So Many Acting B.A.'s, So Few Paying Gigs

Parents Forum
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<p>“I certainly don’t understand heuristics”</p>

<p>That’s OK. I don’t understand my istics either. Few people do. </p>

<p>Miracles can and do happen and sometimes we have to rely on them. I must admit that I was a little hesitant when my daughter started playing double bass part way through eighth grade and started asking about Juilliard and Curtis about a year later. Her mother (a flute major) and I told her that was a fine dream, but that she was going to have to show us that she had the talent and dedication she would need to survive in the professional music world. </p>

<p>We proposed that she do that by earning first chair in the double bass section of her All-State orchestra by her senior year. We thought we would be safe because it was unlikely for a string player to rise to that level with less than four years experience on their instrument, particularly in a highly-populated state like NJ. Imagine our surprise when she met our challenge in her junior year (and repeated in senior year for good measure.) At that point, we just couldn’t say no.</p>

<p>It is hard for a parent, even one who is a professional musician or actor, to objectively evaluate the talent level of their offspring. It is easy enough to tell that another career might be wise if, for example, they are still working on “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in their third year of study. It is much harder to separate “pretty darned good” from “good enough to make a career of it” when observing your own child. It would have been a lot harder for me to make that leap of faith without an independent opinion.</p>

42

<p>“I am always amazed at how many parents encourage their kids to do music, dance and other artsy activities. Then they get worried when their kids want to continue and develop those skills”</p>

<p>Then it would appear you are rather easy to amaze.</p>

<p>I supported my boy when he wanted to play little league baseball too. That doesn’t mean I really expected him to come back and tell me he was going to devote his whole life to trying out and playing for the Yankees.</p>

<p>All that those people who so amaze you had in mind was that they were just providing another extracurricular activity for their kid. Something else to do. Another outlet. A hobby; one of many. Not an obsession.</p>

<p>Amazing, huh?</p>

<p>Bu what would you suggest then- we should deprive them of all extracurricular activities in the off-chance that they might develop an unusually high affinity for one of them?</p>

<p>Developing skills in a hobby is one thing. Planning on devoting your entire professional life to it is another thing altogether.</p>

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<p>BassDad and Soozie are right IMO. You will know what to do about your performing art kid from a matrix combining their desire AND external data points validating talent. My D had some real talent as a ballerina. At 15 she was one of maybe 150 kids picked out of what must have been thousands of auditioners for an ABT summer intensive in NYC. But when she got injured, she found so many other things to do I could tell she wouldn’t have wanted to be a ballerina. And I had always suspected, that despite the talent, she didn’t really want to do it with the intensity required. I would always say that if they had put her in the corps she would have been the one saying, “Mr. B, very nice, but I think it would be more efficient if we organized it another way…”</p>

<p>So you have to listen to your kid and you have to listen to the external data points. I suppose the hardest to be to have a kid who really wants it badly despite the lack of validation. I guess even then I’d still vote for letting them give it a shot. Of difficult life emotions, regret is much worse than disappointment.</p>

<p>Hell, I was a Comp Lit major and now I market overseas software development…Like everyone says, you can get an education in one thing and wind up doing something COMPLETELY different.</p>

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<p>Monydad,</p>

<p>To me it’s a question of degree. </p>

<p>A kid may be doing all kinds of ECs, including dabbling in art, dance, etc. If that child isn’t really sure what he/she wants to do and says “maybe I’ll go to art school” I could see why there would be reservations.</p>

<p>On the other hand, if this activity is their all consuming passion through HS, a parent shouldn’t be surprised if the child wants to continue that passion after high school, especially if they attended an arts high schools or received commendation at a state or national level.</p>

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<p>My sister turns 64 next week. She’s been a professional dancer since high school (although she graduated from Radcliffe summa cum laude and occasionally teaches theater history) and is still a professional dancer. She’s never had a lot of money, but she seems to manage okay. </p>

<p>Yes, to succeed in dance/theater/art, etc. you need to be serious, passionate, resilient, etc. But you know, millions of people DO succeed at one level or another. Check out this study on the economic impact of “the arts”: <a href=“http://ww3.artsusa.org/information_resources/press/2002/2002_06_10.asp[/url]”>http://ww3.artsusa.org/information_resources/press/2002/2002_06_10.asp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>among other figures: 4.85 million full-time-equivalent jobs.</p>

