Who makes your life charmed?
Who helps you in your career and how do you thank them?
What is life and career if not for your admiration of friends who championed you and watched you succeed? What is success if not for your gratitude for the way friends helped you reach your goals?
My theater community in New York was outstanding in the way we supported each other by sharing our strengths. We inspired one another with our varied talents. We impressed one another with the interesting theater projects we worked on. We set high expectations.
If everyone around us is doing well and getting acting roles, it makes for a better theater community; we feed off of one another’s examples of accomplishment. We set an example of what is possible, be it the opportunities, roles, networking, praise for performance, or a good agent or manager. We need to surround ourselves with the best so we can collectively be better. We need to connect with those who have different strengths so we can lift each other up. We can be a “family” of artists.
A person who made my time in NY as an actor especially charmed…
Lisa Hickman was the first person I met at Pace University while I was seventeen and shopping for undergraduate acting programs (SUNY Purchase, NYU Tisch, Pace, and many more). Maybe she felt in a small way responsible since she had informally recruited me as she was just finishing her degree. Her insights were valuable in my exploration of Bachelor of Arts programs. The reasons she chose Pace resonated with my own thinking. I had a phenomenal four years at Pace.
Lisa was an exceptional actor and friend who shared many resources and teachings with me over the years. She was talented, studious (well read in plays of all genres), and business savvy. Recommending monologues, headshot photographers, and giving me her acting technique and dramaturgical notes was a regular practice for Lisa. I was the grateful beneficiary of her graciousness. She set an example of how to approach the acting industry with pragmatism and hard work. She was (and is) an asset to all of her networks of artists in NY. I don’t doubt that Lisa has many other people indebted to her, as I certainly am.
What did I ever do for her? I hope I did for her what I think is my greatest gift when it comes to contributing to my closest friendships- face time (not FaceTime) -being physically there — being available. There is never anything more important than time with those I’m close to and who support me. When it came to Lisa, being there for her was often in the form of seeing her live performances and watching her TV and Film work, and even joining karaoke nights. I can only hope that I supported her by giving thoughtful responses to her performance and the work overall.
Lisa and I had years of stage and film experience already when we took an acting class together. The combination of DJ Mendel’s acting technique, his teaching style, and Lisa’s participation in the class, meant that I was in my happy place…my happiest place. Watching Lisa in the class, she was good-natured, perfectly prepared, physically and emotionally committed to the scene (acting classes are typically called scene study classes because you are working on select scenes rather than full-length plays). Her communication was sharp. She keenly listened to feedback and took direction (meaning carried out the proposed changes to the performance). She was curious, engaged, professional, and energetic.
Lucky to have a theater industry ‘big sister’
Lisa served as an example of how to hone my skills and stay current in the industry. She was perceptive about what I (and anyone) needed to do to progress. She was continuously multiplying the options I had at my disposal. Imagine the impact of her telling me where to find more auditions! Somehow I got lucky that she thought to help me in so many seemingly small, but actually huge, ways.
How do we ever give back to someone slightly older and a lot wiser who helped us time and time again in a selfless way? Their actions conveyed their belief in us even when it wasn’t said explicitly. How do we ever properly thank the people in our lives who filled the gaps of what we didn’t do, couldn’t do, or was especially hard for us to do?
As an actor, we market and showcase ourselves. We are alone at auditions and in much of the creative work to prepare for a role. But it is the underpinnings of a whole community of actors that is the reason we can stand there poised and doing our best work.
I gravitated to Lisa because of her charisma, humor, talent, intellect, and know-how. She is exemplary of the type of person who ultimately makes life worth living. That person makes your life better than you could have done alone. They make something as challenging as being an actor in New York City something feasible…in fact, a fully realized experience. Thank You Lisa.
Lisa’s site: http://www.lisahickman.com/index.html
Originally published at https://www.framedperformances.com on September 3, 2020.
