Every Day I'm Hustling Page 9

  Mary became a divorce attorney, and re-created some of the aspects she liked working in a big firm. She works in a shared work space with a host of other entrepreneurs who can book conference rooms to meet clients. She also uses an inexpensive call service to answer her phones, so that no matter what, the client feels someone is working on their case. “There are things I miss about firm life,” she told me. “Like having support staff and not working so much on weekends. I’m always working now. But it’s work I love.”

  So let’s go over her pros: being her own boss, low overhead, no fee for certification—and don’t forget happiness.

  2. What makes you stick out?

  This is usually the thing that we initially think might be an obstacle, but turns out to be an asset. Growing up I thought it was my name, because it was so uncommon. Now, people say “Vivica,” and you know who they’re talking about. For Mary, it was that she was a woman in a law firm. She felt barred from the boys’ club. “Meetings had a funny way of continuing afterward at the urinals!” she said. “Then I’d hear, ‘Oh, Bob said I should…’”

  Now potential clients sometimes seek her out as a divorce attorney specifically because she is a woman. Some men want a woman to represent them in court as part of their strategy, and some women want to speak to someone they know understands them.

  Another way Mary sticks out is that she is a member of the LGBT community. With same-sex marriage comes same-sex divorce. She can genuinely market herself to that community and also feel good about being a real resource to them.

  3. Ask people what your strengths are.

  I know it’s hard, but just do it. I always tell the exceptional actors in my life, “You’re used to being you.” They do all these great things that no one else can do, and it’s become so ho-hum that people don’t mention it. It becomes so that even they lose sight of what makes them such assets to the work. This isn’t fishing for compliments from coworkers and friends. It’s figuring out what you’re actually good at and asking for examples of why they thought that. This list of strengths will reveal what you bring to the table, and give you a script for how you present yourself in an interview or with a potential client: “I’m a closer. Put me in a room and I can use my people skills to sell an idea.” “I have never missed a single deadline.” “I have a levity that can calm people down in high-pressure situations.”

  4. Make a vision board (and tack a to-do list next to it).

  Anytime you see someone or something that inspires you professionally, tear it out or print it up and put it on your vision board. This isn’t an afternoon activity with an excuse to buy magazines. This is an ongoing process of finding articles and images that speak to you as a worker bee.

  Next to that board, I need you to put a blank sheet of paper, and it cannot stay blank for long. That is where you will list the concrete, positive steps you are doing to get to what’s on that vision board. This has to be an everyday ritual. It’s paying off a bill. It’s contacting one of those people on your vision board and asking to shadow them or just talk on the phone. This is about doing the work, so make sure you’re doing something you love.

  *   *   *

  Since I’m asking you to think about what your dreams are, I need to tell you why acting is my dream job.

  Last night I was in a stage play, and it reminded me why I love what I do. It was at Philadelphia’s Merriam Theater. Built nearly one hundred years ago, this stage has hosted greats like Sammy Davis Jr., Katharine Hepburn, and Helen Hayes. They took the same breath I did before walking out, and maybe had the same butterflies I did. Yes, I still get butterflies—from acting and from certain men.

  And there was the audience, ready to give me that immediate feedback of love. The butterflies go, and you get a warm feeling in the pit of your stomach. It really is that cliché of surprise every time. They like me. They really, really like me. But you gotta do the work. You gotta earn the applause. It’s not just given. So hold for applause, and then deliver.

  Last night was in front of a mostly black audience, and they are the best. ’Cause they let you know whether the show is working or whether it’s not. Black audiences are part of the show, let me tell you. “Oh, child!” someone says. “Yes, get that bitch! Don’t let that bitch in.”

  There was one girl last night in the front row who really stood out. I thought she was gonna climb up there to join me. During this big confrontation scene between me and the ex-wife of the lead, this pretty girl yelled, “Tell her, Vivica! Tell her ass. Oh, I can’t with her. No, she ain’t up there talking to my girl.”

  When things like that happen, it takes all of my training to stay in character and not give her a smile. Or just flub my line.

