In October 2007, 3 months have passed since I came to LA. I felt time went so fast. I was learning English hard though I was getting frustrated because I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do most in the US. The dream to become an actor in Hollywood was my biggest dream I had in my life. I felt the pressure sometimes from that.. Anyway I didn’t reach the place where I could tell it was hard to become an actor here or not. I spent 3 months just to improve my English skills (I still had strong Japanese accents though)It was about time to make moves! I started looking for an acting school. I didn’t expect to be on movies by chance. If I could be on movies only by luck, the meanings of challenging here for me would be nothing. Where would I find information?? The modern world gave us internet. It greatly helped me! When I was looking for some information, I always used internet or magazines for actors. I noticed how much internet helped me for my dreams. I got my ticket to the US online and I also applied for my language school online. At the point maybe I was lucky that I could use it. But the laws of immigrations and so on were getting more strict these days, so maybe becoming an actor in Hollywood for foreigners was as hard as before. Then the most important thing to challenge was just myself. I was looking for information for a while…
I always believed my intuition. I followed my intuition after long deliberation. Then after a few days, I found a right school finally! I really wanted to take everyday acting courses though I was a language school student, so I chose to go to an acting school once a week. The school was nearby Hollywood. I was getting so excited! I called the school. A lady answered. I asked her if a Japanese guy could attend classes there. She said yes. But she had to ask me some questions to test me. She said, “Why do you want to study acting here?” She me asked some of other questions. I answered what made me come here and so on and we finally finished the test. At the end she said “OK , the new class will start next week. Come to the class next week!” This class was short term class though no matter what I decided to join the class.
Next Sunday I was heading to the acting school. The distance between my place and the acting school was even farther than the one between my place and language school. But I really didn’t care about that. It had been about half a year since I last acted. I had 3 months to study acting in this school. I didn’t know what I could learn in this acting school. I just had to do what I could.
I arrived at the acting school. There were some people. The rest came there after a while, then we got total 20 students there. The teacher came into the room and she explained what the purpose of this class was. It was to develop ourselves and stand at the start as an actor. We introduced ourselves first. By the way everyone were foreigners! Oh well I meant I was the only foreigner there. My introduction with Japanese accents finished. We did some exercises and then we were about to do improvisation. We made some groups with 2 men and 2 women and we sat on a sofa. That was all about the scene. We just sat down there and we could say whatever as we liked.
I saw they were acting then the foreigner had to act in the last group in this class. All of us got on the stage one by one. 2 girls and 1 guy were already on the stage. I was the last one to walk in. I got on the stage and sat on a sofa like others did. They were talking casually and I thought “Oh this is how Americans talk..” and joined their talk. Sometimes they couldn’t understand what I said though I was doing well at the time. When we were about to finish the scene, girls left the stage suddenly! Only I and another guy Dino were on the stage. He had some accents not from California (sorry for saying this Dino..) and of course I had the strongest accents from the island Japan. Then what happened ?? We could barely understand each other. The scene was getting funnier in a way. After 5 minutes I thought we should have ended this scene soon and I also thought maybe Dino would finish this scene. But that never happened. OK I was the one to finish this scene. He said, “What were you doing by now??” Well I just answered generally and said,
“But what were you doing in my house??”
All of students never expected that I would say this. The audience burst out laughing! This was my first acting experience in English. I had never had something like this experience , so I was glad about that. It had been 7 years since I stood on my first soil stage in Japan. “Now I’m standing on the stage in America” It was just a small stage. Though it was only a departure of my long journey…
To be continued...
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