I perform tonight

Oy. I'm nervous and trying not to freak out.

The crowd is larger than 99% of the theaters I've performed in.

I'm nervous. Did I say that already?

But hey, I'll rock cuz I'm that cool (this is justina's new resolution --positive thinking. awwwwwesome.)

i'm gonna rock n roll....rock. and. roll.

finding your art

I have spent years searching for my talent and then years avoiding it. I am fortunate to be a person who found her talent. I am fortunate to be liked for my talent. I love meeting people who already know me through my work. I'm certainly not famous or reknowned, but on occasion, my art precedes me and for a shy girl like myself, it's a comfortable cushion between hellos. I was talking to a friend who wanted to be a surgeon but found out she was excellent in math, so she veered into a completely different field where math was utilized most. Another friend said, "What a blessing to fall into a talent and then find out you love it and even more than that, you make a living out of it." Oooh! Yes, to fall in love with your talent and career? It's the perfect tryptich. Career, passion, talent. Mmmmm...There are buddhist monks who never reach enlightenment, grand musicians who never find their instrument, genius scientists who never get the right education, amazing painters who never pick up a brush.

How beautiful the synchronicity of fate to match the person to the one of millions of talents they can have. How an act of God to see a writer with his first pen, a skater her first time on the ice, an actor with his first audience {even if it's Mom hearing his first joke). It's a spark. Imagine what it ignites: Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Einstein, Van Gogh. That is God right there. In your art.

Where is our leader?

Not President. I know where he is. I mean our leader. If an alien came down from outer space and said "Take me to your leader," what would I do as soon as I took his green little hand? The UN? Bill Clinton (that last winner I voted for) To my boss? My church leader? My guru? My sponsor? Brad Pitt? Kobe? The next Pope? We got nothin'. At least until April 18th when we may have a cool new guy in a pointy hat.

Gandhi, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa. There are people I'd proudly display as my leader. But they're dead. Here's what I'm saying. Every generation has a motivator. Not a voice of the people. A voice the people can become.

The most charismatic people I've heard are people who are motivating us to change the inside. Create more love, more wealth, more creativity in our own lives. And that is great and necessary. I'm not saying that's bad. In fact, it's important for us to have those people who help us fix the inside so we can then move on to fix the outside.

But while we're all fixing our innards, there is a world falling apart. There are wars being lost. There are rulers making mistakes. Or worse, making wrongs on purpose. Who is our motivator to change the world?

This is an essay, I've always wanted to write, but it is never long. It's a simple cry for help. Someone tell me this person exists? Someone tell me this person is right here. Making change.

I'm going to church tonight

Church going atheist me!

Things I want to do before I'm 40

1. Faint. It's true, I've never fainted. I want to faint from some form of drama, not illness, which would be a downer. But faint from winning the lottery, getting a truly coveted grant, and/or the Oscar (would I be the first Oscar fainter?). Maybe seeing an immaculate conception and birth. That'd be a cool faint thing. Oh! And seeing God. Old Testament God, of course. The "God's in everything" God isn't quite for fainting. Because then I'd faint so often (seeing flowers, puppies, babies, the sun, the moon, etc) there'd be a debate on whether my quality of life is high enough to even live. I would need a burning bush telling me to kill something. Now THAT is worth fainting for!

2. Slap a man in the face. No man has disgusted me in person enough to warrant it. Or I've had a comeback. Or (and this is the worst) I don't realize the true quality of the offense at the time and think of it hours later when the man is gone. But I so want a moment where a man says something, I react in the moment with a gasp and a slap in the face. Well aimed, too. Nothing more embarassing than missing the whole cheek and scratching a nose.

3. Be in on some good Hollywood gossip. All my gossip reiterates some bigger gossip, so it's never an "oooooh" maker. No "he's an alcoholic" or "she's gay" gossip. Real stuff film noir is made of. True murder and mayhem gossip.

4. Save a life. I mean like save. a. life. Wouldn't that be awesome?

5. Find myself an unexpected superhero. You know, like suddenly find a cape and boots and when I put them on, I'm not only hot, I can fly.

Baby steps

So I'm well enough to write. But I'm still cancelling anything that involves leaving the house. My pride pushes me out the door on occassion, but really work is the only guarantee.