<p>Compare that to 2.7 million NEA (education union) members.</p>

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<p>Monydad, that’s the problem with a career in finance. Too much cost-benefit analysis. :)</p>

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<p>Dstark, yeah…</p>

<p>Cost of an MBA degree…$80,000.
Cost of a life in the arts…priceless. </p>

<p>LOL</p>

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<p>soozievt, you may be right. lol</p>

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<p>I assume you mean “benefit”, not “cost”.</p>

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<p>So…I’ve got two stories (let me start with one). The vocal director of our opera company Opera Pacifica grew up three miles from me in New York City. Was an education major at Temple in the late 60s, switched to music education. His draft board made it clear they weren’t going to honor the switch (and the extra now required) and was going to draft him. So he enlisted. As it turns out, he was very good at “schoolboy Latin”, signed up for translation training. In 6 months he was fluent in French, and posted by military intelligence to the “non-existent” U.S. military operation in Laos, where he spent two years. Among other things, he says, he played in a rock band with members of the Viet Cong in Laos. Comes back to the states, and, now having discovered he is a singer (at 19, having sung nothing before except as an altar boy), with a natural high C, enrolls at Temple in their opera program. Takes him 7 years to finish (because, among other reasons, he can’t pass the piano exam.) </p>

<p>During his time there, he meets a famous Spanish tenor Alfredo Kraus. Kraus is one of the best singers of his time, but sings only a limited number of engagements a year. Bob asks him what he does the rest of the time. Kraus tells him he is a high-end real estate broker on the Costa del Sol. Bob takes a hint, gets trained in real estate, and becomes very wealthy. But his opera career goes by the wayside, for the most part.</p>

<p>Moves to Washington State. Meets Claudia (next story), they found an opera company in March 2002 (which is when my daughter and I meet them, and we become charter members of the company), and in August, we perform our first opera - The Magic Flute - with Cyndia Sieden of the Metropolitan Opera singing the Queen of the Night. They purchase an old art-deco movie theatre in Centralia, Washington for a pittance (a $10 million building, for $240,000), and we are refurbing. In the meantime, we’ve done 5 operas since then (including one by my d.), Bob goes to China and with Claudia, rents the Beijing Opera Orchestra and makes a recording. On December 17th, we are singing Beethoven’s 9th (Claudia having been hired to lead a local chamber orchestra), with a new translation commissioned from a local professor and member of the opera board.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, Bob flies to New York every two weeks for coaching at the Metropolitan Opera with Nico Castel, perhaps the biggest male name in operatic coaching in the world.</p>

<p>Interesting twists and turns…(more later).</p>

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<p>Um, yes. And Bill Gates dropped out of college.</p>

<p>But if a young person asked me if there’s a greater likelihood of founding a major corporation and becoming a significant philanthropist trying to cure aids and reduce infant mortality by dropping out or by getting a degree… I think I’d suggest that they stick it out at school. Just my two cents, and not to deny the existence of luck and serendipity.</p>

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<p>Luck. Serendipidity. Connections. Talent. Health.</p>

<p>No matter what the career, success will depend on the proper shuffling of these five (and not in any particular order.)</p>

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<p>Mini, I was talking to a friend recently about "luck."She is doing significantly better financially than anyone else in her family and they tell her she’s “lucky”–which makes her furious, since she spent years working and putting herself through school while her brother spent the same time drinking. She decided against having children with a man she later divorced because they couldn’t afford it. In other words, she looks “lucky” now but it’s the result of a lifetime of choices. Her feeling is that there is no such thing as luck.</p>

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<p>Well understood. And no amount of work or talent or connections or lifetime of choices helps much if you are stricken by a debilitating disease or run over by a truck.</p>

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<p>dmd77 - While I think my comment above is sensible, as far as it goes, I dont think it addressed your point. I have known PLENTY of people, in every field I have ever been in contact with, who became successes without hard work. It can help greatly, of course, but, unlike talent, luck, serendipity, connections, and health, in my experience, it is far from essential, or at least success is not necessarily dependent on it.</p>

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<p>I do believe in luck- or Karma or whatever you want to call it.</p>

<p>While I believe that we all have choices,we see different opportunities, and thus make different choices, which then open up other opportunties, and depending on how we view the world, we will see or not see.</p>

