Leslie Marie Collins

So, I feel good that 2011 is over and 2012 is starting up.  Seems like 2011 was another year that I felt a little stalled in life.  Just sitting in idle at a traffic stop.  But I think someone nudged me through the light in late summer and now I am driving, with a little more momentum each day.  I still have the habit of sitting on my hands all day, so I never get things done, but this year… that’s gonna change!  It has to change!   I am saying that out loud.  This is the year I do what I am gonna say I do.  I’m gonna be loud about it!  

Things I did this last year that were good for me…

Teaching…

I started teaching this last year which was really eye opening for me.  Now I have to know my game because people expect me to be good at what I teach.  I had to find my confident side and actually say I know what I am talking about.  The confidence was in there, but it sure took a lot to get me to bone up and get aggressive.  I feel like maybe I got more aggressive when I was super comfortable with who I was playing with.  Now, I am still working on the aggressiveness when I don’t know my fellow players well.  It has nothing to do with who I play with, just me… so I am still fishing though how to not care and just be myself onstage all the time.  

So, I feel far more confident starting out this year, as far as improv goes.  I feel like I do know about improv.  I thought I didn’t understand it all for a long time and I just got lucky when I’d have good scenes, but I think I do know what I am doing.  Not all the time but more than I used to.  I may not always make good decisions when I play, but after all that teaching and coaching, I can definitely analyze scene work from the back line better. That’s been an amazing part of teaching… it made me a stronger player… I think… there’s the confidence thing again.  Seeing my classes graduate and be hilariously funny was icing on the cake.  They were doing it!!!  They improvised and I taught them how!  That was so cool. 

I started performing musical improv…

I starting performing on a house team at the PIT over the summer and really had no idea of how to do musical improv.  It was frustrating to not know the basics when many other people did.  I also hadn’t taken a class in anything anywhere but the PIT, so I took a class at the Magnet and LOVED it.  Musical improv was a perfect fit for me.  Still learning a ton and can’t wait to take my level two this winter.  I made some new friends too!  It puts all that musical theater career I used to have together with all this improv stuff I do now.  It’s awesome.  I think if you quit learning, you quit.  I like learning new things and this has been one of the coolest new things to learn how to do.  I am an addict now.

I started online dating…

It’s certainly not perfect and there sure are some total weirdos out there, but it was worth it.  I might be considered a weirdo to someone else too, who knows?  Someone did send me a photo of his junk which was oddly intriguing yet offensive at the same time.  He looked completely normal to start out with too, so I got past that “don’t judge a book by it’s cover/profile pic.”  But anyway, internet dating helped me meet a really nice man and gave me lots of material to write about. Dating is funny.  I also figured out that I was given the gift of gab by my mother and even if I didn’t like someone, I could always talk to them and usually have a good time… except the Italian gentleman who only wanted to talk about Fiats.  But whatever, it wasn’t horrible and in the end, I learned a lot about Fiats that I didn’t know before.   We’ll see!  

I started doing yoga…

I love it.  Love it. Love it.  I just wish I could do a class everyday.  I started talking a Vinyasa class at the LIC YMCA with this groovy teacher who always has wonderful chants and mantras to recite in the beginning and the end of class.  She plays great music and leads a pretty awesome class.  That 5 minutes at the end of class is the most relaxed I have ever felt.  I take the class for that 5 minutes of total relaxation.  Also, the quieting of my mind throughout the class is awesome.  

I started being OK with aging…

It’s happening and this year I saw it even more.  Not entirely happy about it but surprisingly, I don’t think I obsess about it.  I kind of accept the fact that beauty fades and we all can’t be 25 forever.  I got smarter with my age and I think that’s more important than beauty in the end.  Wit is way more attractive than beauty.  I know this because really gorgeous model type people I know are not usually funny. *Disclaimer, I know very few models but the ones I met are boring… pretty but boring.  Plus, I am surrounded by some friends who are my age and older who look awesome with a little gray in their hair and their beards.  These people (who are all about my age or slightly older) are so good at stuff.  Sounds vague, but it’s true.  They all have these other passions like playing the guitar, drawing, cooking or writing that they have been working on for a long time.  They also just know more about everything because they’ve been around long enough to experience it.  But I also know this pack of late 30s to 60 yr olds are all big kids at heart and that’s why I love them.  I feel like I’m in good company.  They are wearing age very well and if they can do it, so can I.

I got lucky enough to finally get a manager…

His name is Rick and he’s my personal cheerleader.  He’s awesome in many ways, but for once I had someone see me do what I do best, believe in me and then introduce me to some big players in show business.  He certainly doesn’t sugarcoat anything for me though and I guess that helped thicken my skin a little (which I needed).  But it was such a sweet moment, maybe one of the top five, to go to a meeting and have someone know who I was before I walked through the door.  I spent a lot of years walking in a room with no confidence and waiting for someone to tell me they’d heard enough of my song.  I had been beaten down by the audition process and all I ever wanted was for someone to remember me.  But most of the time, I was just a number and that’s what beat me down and I quit.  But, to do my solo show and have someone see what I wrote and performed and then believe in me enough to help take me to the next level, was one of the highlights of my career.  He believes in me and this guy is legit!

So, all in all that was 2011.  I can’t say there was much happening before the summer time, probably because I was just stalling.  But this year is different.  Mainly for one reason, and I’m saying it out loud.  I am gonna be me.  That’s it.  It’s not like I’ve been walking around as someone else or anything but I always had a wall up.  I wanted to be everything to everyone.  So, in a nutshell, I’m gonna stop that.  I realize that people get hired for just being themselves right and left.  Those people are successful because they know how to walk into a room and just be OK with themselves.  So, this year, I’m not gonna try to be perfect for everyone or be something I think someone wants to see… I’m just gonna find the real me and be it and be OK with me.  I feel that with the momentum of 2011, I’m ready for 2012!