Boston

Day Four Hundred Thirteen

April 30, 2021 at 10:27 am by Claudia

I glanced behind me while sitting on the Funky Patio and saw something white. Investigating further, I realized it was a daffodil! A little miracle that popped out of the gravel by the porch. I’m so glad I didn’t yank it, thinking it was a weed.

These little wonders are everything.

Wind. It woke me up last night. It’s going on all day today. I moved all my pots to areas on the porch that, hopefully, will shelter them a bit. In the meantime, I’ll try not to scream too much.

________________________

Back to the story of my career:

A dusty framed photo of yours truly in my office at Boston University. The longtime faculty of the School of the Arts had the offices with windows. Mine was windowless. Nevertheless, I loved it. A wonderful voice teacher from the School of Music had the office directly across the hall from me, and I had the pleasure of hearing him sing as well as his students. Richard Cassilly was his name. He was an operatic tenor who had had a long career singing opera all over the world, including La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Royal Opera in London. He was a kind man and a gentleman. The wonderful thing about BU’s School for the Arts at that time was the fact that theater, music, and art all shared the same building. How can that be anything but exciting and stimulating? The Dean of the School for the Arts was famed American opera singer, Phyllis Curtin, who I was honored to call my colleague and friend. She was beautiful, elegant, funny, and wise.

Note in photo: My dark hair, which you rarely see here on the blog, my cheekbones, which I used to have in abundance, a desk phone (no personal computers yet, no cell phones), and my Filofax! I remain a planner addict to this day.

I’ve said before that my favorite time in my career was the five years I taught at Boston University. I don’t think I’ve ever been as stimulated. I felt good about myself (my peak years – I think – were my thirties and early forties) I loved the students, I worked constantly, and I loved living in my rent controlled apartment in Cambridge. I didn’t have a car, so I took the “T” everywhere and I walked and walked and walked, just as I had in Philadelphia. I loved nothing more than exploring neighborhoods, visiting historic sites, people watching. I lived just down the street from Harvard. In fact, I lived on Harvard Street.

If I was earning more than I was, I would have stayed, because I was perfectly happy there. There was nothing I didn’t like – except being relatively poor.

Two things happened that made me start to think about leaving. My brother, who had been fighting lymphoma since the tail end of my time in Philadelphia, grew worse. Right after I returned from chaperoning our students on a trip to the Edinburgh Festival (where they performed two plays by BU alum, Craig Lucas,) my mom called me. She had held off telling me that Dave was critically ill because she didn’t want to ruin my trip. Within a week of my return, Dave passed away. This was in September of 1991. I won’t go into details but Dave’s death at the age of 44 was devastating. It still is. My students were incredibly loving and supportive when I returned from Michigan. They literally wrapped their arms around me. Then, the next year, I turned 40. Decade birthdays have always been hard for me, but ultimately positive. My 30th birthday generated some self-reflection that led to me auditioning for grad school. My 40th led to me saying out loud that it was perhaps time to move on to a job that paid better. My wish list was this: a teaching position in an MFA, rather than BFA, program and one that was affiliated with a major regional theater. BU was affiliated at that time with the Huntington Theater (which was in residence at BU’s theater space near Symphony Hall.) I had coached there several times and was starting to amass a lot of professional credits, in addition to all the productions (at least a hundred) that I had coached at BU. I worked with many well-known actors there, some of whom I worked with again years later. My professional world was expanding.

Dave would have urged me to take a chance.

I said it out loud. I owned it.

Rick, who was my colleague at BU and had become a good friend, was also thinking of moving on and we talked about what we wanted in our next positions, wherever they might be.

These conversations led, in a strangely wonderful way, to my next job. More later.

Rest in Peace, Johnny Crawford, of The Rifleman fame. I loved that show and I loved him. I got to meet him several years ago at the Old Globe Gala. He had his own orchestra and they supplied the music. I was star struck and he was awfully nice to me.

Stay safe.

Happy Friday.

Day Four Hundred Three

April 20, 2021 at 10:37 am by Claudia

First up:

We tag-team mowed our massive front yard yesterday for the first time this year. We did a high-five and were proud of ourselves. Then, by the evening, we were frigging exhausted. And my allergies went haywire. The first mow is always the hardest and, eventually, it will be much easier. As will my allergies.

Started a new puzzle, but I was so stuffed up and tired after mowing that I didn’t get very far.

Today, we’re taking it easy.