I'm feeling like a writer again. I spent my lunch break working on a treatment and rewrite. The screenplay I started last night is filling out nicely into a fish out of water romantic comedy. There is something simple and challenging in its simplicity about the romantic comedy. You fight the cliches but you're wallowing in one large ocean of them. How does one get out? I wrote a cute act two scene where the protagonist glances at the love interest as they clean the house. It's so cute and in every film that has a famous blond. How can I not grin when I reread it? It's so in the final draft.

You may say three weeks without writing is not really what one would call a drought. But ohhhh did it feel like one. I love writers who say they hate writing. But they can't stop. I relate to that.

I hate writing. I can't stop. It's not like a drug because drugs feel good and are a short cut to a specific state of mind. Writing feels like birth. It's the opposite of drugs. There may be endorphins in the process, but it's only done so you keep going. And the result, the child, is the reward. The end is the high. Sadly, you may have an ugly baby. You may even be birthing a future killer. You don't know. You just know you're done and it's gonna go out into the world and do whatever it was meant to do. The Jesus or the Judas. You're out of the loop at that point. You're disowned. A writer is a person who births baby after baby but never gets to raise any of them. She just sweats on the table, pushes, watches the umbilical cord get cut, reaches out to hold the crying baby, but recoils with a new wave of contractions. And it starts again.

The last three weeks was me laying in bed, waiting for contractions.

Nothing.

And now they start again.

Ooh. There's one now.

Does this count as a page?

I'm exhausted all the time and all I do is pull up tile in my new room and sleep and work. Then I sleep and work and pull up tile. I hate theater right now because it kicked my ass. Chewed me up, spit me out, put me in debt that'd make a bookie gasp, and then hopped along to kill some new unexpecting young thing who feels like "putting on a show." I feel raw from seeing some true colors in others as my life shifted. I feel raw from seeing my friends not know what to do with me. They are concerned. They want to help but don't know how. I just gotta get the dissappointment out of my system. So all these loves in my life just gotta wait. Wait while I cleanse the toxin of business failure out of me.

Oh sure, it's not so bad. The average Los Angeles theatrical audience is eight people (yeah, I know!) And we averaged about 12. So hey, we win. And many theaters last year lost upwards of $50,000. We lost a small fraction of that. Many quit after year two. We go on. We just won't produce four full lengths and a dozen collections. We will be lucky to get two full length originals and no collections this year.

So here I am. Not doing much except sleep and eat and pay bills. My email boxes are filling up. My voice mails go unheard. I can barely answer a person who is standing right in front of me. I have rest to get.

But I also got writing to do. There's this weird thing that happens when I don't write.

I have panic attacks.

I wake up in the morning with a new scare: my debt will kill me, sudden death will kill me, illness will kill me, a dead end job will kill me, my car is getting stolen, my identity is being stolen, my soul belongs to not satan, but one of his cronies who likely will lose it -the irresponsible schmuck- and my spirit will fall through the cracks of after-life beaurocracy.

So while I can't seem to think, let alone write, I find myself in dire need of some writing therapy.

If I write, all that fear and energy can be on a page and I'll be better. My character will get a fear and confront it and rise victorious (or die, either is fine) and I will get a good night's rest.

So to get me back on the writing track, my roommate and I are racing for 20 pages. We must write 20 pages this weekend or suffer the humiliation of not following through (yeah, I know, we're big gamblers).

I got 2 pages of a treatment, 5 pages of a new screenplay, 3 pages added to my Evo rewrite, and now I think this should be considered a page or two also.

Yeah, I'm 9 short. Sue me.

Anyway, that's my weekend. Harry Potter plays in the background. People are cooking around me. I'm acclimating well to the bustle of collective living. I spent some time with the kids, which is a blessing. Such a blessing. I was staring at a room the size of a theater and thinking of square feet and stages and revenue potential and insurance etc -frozen by overwhelming possibilities. The girl, only six, sat down with me and I warned her not to sit too close to the ledge as we dangled or feet off the observation room window and stared into the theater's emptiness. I asked her what she would do with the room and the obvious answer came quite suddenly from her lips: "Turn it into a Winter Wonderland." And then I watched her run off to ask Mom if she can have a winter sleepover.

Sometimes you hit a rock and find a rose growing from the wound.

Now to get that 9 pages.