<p>If you are hit by a truck- I wont argue over the situation, because “accidents” do happen, but we have choices over how we then react to that situation. are you going to throw up your hands, or are you going to make it work for you?.
I had a friend who was a nurse, and was in a car accident and was in a coma for 6 months. When she came out, after some therapy and she learned to walk and read again, she went back to school, to learn a profession that she could perform, because her old job of nursing wasn’t available to her any more because of cognitive changes after the coma.
She could have just sat at home bemoaning the fact that she “lost” her old career, rather than appreciating that this opportunity gave her a chance to try a new one. </p>

<p>Another couple we know, had a 5 year old, who had an inoperable non cancerous brain tumor, they chose to fully celebrate his life, and enjoy the time he had left, other families might have had made different choices. For some they might spend that time moaning and groaning and saying “why me”?</p>

<p>Surely not choices you would choose to make in a perfect world, but we always, always have choices, but some of us don’t choose to acknowledge that, and so to them, the ones who actively make choices are “lucky”</p>

<p>OUr oldest was born 10 weeks early- had intercranial hemmorage and gross motor delay, we might have just acknowledged that she was going to have problems and treated her as such. BUt we were in our early 20s’ had no idea what we were doing, and treated her like the gift she was.
We took her to Gymboree- which apparently did wonders for her neurodevelopment as well as her outlook, and voila!
She is a senior in college!</p>

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<p>Some choose to focus on the glass that is half full, others choose to focus on the glass that is half empty.</p>

<p>The engineer says the glass is too big.</p>

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<p>Mini, I absolutely agree that there is serendipitous luck (“right place, right time”) but I was trying–and apparently not succeeding–to also address that one can make one’s own “luck.”</p>

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<p>Mini…while I don’t want to veer off topic too much, you wrote:
“no amount of work or talent or connections or lifetime of choices helps much if you are stricken by a debilitating disease or run over by a truck.”</p>

<p>First, I think some LUCK is involved. For example, as you are likely aware my youngest child at age 16 this past March was in a serious car crash. Some bad luck is that she had it. But the good luck was that one, she lived (I read just a week later of a kid in a similar crash in the area who was not as lucky). Other good luck…she was a kid who was auditioning to be admitted to BFA programs in Musical Theater for the coming fall. You must audition to get in. She had JUST finished her 8th and final college audition serven days earlier. Had she had the accident just a few weeks earlier, her plans for going to college would not have been possible. Had the accident happened much later, her plans also would have been thwarted. With some luck she survived but it was a long haul and they said it would take six months until she could dance again and that was exactly how long it was until college was to begin where she would be training in dance. The window of this accident was luckily just right. She got many of her acceptances while in a hospital bed either in the hospital or in the house. What a goal to get better and heal. </p>

<p>Not all IS luck. Someone would have to not give up and to really work hard to get to their goals even with setbacks like this.</p>

<p>I agree with Emeraldkitty about choices that are made when some bad luck happens. </p>

<p>Let me share this story with you. My daughter had the good fortune to work with a guest director one summer at her beloved theater camp out of state. The musical he was directing was one he conceived of himself, a revue. It was called Another Openin’ Another Show and consisted of 40 opening production numbers from 40 different musicals. He not only directed the show but choreographed it, teaching all the choreography himself, which included amongst many others, the full tap number from 42nd Street and the dance opening number from A Chorus Line. He was a fantastic director and choreographer, AND person. He was a true inspiration. Why? This young man had NO feet. He had two prosthetic feet. His bad luck was that as a child, he was mostly in the hospital and due to defects, he had to have both of his lower legs amputated. He spent years in rehabilitation. Doctors told him he would never walk. This man went on to DANCE on BROADWAY, in the Tony Award winning production, Shenandoah. He also won an Emmy for choreographing the Miss America Pageant. He has a career in musical theater. Life dealt him lemons (bad luck) but he surely made sweet lemonade. His name is David Connolly if you wish to read any more about his incredible journey. </p>

<p>Susan</p>

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<p>I prefer the Samuel Goldwyn quote: “the harder I work, the luckier I get”.</p>

<p>I have no doubt that serendipity exists, but I prefer the odds of someone who worked hard at their art with talented people they respected as mentors. That’s why some parents are supportive of their child attend a pure arts program in college: they know that the enviornment will be more conducive for their children to learn, experiment, work, make mistakes they learn from with like-minded passionate individuals.</p>

<p>if we put it all down to luck, why should anyone bother to go to college for their chosen field at all?</p>