Welcome to the first post on LeighMonet.com!
Greetings, dear reader, and thank you for joining me on this experiment of one. First off, a little about me and why I am taking on this blog and website thing.
My name is Leigh Monet, and I am an aspiring actor...which means I have made money doing just about everything BUT acting. But, I’m working on that, and my plan is to create a foundation in audiobook narration work, and then use that to build on additional storytelling work as an actor, a writer (maybe), a filmmaker (even bigger maybe), and maybe even a showrunner of a dramedy show (probably the biggest maybe of all).
I have wanted to act for almost as long as I can remember. I think I was 10, and it was around the time E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial came out (just checked Google, and it came out the month before I turned 11!). I remember watching that movie and being completely drawn in to the world it created. I felt things watching it-I felt the wonder, the confusion, the love, and the terror of being found out by the big, bad adult world. And from then on, I wanted to be a part of that world, a world where people create fictional things that make people in the real world feel things.
In the intervening years, I have pursued acting in various forms and in fits and starts. For several years, I worked for a professional theater in Chicago as a dresser (basically, I threw clothes on actors-not a bad way to make a living), and on the side took various acting classes. I wasn’t quite ready to get out and do the audition thing, so when I found myself in Knoxville, Tennessee in the very early 2000’s, I decided to pursue a degree in theater. A few years after graduating with that degree, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in the hopes of parlaying my talent into a career.
And it almost worked. I booked a commercial, and was paid for acting!
Then 2008 happened. And for those of you who don’t remember/have blocked it out (wouldn’t blame you for that), that meant the bottom fell out of the economy and many things in the world came to a screeching halt...including a lot of projects in and around Atlanta. It was already hard enough, what with being a new actor in town, being in my 30’s, etc., and after the crash it became just that much harder.
So, I threw in the towel and moved back to Knoxville, where I spent several years strenuously avoiding almost anything to do with acting. Even going to a movie was painful, a reminder of what I had failed to do.
Then, I fell into one boring and frustrating corporate job after another, and grew more and more frustrated with sitting at a desk surrounded by four walls. Until the final indignity-I lost my job at the end of December, 2019.
And at first, it felt (oddly) like a gift. I knew I wanted to escape from the corporate world, and here was my chance to write my story on my own terms. I made plans to contact the agency I had been with back in Atlanta, to see if they were still interested in representing me. I would contact a few of the production companies in East TN, to see what kinds of performing opportunities were available. I had time to be in a live theater show and really give it the time and attention it deserved, which I felt I couldn’t do when I was working a full time job outside of rehearsal. Maybe my dreams would finally have a chance to come true!
You ever heard of that phrase, “man plans, the gods laugh”, or something like that? Yeah, all my plans had basically sent every god ever known into a paroxysm of laughter. If you’re reading this anytime near the year 2020, you know that most or all of those plans went up in smoke. Well, except for one week of the live show. We did get that, although the second and final week was killed, due to…well, you know.
And as I write this, in March of 2022, things are still wonky, and a surprising amount has happened since I first started writing this blog post, back in May of 2020. There have been even more fits and starts, detours and off-ramps, and however many more metaphors and similes I can come up with.
And that, dear reader, is enough for now. My thought, right now, is to use this blog and my soon-to-be-revived YouTube channel as ways to explore how this whole process is going to go. I’ll take us all along on the ride of creating a new career as a narrator, and where that might lead me. There will likely be talk of finances, networking, recording technology…basically, everything that might give me nightmares and keep me up at night. If that sounds good to you, feel free to follow along.
More, later. Thanks for listening.
Comments