Work is what you do for others, art is what you do for yourself

Day 7

It's officially been a week since I started this blog. I've been good so far, so here's hoping it will continue!

This one will be a short blog because I'm super tired and have work in the morning. Which brings me to my topic: work and theatre. I only recently have found how difficult it is to juggle theatre and pretty much everything else. My parents thankfully knew how difficult it was to juggle work and school, so they let me not work so I could focus on school. This year I decided to keep my summer job because money is hard to come by, especially when living off-campus. And now I have the extra job of juggling classes along with homework, a job, and theatre. There were some days last semester when I would go to school at 8am and not go home until 11pm. It's stressful!

Don't get me wrong, I love being busy. If I wasn't this busy I'd go crazy. But if you get involved with theatre, you have to learn how to juggle two or three more balls in your life. Theatre is a second job, there's no about about it. The number of hours you put into it every day, plus the extra hours outside of rehearsals, and technicals that last all night...can you imagine if we actually got paid for all that??? Or, if you get to be a professional actor and actually got paid for that, to get a pay scale that represents the amount of work you put into it? It's crazy.

I just recently was in a play where I actually got paid to act. Mind you, it wasn't much at all, but the fact that I actually got money for it brought a whole new dimension to the whole acting thing. I've only done it for free, and only for myself to get better. Now to add the whole money thing to it...it makes me want to do it as a job. I wish I could do it as an actual job. That's my goal in life. I don't have to be famous, I just want to be able to act professionally, as a job, for the rest of my life and not have to do anything else for money. We'll see if that happens!