# 49 - Life Begins when We Take a Risk

Episode 49

[00:00:00] : Welcome back to the follow through formula Podcast. My name is Rick Lewis, and this is Episode 49 some while back. I can't remember how long ago now, but it had to be sometime within the last 49 days because that's when I started this whole podcast. But I did do an episode called Seven Rules. You Were Born Break, which is based on my book that I wrote called Seven Rules You Were Born to Break. And that book details seven hidden rules in our culture that many of us unconsciously obey to the detriment of our ability to follow through. And one of those hidden rules is the rule. Avoid mistakes. And today I want to tell you a story about breaking this rule. Avoid mistakes. In my senior year of high school, I had applied to a number of schools and universities, and among the options I had seriously considered was the famous Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Clown College in Sarasota, Florida And you may not even be aware that there is such a thing as clown college, and actually, I think it might not exist any longer. But when the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus was highly active in the years that it was touring all over the country. They actually had a clown college, which served as the gateway for the training and instruction off all the clowns who toured with the Ringling Circus. So it was a really cool, amazing in depth program that literally trained individuals with comedic talent and basically physical the physical talent because, ah, lot of being a clown is physical comedy. So they taught you character development and how to create props and gags. And anyway, it was very, very cool, and I was sort of captivated by the possibility of maybe going to clown school. I had a very good friend who I was doing theater with At that time. His name was Skip, and I told him, since he was also graduating from school that year about the Ringling program, he expressed his interest in that, And since I had already been accepted to a school called Webster University into their theater program, I didn't have any use for my application, so I just gave it to skip. I gave him my application to clown college, Skip my friends. Skip was accepted into this program, which was actually highly competitive. You might think just anyone can get into clown school, but not so It's a very selective program. He got in eventually graduated and then got offered a job touring with the Ringling Circus. And he's got some fantastic stories about that time traveling with the circus. But that's for another time. So my friend skips willingness to apply to the Ringling school. His dedication to that program, which was not easy to get through, and his acceptance of an offer to clown for riel with what used to be called the Greatest Show on Earth, were all demonstrations of overcoming this rule of certainty. We tend to want to follow. We want things to be certain, and so this rule avoid missed aches, unconsciously derails our ability to follow through very often. But Skip overcame that to get himself to Clown college and actually tour on the road with the Ringling program. Clown College itself was a very untraditional choice for a high school graduate. On the surface, it would seem to promise very little in its breadth of options for a future career or livelihood, and I know that skips parents were concerned at that time, and there were plenty of other people who also pointed this out to skip. But he was undeterred. Circus life itself is very hard and uncertain, and interestingly, when tragedy strikes, like in the circus, when something bad happens because it's a live performance and people are doing scary and risky things when something bad happens, it's the clowns who are called upon to go into immediate action and help everyone to cope. That's where the famous Stephen Sondheim songs sent in the Clowns comes from. So anyway, in April of 1980 a musical called Barnum made its debut on the Broadway stage in New York City, and this show was about the life of the infamous hoaxer and circus producer P. T. Barnum, the very man that the Barnum and Bailey Circus was partially named after. So this Broadway musical logged 854 performances in one ah bunch of Tony Awards before eventually closing on Broadway and launching a national tour that played extended runs in some of the largest cities of North America. And that was standard practice for Broadway shows when they, when they closed on Broadway they would launch a national tour and travel to these cities. Now in high school, I was totally into theater, wanted to be an actor. That's what I wanted to do with my life and my friends. Skip had the same dream because we were part of this community. Handful of us as high school students. We auditioned for and got roles in every version of any kind of theater that was happening in our hometown that that we could try out for and Skip. And I would always talk about in dream of performing one day in a Broadway show, along with the whole circle of our theater friends. So after graduating from high school, we all went our separate ways. Attending universities that were known for their theater programs. Some people moved to Los Angeles to court stardom in Holly Hollywood and try out for roles there. Some of us moved to New York City to try and seek theatrical success there on the stage. So we had this whole group of us that kind of scattered across the country from our hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, to find work. Now skip to the rest of us, seemed to have taken the path that was least likely to result in a respectable career as an actor. But what happened after he had graduated from Clown College and started touring with Barnum is that a Broadway casting rep visited the actual circus, looking for skilled circus performers to cast in chorus roles for Barnum's national tour. So Skip got a chance to try out for this tour, and his talent and enthusiasm stood out. And he got this part, which meant he was suddenly a member of the esteemed Actors Equity Union, making a very good living as a bonafide actor and chorus member of a Broadway musical. And the rest of us who were on these mawr certain respectable, predictable tracks of quote, success in the industry of acting when we heard about this were like, What the heck? I'm here in this academic institution studying acting from a serious perspective. There were people like I said in in L. A auditioning for roles. There were these all these friends in New York, and Skip is the one who gets the actor's equity card after going to clown college. We were all very disconcerted by this, but it was so much fun to see skips willingness to just go for this wild off the wall possibility and have it turned out this way. So now the story fast forwards to the end of the national tour, which Skip completes now. National tours for Broadway shows are typically followed by a second tour called a Bus and Truck Tour, and they play in smaller cities and towns across North America for shorter periods in less populated areas. So one day I get an excited and breathless phone call from Skip as he stood on a busy New York street corner at a payphone. I know I'm really dating myself, and I'm dating Skip Thio. Sorry, Skip, But so he was in Manhattan, in the midst of rehearsals for the Barnum Bus and Truck Tour, which he had been invited to join. Having just finished the national tour, he said that he had overheard the director speaking about this shows need for a swing and I'll tell you what I'll tell you about what that is in a second, and that the director intended toe hold a general audition for the part a few days later. Now a swing is a particular kind of understudy who has no regular role but backs up many performers in a show swings air particularly crucial for bus and truck tours, since the traveling performance schedules are really grueling and hard on the stamina off the cast members. The Barnum Bus and Truck Tour was scheduled to play 70 cities in a nine month period. And as a tour like that wears on, the cast wears down. Performers get tired, ill injured, so the swing is the replacement who stands waiting in the wings in case something happens and one of the roles need to be understudy. So the swing role is a very important job on these tours, and the swing is paid the same as everybody else. Whether they go on stage on any given night or not, just having them there is a crucial and pivotal part of the touring company. So Skip was telling me on the phone that he had somehow persuaded the director to audition me alone prior to holding a cattle call for the rest of the professional acting community in all of New York City. We're talking about thousands of talented performers who would happily queue up around the block for a shot at such a job. Is this because that's what everyone is doing in New York City, hoping to land a professional role in a job such as this to get their actors equity card. Now the swing role for the Barnum tour was especially unique because not on Lee did the male and female swing. So there was two of us. There was a woman and there was me, and we understudy the male and female parts, respectively. Not only did we have to learn all the songs and the lyrics the lines of all the parts, every dance step in the musical numbers, all the blocking cues we were responsible for requiring enough competencies in each circus discipline to perform that specialty in this show, because every cast member had something they could do as a circus skill that was featured in some point in the show. So there was not only the need to have thes skills of singing, acting, dancing. We also had to know plates, spinning acrobatics, tightrope walking, eunice cycle writing, um, juggling. There were all these other skills that we had to know. So the reason skip called me and convinced the director to hold off and audition. Me first is that I already had a number of these skills. I had already been working as a clown in my local hometown. That was how I was actually making my living. At that point, I was working as a clown for birthday parties, so he knew that I had a good shot at this, even though I didn't have all the skills. So the plan was that I would need to arrive in New York, prepared to demonstrate as many of these skills as I could and to be auditioned for my abilities in acting, dancing and singing. Skip needed to know, then in there on the phone if I was in so we could tell the director to wait and see me or move forward with the general auditions at a cattle call in New York City. And there was another catch. Onley. One week of rehearsals remained prior to the start of the actual tour. If I got the part, I'd have to be prepared to stay in New York City and immediately start with the tour. So the upshot of all this was I had to wave goodbye to my hometown and my entire life, all my life plans. As I currently knew it, the