You know that dream everyone has where you’re back in high school and it’s final exam week, only it suddenly dawns on you that you haven’t been in class all semester, have no idea what you’re going to be tested on, or even where your classroom is and you’re going to fail miserably and why-oh-why aren’t you more organized and prepared?

Yes, that one.

Last night I created a variation: I dreamed I was in New York and had a 3:15 p.m. appointment for an audition, only I didn’t have my monologue with me and I couldn’t remember which one I was going to use or even all the words, so I got in a cab and tried to find a bookstore thinking that, hey, it’s only 1 o’clock and I have time, only the cab gets lost and I can’t remember the address where I’m to audition and I’ve muffed my big chance and they’re never going to let me audition in New York again!!! (shriek!)

Anxiety.

Well, at least I wasn't naked.

The weekend is here. Shooting through Monday night. I must say that working seven days a week certainly helped me drop the 10 pounds I was trying to lose. Have a lead on a web series in its third season that has parts for older actors. Checking on it.

Watched Louis Malle's Au Revoir, les Enfants last night - an engaging and thought-provoking film - and was again struck by how difficult it must be to direct children and get a natural and touching performance. Children cast in American television seldom capture anything that looks like genuine childhood, but perhaps it's because they are shown talking too much and thinking too little. What I mean is, and I’m sure there’s a term for this, Malle keeps the adults’ and children’s visible emotions to a minimum, allowing the viewer to project his or her own emotions produced by the story onto each character. Julien doesn’t cry, the viewer cries. Shona Auerbach achieves a similar result in her wonderful film Dear Frankie.

I’m becoming increasingly aware of this in films and working hard to tone down my own performance so that I get less “acting” and more being. Interestingly, I’m finding that film directors seem to respond very positively to that, saying things like “I like that subtle thing you’re doing.” This is, of course, exactly the opposite advice I was given for stage work, where directors said they wanted an all out, eat up the scenery audition because it was easier to tone that down than to ramp up a performance that was too low key. All I can say is that it must take a tremendous amount of experience and confidence to move easily between stage and film.

It’s warming up. Scouting out some film work for the summer as the two short films I’m working on are wrapping up. Not as easy to find roles for older women, but something will turn up. My employer is casting an industrial for a physicians’ association on Hypo Sexual Dysfunction Disorder. I’d ask to do the doctor part, but I think I’d get the giggles. Not good.

Got a call from the local PBS station about jumping in last minute as host for a web series they’re taping for the Department of Education (a friend in the business recommended me). On three hours notice I just couldn’t do it. (Rats!) They may be looking to sign on rotating hosts for the series, however, so still a potential opportunity at some point down the road. Concerns that this might get me off message though.

Getting a pass this weekend this 25-minute film being shot up in Maryland. I’m not in any of the scenes so I can sleep late and run errands. Last weekend I was on set or en route from 10 a.m. to midnight Saturday and 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday.

Monday I had a drama class after work downtown that involved setting up to do another short film. This one involves a hostage situation cop scene – comedy, although my part is more ironic than comedic. (The important thing is I get to use the BIG prop gun. My “partner” gets the small one.) Fun to rehearse, but by Tuesday I was really beat.

Finished the Mark Viera book on Irving Thalberg and am now deep into Foster Hirsch’s book Acting Hollywood Style. Both of them (and my experiences in class) have me thinking about the need to create a recognizable personal image (or brand as they say in marketing circles these days). Every actor has a look, a sound and a pattern of behavior that forms the basis for getting his initial foot in the door. I need to find mine.

The old studio system, which was in existence from the 1930s to the 1950s, did a lot to help actors find their personal brand. It wasn’t just having a stable of stars under contract and putting them in as many films a year as you possibly could (although some studios did that and many actors certainly felt they were being used that way). Thalberg raised the “system” to an art form by viewing actors as raw material that studios invested in, mined, refined and protected to ensure that they retained maximum value. He would put up-and-coming actors in a variety of roles in low budget films and then track the fan mail. When he saw a spike in interest he took another look at that particular picture and role and tried to analyze what the actor was projecting that appealed so much to the audience – and then he’d put the actor into more of those kinds of roles.

