Lucky Stars Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sledgehammer Stacey. I was determined to prove that Jack Rawlins’s negative assessment of me was merely an example of his snotty, mean-spirited personality, with no basis in reality whatsoever, and that I was, in fact, an actress with range and nuance and, damn it, subtlety.
    But just in case he was a teensy-weensy bit accurate in that I did have a slight tendency to go for too much in front of the camera (The New York Times had called me “grating”), I decided to take a few brush-up acting classes. Why not, I figured, given that I had time on my hands while I waited for Mickey to send me out on auditions. It wouldn’t hurt to perfect my craft, would it?
    I enrolled in a class given by a rather well-known teacher named Gerald Clarke. I’d heard about him for years, heard how actors swore by his supposedly radical approach to teaching.
    Well, I found out just how radical on my very first night in his Santa Monica studio.
    “Let me begin by stating right at the top that this class is not going to be about nurturing you or making you feel safe or reassuring you that you have talent,” Gerald said to the twenty of us who had gathered precisely to be nurtured and made to feel safe and reassured that we had talent. He was standing up on a small stage and he was wearing a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck. He was in his early fifties, I guessed, with a receding hairline, a protruding gut, and a complexion that bespoke teenage acne. “This is a class for actors who want to be better actors, actors who understand that in order to be better actors they must be stripped down, forced to confront their vulnerabilities, forced to confront the personal conflicts in their lives that prevent them from losing themselves in a character. In this class you’ll learn that you don’t play a character, you become the character, which necessitates—no, demands —that you be stripped down to nothing. Nothing! Does everyone hear me?”
    “Is this guy a drill sergeant or an acting teacher?” I whispered to the woman next to me, who, I realized with some dismay, was the vixen I’d been running into at auditions, the one who annoyed everyone with her bullshit gamesmanship and gigantic hooters. We had to stop meeting like this.
    “He just wants us to get in touch with our issues,” she whispered back. “If you don’t think you can handle it, honey, maybe you should sneak out the side door.”
    “I can handle it fine,” I said. “If anyone should sneak out—”
    “You. The one who refuses to keep her mouth shut while I’m talking.” It was Gerald Clarke and he was pointing at me, shooting daggers at me, making me the focus of every eye in the room. “Step on up here and let’s see what you’ve got.”
    “Me?” Nothing came out but a croak. “You want me?” I tried again.
    “Why not?” he said. “Since you seem to be the chatty type, let’s have you chat us all up. What’s your name?” Sledgehammer Stacey. “Stacey Reiser,” I said with false bravado.
    “All right, Stacey Reiser,” he said, “let’s have you come up here and blow us away. I’d like you to do an improv of approximately three minutes. Here’s the premise: You’re a customer in a department store, browsing at the perfume counter, and an attractive man sidles up to you, asking for your help. He claims he’s there to buy some perfume for his wife, but the more he talks the more it’s clear that he’s there to score with you. Go.” Go. Yeah. Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t done improvs before. They were a staple of acting classes. I just hadn’t done one after being decimated by Jack Rawlins, so my confidence level wasn’t particularly high.
    I inhaled, exhaled, took a moment to collect myself, then arranged my body as if I were standing beside a department store perfume counter.
    “Oh,” I said, spinning around to indicate that I’d just been tapped on the shoulder by the phantom man. “So it’s your wife’s birthday? Well, I’m