(Hint)

If you have HBO, you should watch it tomorrow. Specifically Big Love. More specifically the wake. You may see a little someone, someone...

Ack!

The worst thing about multiple and flexible jobs is double booking yourself. Man, I am just so not a fan of making promises I can't keep. If I say I'm going to be somewhere, I need to be there. I guess this is part of the job, schedule juggling and the like, but like I said: Not. A. Fan. I don't know why when it rains it pours, but that certainly always seems to be the case. Then you have to quantify, consider priorities, decide who you have the greatest room to screw. Jeez, so not a screwer...
Anyway, booked with catering, extra job, and two auditions all in the same day. Why? Because I need a friggin' secretary, that's why. Stop asking sarcastic questions. Now I'm trying to worm my way out of one with the least amount of damage as possible.
Plus, cracked out on some kind of heroin-laced, super coffee not of this world, which is proving itself unhelpful in maintaining the mental faculties required for this sort of maneuvering. I wish there were three of me, and that none of them had drank that coffee.

Another magical day in the land of Los Angeles.

I met L at a party a few weeks ago. L is an established actor in his forties. The type of actor who, if I told you his name, you wouldn't know him, but if I told you what he'd been in, you'd say, "Oh, yeah. That guy."
L and I met for coffee yesterday so I could pick his brain about how to get my foot in the door. Just keep doing what I'm doing, was his basic advice. But L is also opening up a management company with another guy. He says they would be willing to audition me, and that I should get together a stack of head shots and resumes and drop them off with him when next I happen to find myself in Hollywood so he can distribute them to some of his contacts. "I like you," he told me, "and I'll help you any way I can." Always a nice thing to hear for someone in my position.

Afterward, while pulling out of a parking lot, a man crossed in front of my car on the sidewalk. He smiled at me and I reciprocated. This was an in, apparently, and he proceeded to come over to my window and insist that he was a swami (he pulled out a row of beads from under his shirt) and asked me if he could tell me my fortune, free of charge. I reluctantly agreed and, mace in hand, parked my car and sat on the sidewalk with him. He told me I'd been working for the past few years very hard, but with little results. He said this would change, that 2009 was the year in which I would make a breakthrough; I would be lucky. He then asked for money for the poor (free of charge). I had a dollar, so I gave it to him. He asked for more money for the poor. I showed him that that was all the money I had in my wallet, to which he graciously offered to escort me to an ATM machine.
I rudely declined. He told me that an ex-boyfriend had taken sexual advantage of me and put "bad voodoo" in my food. He offered to show me the bad voodoo. I told him I had to get to a meeting, so he pulled a "lucky stone" from his pocket, blew on it, and gave it to me. We shook hands and went our merry ways.

Later, I signed up with a group called The Actor's Network, or TAN for short. They are a group recommended to me by another actor I know, and supposedly they teach you how to be aggressive in the business part of the industry. How to market yourself, network, all the crap I'm really bad at. They have a little office in Studio City and don't promote themselves at all, started and currently still run by a working actor (who was on the X-Files, yay!). Their business is entirely based on word of mouth, which makes me a little less weary. Anywho, I'm giving them a shot.

I went to the gym, gymed until I felt the burn, and passed out at home. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The MFing SAG Awards!

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but Meryl Streep is a total cockblock. Here's the thing, Amy Adams graduated from the high school where my mother now works. Her former drama teacher sends out updates on her career to everyone in the district. We've been following her for years. I promised my mother if I ever saw Amy Adams that I would tell her all of this and let her know how proud everyone is of her. Well...I saw her. I saw her a lot. And she is beautiful. And I have a total girl crush on her. But first Alec Baldwin and then Meryl Streep just would not get away from her so I could talk to her or even slip her the note I absolutely did not write.
Fucking Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin.

She's nominated for an Academy Award, so that will be my next chance. If I have to elbow Streep in the face to get to her, I will do it.