That approach had the huge advantage of helping an actor to find his niche fairly quickly. Until an actor finds that he or she shows up in a lot of unsuitable roles. Take The Conversation, where Harrison Ford plays a corporate CEO’s stooge – smart but hardly the smart-aleck who endeared himself to Princess Leia. Or The Big Clock, a rather plodding murder mystery from the 1930s, starring Charles Laughton, where Harry Morgan plays a glowering thug with no lines – Harry Morgan who eventually wound up in a raft of successful comedic roles in television series from December Bride to MASH. I watched Evelyn Prentice a few weeks ago, a groaner with William Powell and Myrna Loy that introduces Rosalind Russell as a helpless, soft-voiced society woman in distress. This was a standard-issue portrayal in scores of films being made around that time, but one that completely obscures the brassy, loud-mouthed personality that made Russell a star. The movies are full of eventually great actors in initially bad roles.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because from time to time I find myself frustrated in class by a drama instructor who seems to think roles are one-size fits all or that I will learn something from trying to “act” a part that is radically different in age, gender, or personality type. (Yes, I guess I can roll around on the floor and play a baby, but where does this get me in the long run?)

So, the immediate goal is to find my niche, my recognizable brand. My height and voice seem to make female authority figures a natural fit, but it’s too easy to play those cold and come off like Louise Fletcher. That would be a bad move; if there’s no warmth, audiences don’t like you (and I don’t think they liked her unfortunately). I’m trying to be sensitive to the warmth issue and create a more nuanced authority figure, adding irony, vulnerability, intelligence, layers of personality, but without taking those elements so far that I lose the authority. Having decades of life experience, I think I can do that.

Tough week. Horrible cold made worse by the sloppy weather and the ongoing remodeling in my office. We're trying to keep up with clients amid absolute chaos. Printers disconnected. Construction debris piled up everywhere. People shifting around trying to stay out of the way of the workmen who today were painting the walls federal institutional yellow. (My, my, what was management thinking.)

But on the plus side we've started shooting the short film I'm appearing in, though it took a half box of cough drops to get me through my scenes on Sunday. This is going to be a real learning experience, as I suspect all film projects are in one way or another. The first thing I'm learning with this one is stamina. Sunday started at 5 a.m. and didn't end until 11 p.m. that night when I pulled in the driveway bone tired and with my cold taking a turn towards plague. This weekend I'm going to try and cat nap while they're changing scenes and relighting. (Where's my trailer?!)

I start my "Creating a Film Role" class on Monday with Michael Gabel and Todd Shoemaker - very excited about that one - and then I audition Tuesday night for another short film that gets underway in late March. Not forgetting the Stonehenge Auditions, but I still have to pull an audition spot out of the hat.

And tonight it's supposed to snow. Again.

I finished the book on Irving Thalberg and have been mulling over thoughts on the issue of personal branding. But that's for next time. For now I'm going to go lie down and read and think positive thoughts about how I'm not going to sneeze, wheeze, cough, snarkle and drip. I hate being sick.

My Voice! In VO, you either "Sell It" or "Tell It," and here I'm telling it for Associated Builders and Contractors. As with most talent, I'm hypercritical of my own work. I like this narrative read, however. I think I capture just the right inspirational tone and maybe just a little bit of Sally Kellerman.

I think telling it is harder than selling it, because you have to sustain interest over a longer period. I find when I hire people to do VO for my produced videos that it's a real crapshoot as to whether I'll get the quality I need for narration. Everyone sounds good in a short sample commercial.

I’ve been reading Mark Vieira’s book on Irving Thalberg while waiting out the blizzard. Books about Hollywood and filmmaking provide a lot of insight into what it takes to be successful: preparation and competitiveness (Katharine Hepburn), dogged persistence (Alec Guinness), and in many cases just being in the right place at the right time.

I am encouraged especially by actresses who succeed late in their careers. In 1930, MGM’s biggest female stars were Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and – Marie Dressler, a 60-year-old, overweight, self-described ugly duckling. Dressler was a vaudeville comedienne who’d done a few low-budget film comedies when screenwriter Frances Marion suggested her for a screenplay she’d just written called Min and Bill. It was the kind of heavyweight part Dressler later said she’d been waiting for her whole life, and she won the Oscar for Best Actress for it the following year.

Dressler isn’t the only one. Beulah Bondi, an Emmy winner and Oscar nominee, had a highly successfully film career, often playing the mother of stars like James Stewart. Jessica Tandy worked sporadically while raising her kids and thought she was washed up as an actress; she saw a revival of her career late in life and won the Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy at age 80. Most of Joan Plowright’s film work has come after she turned 60. Ditto Angela Lansbury who had a successful TV series and just picked up another Tony Award on Broadway at age 84.

