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Warmly, 

Lauren 

Today is the one-month-and-six-day anniversary of the most depressing birthday I’ve ever had. A week before the day I read Bossypants and it cast shadow over the festivities.

Every birthday stands a reminder that I am not where I want to be, and as one year closer to becoming too old to act. Betty White excluded, the older you get the more difficult it becomes to get work as an actress. This is a fact. As Tina Fey said in Bossypants“I have a suspicion that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.” And crazy people aren’t hired.

Something I look forward to experiencing. Soon enough, I will be the crazy tall actress with the impronouncible last name walking down the street holding an umbrella when it is sunny, going to auditions which I will never book.

My rational mind often brings to my attention a consequence of the age-factor in show business: I’m spending my peak earning years working towards a goal in which I have little control. I read all the self-help-manifest-visualize-create-your-reality books out there, but when I tally the numbers, I’m basically volunteering countless hours of my day for the hope that it will pay off with a miraculous pay check. I never aspired to be a starving artist, and at the back of my mind I wonder if I’m settting myself up to be homeless in retirement.

Add to the umbrella countless shopping bags. And buff arms.

I can always delay unemployment with Botox or a good ol’ face lift, but that maneuver only makes it more obvious that you are too old and no one wants you.

When I’m striding down the street with tattered clothes, dirt-colored complexion and a mind full of haunting memories, at least I won’t look like the Joker. Don’t be afraid to say hi!

I am finding out that when a movie you are in goes to theaters you get invited to a lot of fancy events. During the first hour of these aforementioned gatherings the guests of honor are asked to do a series of poses on a 50-foot-long carpet of red. The photographic results of my experience on cardinal-colored tapestry have ended up on Facebook and IMDB. This is the cause of all sorts of interesting questions from friends and acquaintances.

One question or pondering expression that often comes surging from an offender’s mouth is: Are you rich now? I look behind me. Have you mistaken me for someone else? I have also gotten the query: Are you going to forget about me now? I find that an ironic question, because every time I hear my name announced and I do the obligatory suck-the-stomach-in spin onto the red carpet I ask myself: How much longer will I be asked to do this? and Do I really deserve to be here?

My inner critic is very vigilant and if any doubts pass through my mind she comes surging forth to remind my ego, in order of increasingly horrifying embarrassment, all of my shortcomings.

In the approximate 2 minutes and 47 seconds it takes to pose on the first inch of carpet to the last inch, my inner critic races to action. My, is she vicious. The fancier the event that I attend, the more malice she gathers into her being before she hisses in my ear: You’ve got to be kidding me!

Over the past month I have been so fortunate to receive excellent press for my work on “When Harry Tries to Marry.” I’ve posted the links, which don’t quite have the pizzazz of the scans — the layout on the printed page is fantastic! Here they are!

Cover of Courier Sun!
http://bit.ly/lauren-courier

Page 3!

“Rising Star in Film/Theater”
http://bit.ly/lauren-gazette

“Home is on the screen.”
http://bit.ly/lauren-chronicle 

A little more than a year ago I went to India to finish up a feature film “When Harry Tries to Marry.” Remember the blogs about the experience? Sleeping in cool tents, revisiting past friends…it was wild!

After answering “I’m not sure” to everyone’s question of “When is it coming out?” manymanymany times I finally have an answer!

April 22nd!

Tickets go on sale today at most theaters. Updated information will be live athttp://www.whenharrytriestomarry.com/release-schedule.html.

And join the Facebook page for the latest updates!http://www.facebook.com/whenharrytriestomarry

My character’s name is Angela — you can’t miss me and my character’s big pregnant belly!

