welcome to a taste of theatre where everyone is a star i have with me the one and only that she's going to do our joke of the moment and if you have a joke that you like for us to read on the air please submit it to us at submit at the taste of theatre dot so much yes i am debbie so i'm from skokie illinois and i am still single everybody is always telling me how to find the right guy and i do have a lot of wonderful friends male and female but i found out you can meet people in unusual ways for instance i was just standing in line at my local post office like this minding my own business a guy taps me on the shoulder i turn around he's holding a bunch envelopes he says with a face like that i feel like i could sell you anything he says i'm going to tell you everything he goes i lost my last four jobs yep they fired me mailing out six resumes and my car was repossessed so i gave him my phone number how don't know why i just looked like a nice guy calls me up the next day and i heard a strange noise in the background it sounded like a washer and dryer sure enough he said debbie i'm calling from the local laundromat they took my phone away i've only got one minutes of talk because i'm running out of change i'm using a payphone but i'd like to take you on a date for a walk i said or walk i don't do things like that on the first day maybe the second or third not the first  classes those classes have been cut out of a lot of the children who curriculum right so i went to foster four yeah i went to foster for i don't remember how many  years but i went to foster and that's where i had my first drama class and i always was a stand out in drama class you know i would always be the one that would go like yes and then or and then it got to be the point where to the point where the teacher would always call me up and ask me to sort of try did to demonstrate or whatever and it was really clear that i had a talent for it and i i certainly had a love there i don't know if you remember but i think i think that there was either it was northwestern or e t h s but there was a summer program where they would come in and have play six weeks in the summertime and you could buy tickets you could buy a block of tickets and then you would go over to e t h s on saturdays and you would see shows leave there and the whole week i would act out all the characters from that play until i went to see another play and then i would come home and act out all the characters all week for the pla they are different theater mentors i studied with stella adler and if you don't know her work she is absolutely brilliant and people like dinero and oh i'm blocking on blanking on the other great names that went through style adler's training program and i went to this stella adler school of drama in los angeles and then i worked with a fellow by the name of arthur mendoza who is over at the he still has classes over at actors i don't know but it's it's it's something in l a called act and i was really fortunate that that people insisted upon training you know a lot of times today if you with reality t v if you were just good in front of the camera or if you were able to memorize that is defined as acting but training and really understanding the art of acting in all the things that go with it from your vocal control to your body control to the choices about how you inter room all of that is the detail in the and the sophistication of the art of acting so you've been in a lot of movies i mean a lot movies in one nine hundred eighty three you started out with hill street blues how did that come about because i was one of my favorites as a kid well i think that that the way anything comes about  is that you've got to first be able to dream and so being an actor is something that i've always dreamed of it's the only thing i've ever wanted to do so in order for me to get to h street brew blues i have to tell you a little story is that ok so i won't want to be an actor and my father and i was a daddy's girl told me that i didn't want to be an actor because you know it's challenging a lot of actors you know ninety percent of the actors don't work and they don't make money and so he wanted something more for me and he also felt that the that the world of acting have a lot of heartache in it along with drugs so he didn't want that for me but because it was the only thing that i wanted to do and because that's what i thought about all the time i kept finding myself in situations where i could do it as a hobby i could do it you know just for the fun of it just just stay or oiled ok i wasn't going to become an actress because i can't make money but i'm going to do this thing over here for fun and i directed by the name of bill to asked me to be in a play and when i said yes to that play it changed my life and the reason it changed my life is because i had to in order to say yes to that play and to build to coo loved my work and hated the fact that i wasn't pursuing it as a career i had to take off from my normal job a two week vacation so that i could be a part of his rehearsal process ok i got fired oh and when she fired me it was the best thing that could have happened to my life but never wow never but in in that very beginning period i was collecting unemployment and that unemployment because i was living in a tiny little partment allowed me to study and to really commit to acting as my as a possibility in my life and then when you know it built to wound up getting a directing job and he because he it pushed me to commit to acting as a career he had a role for me and that role did what is called in the business it got me attached hardly it means that i was able to you know get signed into the union seems like it is a very interesting book can you tell me a little about the book the little book of big lies well now that's really interesting so so it all connects yes we're here talking about acting yes and we're here talking about  career twenty year career as an actress what i didn't share with you is that right alongside that twenty year career acting has been a twenty twenty plus year actually it's been probably thirty forty year passion because i remember going back as early as the second grade when i was really interested in sort of understanding this big ole world that we live in and understanding myself so i would walk to school hugging one side of the walkway so that god could walk next to me right right sit at my desk in second grade over to one side so that god could sit next to me and when i was sixteen i remember writing i've always been the a bit of a writer and i remember writing with frustration you know why is it that people do blah blah blah blah blah you know or  what is it that life is so blah blah blah blah blah right so i've always been curious about how do we make our lives work and that led me into all kinds of extra curricular activities side i have graduated from a masters program in spiritual psychology i have a a spiritual practitioners license i am a  licensed coach life coach and i did that for fun while i was acting for my career that's right and and here i was here i was with these two passions and i asked myself how do i take them and have them live together right and so what happened was i started writing a book  that book well before i tell you that i have to ask you a question sure ok because this is a question that i ask