_____________________________

I’m sharing more today about my career. First, a clarification. My decision to teach was also based on the realization that after acting since I was 10 – that would be for 23 years – I no longer had any desire to act. I was done. Ironic, since I had just been granted an MFA in Acting. But without that degree, nothing that happened later would have happened. So, going back to grad school changed my life. It was a bold move for someone like me. I’d stayed in Michigan. I was cautious. At the time, I was not someone who could just pick up and move someplace far away. I had ties to my family, I watched out for my sisters, I had a support group of friends and family. But staying there, I realized when I turned 30, would have been lethal for me. I was stuck working in a job that I didn’t like to support myself. I worked 40 hours a week and spent another 25 rehearsing for various productions. I hated doing something I had absolutely no interest in. I had dear friends who knew me well and urged me to make a change. I knew that the way to do it was to audition for a graduate program and earn a post-graduate degree (which had always been important to me.) Once I made that decision, the rest followed.

So. Three times in my life I have changed my course. Moving away to grad school. Deciding to no longer act, but to teach instead. And eventually giving up a lucrative teaching position and resident voice and dialect position with the Old Globe Theater in San Diego to move east with my husband and freelance.

But back to Boston University. That job was everything for me. I worked my ass off. I was usually gone for 12 – 15 hours a day, teaching classes during the day, attending rehearsals at night. Since it was my first teaching job, I felt like I was about 2 days ahead of my students. Every night, I wrote a lesson plan for the next day. Then I ‘sold’ it. That is what I did when I interviewed for a job – I had to teach a class and I sold it. (I can be very funny and charming.) Same with teaching. I think all of us – at times – feel like we’re fakes, pretending to be qualified when, in our heart, we feel exactly the opposite.

That entire first year, as I taught phonetics and Standard American Speech (speech for the stage that had no discernible regionalisms and a rich, full sound) and another class in dialects, I was figuring out how to teach it. I was blessed in my colleague Robert Chapline, a brilliant teacher who became my mentor. I wrote about him a few years ago when he died. He was always there for me if I had questions – a gentle man and a gentle guide.

BU’s program was a tough one and there were cuts made after the second year. (I hated making those decisions.) But it was a BFA program and when you’re 18 and coping with all sorts of changes in addition to the demands of classwork and performance, there comes a time when you – or the faculty – realize it’s not the right fit. But the students! Lord, how I loved them. They were fiercely talented and intelligent and funny and demanding and I remain friends with many of them to this day. They brought out the best in me. I had to become good at what I do. I coached everything; mainstage shows, lab shows, projects…I never stopped.

I worked there for five years, only leaving because I was paid too little to survive long-term in Boston, which is a very expensive place to live. When Bill Lacey hired me, he hired me as a visiting assistant professor. Since they hadn’t been able to do a full-out search, I was ‘on approval’ for that first year. I was so grateful for the job that I accepted a ridiculously low salary and, though I got a raise every year, it wasn’t enough to make a huge difference. Luckily, for four out of the five years I was there, I lived in a rent controlled apartment in Cambridge. But my first year? The smallest studio I have EVER lived in – three times the rent of the rent-controlled one bedroom I eventually moved into. The size of many walk-in closets I see on Instagram.

Many of those students are working to this day. Some of them are rather big in Hollywood; Krista Vernoff, the show runner for Gray’s Anatomy and Station 19. Michael Medico, who directs for both those shows, as well as others. Cynthia Watros, Daytime Emmy Award winner for her long-running role on Guiding Light, Abraham Higginbotham, producer for Will and Grace, Ugly Betty, and Executive Producer and Writer for Modern Family and multiple Emmy winner. Peter Paige, actor in the series Queer as Folk and many more, and producer and creator of The Fosters. Kim Raver, actress, who has had continuing roles on countless shows; 24, Ray Donovan, Designated Survivor and currently, Grey’s Anatomy. Anthony Ruivivar, who works constantly – he was a regular on Third Watch and has a new series starting up right now. He’s also married to a fellow alum, Yvonne Jung. And more, of course, I just can’t remember specifics at the moment. I am still friends with them to this day.

They shaped me. They made me want to help them and be the very best I could be.

Also, while I was at BU, I started to coach in regional theater, specifically, at the Huntington Theater in Boston as well as the North Shore Music Theater. All of that experience prepared me for my next job.

More later.

Stay safe.

Happy Tuesday.

Day Four Hundred Two

April 19, 2021 at 9:52 am by Claudia

The forsythia that grows in the woods. On our property, thankfully. We used to think it was on our neighbor’s property. This photo doesn’t do it justice; this year the yellow is quite vivid and gorgeous.

A longtime reader of the blog, Suzanne, sent me a message a while back with some ideas for blog posts:

“If you find a day when you can think of nothing to write about, I’d love to hear stories from your time in the theater. I’d love to know how you learned dialects and how you teach them. What does a dialogue coach actually do? What is it like (thinking of Don in M’ville) performing the same show so many times? Did he have any famous visitors backstage? Well, I could think of a zillion questions I could ask and I bet your readers would be fascinated by your theater knowledge and memories.”