apartment I was renting the car. I had all the performing jobs that I had already lined up. I would have to cancel and wrap up all of it, prepare myself for the audition with a monologue and with a song, fly to New York City and audition on the chance that a busy Broadway director across the country would find me suitable to the needs of his production. So I sat there contemplating this decision, considering what I had, Ah, life that I enjoyed that was ordered under my control and offered a reasonable degree of predictability. My momentum with work is a local performer. I was becoming better known. It had taken time to build that reputation and my clientele. I had my apartment. I had my life. I had my routine. Was I willing to risk it all for a chance? It's something that sounded intriguing and exciting, but in reality was completely unknown. So I considered all this and the decision was only made in my mind when I imagine the possibilities that would open up. If I took the risk and succeeded, it would be an actor's equity job, which meant an equity card and access to equity auditions and the world of professional theater that we had all wanted all our lives. Also, it would be a chance to do what I had always wanted to do professionally, getting well paid for it, getting to travel all over the country. And I knew, as I had considered this, that I would later regret not going for it if I didn't try out for the park. So now imagine me and the whirlwind of the 48 hours that ensued between the time I said, Yes, I'll come and the time I actually stepped on a plane to fly to New York City, I had to cancel the sublet of my apartment, pack up everything in my apartment, put it in storage, put my car up for sale and park it at my parents house so that they could show it and have it sold while I was gone. Cancel all the clowning jobs that I had lined up, book my airline ticket, find a pianist in town and go to their house and actually practice a song, which was by far my weakest skill. But in any case, with in two day's time, I had to do all of this. And 48 hours later, I found myself sitting in an airplane seat, very tired on route to JFK International Airport. Now my audition was scheduled to take place during the cast lunch break. That very day at noon, my flight was due to arrive at 10:45 a.m. And I knew it was a 30 minute cab ride from the airport to the rehearsal studio in Manhattan, which was a now our ride at the most. If traffic was bad, so it had been an epic effort just to get to this point to be on the plane. But now everything was looking good in terms of getting to New York City landing, getting in a cab and going and showing up on time for this audition until I woke with a bit of a start as our plane bounced across the top of some storm clouds just outside of New York City and the seat belt sign went on. So I dozed off, and now it was 10:30 a.m. We were due toa land in 15 minutes at the JFK Airport, but the bumps were getting worse and worse in bad weather. And as we were cutting through the banks of these grim looking thunderheads, the plane suddenly pulled its nose up and we started climbing again. The co pilot came on the speaker system and explained that this volatile storm system that had blown in made it too risky to attempt a landing and that we're gonna have to circle and wait for conditions to improve before making another approach. So now, helplessly. I was sitting there in the in the seat and looking out the window at the storm system, and we circled and circled the city for 20 minutes. Ah, half hour, 40 minutes past and we were still circling the doorway to my potential. Future was now all but closed. I had taken this huge chance, shut down my life and walked away from it. While the chances now of landing deep planing, getting in a cab and getting to the theater on time were virtually non existent by the time we actually landed. And I got to the curb to hail a taxi. It was already 12:30 p.m. The time my audition was supposed to start, I jumped in the cab. I had cash with me and I pulled out a wad and I said, Get me their asses fast you can. I'll give you a really good tip. We arrived at the rehearsal studio at 12:55 p.m. I ran into the building and up to the rehearsal loft, and Skip was standing there saying, Where were you? We're starting rehearsal in a few minutes. You missed the audition. He was upset. I was upset, so I took a seat in the lobby outside of the rehearsal hall. Skip ran off to tell the director that I had arrived and see what he wanted to do and oddly, sitting there in the chair. My thoughts were not focused on the worry that the director might not see me, or that I was essentially alone in New York City without a job or a home, no return flight and no particular direction or plan. I mostly remember feeling excited and interested and very present in what would happen next, which is an interesting the reason I remember this so vividly is because it's usually in projecting into the possibility of things going wrong in the future that we have fear. When we actually get in the situation in the moment and we're in the midst of a challenge, we actually feel Mawr capable and present off working with the situation as it is than we do when we're imagining it in the future. And this is exactly what was happening to me. I was just sitting there on this adventure, going all right, let's let's see what happens next. So Skip ran back to where I was sitting and told me the director wanted me