Allison Page, America’s Less Awful Version Of Most Things.
Step 1: Get a fucking calendar. That’s how you keep track of your stuff.
Step 2: Use that fucking calendar. Ya see, then you’ll maybe show up to the stuff.
Step 3: Did you fuck up your calendar? Take care of that shit. Communicate with people when you need to change timing of a meeting or audition or ice cream. Don’t wait for them to ask you where the fuck you are.
Step 4: Apologize for fucking up. That was on you, say you’re sorry and suggest solutions.
Step 5: Learn from your fucking mistakes. Don’t keep making the same ones, especially with the same people. Nobody’s perfect, but don’t be awful.
Step 6: See Step 1.
Step 7: You did fucking get that calendar, right? Because…I was totally not kidding about that.
Step 8: Laptops generally come with calendars on them. If I see you with a MacBook pro and you can’t figure out your schedule, I’m going to flip a table. There’s also this thing called a smartphone.
Just one of the many fantastic calendar options of 2010
Step 9: Communicate your conflicts in a timely manner. No, no, you didn’t suddenly end up in Spain. That’s not something that happens. You had to buy tickets to Spain, so maybe that would have been a good time to tell the director you’re going off to find yourself and eat paella.
Step 10: Don’t over-promise. Listen, I have fucking done this before, and it’s terrible. Your volunteering isn’t going to make you look charitable if you cancel it 6 minutes before it’s supposed to happen. I say this from experience on both sides of that shitstick.
Step 11: Don’t underestimate someone’s ability to remember that you fucked up. Oh, they remember. BOY HOWDY. If you’ve fucked up and been a no-show more than once with the same person/company, you should probably call that out and say that you know about it and don’t plan to do it again because YOU HAVE ESTABLISHED A PATTERN, MY FRIEND. People notice patterns. Like fucking houndstooth.
Step 12: Your resume doesn’t matter as much as you do. If your resume is nice and you act like a shithead, it’s the shithead I’m going to remember, not the resume.
Step 13: Don’t be a shithead.
Step 14: If you don’t like the rules, don’t do the fucking thing. It saves you from doing something you don’t really agree with, and it saves every other person involved from listening to your bullshit. Know the expectations of the project/show/whatever and if they aren’t to your liking, walk away. It’s probably just better suited to someone else and you’re probably better suited to a different project that you actually like.
Step 15: See Step 1.
Allison Page is a writer/actor/creative director of Killing My Lobster.
San Francisco Theater Pub 