Tag Archives: actress

Andrews, Julie

dictionary with letter A

Andrews, Julie: (1935 – ) English actress and singer born Julia Elizabeth Wells. She is best known for the movies Mary Poppins (1964), for which she won an Academy Award, and The Sound of Music (1965).

Progressors.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are people who arrive at just the right time in history to do just the right thing, to progress things at just the right pace. Without them, nothing happens–and if they were any more progressive, they would have scared everybody away.

There are many examples, but certainly, Julie Andrews falls into this category.

For I will tell you, if Julie Andrews arrived on the scene today, she would be rejected for her sprightly personality, her clarity of singing and portrayed as a lightweight.

But at the time she arrived with her talent, there was a need for hope, inspiration and music sung with the purity of a nightingale and the intensity of a roaring lion.

She was a treasure. And because she worked very hard at making sure she maintained her excellence, her work endures.

Oh, we may think that “a spoon full of sugar” doesn’t “make the medicine go down,” or that the hills aren’t “alive with the sound of music,” but her infectious desire to bring good cheer to the listener is very difficult to criticize or ignore.

Now, there is a problem when we become nostalgic and insist that we need Julie Andrews back.

We don’t need another Julie Andrews–we need the next Julie Andrews to progress us in our consciousness. We need talented folks who bring hope in their own way, clarity using their own voice, and inspiration sensitive to their own times.

Without Julie Andrews, there never would have been a Barbra Streisand, and without Streisand there never would have been Heart with the Wilson sisters or Fleetwood Mac with Stevie Nicks, and without them, there would not have been Celine Dion, Beyoncé and Pink.

We need progressors.

And what is the goal for making this place called Earth better?

Anybody who promotes the idea that we are human … and that is not a bad thing.

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

Act

Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Act: (v.) 1. take action; do something 2. perform a fictional role in a play, movie or television production.

I was very proud of myself.

I had taken a position as a professor at a very, very small college–a position I was neither qualified nor prepared for in any way. Yet I was determined to do a good job.

I was asked to teach a class on drama. I thought the best way to instruct in drama was to write a three-act play and involve my students in the process of discovering the craft through the execution of an actual production.

To make sure that it would have some community appeal so we could sell tickets, I brought in a ringer. She was a lovely actress I had met a couple of years earlier , who had toured in one of my shows. She was delightful. She agreed to come in and work with the novices, and joined me as we went into rehearsals.

It was touch and go. I suppose, using a barnyard analogy, that it would be similar to trying to convince  a pig to lay a daily egg.

Yet after about a month’s worth of struggling interchanges, we were ready for opening night. The cast was nervous and so was my dear professional. She was wondering where they were going to fall apart–where she would need to step in to cover lines and bobbles. To make it even more interesting, the critic from the local daily paper had appeared to review the show.

Everything went splendidly throughout Act I, when all of a sudden, my intelligent and well-versed actress freaked out, skipped the entire second act, moving directly into the third act of the production, leaving her fellow-performers a bit baffled and the audience absent a good bit of plot development.

It was even more comical the next day when the review came out and the title read, College Play Gains Credibility in Third Act.

Certainly made possible by the fact that we were absent a second act.

I learned a lot that night–that life is never about what we THINK is going to go wrong, but rather, what chooses to go wrong without us ever thinking about it.

And like Shakespeare told us, all the world is a stage and we are actors in the forum.

So don’t be in a hurry.

  • Enjoy Act I.
  • Understand you will need Act II for development,
  • And don’t rush into Act III because you are anxious for the happy ending.

Acclaim

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Acclaim: (n) praise enthusiastically and publicly.

You know what the problem is with “acclaim?” To achieve it you really need to make a claim on something and follow through to completion–and probably even excellence.

After all, when we begin to acclaim EVERYTHING as great, NOTHING is great. And if we acclaim things that are actually poor, trying to convince the public they are adequate, we end up with a very sarcastic populace.

So to a certain degree, acclaim is unnecessary, because if you’ve already made a claim and followed through, you are reaping the benefits and don’t need any other stamp of approval.

So there is a certain amount of dishonesty that goes into requiring acclaim. This is personified by the actor or actress at the Academy Awards who insists that it’s an “honor to be nominated by my peers.”

Supposedly it is a great boost to one’s ego to receive acclaim from those in the same profession or who possess similar motivations. But honestly, when you get to the end of a movie and you’ve played your part, if you have half a brain you pretty well know if you did your job, and the opinion you have of your own performance is much more accurate and important.

So in the pursuit of acclaim, we have made some people famous in this country who should never have left the print of their local, small-town Register.

And nowadays, of course, it’s very possible to achieve acclaim by being notorious instead of glorious.

I am suspicious of acclaim. I will go further. I am aggravated by what our society touts as worthy of “honorable mention.”

If you don’t mind, I just think I will make my own personal claims, follow through on them, discover the rewards included and enjoy a reward ceremony of my OWN making–with the trophy being a sense of satisfaction.