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Volunteering Will Make You A Better Actor

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By Marci Liroff

As an actor you are constantly striving to be better. You train consistently, audition, research and hone your craft. One often-neglected element of being a better actor is being a better human. One way of doing this is by volunteering your time.

You might say, “Marci, my day is booked from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep! How can I find the time?” Here’s my proposal – you must make the time.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a charity event for The Motion Picture and Television Fund. For those that aren’t familiar with “The Fund”, the MPTF has been helping Hollywood take care of its own for the last 90 years.

MPTF was created by Hollywood’s earliest entertainment luminaries such as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith, who realized the need for reaching out to those in the entertainment industry who fell upon hard times. It began with a simple coin box in Hollywood where entertainment industry workers would deposit spare change for fellow colleagues.

Can anyone be a volunteer at The Fund? You have to be in the industry and there are different background checks depending on how you want to be engaged as a volunteer. There is a gorgeous piece of land in Woodland Hills called “the campus” where people within the industry (i.e. actors, grips, storyboard artists) live with different levels of assistance. As a volunteer, depending on what skills you bring to the table, you can work on campus or in-home.

Imagine sitting with 102-year-old actor Connie Sawyer and hear stories about her experiences working on such films as “When Harry Met Sally” or “True Grit”.

“I loved working on Ray Donovan – my son was a hit man and I really got to cuss,” said Sawyer in a recent interview. I guarantee you will become a richer person for having met and talked to her along with all the others involved in the program.

Find something near and dear to your heart when you’re looking for a place to volunteer.

The Fund is just one example. As many of you know, I’m a big animal person. Years ago I trained my dog Savannah as a Certified Therapy Dog and we visited patients in hospitals. It was emotionally grueling and physically exhausting. But, to see the look on their faces when we arrived was the most rewarding volunteer work I’ve ever done. That my dog and I could change a person’s day – even for a minute – made a huge difference. It’s a win-win for both of us.

It made my heart break wide open, in the good way, and made me a better person.

When you are being of service you are not thinking about yourself and you are giving of yourself. When you simply apply this thought process to your auditions, you will be a better actor because it’s not all about you. You’ve taken the focus off of you, and onto the project. You are there to serve your character, the words, and the craft.

Make sure to check out my new online course “How To Audition For Film and Television: Audition Bootcamp”. You can view it on your laptop or your mobile device and your subscription gives you lifetime viewing privileges for this course. I’ll be adding lectures throughout the year.

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A Quiet Night Watching the Tonys – or so I thought….!

By Marci Liroff
I was so excited last night to just park myself on the couch with a big bowl of pasta, a martini, and my iPad to watch this year’s Tony Awards. Yeah, I’ve become that person. I can’t just watch a TV show…I have to be connected to the net simultaneously.
Gosh I just love Neil Patrick Harris. I think he should host everything from now on! He’s so funny, loose, perfectly self-deprecating….and he sings! I was looking forward to catching up on all the plays I didn’t get to see in person because of a busy pilot season. A good casting director is always doing her homework!
Just as I start to get into the show I see a status update on Facebook from a friend saying that her dog is missing. My coaching client’s mother’s dog has gone missing in Texas. Yeah, a small French Bulldog in the heat of Texas in the Summer. Not good.  So what do I do? I take to the Twitter. I start tweeting the crap out of this to everyone I know and asking them to RT (re-tweet) my tweet. I know that I have about 7800 followers, but if I could get them to RT this tweet to all of their followers….well, you get the picture. We could get the word out instantly to TONS of people.
I have become a huge fan (read “addict”) of social media in the last few years. I used to think it was just people tweeting about what they ate today or where they are (I still hate Foursquare – why do I need to know where you’ve “checked into” at any given moment of the day?!). I’ve come to realize it’s SO much more. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogging) brings us that much closer to each other. It’s not about “me, me, me” in this world anymore. It’s about you and me and how we can help each other. I love how a very large community of strangers becomes a small community of friends, helping each other.
By the end of the evening, I had gotten so many people to re-tweet my original tweet about the lost dog. They included people who had only 12 followers (thank you), to people who have 32,360 followers – thank you Lacey Chabert! I was so touched that a big corporation like Back Stage Magazine with 21,535 followers who was very busy tweeting about the Tonys (remember…I was still parked on the couch trying to watch the Tonys) would break away from their job and tweet about a lost dog. Amazing support.  By the end of the night, my tweet had been seen by over 100,000 people worldwide! By morning, the dog had been found. Seems that my friend’s family in Texas plastered the city with homemade posters and the dog was found….only a few houses away. Phew! Moral of the story? Yay for social media and yay for good old-fashioned craftiness. One more thing?Please microchip your dogs! Even if they’re an “inside” dog and you think they never want to go outside and leave your side – there’s always a chance that your gardener will leave the gate open or they will somehow get out – and it’s usually without their collar on! Hell, I’d microchip kids if I could!!
You might think this was enough for one night, right? I could get back to watching the Tonys and see scenes from the play Once which I really wanted to see in person. But no, that would be too easy.
The emails started coming in around 8:52 PM PST with the heading “IMPASSE EMERGENCY!”
Stay tuned to Part 2 wherein I manage to cast the lead of my friend’s short film….from my bed!
Glad you’re here – Marci