everyone so i'm asking everyone who's watching this ok everybody gets to answer this question in all your years of schooling from kindergarten to what ever grade you completed did you ever take one course that taught you how to navigate the dramas traumas upsets and disappointments that come with life oh no that's on the on the job training ok you say oh no ninety eight percent of the time that i asked that question and i've asked it to over like eight thousand people now the answer is no we don't get that kind of education right that's true and yet i'm going to guess because you're human you have some dramas traumas upsets and disappointments we are what we call you know unresolved issues or people call it baggage but we all have it and it works on us it affects how we interact with our lives it affects how we interact with people it affects what we believe is is possible for our lives it affects what we believe about ourselves right yes how come we don't get any support with actually learning skills that can help us navigate life is that crazy ok excellence growth all right i'm going to i'm here here we're going to go one step further ok you know what physical fitness is right all right physical fitness and if someone were to say well what are the basic principles of or components or focus of physical fitness one would say die exercise right yes so what are the basic components of inner fitness and why is it that we don't know i mean you can choose to go to the gym or not go to gym but at least you know how to take care of yourself right that's true how come we don't know how to take care of ourselves in terms of those dramas traumas upsets and disappointments it's crazy it's true it's insane so the little book a big lie became my passion how can i put on paper then cers that i have worked like crazy to find in in my life working with coaching clients in and being honest and authentic in myself and and actually what happened was i ran into a dead end with writing the book but i had this love for theater i threw my hands up on the nonfiction book and i started writing a play instead so that must bring us to there are a play that we'll be seeing those way and that is called the circle as a way that's exactly right and so the circle became my outlet for that frustration of writing that man fiction book and i when i i interviewed over one hundred women and and i also of course had all of these  these interactions from my coaching clients and so on is in all of the schooling that i've taken and so what we did was we were i was able to go through that history and those and come up with right amazing monologues and from those monologues we then took and broke those monologues into a beginning middle and in and it's a story of seven diverse women navigating the choppy waters of life together and you've got we've got a latin woman we've got an asian woman we've got white women and black women and the seven of them age diverse ethnically diverse of course and socio economically diverse and you experience ninety minutes of theater that is somewhat interactive a who have become friends and their friendship this particular friendship is based upon supporting one another through the choppy waters of life so this is they aren't necessarily the friends that you go shopping with but they're their friends where you feel safe seen and heard with and so for ninety minutes you experience ways in which these ladies together support one another in resolving some of those old traumas traumas upsets and disappointments so how was this role that you're doing now different from the previous roles that you've done over the last twenty years one that's an interesting question ok i'm going to answer that question but i just want to finish and tell you that once we did the circle and the response from the circle was amazing and it has been amazing that really helped me to go back and finish the book the little book of pick lives and so the little book a big lies is fourteen stories they're not the same stories as is in the circle but they're fourteen stories and the stories tell you different ways in which you can take and deal with the noise that goes on in your head or deal with the sense of feeling small are not good enough or deal with the  the the upsets that come up and you don't really know why they come up with that that one thing i think we all have one sort of recurring challenge or burden you keep saying you know i want to be done with this for good right and then something happens and it comes up again all of that is addressed in ways that really move you forward in the little book a bit lies and and all of that all of the the the resource that i am now is because as an actor you have to really commit to being emotionally available and authentic yes and if i had not done my work that allowed me to get to know who i am to get to know what my fears are to learn how to walk through them then there's no way that i could do that for the characters that i that i do excess yeah so being in what i call healthy or having inner fitness as an actress it just goes hand in hand with me being able to deliver michael my craft well so what is it that you want people to walk away with after they see the surf i may be a girl i and it's a concept that every single parent should teach their child and it we should learn it in school and it's from this point forward up until now and from this point forward and it just simply means no matter how it's been no matter how challenging no matter what the circumstances were that happened in your life no matter how small thing made you feel up until now from this point  hanging out yes i do in the circle and it's a big it's a theater experience unlike any that you've had i think and we actually we actually do our show it is written to be done on book so it's not a reading them in oh it's a performance but we have the books in our hands and the reason is because these are real stories and we want our audience to know that that what they are experiencing are real stories so that they don't have to look at us and think oh those are just great actors doing what they're doing that's me up there that can get me up there that's my story up there and if this if these stories of people have been able to make their way through these challenges then i can make my way through my challenge while so other than the research that you do with the interview interviewing all ting a play is a very mystical process and a lot of times the characters tell you who they are they tell you what they need and i would interview someone and there was would be something in their story that was so compelling that i just had to write a monologue for them and then when i worked with my drama teacher and amazing directed by the name of surely joe finney we were able to take what was there and shape it into a story that people could relate to so it really was unlike the nonfiction book it was really it was really almost effortless to write the circle  circle the circle play dot com is where you can go to find out or buy a ticket for tuesday the twenty sixth i recommend that you go online and do that and if you are interested in but we definitely want people to go to the circle play dot com so they can now only see clips of the play yes but they can also learn more about what team is up to yeah you can read testimonials there you'll be