BEFORE THE MONTH ENDS

I wish I were a disciplined blogger but my blog started out chatting of nothing so I could just learn the interface of Blogger then I began chatting of the things I like to do creatively since that made sense to me.  Who would want to hear about my humdrum hourly wage life? So I wrote mostly about my arting and crafting.  Then my muse left town (hopefully temporarily) and now I am WRITING more and crafting only rarely until the creative muse comes back. In my head I want to make things but my hands seem to be unwilling.  So, I type.  I write.  I HAVE to do something that has nothing to do with what I do when I clock in and serve my 40 hours a week or I will simply lay down and die. Not that I hate the day job.  I don't.  It is semi-creative and I often have a very good time during those 40 hours.  I just know it is NOT my BLISS.  I think many can relate to that.  I have to pay the rent, ya know?

At the beginning of the week I was blessed to spend some time chatting with a friend I had not seen in months after a "day job" related meeting and she tells me to do just ONE THING creative each day even if it is just e-mailing a Craig's List job opportunity to myself or watching a film or even just writing a blog post.  So, here I am tonight struggling along with a post wishing for more discipline.

I had the day off today from the day job and did much of nothing due to battling a terrible sinus infection all week brought on by some insane allergies as Spring breaks and the Santa Ana winds kick up here in Los Angeles.  But I did sit on the couch with laptop in hand as well as one movie after another playing on my TV.  I discovered the wonderful world of "On Demand" and have been demanding one film after another absorbing as much as I can about the art of FILM.  I never studied it.  Just sat back & enjoyed or hated it.  Now I watch and take notice of absolutely everything.  Everything from the acting, the writing, plot devices, who cast it, who produced it to how much it might have cost to shoot the thing.  Cinema is simply MAGICAL to me.  It's like a 2 hour long painting, depending on the film.  Paint strokes that spark the imagination or feelings in me that make me FEEL, THINK and REMEMBER....

If not for cinema, my life would be a big fat void, I think.  I live vicariously through it.  I have fallen in love over and over again, died a thousand deaths, laughed a million laughs....I simply get inspired by it.  Moved to do things I never thought I could do.  It has kept me company when I had no one.  It is art, life and so much more.

I will shut my trap for now and hope to write just a bit more tomorrow and that, my friends, will be a miracle if I do.  Wish me luck.

BLIND FAITH

A song by Blind Faith came to mind after returning to LA from a recent trip to Texas.

Can't Find My Way Home lyrics
written by: Steve Winwood

Come down off your throne and leave your body alone
somebody must change
You are the reason I've been waiting so long
somebody holds the key
Well, I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home

Come down on your own and leave your body alone
somebody must change
You are the reason I've been waiting all these years
somebody holds the key
Well, I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home



Many folk close to me know that I am working on writing something that takes me back in time to pretty much when I began in this big bad world. I thought that I had to be in Texas to write it. And maybe I do. It would make some of the research easier to be able to sit with my brother who has very clear memories of events I was witness to only a small portion of. He has a sharp memory for names, places and tiny details of so much. He amazes me in that respect. I have strong sensory memories. I remember the way the sun was setting or the smell of the yard's fresh cut grass or the smell & color of the light mint green paint that was slapped across my brother's face to get him to quit running in and out of a door that was being painted...that's a funny memory for me by the by. Maybe not so much for him.

I aimed for my story to be a funny one...dark comedy at best based on the dramatic nature of some of the events. Striving for the funny in the story got me stymied. A very good friend had some sage advice for me a few evenings ago, "Your most honest writing may not be amusing. Doesn't mean there isn't a place for it, not an audience. Write one true sentence after another, and see where it goes." Then today as I sit on the couch with my laptop mustering up enough courage to use some new writing software and to write the first "true sentence", the film Antwone Fisher is playing on AMC in the background down low. Usually I have music on Pandora playing but not today for whatever reason. My ears perk up when the character of Antwone Fisher reads a poem aloud to his psychiatrist played by Denzel Washington. The poem jerked a tear or two from me and then afterward Antwone says, "I told you I was good" and then Denzel replies, "You are good because you are honest." I put the laptop aside and watched the rest of the film and was very moved by this young man's story and his courage to not only live it but to share it with the world first as a book and then as a screenplay.

It is hard to "go home" and sometimes it is hard to find one's way there but I am putting on some sturdy hiking gear and am ready to make the trip. I also have a hunch that I just might find some funny in all of the dark caves I am about to explore.

STEPPING BACKWARD TO MOVE FORWARD

I moved to LA almost 15 years ago. I met a young man in late 1994 doing a play in Dallas, Texas (where I was born and raised & had never left except for the occasional trip to a bordering state or country) titled Liebesreigen where he played a low-rent call boy and me a prostitute. I’d say “typecasting” just to get a laugh out of those who really know us…it really wasn’t at all. However, it was fun and even a bit of a stretch as an actor. We became good friends having coffee after rehearsals, and chatting late into the night. I was seeing someone else at time which would come to an end well before Easter of 1995. In that time, we became very good friends and come June, he was holding my hand or me his…I really don’t remember but what I do remember is that he said to me, “You realize you are holding hands with someone who is moving to LA?” Such was my life. I had a major tendency to get involved with men that were unavailable or would be shortly…it seemed like every fella I made my heart vulnerable to was moving this way or that way or on their way out of the closet….but never moving to LA. LA was a city on my list of possible destinations now that I was beginning to take this acting thing seriously. At this hand-holding juncture, my dream was to go to Chicago. I had visited a friend who lived there the year before and fell absolutely in love with the city and knew that Second City was going to be my new hang out. This would be the first time I got exposed to the idea that I might actually have at least ONE funny bone in my body and it may not be located near my elbow. Chicago would have to wait…and it still is.

