Inspiration For The Day!

By Dawn Tolson

As January 1st comes and goes with a big bang each year, it is a certain fact that you will never know what the coming 365 days will hold for you. Who would have known that this year would have been my year to have the fortunate opportunity to participate in so many inspirational seminars? After so many years of stay-at-home-boredom, oops, sorry, meant to say MUMMYDOM, my diary has been full of school schedules, band concerts, dance rehearsals, and other time-demanding tasks that have left really no time for anything else than a zombie at night in front of the TV.

Once again, this week I find myself on another one of those tasks as I am currently sitting on the 26th floor of a luxurious Boca Raton hotel accompanying my daughter whilst she attends an International Talent Show. We arrived last Tuesday and are here for a week. A whole week of mummy be-here-for-me time! This extracurricular activity trumps most when it comes to time and money! Nevertheless, it was her dream, so I could not deny her. At the young age of 12, she is already a natural beauty. She turns heads everywhere she goes. I have had to adjust to the attention she receives. I am getting used to it as much as any caring and protective parent can.

However, as I write this my eyes are heavy and my head is spinning. Today has been filled with a wealth of information that has been imparted upon the eager young delegation and to us, the parents.

The whole convention has been filled with workshops and seminars led by leading industry professionals. We have seen runway coaches that have appeared on America’s Next Top Model, agents recruiting for the markets in Asia, New York, and Los Angles, authors, photographers, singing and acting coaches, everyone but the Queen so to speak (well maybe one or two but that is another story!). However, today, one person stood out like no other. He is an older gentleman, a seasoned Shakespearean actor and tutor at an esteemed acting school in New York.

His message was simple but oh so effective. The seminar was called “The Three P’s Of Becoming an Actor”. Those “P’s” were not pertaining to Playing, Performing, or Pretending but had to do with three other simple rules that quite honestly every child, no let me change that, EVERYONE should apply to their lives. With these three simple rules stardom in your own life is a certain outcome.

P 1          Preparation

To be well prepared is key. Learning is an ongoing experience but it takes energy; you need to up your energy levels. He advocated exercising whether that is in the form of physical, or such things as singing. Every actor has to learn how to put his or her own statement on an audition. Transport this notion to normal life and what do you get? You get the message to make yourself an Individual. Something that is lost currently in our multimedia, digitally enhanced world. Preparation is also about epiphanies. The time to discover you, embrace it, prepare for it and apply it.

P 2          Passion
Yes, we all can imagine some hunky movie star in a passionate embrace of a beautiful maiden, but, no, this is not the idea here. It is about doing what you are passionate about. How many of us adults ended up in a career we don’t even care about? How did that happen? Were we afraid of falling back, worried that we could not do what we truly wanted to do? Go back to P1 and did we prepare ourselves, did we have the epiphany? I will leave you to answer that question. This simple statement he made says it all, “Follow your heart and you will be a happy person.”

P3           Persistence

NEVER GIVE UP!!!! He related the story of Anthony Hopkins, once an ever-perpetual understudy and a drunk who would have killed himself before giving up his passion. He persisted relentlessly, took control of his addiction, and forged forward to achieve his goal. How many of our children dart from one activity to another because they feel they are not good enough? Take my son for instance. He wanted to play the flute and after a growth spurt, his hands were so large that he had difficulty on the keys, but when the Band Tutor tried to change him to a “larger” instrument, he directly refused. I was proud of him and he went on to do two more years with the flute. His determination to carry on playing was his passion. This was not the same scenario with his baseball!

So I guess my message today is this: DON'T make life too complicated, find what speaks to your heart, live it as if it was a stage, you are the leading role, follow your passion, and don’t ever give up!

Really Being Real

By MaryAlford-Carman

It's all over the news: Woman gives her eight-year-old Botox. I can't fathom it. I question whatever happened to growing older gracefully and now here's a new dilemma. Let's have our eight-year-olds look like infants…ever look at a newborn? The last time I checked they were pretty wrinkled. What's next? Giving Botox in utero? What on earth has happened to our society? We have an obesity percentage that beats all in our nation, and yet the media and magazines force size zero models down our throats. Cher looks like she's in her late thirties, Madonna has the arms of a twenty something swimmer, and Demi Moore, well, she's just hot (dang it). But do the rest of us have what the celebrities have to maintain that kind of figure and face? What's wrong with being real?

In Forty-fied, an essay in www.4gaby.com by Rachel McClary, the age of 40 is compared to Eeyore with his stuffing falling out. I can only speak for myself, but my forties rocked, and nothing fell out. People couldn't guess my age and I could flat out keep up with my very energetic daughter. At the mere age of forty-eight, our son Jack was born (unexpected and totally fantastic). At fifty, I may be a little slower, but I keep my children alive, fed, and on time to all their events. (Their social calendar is fuller than mine.) All of this is without the help of a personal trainer and a boat load of Botox. Would I like to turn back the clock when I see the new wrinkles appear? You betcha, but not at the risk of my health.

Having something done to make you feel better is fine with me. Lift it, tuck it, smooth it or hike it up, but don't expect me to believe for one moment that an eight-year-old child has the mental capacity to make a decision to have Botox injected into her face. The mom in question was asked why she did this to her child, and her response was that it would benefit her child in beauty contests and that many were doing it. I heard my Daddy's voice at that point saying, "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?" Yes, everyone seems to be "doing it" with Botox, face-lifts, and implants, but what is the reasoning? I don't want to look like everyone else; I want to look like me. When I smile, I want to actually smile, not merely wonder if I am. What is the message we're sending to our children? What happened to unique? What happened to being real? I'd really like to know.