The prolonged agony of near misses
I used to cry a lot. My favorite place was the bathroom floor.
I’ve had the conversations enough with friends and colleagues. It usually involved their own kids or a niece or nephew who has a lot of “natural talent.” They would ask me for advice in helping make decisions on whether to get behind a kid they care about wanting to do acting. It happened enough that I have enough data to say, with consistent frequency, most of the adults involved are asking because they have genuinely no idea where to begin or what to expect. And for good reason.
I quietly suss out if the person in question is pushing it or if the kid is driving the whole thing. If it is the former, I usually plead the fifth and quote Johnny Cash who says “he doesn’t give advice. He gave advice one time. To his friend Roy Orbison. Saying change your name, don’t sing so high and lose the glasses.”
But if I hear that the kid really loves the whole thing and such, I will engage further. What can I say, really? The answer is there is no decision. It is generally made for you.
Like a good gambler, I was blessed with early success, so I believed the whole game was easier than it was. I would learn later, again and again, that it wasn’t always so.
But if it didn’t seem like all the doors were open and we would have been foolish to not walk through them, I probably never would have stuck around to earn a role in The Mighty Ducks. But it was just easy. So, that’s always my first thought to share with anyone. If it doesn’t feel like work for the kid, but fun, and things are lining up to make it feel worth it, then by all means have at it. But keep in mind - at some point or another, it will get difficult. And your kid, no matter how precocious, will run into a wall and crash. And feel pain like no other. And will remind you they are indeed a child running in an adult world and just got ran over. And they will cry on the floor in the bathroom just like me.
There is a certain pain that comes with the privilege of being close to so called success that is like no other. Especially when achieving that success involves trips to exotic places, and playing in a sand box with super star movie stars while everyone else is stuck in school reading Nathanial Hawthorn. To me, I had no real concept of the money. Luckily, I was motivated by the opportunity to do weird stuff in strange places I couldn’t find on a map. ‘Wait, I get to say Fuck you to Daman Wayans’ or pitch for a major league baseball team and shoot the whole movie in Wrigley Field?
It was that dangled carrot that was my first rock bottom.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tales From The Pond by Matt Doherty to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.