More snow. It started yesterday morning and is still coming down. The forecast was for 25-33 inches. My husband and I have been out with shovels and snow thrower four times and will likely make another pass over the driveway and walks in another hour or so. How do they make it through the winter in places like Maine and North Dakota?

Shooting on the film has been put off until next weekend. Hope the director likes a snowy background as cold temperatures will keep this on the ground for weeks.

Watched Clara Bow in the silent film It last night and caught a 26-year-old Gary Cooper in a very early role as the newspaper reporter. Cooper speaks (mouths words) but not enough to warrant a title card on screen. The commentator noted how he “fills the frame,” even in a minor part, and that this is what it means to be a star. Audiences noticed him and liked him (as I did, even before I recognized him). There is just something about his face, about the way he moves. After It he did another film with Bow, not very successfully, and then landed a Western and found his groove. Clara Bow must have had a harder time. She’s very cute and animated in this film, but not terribly different in looks than the other actresses playing shopgirls. Bow, I think, had to earn stardom. Cooper just had “it.”

The film is noteworthy for another face on screen – romance novelist Elinor Glyn. Glyn was the Barbara Cartland of her day apparently, and originated the term “It” as a code word for sex appeal. For a long time I thought Glyn and Rudy Frimmel were just names Meredith Willson made up for The Music Man – like Eulalie MacKechnie Shinn – but I have since learned that both were actual people of that time. As was Dan Patch (actually he was a horse). Madame Elinor Glyn in person hardly lives up to the hype. She looks rather middle-aged and dowdy, very much like Margaret Dumont in the old Marx Brothers films. Hardly anyone you’d think was a writer of hot novels. She must have had a very active fantasy life.

Still struggling to find appropriate audition monologues, especially one I can use for the Stonehenge Auditions in late March. Stage monologues are just too over the top for film and hard to cut down to the 90-second time limit. I may have found one from the film Virtuosity, a Louise Fletcher role I pulled out of an interrogation scene that involved several characters. Fletcher was just my age when she did the part in 1995. I just need to remember Michael Caine’s advice for confrontations – don’t blink, hold the power. (I don’t think Louise Fletcher ever blinks!)

I ran the Virtuosity piece by my drama instructor, along with Saunders from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Constance from The Life of David Gale. This was the only one he thought I could make work for me, though he wasn’t crazy about any of them because he thought the monologue should be more about my character than me talking about another character. I don’t know. I think your delivery can say a lot about your character. Besides, most monologues where the character is saying something about themselves are memory pieces, and I’ve read a lot of interviews with casting directors where they say they don’t like memory pieces because they see so many of them. Anyway, I’ll just be glad to have something for Stonehenge, assuming I get picked in the audition lottery. Stonehenge is a chance to be seen (and cast possibly) by a lot of casting directors, and to have my audition posted to You Tube. I’m involved in short films shooting through the first week in June. Stonehenge might fill my dance card for a time after that. At least I hope so.

The hour is up. Time to grab the snow shovel again. This is getting old.