Day — 6: Project 1: Rock. Paper. Scissors.

My brother-in-law, Matthew Dubroff, is the man. He knows Tai Chi. He made and continues to make a big impression on me. There’s even a Facebook group his students have started; it explains to some degree why he is an inspiration. Anyhow, there’s a lot to learn from certain kinds of folk and he’s one of them. There are some things that people say that only become more resonant and full of sense as one lives and learns. This is the case with one of the statements Matt made to me about learning… I think he was quoting something but Google hasn’t surfaced it, so, here it is:

There’s dipping your toe in the water, there’s drinking a glass of water, and there’s swimming in the ocean.

Today, Codecademy decided it was time to drink a glass of coding water. Until now, it was just a dip of the figurative toe. So, this happened to me before where I thought I knew something and it turned out that that was seriously called into question later…

I had obtained some degree of proficiency as an actor by the time I had begun to study it for my master’s degree. After all, it was in 7th grade that I began to think of auditioning for LaGuardia High School. It’s what you did if you studied Drama with Ann Ratray. You did the school play, yes, but you also took up a monologue or five… And you worked on this for months until it was time to audition for the “Fame” high school in 8th grade.

Harvard admits about 5% of applicants. LaGuardia’s Drama department, last I heard, took about 1 in 60 when I applied. That’s around~1.6%.

This might be the first time in a young actor’s life that he or she should learn a lesson they’ll have to learn repeatedly: the odds are not as important as the fit.

Some things are just not a matter of numbers, they’re a matter of quality, they’re a matter of whether or not the peg fits the hole. I fit what the selection committee decided it needed. I’m convinced I was lucky. There were definitely some more talented actors than I was who auditioned — I’m certain of that. However, what there likely wasn’t were actors auditioning of my type who were necessarily appearing as more talented than me on the day that I auditioned for the archetype that the teachers might have been trying to fill for their ensemble. In summary, it doesn’t matter how many people audition for a role or a spot on a team. If they aren’t the right fit for it, they don’t get onto or into it. If they are, they might. You cannot control certain factors with regards to fit. All you can do is all that you can.

I had worked hard. I was admitted to LaGuardia. I worked hard there. I was admitted on a full merit scholarship to the CUNY Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College. I worked hard and was admitted on a full merit scholarship to a top-ten actor-training conservatory, the Asolo Rep/Florida State University.

What I found was that I thought that I was a seasoned long-distance swimmer. In some respects, yes, I had certain skills that had brought me a good deal of success that I had worked hard to hone. I had dipped my toe into the craft of acting when I was performing monologues. I had drunk many glasses of water throughout my scene studies, throughout the various productions I had performed in college, in student films, and off-off-Broadway. I had even done some laps, maybe I had even swum a few miles offshore in Oxford University when I did 6 plays in a schedule similar to a repertory theater as well as a summer at the Edinburgh Fringe.

The thing is, and this is what I had found with the Rock Paper Scissors x99 exercise with Codecademy, you can only prepare so much for activities that contain fundamental differences between them although they’re related. Yes, a monologue is related to the discipline of being an actor. Yes, scene study is too. However, there is an altogether different fortitude to doing theater work in repertory not just for a year but for years. I had the privilege of diving into deep waters and to working and living and breathing and loving theater year after year for my three years with the Asolo. That quantum leap between acting a monologue and living in a theater was akin to coding exercises and actually calling up terminal, accessing a file, and knowing how to begin a project. Sometimes with these things, there just aren’t instructions in this life.

I confess I was short on time. I had to watch the solution video to even just get started. I had thought that I’d know enough to be prepared but I just had to progress. I’m glad I tried to look through the documentation of Mocha and Chai to make sense of what I was being asked. However, I think I made the right choice and I don’t feel that I sabotaged my learning by “flipping to the back of the book.”

I now have a much better understanding of test-driven development and arrow functions. Looking back, I don’t think there was a reasonable way for a student in the position I was in to know that the first step was to npm install . I think that’s a little like an actor walking into a rehearsal room for a play and saying “I didn’t know I was supposed to work from the script.” But that’s where I’m at! I had done the npm install as part of project 0 but I thought that was because of the nature of project 0, not because of test-driven dev… ah, learning!