Patience. The next part will come along, and it will be exactly right. In the meantime still reading Harold Guskin’s book How to Stop Acting. I am so excited about this book. It’s an entirely different approach to creating a character. I read it with a pen in hand, underlining passages and starring sections that are especially important. (An awful lot of this book has been marked up, I tell you.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Guskin’s book in relation to the Robert Duval/Sissy Spacek film Get Low, which my husband and I saw last weekend. It’s a simple story extremely well done. Duval turns in such a powerful performance; he should get an Academy Award. And Sissy Spacek looks amazing. Twenty years ago she was all elbows and hard angles; now there’s this soft, round, womanliness about her that is just lovely. She is of the earth somehow. I want to see more of her in other films.

But, back to Duval. Guskin, at one point in his book, talks about “physicalizing” your lines as you read the script out loud – i.e. jumping, singing, making sounds and gestures as impulse and the lines move you. (Something that would benefit me especially since I’m at heart a shy person.) Well Duval, in this story he tells at the end of the film, makes this whooshing sound. I was just stunned watching it. It isn’t the kind of thing most people would do, but his character was so in the moment of reliving this incident from his past that it was like he could see everything again, fresh, and that sound was what he was hearing. It was so right. It made the scene so much more than just someone telling a story and relying on filmed “flashbacks” to show the viewer what had happened. With that sound, Duval brings you right into the story with him, moment by moment. Really remarkable.

One thing I’ve learned about acting – and I’ve probably said this before – is how hard it is. It’s hard even to be a bad actor (and I have much more respect now for bad actors!) But when you study it, and when you see acting done well….wow.

My husband and I talked about that film for a long time after we left the theater.

My home computer fried its brains this week - third time in seven years. It's in the shop, but I suspect the tech is going to call and tell me he can't resurrect it. Thinking about abandoning PCs and getting a MacBook Pro, which is what I have at work. This week's snag. Not insurmountable, just costly.