  Forgetting your line is every actor’s nightmare, but it happens to everyone. That’s when you depend on your costar. There were a couple of times last night where I knew we messed up, but you can’t let it derail you. It’s like troubleshooting any problem in business. Keep calm, and carry on. If you kind of mess up a line, then just bring it back.

  One trick that I pass on to the actors I do stage plays with is that the audience is not sitting there with the script, reading along. This is something I actually learned on Dancing with the Stars, of all places. I kept worrying about messing up a sequence of moves.

  “They don’t know the choreography,” my dance partner and teacher, Nick Kosovich, told me. “They will only know you messed up if you tell them. So don’t tell them.” Don’t point out the slips that only you know you made.

  Doing a play is completely different from doing a film or TV show. With those there is so much waiting. You are in and out of character, constantly being stopped for touch-ups or lighting tweaks. You listen to direction and get a few tries. You do it and it’s done, there on film forever. On the plus side, so many people see it and can discover it years and years later.

  With a stage play it’s kind of like being pregnant. You’re molding this story, and opening night you give birth and hope the kid turns out to be a good kid. You gotta get in there and do the work and plant the seed and make sure that the lines work and that things are funny. I worry about wardrobe, makeup, lighting—the things that I normally don’t have to worry about when I do TV. There my job is to learn my lines and, well, act. The set is for somebody else to do, but I still pay attention so I know what works.

  Whether or not I’m a producer on the play, I’m such a stickler for detail. When I am in a new theater, I make a point to go out into different parts of the audience to sit and see what they see. I need to know that everyone can see my movement, and how to hold my face so my reactions can be seen. Because there’s no Bill the camera guy swooping in to get that shot. It has to be right there for the person who put down money to watch me act.

  The tweaking doesn’t stop. Last night we went long, which I had a feeling would happen. So we’ll fix that. When you’re actually onstage and it’s real, you also start to clock stuff in the middle of things. Last night on my way out of a scene, I saw that somebody forgot to take the little price tag off the lamp. So you know I’m gonna go and get that today!

  I travel with stage plays, so it’s kind of like an old-fashioned theater troupe hitting town. That’s different from when you do location work for a film. Then it’s like sleepaway camp. There’s tons more people and the stars are all kind of forced to hang out together. When I starred as Lysterine in the critically acclaimed Booty Call, I worked with the incredible Jamie Foxx. Back then, I knew he was so funny, but oh man, it was hard to be his dressing room neighbor for a few weeks. He had a piano in there, and he would just play it all the time, singing his pretty heart out! One time I was trying to take a nap between scenes, and I went out and screamed at him to stop playing the damn piano, not knowing that in less than ten years he would be getting an Oscar for doing that and so much more in Ray.

  Getting to work with such talented people is amazing, but travel is also a major aspect to this being my dream job. I feel
so blessed to go to these places that Angie from Indianapolis didn’t even know existed. Doing Boat Trip with Cuba Gooding Jr. brought me to Santorini, Cologne, Israel, Egypt … It was just amazing. I did an action comedy with Eddie Griffin that you might have missed called Blast. It’s the reason I got to go to South Africa for the first time. I distinctly remember looking out at Table Mountain in Cape Town and saying out loud to no one, “Oh my God, I love my life.”

  (Have I picked a film because of the location? Oh, hell yeah.)

  So just as Mary listed her pros, I recognize that acting and producing channels all my gifts and loves. I like being on a team and collaborating as we tell stories I care about. I choose projects that reinforce and extend my personal brand. My OCD tendencies inform my work ethic, or my work ethic is informed by my OCD—it’s a chicken-or-egg thing. And I get to pick up and leave, play someone else in some of the most magical places in the world.

  *   *   *

  It’s not enough to decide what you love. Start today on making your dream job happen, not tomorrow.

  I recently hosted a baby shower for one of my girlfriends in L.A. I love these kind of events, because it’s a time for me to catch up with a lot of my friends all at once. There was this lady, and she just kind of kept looking at me. She was a white woman with brown hair and blond highlights, probably about thirty-five. Finally, I went over and introduced myself.