I wrote about some of this before, but I forget sometimes that the blog is over 13 years old and many of you weren’t around here back then. I so appreciate your suggestions, Suzanne, and I’ll try to write about these things on occasion.

First up: How did I end up doing what I do? Part One.

I was an actress for many, many years and moved to Philadelphia to get my MFA in Acting from Temple University in the early eighties. It was a three-year program. That move changed my life. It saved me. (Side note: I’ve always had a good ear and could mimic dialects at a young age. I take no credit for my ear. I do take credit for developing it over the years.) In the course of the three years, one of my classes was Voice and Speech and I started to learn more about the actor’s voice, articulation, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and dialects. I discovered that you can learn and coach any dialect if you a) have a good ear and b) know how to transcribe sounds and sound changes using IPA, so that anyone who is familiar with IPA can look at a transcription of the phonetic changes in speech from, let’s say, standard American speech to Italian and begin to figure out how to make those sounds. Of course, there’s also musicality, tempo, placement as well. That’s why having a good ear is terribly important. And having a good coach, as well.

During the last year of the program, we had to teach a class to undergraduates. We were assigned those classes and my friend Cynthia and I were assigned Voice & Speech. I really enjoyed it and I began to rediscover my love of teaching. After graduation, I stuck around Philly because I was acting at the Wilma Theater there and supporting myself by temping in an office. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I wanted to teach – at the age of 33, I no longer found the idea of competing for acting roles and living in a closet in NYC attractive. But I did want to teach. So I started the long process of applying for a teaching position in a university. In those days there was no internet. The only way to see job listings was through a publication called ArtSearch. I was poor at the time and was just getting by, and my good friend Richard, who studied costume design at the same time I was studying acting, gave me a subscription for Christmas. I thank him daily for that generous gift.

I started to apply – I had no experience except my time teaching in grad school and a class I taught at the Wilma – so I was prepared to accept any job, anywhere. In most cases, I heard nothing back. But I did hear from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a very well known professional training program. For some reason, they wanted to interview me. (I would have been happy in a drama program, but a professional training program? That was a dream!) I flew down to Winston-Salem, went through the insanity that is an interview; meeting tons of people, smiling so much my face ached, teaching a short class, watching other classes, and being interviewed by the Search Committee. It was a wonderful program. I am not a Pollyanna by any means, but conversations that I had, and in particular, one I had with a member of the voice faculty as he drove me to the airport, left me feeling that I had the job. I mean, it was so overwhelmingly positive and in so many words, I was definitely led to believe the job was mine.

I returned to Philadelphia and a couple of weeks later, Meredith came to visit me for Memorial Day weekend. When I picked up the mail that Saturday, there was a thin envelope from North Carolina. Too thin. I opened it up and found I didn’t get the job. The message was that they loved me and had wanted me but someone else got it. Most likely it was someone they’d already decided to appoint, even though they were required to do a search. That happens. They said if there ever was another opening, they would strongly consider me.

I was devastated. Searches happen in the spring and this meant that I would have to go through another year of working in an office before I could apply again. I cried all weekend long. Thank heavens, Meredith was there.

Fast forward to about a week or two later (I can’t quite remember how much time had gone by but it wasn’t much.) I was walking home from work and I was pretty low. I stopped on the street and said out loud, “God, I don’t know what to do. I give up. I surrender.” And I truly did. I let go. I was powerless.

I walked in the door of my third floor walk-up and there was a message light blinking on my answering machine. It was from someone I didn’t know: William Lacy, the acting head of the BFA Theater Training Program at Boston University. He said he’d like to talk to me about a job opening that came up suddenly – after the official search season. When the opening came up, he had called his colleagues around the country and North Carolina School of the Arts had highly recommended me. BU was going to do a shortened search with about three candidates. Would I be willing to fly up for an interview? Of course!

A few days later, I flew to Boston, met Bill and some students who were still in town, as well as two other members of the Voice & Speech faculty, Bob Chapline and Rick Winter. I taught a short class in learning a Spanish dialect to the students, Bob, Rick, and Bill. I had my interview and then I flew back home the same day.

I got the job. A month or so later, I moved to Boston and started to teach Speech and Dialects.

And my life changed forever. Everything that has happened to me professionally in the years to come would never have happened without that job. Never. I met Rick there. I met the new chair of the program, Bob Morgan, who I remain close to to this day. (Both of them had ties to Jack O’Brien and the Old Globe, but that’s another story for another day.) I learned so much at BU. It remains my favorite job ever.

You never know what will happen. I thought things were hopeless. But the job that I didn’t get led directly to the job I did get. A job that ended up being far, far better for me.

Oh, puzzle done:

Stay safe.

Happy Monday.

Day Four Hundred Thirteen

Day Four Hundred Three

Day Four Hundred Two

claudiahillsparks

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