Here are some places it is showing:
AMC Empire 25 http://www.amctheatres.com/empire 42nd Street and corner of 8th Avenue
Village East Cinemas http://www.villageeastcinema.com 181 – 189 2nd Ave (12th Street) NEW YORK CITY , NY 10012
Kew Gardens Theater http://www.kewgardenstheatre.com 81-05 Lefferts Blvd, Kew Gardens, Queens 11415
AMC Loews Raceway Park in Westbury http://www.amctheatres.com/Raceway 1025 Corporate Drive, Westbury, NY 11590

Tickets go on sale today at most theaters. Updated information will be live at http://www.whenharrytriestomarry.com/release-schedule.html

I lovelovelovelovelove working in commercials. Besides for film shooting days, it is my favorite day of work. Check out my latest — for Ion TV in their “Best Kept Secret” campaign. I’m Kim D., a media buyer. It was a fun gig, especially because in the process of preparing my lines, I learned from the commercial’s production team what a media buyer actually does — a person who makes the commercial world happen.

http://bestkeptsecretintelevision.com/

“I’ve spent as much time over the last 30 years as I possibly can because Italians seem so ambivalent about the modern world’s arrival.”
All Broads Lead to Rome
By Michael Wolff
Vanity Fair, September 2009

I just came back from an incredible few weeks performing in Florence and Catania, Sicily. As was the case with all of my previous performances in Italy the Italian public was attentive and interested. They showed up in force for the last show: one-thousand people payed homage in Florence. As a performer it was an unbelievably gratifying experience.

We were in and out of Florence and Catania, so most of my stay I was in Rome. I came back from an active audience and accolades to a city of inspiration. The architecture. The sculptures on street corners. The massive fountains.

Being around this grandeur made me feel very sad about the current state of Italy.

It was two years since I had last been to Italy. From the moment I stepped off the plane everyone I spoke with told me that the economic crisis had a huge negative impact. Conditions feel like they are getting worse. Friends in professional theater spoke about how their wages have been cut to almost unlivable levels. And it doesn’t look like this will change in the near future.

I spent an evening walking through the Roman Forum with a group of Romans. One of them turned to me and said: “You can’t invent such a fantasy of history as what you can imagine happened in Rome.” As they pointed out the significance of, what to me was a pile of rocks, I got the sense they were trying to prove something: “See, our country could be great, too!” It also was apparent that this pride takes a new dimension in a time of decay; they are especially proud because they do not have much as a country to be proud of now — and haven’t for a long time.

In The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman he asks: “Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?” Because if you have more memories than you are on the decline. During the course of my stay I didn’t hear one hopeful comment about the future of Italy. When I heard about the nation as a whole it was about one of two periods: Ancient Rome or the fascist period. Fascism was when things went from bad to worse (or temporarily better, depending on who you talk to). But, Ancient Rome — that is the time to remember! Current events? Too despicable to talk about with self respect. All memory and no forward thinking.

The Italians are waiting for someone, anyone, to step through the levels of corruption and muck to do something, anything, to improve the economic situation. Yet, most remain cynically inactive and brooding on the past.

I went to Paris abrasive-ly resistant to spending time in a country I was taught to hate. I left a beret-wearing Francophile shouting “Viva La France” at random intervals. The reason for the change was finding that France is a magical place where ordinary rules do not apply.

Here are the top ten things that make Paris a mystical wonderland:
11-Butter is not fattening.
10-Public pools have co-ed bathrooms and showers where no one is sexually harassed.
9-Bread, cheese and wine have their own places in the food pyramid.
8-The most one waits for a subway is not at all to thirty seconds on a normal day, and four minutes on a bad day.
7-The best thing to drink after a morning run is a coffee.
6- It is not necessary to tell people to turn off their cell phones before a movie.
5- Muscle relaxers are over-the-counter drugs.
4- Buying new clothes is not necessary when there are one-hundred years of the finest fabrics and designs at your disposal at a bevy of decently priced vintage houses throughout the city.
3- A forty-something woman can dance on the bar in a chain-link mesh shirt and still be the hottest thing in the club.
2- A photo of a topless women does not make a movie or an advertisement or a television show or a piece of art pornographic.
1- You can have two kids and a husband and still find yourself in a lesbian bar on New Years Eve.

Matt Wells at the BBC wanted to know more about how I changed my NY accent. Here is the link of the segment that recently aired.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9334000/9334355.stm