Anyway...awesome! Totally awesome! I saw more stars then I can count on two hands, and I just couldn't seem to get away from the guy who plays Taub on House. Every time I turned around, there was Taub, in my face, trying to give me medical advice. Get over it dude, it's just a show.
One actor, who I will refer to as ? for the sake of discretion, was at one table as I was trying to get a dessert plate to the table next to him. The conversation went like this:

?: "Oh, desserts!"
Me: "I'm trying to get to table 14."
?: "Fuck table 14." ::Starts eating off my plate with his buddy::
Me: "Dude, come on..."
?: ::Waving his SAG Award in my face:: "See this! I won this, so I get to eat this." ::Waves donut in the air and then bites into it. It squirts on his sleeve:: "Oh, look what it did."
Me: ::Pointing:: "Haha! That's karma."

I found table 14. Then I felt bad and brought him his own dessert plate and said, a little sarcastically, "Congratulations on your award." He, both jokingly and petulantly, responded, "Now I'm not hungry." So I plopped it down on the table in front of him, said, "Fine. Someone else will eat it," and sauntered away. It was kind of a rockin' moment.

One thing I did learn is that I will never be famous. This is because if I only ate cabbage for the rest of my life and ran on the treadmill 23 hours a day and had 2.5 billion dollars worth of plastic surgery, I will still never be as skinny as 80% of the women there. I'm not going to lie, it's a weird phenomenon.

Stargazing.

To help make ends meat here in LA, I work part time as a cater waiter. This job, like any job, has its perks and drawbacks. Tonight, however, is one of those times where I would happily work for free because tonight, dear reader (whomever you may be), I get to go to the SAG awards. I will be in the same room with Meryl Streep, Josh Brolin, Sean Penn, Kate Winslet, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and tons of other awesomeness. Now, whether this proximity will lead to auditory communication one can never tell, but regardless...well, that's all I got. I'm stoaked.

Time to prepare...

Expansion.

I am the only daughter of a pilot from Kokomo, Indiana and a nurse from Denver, Colorado. The first thing you should know about me, if your going to know anything, is that I have the greatest parents imaginable. Middle class, only child, abundant love. Unwavering support, no matter how outlandish my ideas about life. They would sell the clothes off their back to help me follow my dreams. This, however, doesn't mean that I get blindly spoiled. They don't hesitate to point out inconsistencies in my game plans, or snap me back into hard work mode when I fall into lazy, hopeless mode. They make me work for what I want, and then they fill in the gaps when I can't do it on my own. I owe them everything, even though they insist that I owe them nothing.

So, that out of the way, I grew up in Elizabeth, Colorado. A little town no one has ever heard of, populated by more cows than people. I went to the University of Northern Colorado for my first year of college and then transfered to the University of Hawai'i at Manoa to finish out my BA in Theatre. I then moved back to Colorado for one year, the worst year of my life thus far, in which I couldn't manage to keep a job because of the economy and, when I did, it was under abusive management who walked the line of illegality on their treatment of employees because they knew we couldn't afford to quit. My parents watched me be miserable and go from restaurant to restaurant as they shut down, falling like dominoes. Finally, after a particularly bad encounter, they offered me the money to move to LA and pursue my acting career under the conditions that 1) I never hide it from them if I am in financial trouble and 2) that I give it all I have, and not give up unless I am sure I won't regret it.

And that's what I did. At the end of July, 2008 the three of us drove my car from Colorado to California, we all had emotional breakdowns, and then my parents flew home. I was alone in one of the biggest cities in the world with no idea what I was doing. To be honest, I still don't know what I am doing. I got a job, met some friends, got another job, quit my first job, made more friends, and now I am working as a cater waiter and doing extra work on movies and TV shows. My full-time job is finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Right now I'm just doing laundry.

Welcome, welcome...

...to the start of a blog, a career, a life. My name is Mary Dena Shirley and this is my written account of my actions and the actions of those around me as I try to make it in the big ol' city of Los Angeles, California as an actor. It's also a way for those interested to keep up with whatever I may be up to (professionally speaking, although I'm no good at keeping my personal life out of anything, so I'm sure it'll seep through the cracks).

At the moment it's far too late for me to write anything of merit, but tomorrow I shall provide my foundational structure and outline the progress I've made in the six months since moving here. After that, well, sky's the limit, so they say. And They're always right, right? Of course They are.