to wait, that he would see me At the end of the day. There was an adjacent practice room next to where the cast was rehearsing and in the practice room were all of the's circus props. So I went into the practice room because now that he told me he was still gonna audition me, I was feeling quite nervous, and I started picking up the juggling props. There was a tight wire. There were juggling props. There was a Eunice cycle. There were acrobatic mats, so I spent hours practicing and When I was finally called in for the audition, I felt really prepared in sharp and clear. So this is at the end of the rehearsal day. I'm called in. The director is sitting there. He's very friendly. He's like, Hello, nice to meet you. Let's get started So the first thing he does is he asks to see my ability with these circus skills. So he says, All right, let's see you juggle. So I pick up three juggling clubs and I start juggling and he stops me like, four seconds later. And I'm like wanting him to let me go on, because this this is my strength, the circus skills or what? I really know how to dio. But, you know, the moment I picked up the clubs, he could see I could juggle. So we stopped me the same thing with acrobatics and unicycling. He didn't give me a chance to show off my abilities in these areas because he could see right away I could do them. We kind of breezed through all of these skills one by one, and then we got to some choreography he had me do. Now I was a dancer in college, I danced with a ballet company. This, too, was no problem. So it took us maybe 3.5 minutes to get to the point where he turns and says to me, Did you prepare a song? And I'm sitting there going, Yes, I did. I pull out my sheet music. I hand it to their pianist who's standing by, and now the director wants to hear me sing. And this is the moment where I felt the most nervous and the most scared. And it's not easy to sing when you're nervous and scared, because singing requires control of your breath and that that nervousness in that fear was causing my breath to be shallow and quick and constricted. So I handed the sheet music to the pianist and honestly thought, This is where I'm gonna lose this job. But as it turned out, I did a not very good job at singing my song. But the pianist and the director spent about 20 minutes with me going over this song, actually beginning to train me in some singing technique and working with me to improve my singing ability right then and there. So we worked with my song for about 20 minutes. We moved through that and the director turned to me and said, Welcome to the cast. You have the job. That was the beginning oven. Incredible. An amazing adventure for me. One. It opened the door professionally to some, some incredible opportunities in my life. It gave me, Ah, chance to earn some really good money over the course of a year that provided enough savings to do some other important things in my life. But mostly it was an irreplaceable training in the willingness to move forward into life without knowing what was gonna happen next. Because once we were on tour, I had to learn all of these different parts. And my job was to wait in the wings in case somebody got hurt or didn't feel well. And have the director walk up to me in the middle of a performance and say, Malcolm just hurt his ankle. You're on, and I would have to throw on a costume and run out into the middle of a musical number and pretend that I knew what I was doing and that I could remember everything I needed to remember to fill in for this cast member, and often I had to rely on my other cast members who, in the middle of a musical number, would be whispering into my ear. Go left, turn right, go over to the other side of the stage like they would literally have to help me on stage in the moment to remember what to do next. It taught me about the necessity of teamwork. It taught me how to fake it till you make it. It taught me how to pretend that everything I was doing was deliberate, because usually if you don't act like there's any kind of problem, no one else is ever going to know that you're that you don't know what you're doing. And in the meantime, when I wasn't on stage, I got to be backstage during this shows every day, practicing other skills. So I was practicing all these other circus techniques. I was reading books. I learned how to play to musical instruments from orchestra members who I was traveling with as this was going on. It was the most concentrated, dynamic and enriched learning experience I have ever had in my life, and I wanted to tell the story today because it's one of my most vivid memories of having made ah, life Lee. That turned out to be so positive for me. And when we make these kind of life leaps when we're when we find ourselves willing to take a big risk, it often brings forward a degree of capacity and ingenuity and presence that we just don't have when we're playing it safe. So if you get one of these opportunities, I hope you'll remember this story. There are many risks weaken take in life that are far less dramatic than this. But even taking small risks can initiate and facilitate the awakening of these hidden capacities inside of us in a way that air really worthwhile. So that's my story for today. Good luck to you with any form of follow through that you have the opportunity to engage in your life. Today. My name is Rick Lewis. This has been Episode 49 of the follow through Formula Podcast, and I'll be back tomorrow