About a month ago I was prepping to enter a drama school. I was to read a piece from some book (actually from this one :)). One weekend I went to a city garden to rehearse in the open air, for a change. I chose a nice quiet place where nobody disturbed me, and I didn’t bother anyone either, and started.

I needed to do some speaking excercises. First you only read consonants, then vowels, then read the whole text lisping and jarring, and only then it is read in a normal way… Great technique, btw, but all this sounds, to put it mildly, weird, if one doesn’t know what this all about :)

Everything went fine, however, until a jolly company of three friends chose to sit not far from me. They were chatting and drinking beer. Soon they heard the strange sounds I was making; they started to laugh, ask me questions and make suggestions aloud about what I was doing.

Now, I know for sure what I would have done less than a half a year ago :) First I would try not to pay attention to them. Then, if they didn’t stop, I would just leave for another place… But now, not even thinking much, I turned my face to them, smiled and asked, ‘Hey there, is it me you are talking about?’

‘Well, yeah’, they said, ‘wondering what you are doing’.

So I just calmly explained them everything. And they were… impressed :) ‘Cause they never met a person that would be into something like this. And they asked if they could join me and watch. I didn’t mind. So I continued my excercises – this time in front of the audience :) They were very amused, then got so excited that joined me. We were laughing and making a lot of noise, and other people were wondering what we were doing, and wished me good luck… When we made pauses we were talking, I heard these guys’ stories – curious ones, I should say… And they were glad to find a listener in me.

I could have easily escaped all this, and this would have been OK. Just a good rehearsal in the open air. But when I started to analyze what I’ve got by taking this direction, I was just stunned:

I had fun;
They had fun;
I’ve got 3 new friends;
We opened something new to each other that day, making our lives a little bit richer;
In front of the audience my rehearsal was much more effective;
That was quite a move for me in overcoming my natural shyness :);
That little episode suddenly gave me a clear vision of what, why and what for I was doing all this. All in all, it’s not to amuse myself I was going to perform – I wanted to share that with people. Et voila, I got what I wanted :) That’s what I was actually doing! What these guys made me to do…
Afterwards, I felt so happy, excited and confident… I wouldn’t have received a 1/10th of these emotions, had I chosen another direction…

So that’s it :) And now I study at the drama school under the city’s main film production studio, and enjoy it Immensely! :D