Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Drama School

I come from a pretty traditional family. My parents worship success, and expect all of their kids to go into areas where they cam make six figure incomes. My mom is a doctor, my dad a lawyer, and my eldest brother, a successful businessman. So when I told them that I wanted to go into drama school, they were less than thrilled to say the least.
It isn't that they did not like theatre school classes. Both my mom and my dad came from families which supported the arts, and they had actually met during a class at the local theater school. Nonetheless, they were the kind of people who believed that money trumps everything. Taking some classes in drama schools was alright, but after that you had to get serious and study something that was going to pay the bills. That was the kind of world view that they had.
Still, they were also supportive, loving people, and when they saw that drama school was where my heart lay, they gave me their blessings. I won't say that there were not a few fights about it, because there were. They were unhappy to see me making what they thought of as a big mistake, and they did every thing that they could to try to change my mind. Still, they were nice about it in the end. They even offered to help to pay for the cost of drama school tuition.
Acting school ended up being a lot different than I had pictured it. I had thought about drama school as a glamorous place filled with beautiful people, but in many ways it turned out to be just like any other academic program. We would study things like the history of theater and English language literature, along with drama school acting classes. Still, the drama school definitely had more than its share of strange characters.
In the end, that was one of my favorite things about the drama school. I loved the type of people which it attracted. I do not know if all drama schools are like this, but in mine, you were free to be anything you liked, as long as you did not act boring and ordinary. I have never felt so at ease expressing myself, and I made many friends from the first moment I walked in the door. All in all, I had a blast while I was there.

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