** Warning Tony’s Annual Holiday Message This Year Does Contain Graphic Content. Seriously. You’ve Been Warned.**
Hi Everyone!
What a wild year it has been. For each of us individually on our own creative journeys, but also as citizens of this beautiful blue planet and as artists and activists perhaps feeling the call to become more political than ever. Our voices and hearts and minds and Art are needed during these tumultuous times.
For the studio members at our LA Campus — we are grateful for your patience while we undertook a huge responsibility this year in designing and renovating our new building. We realize change is hard and transitions can be stressful for everyone — and we appreciate that so many of you took the move in stride and offered up suggestions and support during such an arduous process. We still are a work-in-progress but we are thrilled that we have a new, energetic, creative, bad-ass hub in the heart of Hollywood that is filled with passionate artists who are truly doing great and meaningful things! (You have an incredible new space! Use it — if you have ideas for putting on shows, stand-up, scene nights, showcases, one-acts, a Shakespeare comedy…whatever it is — email Tyler!)
I always like to take this time to write a brief Holiday Message to the student body — to reflect on the year and to hopefully encourage and uplift all of us — especially those who find the Holidays particularly stressful or lonely or anxiety-ridden. (I hope my personal story will help.)
As some of you know I was stricken with meningitis last month and was bed-ridden for over a month. When all you can do is rest — it really gets you thinking. I thought of my over 20 years of teaching and establishing the school and what it means to be an artist. And I kept asking,
What is it that we’re trying to do here at AMAW?
Yes, book the job. We want you all to be working.
Yes, get technically proficient. We want you all to become effortless and free in telling story.
Yes, learn new skills and accomplish that which we didn’t think was possible in our work.
But there’s something much more that stirs the soul of the artist. (Perhaps when I was in my early 20’s I didn’t realize it.)
But now it’s a certainty. And it is what drives us as creators — whether we are conscious of it or not. For myself, personally, it is the reason I built this school — to awaken this underlying ephemera that dwells within each of us and to make us conscious of it.
That is, the transcendental.
That is the part in you that yearns to connect with not only your own soul — but the souls of others. In doing so — even if it’s just blips or fractions of moments in a scene while we’re acting — that we fully accept our flawed and failed humanity as much as we can accept the next person’s.
And you’ve all had moments of that. And that is the transcendental. It defies description, and yet it’s like a high — you want to experience it again and again.
Because it is home.
And yet it is an almost impossible task and the challenge for the artist. (Booking a job is much easier than living in — and from — this experience.)
Ah yes, vulnerability. Letting go of control. That’s the only way to access it and why is it so damn hard while simultaneously is the thing we are seeking? And why does it often take humbling experiences to remind us of this state?
On the last day of my trip to Cuba last week — I started to feel very nauseous. By the time I was heading to the airport, I had already gone to the bathroom 4 or 5 times and had stopped eating. On the first leg of my trip, my body started to shake-and-bake for two hours straight as a really obnoxious guy wearing an insane hat made inappropriate comments about all sorts of things while I sat there seemingly dying. I thought my last moments can’t be next to this guy and thankfully they weren’t!
As I boarded the final leg from Houston to LAX – the same guy boarded the plane and again sat right next to me! I must be working off some bad karma here, I thought. He proceeded to ask very weird questions to the flight attendants who basically ignored him as my body started to get feverish. As we barreled down the runway at 500 mph– my body sweated unlike anything I’d previously experienced as my temperature spiked so quickly that I began to lose consciousness. And Bam! I passed out. I came to 15 minutes later to the Ding Ding sound followed by “You’re free to walk about the cabin.”
Except I wasn’t.
I almost passed out again due to the smell of passenger flatulence. I, of course, blamed it on the shameless man sitting next to me, as I fanned the smell away from my nose dramatically — when Horror of Horrors! — I realized it wasn’t him.
Yes, I shit you not…I shat my pants!
Mortified, embarrassed, vulnerable, scared, freaked out and still super sick, I made it to the bathroom (by walking very slowly — no turbulence please!), locked myself in and spent the next 45 minutes intermittently cleaning my clothes and spending more time on the toilet than is humanly possible. When I re-emerged from the bathroom, exhausted and full of shame, but perhaps finally gaining control of my heretofore renegade bowels, I started bawling to the flight attendants, Phillip and Jarmilla.
Phillip grabbed my arm and said in his Southern twang, “Darlin’ you better stop crying because you’re makin’ me cry! It’s gonna be okay. You know what happened? You were just human. That’s all. You had an accident. And that’s why we’re all here. To allow ourselves to be human. Accidents and all.”
Of course this made me cry harder. He had no judgment, just acceptance of me in my smelly, horrible, confused state and now-cleaned but sopping-wet blue jeans.
I spent the next 3 hours running to the bathroom and contemplating the meaning of it all.
What this human experience truly is. How weird and uncomfortable it can be. How we can be shoved into the most scary and vulnerable corners, and then, through grace or some sort of deliverance of an opening in a moment — you see that it’s also simultaneously a blessing. That in the midst of something (relatively) awful, there is some sort of peace. Or acceptance. Or dwelling in a place inside us that is home.
And then you forgive yourself for immediately judging others — like me blaming the poopy smell on the guy next to me. So what if he was laughing at some bad sitcom from the 80’s he was watching on Direct TV?
My judgment is just another way to escape from my own discomfort. Blame makes me avoid my own shame.
So, pushing past our shame, we work towards acceptance of self. The selves we love — the funny, lovable, clever parts of ourselves — but also the poopy, smelly, not-so-fun parts too. The soiled diaper parts! “Oh, my Kingdom for a diaper!”
We realize that acceptance of our own fragility in a world that shuns such truth is really the most empowering stage we seek. And when we realize we won’t be hurt or punished for being fully human — we start to reclaim the parts of ourselves that we were forced to abandon long ago.
So that, my friends, is why we are here. Not just at AMAW — but on the planet.
As we go into the New Year let’s try to be mindful of the gifts we have – striving for deeper understanding and meaning while also being okay exactly where we are on our journey — which also simultaneously lacks meaning and understanding.
Those things can be revealed to you in the most unlikely of situations. Just be there to get them.
Wishing you Presence amongst the presents this Holiday and I can’t wait to see where we all go collectively in the New Year.
With Blessings,
Tony