  “I’m so happy to meet you,” she said, in this sweet Southern accent. “I wonder if I could get some advice from you.”

  We sat down and talked. Her name was Colleen, and she told me she had recently moved here from Tennessee. She’d been in pharmaceutical sales and one day decided she wasn’t happy. “I stopped my job,” she said. “I went back to school and I got my MFA. I studied drama and theater.”

  “Wow,” I said. “It is so important that you studied. I always tell people, you have to be able to do drama, comedy, and musicals. You need to be able to fit in all three.”

  “I know it could be a little bit late for me,” Colleen said, “but I want to be in a movie. Even if I was just an extra, I would be so happy. I want to do what you’re doing.”

  I guess she wanted me to say, “Sure, come to the set next week!” I looked her right in the eye. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” I said. “Don’t say ‘just an extra,’ because that is education. That will get you on a set, and you can see what actors really do. The work isn’t just what’s on-screen.”

  Because people just get to see the final version. You don’t know that we actors stand on our feet for twelve hours a day. We get hustled through wardrobe changes before we lose the light. We have to learn so many lines and hit our marks and look good. Be ready to do a flip and a dip and a hair toss. Most people really don’t understand what it is we do.

  I asked Colleen what she was doing to make things happen. She said she just got here.

  “Well, you can’t stand by the pool,” I told her. “You have to get in.” She’s standing there, wondering if it will be cold, fantasizing that it will be warm. She had a head shot, but it was only her seeing it. She needed to get it in front of people. I told her the first thing she needed to do was go to a casting agency. This girl needed to get on a set, fast. She was so worried about starting late that she wasn’t starting. Once she’s on a set, that is free education. She might see all that work that film actresses do and say, “Hmm.” And maybe she will be on a set, being tended to by a third assistant director who’s checking the extras’ costumes and continuity, and say, “Hey, that’s kind of cool.” That could be the start of being in charge on a set.

  If you want it, you get there. I think of Lupita Nyong’o, the Oscar-winning, Tony-winning fabulous actress. She jumped in that pool when she was visiting family in Nairobi for summer vacation in 2004. She saw a film crew in town and found out they were filming The Constant Gardener. “I said, ‘I will work for free,’” she recalled saying. “I just had to be on the set.” She expressed her ability to help with language barriers. Boom: Hired as a production assistant. On the set. And then she could watch Ralph Fiennes do his thing and ask him questions about his work. One day he asked her what she wanted to do with her life, and she timidly told him she was interested in becoming an actor. “He sighed and said, ‘If there’s something else that you want to do, do that. Only act if you feel you can’t live without it.’ It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was the thing I needed to hear.” That quote is from a 2014 New York magazine article called “Lupita Nyong’o, From Unknown to ‘It’ Girl in Less Than a Year.” Less than a year? Not really. She started that ascent nearly ten years before, when she got herself on that first set. And, it must be said, The Constant Gardener was not her last production assistant job. You have to put in the work.

  I so appreciate that Colleen put time into studying, but I always tell people to educate themselves with real experience. I meet people all the time who say, “I’m going to be the next Viola Davis,” or even, “I’m going to be the next Vivica Fox.” Not knowing that it took twenty years of work to be Vivica Fox. Or that the amazingly talented Viola Davis got herself to Juilliard and she still wasn’t handed a career. She has a two-second scene in her first movie, The Substance of Fire, playing a character called “Nurse.” She hands someone a vial, but it got her a SAG card. You might think they handed her Doubt, knowing she would be brilliant. No. Everyone wanted that role. After auditioning in L.A, she and six other black actresses were brought to a New York soundstage for one day to do a screen test. Each had to go through full hair, makeup, and wardrobe to do a final audition on camera with the crew, director, and producers. She won that role because of her determination and all the small roles she learned from along the way. Her career of excellence didn’t happen overnight. You know from this book that it didn’t happen overnight for me. Little jobs can lead to big jobs. I had to get through being green at my first auditions and nervous on my first set, and so does anyone who wants to make it.