Perhaps one secret is to outlive your competition. I look at the headshots online of the thousands of aspiring actresses and wonder, how does any one of them break through that? There are so many of them. They’re all gorgeous, they all have great figures, they all have beautiful hair.

For actors who do break through and become stars it’s often hard to maintain their star status over time. Someone on screen who was once so sexy and is now wrinkled, bald, overweight, and stoop-shouldered can be painful to watch. It makes you think that Garbo and Dietrich had the right idea – at some point you just drop out of sight and leave your public with their nice memories.

But there are lessons to be learned from those who do succeed. Actors like Lansbury, Plowright, and Michael Caine maintain a certain elegance on screen and seem to avoid roles where they are seen as weak or ill. Even in Caine’s recent film Is Anybody There?, where he plays a man living in an old folks home, he doesn’t seem to fit in with the other doddering residents. He has strength and spirit, and he’s the star. Similarly Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, Jack Nicholson, and John Travolta hang on to their tough guy image into their later years. It makes me think that it isn’t one’s chronological age that’s the critical factor, it’s on-screen vitality. Perhaps that’s the key – outlive the competition and don’t give casting directors the impression you’re going to drop dead in the middle of filming!

I am putting this information in a safe place to refer to later. For now, getting dressed, getting the snow shovel, getting the hell out of this house!

It’s 4 a.m. and I’m listening to the snow creak on the roof. We got 27 inches before the storm finally moved on, but only a foot at most remains on the roof. Still, an airplane hangar out at Dulles collapsed so now I’m wide awake worrying and thinking of a million other things, like the 60 headshot prints I’ll need for the Stonehenge auditions and whether to go ahead and have them printed or wait and see if I actually get an audition slot in the lottery. If I wait I only have two weeks to get the prints.

I like my headshots. I took a bit of a risk in having them done by a portrait photographer who’d hadn’t done actors headshots before, but I wanted to be sure I had someone who would consider what I was trying to achieve and work with me to achieve it. Bonnie Miller did that.

I also did a lot of reading on what casting directors look for and studied headshots of successful actors in film and television. I knew the photo had to look absolutely like me – flaws and all – when I walked in the door to audition. That was rule #1. Casting people don’t like surprises.

Then I spent an hour with TV makeup artist Lorna Basse, who worked on the talk show I produced a few years back, having her show me what look and colors would work best for me on camera, and how I could create that look myself for auditions. I knew I didn’t want makeup sprayed on my face as some makeup artists do, because that look can be too flawless and I can’t reproduce it on my own.

Based on my research, the approach I took was aimed at creating a natural look and eliminating anything in the photo that would distract from my face:

No earrings or jewelry of any kind

Simple, solid-colored clothing, but no all black (I could have also gone with bare shoulders, but decided that wasn’t appropriate given my age)

Simple, soft hairstyle

Professional but “natural” makeup

Shots taken either directly from the front or with my left shoulder forward and turned almost full face.

No angled or “arty” shots

The hardest part was getting what many casting directors refer to as “something behind the eyes.” I’ve never seen that defined beyond that phrase, but what I think it means is an expression that conveys wit, intelligence, humor, charm, or at the very least somebody home. To achieve that, to the extent that I did, I tried carrying on a non-verbal conversation with the photographer – thinking of things to say to her, but letting my face convey the words.

Bonnie took 400-plus shots with a rapid-fire digital SLR and then posted to an online folder the 100 most promising. I cut that list down to 10 and then contacted friends and family, gave them the password to the folder and asked them to tell me which they thought looked most like me and most conveyed that elusive “something.” That’s how I arrived at the four shots I use.

For printing, I asked Bonnie for minimal photoshopping - largely softening shadows and eliminating stray hairs and any evidence of my pierced ears, but leaving the “consternation” lines. I went with borderless prints and, departing from the standard, decided on no name or contact information on the front – again, because I didn’t want anything distracting from my face. I did have my name printed on the photo I use for my postcards, however, since that's a follow-up item and it seemed appropriate to reinforce my name there.

Do the headshots work? I think they do. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the producer of the short film I’m now in say that she’d noticed my headshot online and thought I’d be perfect for the role. That raises the issue of being cast largely on your "look" - at least initially - but that’s part of the business. Anyway, I just need to decide which headshot to print and when, and I guess the which will depend on the monologue I finally decide to do.

So, time to remove small cat from my lap and put him back in his room. Maybe milk will help me sleep. I hope so. Stop creaking, roof!