the other LA girl

Last November I got to live out a bit of a dream.

Jakob Bilinksi is an insanely talented director that I have worked with before: seriously - keep this dude on your radar - he’s only get better and smarter and will eventually take over. And, he wanted to work with me (a) again, (b) on a bigger project, (c) in a location that required me to leave LA and (d) with a kick ass indie script. It was like my own personal field trip to happiness. 

So off I flew to glamorous Evansville, Indiana population 116,000. 

I’ve had previous experience with Evansville. My freshman year roommate was born and raised in Evansville and I had visited once before. I knew going there that it would be uber small towny with an up and coming art scene (as all small towns are now - yeah art!) I also knew I might want to stay away from the food. 

Anyhow: off I went, spending 3 glorious days beautiful Evansville and it’s surrounding areas to film basically 24/7. With no humor let me say this: when you get the chance to work with motivated talented people, the idea of working +60 hours over the course of 72 is actually…sorta epic. I’m still not sure how I made it through the shoot…

And now, 5 months later we finally get a taste of all our hard work with a teaser trailer. 

Hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed filming it. Stay tuned for more:

I’m in day 3 of a 28 day full body cleanse. 

I love food. No. That’s not even accurate. Food for me is something that calms and excites me at the same time. And since learning how to cook - arguably not as good as my mom or my brother, it’s one of the few things that I can do daily that lets me be artistic in a non actory way.

Beside loving to cook it I love to eat it. And a lot of it. My typical day revolves around food. What am I currently eating and what am I going to eat. Conversations while eating tend to revolve around how good the food is, or how good a meal in the past was, or how amazing food in the future will be.

And since I love to eat so much it is totally necessary to me to keep a pretty tight workout schedule. Between my actor life, my social life, my personal life, and my food life my life is crazy full. (And please don’t confuse full for significant or impressive…just full….)

So the cleanse is a good time for me to focus on other things and not cheese. 

It’s the second time I’ve done this. The Boyfriend introduced it to me after doing it about 5 or 6 times himself. I was hesitant at first. But since I live Hollywood Adjacent and stupid body diets are totally vogue I acquiesced.

It’s not exactly fun, but it’s not exactly not fun either though. 

After I work through the caffeine and alcohol and salt and cheese withdrawal it gets a bit easier, too. 

And it’s a way for me to be the super skinny girl at the audition - until I start my normal diet again and surf in a vat of goat cheese on a olive rosemary crostini. 
 

However, when they do, it’s usually because they just perused this site and saw all the jobs other people booked. 

It’s a fairly masochistic thing to do to oneself. But I’m an actor. Self hatred is pretty much a given. 

It’s ok because this is my dog:

And he always makes me crazy happy.

Queen is probably my favorite band. I’m not one for certitudes so I hesitate saying My Favorite Band but at this exact moment I can’t think of a band that has quite the same affect on me.

Queen is my go to for when I need any kind of emotional support. I love them and I think they would love me too. 

My go to for when I have an audition is Breakthru. I mean look at the lyrics:

If I could only reach you
If I could make you smile
If I could only reach you
That would really be a breakthru 

Oh yeah

Breakthru, these barriers of pain
Breakthru, yeah, to the sunshine from the rain

If these aren’t the desperate pleads of an actor just wishing a casting director will bring her back for a call back, if these aren’t the frantic cries of an actor begging a director to bring her on set, if these aren’t desolate supplication of an actor petitioning a producer to give the A-OK to all of it, I don’t know what is. 

I blare it over my speakers (or I used to - my CD was stolen out of my car, along with a lot of other things when I suffered my first LA Car Break In..so now I just play it on my iPhone’s speaker. It doesn’t have the same gravitas but it works and I) sing it as loud as I can. It’s my mantra. My prayer. My pepper upper. 

And since I have an audition today (!) I will be playing it all day. While I’m getting dressed for the audition - while I’m taking a break from working on my sides - while I’m driving to the audition - while I’m sitting in the waiting room. It’ll be on repeat. 

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do:

I’ve entered into a stage of my life where the majority of my friends are engaged or married and some of them are even (shudder) procreating. 

I’m happy for all them. They are charging into adulthood and responsibility with an excitement that I typically reserve for new episodes of 30 Rock. 

Thursday’s on NBC - 8:30/7:30c

Truthfully, my simple life of Boyfriend, dog, day job and acting “career” is all I can really handle right now. Where others can bask in the knowledge that their biggest accomplishment this year is declaring their (legal and binding) love or perhaps creating life from nothingness, I relish the fact that my biggest accomplishment this year is not spending more than $100 at Bevmo last month because I needed to make sure I have enough dough left to get a bathing suit for my trip this summer.

My mental and emotional level of maturity could seriously not handle anything else. 

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. 

(Totally gonna give props to myself for making the title of this post and the content of the post match so perfectly! Small victories, people. Small victories.)