[col-sect][column][This piece was partially live-blogged on my iPhone and then subsequently cleaned up and filled out at home.] I’ve just been chatting with the bartender at Earls this evening; she also happens to be an actor. Of all the bartenders at this place, she’s the most motivated [read impatient] to replace your drink. She’s pretty and has beautiful eyes, but you can’t help but question her sincerity (obviously I mean more than would typically be applied to whatever a pretty server at Earls says). Somehow you get the vibe that trusting her wouldn’t be the wisest thing you’ve ever done. She’s nice, but she can’t fully conceal that she’d really rather be elsewhere and that ‘bartender at Earls’ is just a role that she goes through the motions of performing.

Anyhoo, I had just popped in after submitting my application for registration as an architect with the AIBC, an endeavour that has consumed the last eleven years of my life). So a drink was called for. Actually I went to the Cactus on Burrard first, strolled in cooly (of course) to the lounge and around the bar but as no bar seats were available, I cooly strolled right on out the door. Absurd, 4:00 and the bar is packed. Apparently everybody poured out of the office early probably because the sun made its first appearance in weeks and folks just wanted to get the final hour of it. So yeah, I just split. In and out. I’m not the type to stand near the bar behind the folks who are actually seated at the bar; it’s just weird. It’s the worst place to stand – partly because you’re obstructing the circulation space which implies many people and servers trying to get past you, causing unnecessary interactive “situations.” Not my style. So I went onward to my usual place.

The place is nice and empty – I’ve got the whole bar to myself. I order my drink and pull out the script that Katie and I are working on because I want to work out the blocking. So miss bartender delivers my drink and asks what I’m working on. So I tell her and thankfully before launching in to a whole thing about my experience with acting after only three classes, I smartly asked if she’s ever acted. “Yes, I’m an actor” she said. Ah-ha. Ok Patty, so time to keep it shut. I asked her how it was going and she wasted no time getting in to how she’s very frustrated with the acting profession at the moment because of a recent string of auditions that have not yielded bookings. I asked how long she’s been doing it. Three years. [/column][column]But right back to her frustration: she said something to the effect of, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” (Note: I’d make a brutal reporter actually because I can never recall people’s lines verbatim. Not even close. I kind of just get the general gist, but never commit memory to the ‘he-said she-said’ of conversations. So honestly she could have actually used entirely different words.) The point she made though was that she felt that it was something about her or her performance that is preventing her from getting roles. Which I guess is pretty obvious now that you write it down. But she meant that it’s her and not the circumstances, for example, it’s not that she’s too old or too young; it’s her. She elaborated: she said something about bringing as much of her as she could to the auditions. I don’t know, man – actors speak a different language. She explained what she meant, but I don’t remember. Apparently practising acting casually is a lot more fun than pursuing it as a profession. Speaking of which, she added something bitchy about those people who take acting classes to “come out of their shell” or to “gain confidence” because they are wasting the time of actors who are taking a class to refine their craft. Well, interesting. I can see where she’s coming from, but as a guy who has spent nine years in school and have had to endure every kind of fellow student, including the annoying, the attention-junkies, the moronic, the parasitic, I couldn’t really get to a place where I had any sympathy for her. If you take a class that has more than yourself as a student, it’s going to be a pain in the ass. That’s life. If you want to experience a streamlined, efficient acting class without human obstacles, then pony up for private lessons. 

Our depressing chat continued a bit and my conversation skills are not such that I could rescue it. Girl wanted to vent and she was just going to vent. That’s that. I could see no happy place in the vicinity to redirect this thing. And so I was content to just keep quiet and let it fizzle away. But what’s a little irritating is that I didn’t really see it as my job to listen to her bitching, especially since I’m the customer and I was actually in a good mood and treating myself to a self-congratulatory beverage. What kind of perverse reversal is this? Since when does the bar patron have to entertain the problems of the bartender?[/column][/col-sect]

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