For Love of the Game

It's opening day for the Yankees, and the city is abuzz with excitement! I'm a little torn because I'm from CA, and I have a fondness for the Angels as well, but I'm a New Yorker at heart.

When I was a kid, my Grandpa Bowder would listen to the Dodgers on the radio. They'd moved from Brooklyn to CA, which my Grandpa had also done, and so maybe that's where I get my bicoastal tendencies. :)

                           (my Grandpa Bowder, his daughter, Eleanor, and my Grandpa Daniel)

In any case, I'm excited for both teams, really, because it's all for the love of the game!

It makes me think of acting. Any professional has to keep in practice to stay in the game. I've been on some recent callbacks and it's been a thrill to work on new scripts, songs, and monologues. I love being in the midst of all that, and I'm thankful to have been called back for these projects.

It can get frustrating when you don't get the gig. For me, there's that brief moment of being down, but more than not, it stokes my fire to keep going.

And the cool thing is that I learn from every artistic adventure. For a recent callback, I learned a new monologue that I now have in my toolkit for future auditions. I also learned that I can go darker with my material. There's a common thread of advice that actors receive about "not going too dark," because casting directors sit through hours of auditions, and who wants to see 8 hours of depressing material? But in the case of a callback for a new play, the director specifically asked me to go darker, and so I did. It made me realize I CAN have a dark piece in my back pocket, and I'm excited to dive into some delicious drama.

I'd still go with Karen Kohlhaas' monologue guidance to start with a "Hello, this is me" monologue. But I'm also working on her 20 monologue challenge, which definitely lets me play in many realms!

So what does this have to do with baseball?

Gwyn from The Actors Market sent this email today, and it made me think of how important it is to stay in the game, especially because I love it!

"How to hit home runs: I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball...The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go. I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can." - Babe Ruth