Road Blocks

I've got a million and one things running through my head right now, I don't know what to do with myself.

I'm still flying high on the compliments I received at my audition last night, but at the same time, I feel like I've lost all touch with any real acting skills, that I don't have a clue what I'm doing. I've been thinking about the monologue I performed, and how I can add another layer to it other than feeding a one year old baby, and I'm coming up with nada. I feel that I haven't been taught what I really needed to know in any of my classes, namely how to make good, imaginative choices, how to create layers, etc. Mostly in my classes we were given a scene, we were given blocking, and left on our own to develop the scene. When the teacher had time to work with us again, if he/she didn't like the acting choices we had made, we were told to do it a different way without being given a reason why it was a better choice. I don't know specifically what I need to do as I move forward to improve my acting, I feel like I'm just groping around in the dark and hoping I get it right. I've decided that reading the acting books I have are not helpful, because the information doesn't click unless I experience it. I would love to work with an acting coach or a small acting group. I believe I can learn a lot if I am accepted into this theater conservatory, but Brian told me straight up that I would not receive the kind of feedback he had given me from any of the directors I might be working with unless they were specifically pushing me, that I would need to do my homework. But at this point, I feel like I don't really know how to do the homework anymore. I know the theory behind it, but actually doing the homework, actually getting decent results from the homework? Attempting to find more than one emotional note without having the tools to do so, that scares the crap out of me...

And a thought occured to me after I wrote the previous post that tempers the compliments I recieved a bit. My monologue was completely within my comfort zone. The activity of feeding and talking to the baby was completely within my comfort zone. Would those additional layers have appeared as effortlessly outside my comfort zone?

Now moving on to my headshots. I still haven't gotten them printed yet. Still haven't gotten them on Now Casting or Actor's Access yet. I found a local printer who seems to do high quality lithos for a reasonable price, but they print only a minimum of 100 and they won't split the 100 between pictures. I have three pics I need to get prints of. Which means I'd be buying 300 prints total, and that's way too many considering that I don't know if I'll get any auditions from these pics yet, if they'll be a "working headshot". Bob Fraser defines "working headshot" as a headshot that gets you at least 3-4 auditions from 100 submissions. If your headshot doesn't get you auditions, you need to get new ones. So until I've tested these headshots to see if I get auditions from them, and especially since most of my submissions will be online at this point as opposed to mailing, it would be wasting money to buy more than 10 or 20, I would think. Anyhow, so I checked out Shutterfly's prices, they're decent, only $3.99 per 8x10, but when I had my Photoshop friend prepare my pics, I decided not to have him put my name on the pictures, I figured the printer could add it. Shutterfly doesn't have a way to add text to the picture. AARRRGGGH!