What Do You Think?

Don't be a blueprint. Be an original

Roy Acuff
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"Well, that's the way they did it in the movie."

Something I've never understood is why some actors and directors insist on producing a play to look like it was in the movie. Directors will search for an actor who looks like the actor in the film and it doesn't much matter how good he is as long as he looks the part, or the part as it was on the screen. And I've known actors who will go through elaborate make up and hair styling to resemble someone from a film.

I've played "A Christmas Carol" a number of times and often there was a fresh view of the story, but sometimes the director wanted to reproduce the film. How stupid! If I can deliver a reading of a line that is fresher, more interesting and more relevant than the fellow in the film why should I be forced to do it his way?

I lost an audition for Big Daddy in "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" because I wasn't fat. Burl Ives, who played it in the film, was fat. But nowhere in the script does it call for Big Daddy to be fat. I went on to play him in another theatre and nobody minded that I wasn't fat.

I've also observed the same imitative trait in speech. I've gone into the first day of rehearsal and heard some actor trying to sound like Marlon Brando, or Al Pacino, or Rex Harrison.

Discoveries are not made through imitation. Once you choose to be like, look like or sound like someone else you put aside creativity and imagination, two of the greatest gifts a human being can carry into life.

I don't care if it's a performance of a play or a great piece of music, if it's a garden, a chocolate cake or a rock band. I don't want to see or hear what someone else did. I want to know what you think.

DB - The Vagabond
(Never give up.)
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SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest)

Come on. 11 diverse and interesting answers so far. Where's yours?

NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.

Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?

dbdacoba@aol.com

I eagerly await your answer.

DB
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Natural Nincompoops 8/01/09

You have been given worldly means to use and employ against human ignorance and wrong.

Knute Nelson
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Happy to see you.
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There are two men out west somewhere. One of them did me a serious heartbreaking wrong thus ending a friendship of 20 years. The other one automatically took the first one's side without giving me any explanation for it. I knew from his emails that he didn't know what had happened. I tried to explain to him what had taken place just so he would know, not to turn him against the other guy. The more we communicated, the more adamant he became at not considering or even listening to what I was saying. It was causing me a lot of distress until I heard someone say "You can't win an argument with an ignorant man." Then I relaxed and let it go. It's not up to me alone to heal ignorance.

You can't reason with the unreasonable. You can't educate one who refuses to be educated. You can't convince a person whose mind is closed. You can't turn the lights on in a house that has no lights, You can't argue with an ignorant man.

In "A Christmas Carol" Charles Dickens writes that the Spirit of Christmas Present shows Scrooge two children it has hiding under it's robe.

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;
wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt
down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

'Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.' exclaimed the Ghost.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon
them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.
This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,
and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy,
for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the
writing be erased.

Beware the ignorant of the world, They are dangerous, They will do wrong. The best we can do is work against human ignorance and wrong, because we can't argue with it.

DB
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Welcome to August.
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