Ah, unsolicited advice.
First of all, I know I have done it. We've all done it. Someone tells you a problem and you think, "Aha! I can fix this!" -- but can I just say right here and now how much I loathe being on the receiving end of unsolicited advice? I mean. Hi. Do you not recognize me as an intelligent person that has alreadly exhausted the obvious?
I had a person in my life a few years ago that capped off almost everything I said with,
"Well, you know what you should do..."
It drove me nuts. Fred turn it into a joke. He'd wait until I was in a perfect tizzy over something and then he'd get a shit-eating grin on his face and yell "YOUKNOWWHATYOUSHOULDDO"...then he'd duck and cover.
Nobody likes a busy body.
Last night I was on the subway with my friend Nat and we were creating an accountability plan for going to auditions. Just one a week. For practice. Mind you, we're both married women and working hard at our own theater company here in town. It's not likely, on one audition a week, that we'll book any of the gigs that we're planning on auditioning for. That's not the point. The point is that we recognize that our audition skills will get soft if we don't continue to work them. It would be beneficial to our confidence as artists to just get out and do one audition a week; to keep our song books and monologues fresh and the noises in our heads at bay.
So, we were sitting on the subway, chatting about our plans - like, not even griping about the state of auditions, which is easy to do - no, no, no: we were just talking about our plans to go to Equity Principal Auditions once a week and joking that it is a perfect plan because there's no way we're going to actually book anything from an EPA anyway.
(That's the truth.)
(But, God...? Feel free to prove me wrong. ANY TIME.)
Suddenly, an old lady sitting next to me blurts out,
"HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN IN NYC?"
...and in my head, I was like,
"Ex-cuse me?"
(...because her tone was suggesting that there is always a correlation between the amount of time you are in NYC and the amount of success you've encountered.)
...and then my next thought was,
"Honey, please. There's not enough time here to tell you about my life journey. So you just go back to the word find you were workin' on, Ms. Random-nosy-subway-rider."
But she was the pushy type; so I thought,
"Eh. I'm gonna mess with her."
So I gave her an innocent face and loudly declared,
"SIXTEEN YEARS."
I was hoping that would knock her off her course. I was dying to see what she would do with that information. Unfortunately, she wasn't even listening to me! She went ahead and launched right into her story about her (former) career and agent-this and agent-that and broadway and off-broadway and, you know, TV is really where it's at...
(Talking about herself is all she wanted to do. Okay.)
The funniest thing was that she had to get up while she was talking because her stop was coming up. She was flailing all over the place because she was more intent on talking at us than concentrating on her own balance. She rushed her speech at us as she was walking out the subway door and it was shutting on her.
Now - who does that? Who decides to hijack a subway conversation 2 minutes before their own stop?
I felt so psychically dumped on.
I suppose it's one thing to overhear a conversation and say, "Excuse me? Are you actresses?" and - you know - only choose to do that if you are going to be on the train long enough to have an even exchange with the people you just interupted.
But to just launch and leave? Really?!
There have been times when I have wanted to chat with someone on the subway, but I decided not to disturb them because I know I am disembarking soon and "the flow" would be off. In those situations, you just let it go. Am I right, fellow New Yorkers?
We watched her walk away as our train pulled out of the station.
Finally, after a pregnant pause, Nat was all,
"WHAT. JUST. HAPPENED."
Whew. We got Busy-Bodied!
