There's a First Time for Everything

I remember my first experience writing an "industry advice" email very clearly. I had been interning for several months part time for a talent agency in Studio City and had been one of the fortunate few in my generation to actually become a paid assistant after months of free labor. As I was shuffling through the morning onslaught of emails, cheap office coffee in hand, I stumbled upon something different. I could sense the innocence and excitement in the all caps subject line with three exclamation points and clicked on it right away. Instead of another desperate plea for representation by some annoying hollywood wannabe, I discovered a spunky, determined twelve year old girl from the mid-west.

For her own protection and the purposes of this post I will refer to her as Annie. Annie was very mature for her age and had contacted me all on her own in hopes of obtaining representation in Los Angeles...and becoming a big star. She was honest about her lack of experience and was candid about her parents not approving of moving out to LA so young. But, despite her naive sense of self and zero experience, she had spirit. She clearly knew she had fallen in love with this crazy idea of playing pretend for the rest of her life and she was determined to do whatever it took.

I remember casually mentioning the email to my boss that morning as he walked past me to the hallway murmuring some snarky comment about her dreams being crushed before she even got out of high school. I nodded my head, spun back around to my gleaming PC screen and thought to myself, yeah, he's probably right. She's better off finishing up school in Simpleton, Middle of Nowhere and finding a nice stable career like marrying rich or computer software programming. Then I heard myself and realized, who the hell am I to think these things about a sweet, smart, dedicated young girl?  It probably took her all afternoon to research enough about this talent agency to draft a semi-professional email and send it before her parents could catch her. That takes guts, and frankly I love a gal with guts. Also, I would be lying if I didn't say she reminded me of another 12 year old girl with big dreams, a little training bra, and nothing to lose.

So I decided I would reply to her. Not right then and there, because obviously I had a lot of really important emails to filter through and ignore (i.e. the half-naked guy wearing only pots and pans in a unique attempt to be discovered as a serious "artist"), and I only had until four o'clock to accomplish this task. Thus, I forwarded her email to my personal email account and took my time responding to her inquiry carefully and thoughtfully.

In all honesty, I don't remember a lot of the specifics of the email, but I do know this. I told her she was brave. I told her I admired her gumption and that no matter what happened or who tells her she can't or won't or shouldn't, she can and she will and she should. I told her to stay in school and finish her education because educating yourself is important, not only for life but even for her goals of being an actress. Acting is hard work, but more importantly it is intelligent work, and no one wants to work with a stupid actor. I told her to keep taking class and doing her research about what it is like to live out here in big bad Los Angeles and how much work, money, and effort that really takes. I told her to listen a lot and learn from anyone and everyone and read like crazy. Of course I also told her to we don't represent anyone under the age of 18 that isn't SAG but to research other agencies in her own state that she could potentially start relationships with. I told her to keep dreaming big because if she is already willing to put herself out there at age 12, well shoot girl, you already won half the battle.

A few days went by and I found myself quietly wondering about little orphan Annie. Had she received my email? What did she think of it? Did her parents catch her secretly emailing big important glorified interns across the country? Then finally, about a week later she replied, and I must admit I was so excited to hear from her again I almost forgot to be discrete about constantly checking my personal email at work.

Annie had read my email and she wanted to let me know how helpful it was for me to take the time to write such a long and detailed reply. She told me about how many people she had emailed in the past few months and how I was the first person to even reply back to her. No matter what, she said, she would always remember the nice assistant from Los Angeles named Lauren who took the time to tell her that she mattered. She went on to tell me she felt better knowing that even just one person-one seemingly meaningless stranger far, far away from her -was able to relate to her big dreams in a small way, and for that, she would be forever grateful.

Well, at this point I was feeling so darn warm and fuzzy all over that I didn't even feel my boss hovering over my shoulder with his raised eyebrow. I quickly clicked out of my gmail account and made a stupid joke under my breath to ease the tension, but I didn't care. I had made little Annie's day better for one brief moment and who knows, maybe that email will be the very thing that reminds her on a tough day that she matters and she can do it. Maybe she will be a better actress and more importantly a better person because a bored assistant at an office decided to reply to her email.

Go get em' tiger.

         "Never give up, for that is just the place and time when the tide will turn"                                                                                                         

          -Harriet Beecher Stowe