the actor whom is 100% in it for the art of acting. You can’t because he is doing community theatre in Portland, Maine. And heck, even he has a back-pocketed dream of being on Broadway.

Right now he chants “just the chorus! just the chorus!” but only because he is too afraid of feeling crushed when he doesn’t get the starring role. We back pocket dreams because being an adult kind of sucks, paying rent sucks, working sucks, but making the jump away from that suckage is terrifying. This post may not apply to trust-fund types.

This is vain, but I will admit it. I think I write and do improv because I want to be brilliant at something — and be recognized for it. As my celebrity dream father Steve Martin once said, I want to be so good at something that I can’t be ignored. I think it comes from my deep-seeded fear of being perceived as boring.  To me, brilliance seems like the antecedent to an interesting life. I know it’s very celebrity dream crazy uncle Bill Murray of me, but I want to see what brilliance unlocks once I achieve it.

I think I am only willing to admit these things publicly because I work so hard at bettering myself. I do comedy four+ nights a week, I study it another 1-2 and I try to write one short story a week all while holding down a full time job. I imagine it’s a similar workload to being a mother, but replace a husband and children with comedy. As celebrity dream awkward neighbor Will Ferrell said, it takes 10 years to make it overnight. If there is one thing my celebrity dream crew has in common it’s hard work and cultivated talent. Full disclosure: celebrity dream older sister is Kristen Wiig and celebrity dream dog is Yoda.

The point of this post being, I made it to callback auditions for house teams at iO last week, and that’s a huge deal for me because I haven’t been on my journey for that long. I felt like I killed it in my first audition, but I still really wanted to know what everyone in the room thought about it, which is kind of gross, but comedy is so hard so any good feedback can keep your fire going for awhile. I did just OK in my callback, but in my first audition, I was so good I don’t think they could ignore me.

Isn’t it weird that it’s so hard to admit that you were good at something?

So my comedy debut to the overlords of iO went well, and it feels so good to have a small victory every once in awhile. Now back to the comedy grind, come see my team, Spaceman’s Promise, tonight at The Middle Theatre in Hollywood at 10pm!

Giving Up, Let’s be Unafraid

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I’m not one to let things to defeat me, but today I gave up on a book. I tried, oh how I tried, but the novel 2030 by Albert Brooks was the worst thing I’ve read in a long time. Read is a strong word, because it was quite unreadable. I remember seeing Brooks on late night talk shows and all the hosts made a huge deal about it. It was such a big deal that Brooks was even forced to make a Twitter account that I will never ever follow because his book is unoriginal and without style and I wouldn’t expect his tweets to be any better.

The other egregious example of this that I’ve recently come across is I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections by Nora Ephron, which is really just a shallow book of essays. I want a memoir to have glaring bits of vulnerability and not be about how unhappy they were with their namesake meatloaf at a restaurant I will never be able to afford. OMG, I don’t care. I also can’t follow Ephron on Twitter, because you know, she’s dead.

This is a call to critics and the media to not give kiss butt book reviews to authors who make movies. Let’s only award work if it’s actually good, otherwise your reviews don’t really mean anything at all.  Maybe it’s that these critics themselves want to write for movies, or television and are hoping that a positive review will give than “in” with the “author” because I don’t think you go into arts criticism without having a solid lens of art. The only logical explanation I can think of is that they are jaded arts critics who want to branch out by sucking up.

Critics were not afraid to slam Snooki’s autobiography, but let’s not pretend that the aforementioned books were any better. At least Snooki has more Twitter followers than Albert Brooks, because let’s be frank, she deserves it. To be clear, I don’t necessarily agree with her lifestyle, but I do respect that she knows who she is and is not afraid to share it with the world. She’s also more interesting than fancy meatloaf.

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Things I’ve learned while writing this post: Albert Brook’s real name is Albert Einstein and his wife has an artist’s studio in my neighborhood. Awkward.

Please comment with books that are awful, you know, so we can spare each other some pain.