A few months later, over coffee at some way-too-hip-for-me coffee joint on Lower Greenville, he popped the question or it was more of a statement really. “Move to LA with me.” Ok, that had never happened. In the past, the guy just left on his jet plane, one or the both of us blubbering about how we would miss the other and would write & blah blah blah. Ya know the sad story and we all know it ends right there. Well, not this time. I had to seriously consider it not ending and it going on. EGAD! Going all the way to LA and with a fella. Holy Moses! He was very convincing because any rebuttal of what a bad idea it would be for me, he knocked down and won the argument. He was right. I had done a little bit of everything in Dallas acting wise and had experienced a little of all it had to offer, why not take the next step. “Kelley, you can pay those credit card bills from LA just as easy from a mail box in Dallas.” OK OK…ya had me at, “Move to LA with me.” Well, not really. But he convinced me and the ball began to roll.

This young man made it very easy to move out there with him. He took care of all the logistics of U-Haul’s, plane tickets and we worked as a team to find a place to live once we got there. Notices were put in where they needed to be put in and a new life in LA began. It truly was an adventure. I will skip from here to the present…..for now…

The present…we are no longer together but yes, good friends, since that is how we started out to begin with thus it will be. After 2 years of living on my own here in LA and 2 years of genuine soul searching, I have come to realize a sense of HOME is more important than being in some one-horse town.

It has become clear to me here years later that despite standing in line behind Eddie Izzard for the bathroom at my local Starbuck’s or making friends with the likes of actress, Mimi Kennedy , chatting it up with Beck about PDA’s at a movie premiere after-party, stepping out of a limo just after Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters stepped out of his, having the paparazzi snap photos until they figured out I was an imposter or having a famous movie star hit on me (where the simple thought of walking down the red carpet with them being the nobody I felt like freaked me out so bad I simply blew him off…ha! No kidding! It happened!)…..I came to realize that LA is simply just another city. When I was nervous about moving to LA, I remember my father telling me, “Kelley, it’s just another city, just like Dallas. No reason to be scared.” He was very correct.

I aided in the production of a 10 minute short called CAT DEMON: RE-EXHUMED. Even had a part in it where I drop an F-bomb…wouldn’t my father be proud of me? The USA Film Fest in Dallas decided not only to screen it but to have the director, Laura Kightlinger come out and jury. They could not have asked a better person to jury as she is as smart and talented as they come and her taste is impeccable. So, off to Dallas we fly. I have visited Dallas several times over the years since leaving for LA but it was always for a wedding, the holidays or a funeral or 3. I could not wait to get back to LA each and every trip….well, not this time. So the young man that had tugged at my sleeve to join him LA who had now been back in Dallas for a year or so, showed me around the new and improved Dallas. I fell back in love with my home town. I knew the love was real the second my plane touched down in Burbank and I found my eyes filling up with tears on the cab ride home. I did not feel any connection to LA. I was breaking up with her……

I like LA. But it is not HOME….not right now anyway. Don’t know if it is because I am older and this place just moves too fast. I am completely uncertain of these feelings but it is time to “move backward to move forward”. Back a couple of years ago, my now ex-fella was so afraid to tell me that he was moving back to Texas because he said he felt it “was not a coup”. I choose the words “move backward to move forward” because I have witnessed a man who thought moving “back to Texas” was a let-down to me and those around him. He has since turned his life around. He has created a new life for himself in the political world and is doing a damn great job of it. He thought his dreams were in LA but really they were wherever he was as long as he was “on track”. I don’t think he was ever “on track” out here. I have had my moments of success out here and got some great opportunities, experiences and relationships I would not trade for but I became a workaholic who was always just a bit left of center…not “on track”. I wasn’t on MY TRACK, anyway. I was always pushing someone else down their track of stardom and success and I did a good job of it until I realized I was sitting there with no direction of my own.

It’s weird how there is a feeling of failure for those of us who come out here then decide to go back to where we came from. It’s a topic that has come up many a time with fellow Texan friends who I know out here and I think some stay out of spite as opposed to really wanting to be in LA. I watched folks come and go right and left from the moment I got here…they’d last a few months, maybe a year. We used to joke, “More parking spaces for us…more parts for us….more…whatever for us!” After 9/11, this city full of transplants emptied out as folks who’s dreams were still in limbo and the commitment to LA was not strong headed home to be close to those who were most important to them….FAMILY.

The feeling of moving back to Big D began to set in as I sat looking out the window of what was my grandmother’s home during a Texas summer thunder storm on May 3^rd 2009 when the Dallas Cowboy practice facility collapsed due to strong winds and weather…that’s my Texas. Everything was so green, fresh, real and chaotic. I felt a joy I had not felt in years. I had a talk with 2 very good actor friends of mine on that rainy day in Dallas who had lived in LA at one point or another. They made it clear to me that it is not failure to come back to Dallas. That it is a lateral move to a different place to do what I love. Why did I have to hear that, I don’t know. They were right.

I was my most creative self in Texas. I will be my MOST creative self yet again…and who knows, I might even schlep back to LA on occasion with all the creativity that I hope will pour out of me in Texas. I do know this crazy city of angels so very well.

So, I am stepping backward to move forward.