Stanislavski recommends finding an honest emotional memory for when they dump blood on you
I've realized what's happening and it is a decompression. After months of politics and Serious Things and Nate Silver and number crunching and foreign policy I have had it, and that is why I am following up a post about 'Chinese Democracy' with a post about the landmark Video Hits One television series, "Scream Queens".

Oh, shut up.

My wife is a total reality show junkie, so our DVR is clogged with things like Scream Queens and Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and Celebrity Rehab and whatnot. All the dating shows, like that spinoff of the spinoff of Flavor Flav's show? We record and watch that one. Well, "We". I've watched a couple of episodes, but I can't ever get past the idea that somebody is driving a nice car and living a much fancier life than I am, and it is because they orchestrated a competition where women wrestle each other for the right to date a man who will not actually date them once the show is over.

But I'm totally hooked on Scream Queens, and for the dorkiest reason possible. It's because they're acting.

I've written about this before, but I'm totally down with the Skill Competition Reality Show thing as a genre. I believe in rewarding good behavior and talent. And I don't even really care that the part they're competing for is in the completely worthless "Saw VI". If anything, that makes it harder. If you took ten actresses and had them compete for, say, Three Tall Women, you've got a bunch of actresses all bolstered by Albee's genius words. It wouldn't be hard to look respectable. Fuck, even Paris Hilton could probably get away with cooing a few lines in a Jarmusch film.

I've long held, from personal experience, that it's much harder to turn in a respectable, honest performance when you're dealing with something as ridiculous as a horror movie (or superhero movie, or sci fi, or anything intended for children). "The Dark Knight" with Vin Diesel as The Joker would be worthless. "Carrie" is scary as hell because Sissy Spacek makes you buy into it, just as "Aliens" benefits from Sigourney Weaver's training at Yale.

And so we have "Scream Queens".

I won't bore you with the details if you haven't been watching. It's completely fantastic, and occasionally hilariously racist, and every week they have different acting challenges where they have to, for instance, scream at a guy and stab him. It's everything my acting training should have been.

The point here, though, is to take all of that positive energy we used for Barack Obama and send it to Lindsay Felton. In spite of the fact that, y'know, everything we're watching in this series already happened a long time ago (like the stars in the sky above) and for all I know she died in a horrible roof collapse during the series finale.



You don't know this, but Lindsay is a symbol for everything that we stand for as artists.

Unlike most of the girls on the show, Lindsay actually already had a fairly hefty bio before all this nonsense began, complete with the title role in a Nickelodeon series and a shot on ER. Kudos.

But now the show is down to the final three and they each represent types that we, as University-trained actors, have come to recognize in the real world.

First there is, of course, Lindsay who is all that is light and good. And then Tanedra, who is a natural. Completely untrained, never took an acting class in her life, and she's better than pretty much everybody in the house just from raw talent. And you meet and watch and work with people like that and you think about all the time and money and energy you spent in acting classes for four years and you feel like such a loser. Tanedra has no need for your dumb Viewpoints. Tanedra has never heard of Uta Hagen and it doesn't matter. You'd explain all the sense memory training you did at University and she'd be like, "Oh, yeah - well, I tried to think about my mom and that made it real for me" and you realize that you really could have skipped college and come up with that on your own and dammit, Tanedra, stop making me hate myself.

Then there is Michelle. Michelle is a whore and she should eat forty scorpions and die.

Michelle is that girl who is unnaturally beautiful and just up and decides to be an actress one day. And that bitch gets further than you, because she's unnaturally beautiful. We have all met this man/woman. We have all competed for parts against these people and we have all lost to them, more than a few times. Perhaps we went to high school with them, and watched them soar ahead to lucrative careers in TV and movies while we struggled to write and produce something in the lower east side that had real meaning, man that was about something, man. And meanwhile that bitch, that fucking barely literate bitch who can't even hardly talk let alone interpret the golden verse of the Bard, is riding in a convertible to a mansion and laughing without a care in the goddamned world.

That bitch is Michelle and we hate her.

This could be totally unfair. I mean, she spent two years at St. Eds in Austin, which has a really respectable theater program (especially if she got to work directly with Melba - oh wait. She was RTF. Nevermind, she's awful.). And, according to the Wikipedia entry that she clearly filled out herself, she's in New York at a "training conservatory" (Learning Annex?). So who knows? This is reality television, so we know full well that whatever judgments I'm making are based on the mythical creatures they've sculpted for us. They have played her up as the pretty one with no real experience or training. The small-town pageant queen from Spring, Texas.

And then there is Lindsay, with her years of experience and training, with her respect for the craft (but not the weird religious not-quite-getting-it fanaticism of other girls on the show who just ended up screaming Meisner at each other at the top of their lungs before taking on the role of "disembodied head"). She trained at the well-respected Seattle Children's Theater while I was in high school, for God's sake. Lindsay has struggled, has lost her way. Lost her voice. She loses confidence in her own performance, in her own honesty, only to gain it back. Lindsay fakes bravado, to convince herself, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Lindsay totally overthinks everything and sometimes takes herself completely out of a scene because of it.

Needless to say, I can realate with all of this so I'm totaly on Team Lindsay and have been from the get-go. She is the one my wife calls "my girl" (or, alternately, "the one you like". As in, "the one you like is crying".) And, I am loathe to admit, I am actually picking up a thing or two for the play I'm currently doing from notes Lindsay has received lately.

Yes. I said it. I haven't set foot in an acting class for seven years, so I pick up my pointers these days from elimination ceremonies on reality television.

So go Lindsay! Win one for integrity! Win one for skill and training and Respect For Acting! For the love of God please don't lose to that WHORE I HATE HER WHORE WHOOOORE.

Anyway, one way or the other, Wikipedia tells us that she lives in Brooklyn with her dog Biscuit, so she's already won something. And IMDB has her listed as an "Embassy Party Guest" in the upcoming Nora Ephron movie with Meryl Streep. So, with any luck, she won Scream Queens and they pulled a curtain and Meryl Streep was standing there and, "You didn't think we'd waste all this time and money on something as stupid as SAW VI, did you???" And then Amy Adams stabs Michelle in the eye with a pair of scissors, because she can.