Boredom

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of boredom in our lives, or more specifically, how I should let myself get bored more often. I thought that I am probably at my most bored when I am sitting in LA’s famed traffic. But, I am listening to my iPod on shuffle and getting giddy about how good the music is on it and also getting angry about how much LA drivers suck, and how much my gas mileage sucks, and how sitting down for so long sucks. In my experience, I have found Montreal drivers to be the most offensive, shortly followed by Boston drivers. I hope those sentiments are not too controversial and it should be noted that my list is limited by places I have been. Regardless, I don’t think driving in Lalaland counts as genuine boredom.

I feel like being bored lets your other senses fly because you aren’t distracted by racing thoughts, pointed conversation and impulsive reactions. The last time I was genuinely bored was four-months ago when I went to UCB show alone. I challenged myself to not spend the 30-min wait texting people on my phone, my generation’s go-t0.

Side rant: Some members of my generation seem to think that checking-in places makes your life seem interesting, but I feel like I would have to be next level bored to do that. So in my eyes, that -ish backfires. Also, no one cares that you’re dining at the Olive Garden or that you’re buying socks at Old Navy, unless they too, are next level bored. Go read a book. I will now step off my throne of judgment and step back into our scheduled programming.

I challenged myself to just stand there and wait, alone. It was so uncomfortable, but also totally inspiring. You find the droll parts of conversations you would normally dismiss as boring (or as none of your beeswax), you notice which parts of your ears get cold first and it becomes more and more obvious which part of your feet you stand on. The last part might be less relevant if you are bored while sitting. The whole thing is kind of beautiful, and I would love to try a day alone at Disneyland. If only for the sake of pushing myself into that uncomfortable place, and for the single rider line.

Has anyone else experimented with boredom? I live a pretty fast-paced life as a dream chaser with a day job, but I think I might benefit from some good old fashioned boredom. I think my learnings would be helpful as a writer and maybe as a person who is curious about ancient Egyptians, because even they must have gotten bored, not cared what other people had for dinner and gotten angry at crazy drivers in Montreal.

Harry Houdini, Improv

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I was reading an essay written by Harry Houdini called “Helpful Hints for Young Magicians Under Eighty” and as someone who only thinks about comedy, I’d say most of the hints apply to improv. See below:

  • “In winning your audience, remember that ‘manners make fortunes,’ so don’t be impertinent.”
  • “An old trick well done is far better than a new trick with no effect”
  • “Never tell the audience how good you are; they will soon find that out for themselves”
  • “You may think your trick is old, but it is always new to members of your audience”
  • “An old trick in a new dress is always a pleasant change”
  • “Don’t drag your tricks, but work as quickly as you can, bearing in mind the Latin Proverb, ‘Make haste slowly.’”
  • “When your audience is far distant from you, pantomime work will be well appreciated”
  • “Well-chosen remarks on topics of the day are always in order.”
  • “Walk right out on stage, and tell your tale to your audience, and perhaps many will believe it”
  • “It is far more difficult to give a trial show to a house full of seats and one manager than to a packed house and no manager”

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AJ

p.s. Just read about how Houdini died …

James Franco, Director’s Notes

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I saw a play James Franco directed. Below is an excerpt from his director’s note:

I wanted to do a multi-media piece that simultaneously used live actors and cameras with closed circuit projections. We live on screens, we think within screens, our lives are videos, movies and images: how better to capture this phenomenon than showing the apparatus alongside the players. … We cast almost entirely from the School of Theatre so that the actors were not age appropriate for the parts, in this way we could foreground the performative aspect of the project while at the same time utilizing and framing the passion and energy that is unique to youth. This approach strips away character so that we are interacting with the actors as people rather than the facades of their characters.

This show is all about artifice and about stripping away artifice at the same time. Young (Tennessee) Williams filled his play with dreamers, artists and lovers propelled and often destroyed by their relationships with reality: they want to love and be loved on earth and they also want to disappear into their dreams. And this is a description of acting: functioning in imaginary worlds in order to connect with audiences in the real world.

This is my favorite kind of project: a clusterfuck of different artists, personalities, and mediums. Everyone played their role (actors and non-actors) perfectly.

- James Franco, December 2012