  Or I’ll be on location somewhere in a place that might as well be Timbuktu and a girl will tell me, “I want to be an actress.” Then what are you doing in Timbuktu? You have to go where the jobs are if you want to be a working actress. And if you just want to act, then find a regional theater and start doing. I commended Colleen for getting herself to where the action is. Now she just had to be flexible in order to get in the door.

  This is true of all professions, not just acting. I have a friend named Doneya who proves it. I met him a few years back when he was the wardrobe assistant on a movie I did for Hallmark. He had a calmness to him, and there’s an intimacy to working so closely with an actress, whether it’s in wardrobe or makeup. I believe energy is transferable, and if I am about to do a scene, I need someone who isn’t bringing bad energy to the job.

  Doneya went home to Arizona, and I gave him my email and told him to stay in touch. We talked here and there, and when he was in L.A., we would meet up for lunch sometimes. He was open that he was still figuring out his life and he wondered if he really liked Arizona anymore. “I’m thinking about moving to London or New York.”

  “Okay, hit me when you get there,” I said. Because I wasn’t going to finance it. People always want to tell me their dreams and get around to asking me to finance it. Not Doneya.

  “I moved to New York!” he wrote a few weeks later. He was staying with a friend and still looking for work as a wardrobe stylist for productions. I told him to keep me posted and let me know he was okay.

  Usually when I go to New York, I am in and out for work, but when I realized I was going to be in New York for a few days, I told Doneya I wanted to see him. He wrote back in all caps: “I GOT A NEW JOB!” It was at the Madame Tussauds wax museum. “I love it so much,” he said. “Can you please come by?”

  Of course I could. We met up for lunch before he gave me a tour, and it was the happiest I’ve ever seen him. He told me what he’d been through in New York.

  “Vivica, I was putting in my
résumés everywhere,” he told me, “and hearing nothing. I was living off a dollar a day. I would get apples and make a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread last forever.”

  If there was a soup kitchen he could go to, he would. Doneya walked everywhere, never wasting any money on subways, let alone cabs.

  “I was down to my last eight cents,” he said. He pulled out his phone and showed me a picture he had taken of his bank balance.

  “I don’t need proof, Doneya,” I said. “I believe you, honey.”

  “No, Vivica, that photo is for me,” he said. “I need to look at that so I remember. The night I took that, I said to myself, ‘I don’t know where tomorrow’s gonna lead me.’”

  Tomorrow didn’t have the answer. Nobody called and gave him a job that day. It doesn’t work that way. What he did do was apply to Madame Tussauds, asking if they needed someone to help with wardrobe. He was so excited when they asked him to come in.

  When he got there, they said they actually wanted a new makeup artist for the figures. Record scratch, but he was honest. “I don’t know how to do makeup,” he said. “I do wardrobe, but if you train me, I’ll do it.”

  They liked him—to meet Doneya is to like him—but they just said they would keep him in mind if they needed a wardrobe person.

  “Two days later, they called and said their makeup artist quit,” he said. “Would I come in and be trained to do the makeup?”

  “Hell yeah,” I said, grabbing his hand across the table to give it a squeeze.

  “Hell yeah,” he said. “I got so good at that that I got to do the makeup, hair, and wardrobe.”

  “Triple threat,” I said. “Now you’re talking!”

  They are so impressed with his work that they are going to fly him to London, and they asked him to assist with the opening of their new museum in Nashville.

  “I now have my own place,” he said. “I’ve got benefits. And this is the next chapter.”

  It’s perfect, and it wasn’t the obvious choice. He expanded his reach beyond what he was comfortable with. He moved past the uncertainty of photo shoots and film sets. He has steady work with all these wax celebrities. He gets to style them and change their looks every once in a while. “It’s so creative for me,” he told me, and sometimes he gets to meet the actual celebrities. “They’ll come in for the openings and I can say, ‘Hey, I styled you. I did your makeup and your hair.’”