Deep Breathing, Beautiful Girls, and Other Delights

I used to be an actor. That is to say, I used to want to be an actor. As an aspiring adolescent thespian growing up in Richmond, my first audition was a Theatre IV cattle call. Now, this was old-school Theatre IV mind you, back before the renovation, back when the worn wooden bar stood in place of today's box office, back when I was still embarrassingly young and green and naive, and the bare Empire stage seemed a cavernous, enchanting, mysterious place.

While waiting dry-mouthed and sweaty-palmed for my first ever callback, swinging my legs nervously from a barstool, staring with wide-eyed admiration at the frieze of glossy 8x10 headshots arranged on each bar wall above me, I tried to slow my racing heart using a new trick I'd learned from a book I'd just read.

My father made me read books to earn my allowance. He'd choose the title, and I'd write at least a few paragraphs giving him a critique. Sometimes he'd choose fiction, sometimes biography, sometimes academia. The latest one was a new-age, self-help, power-of-positive-thinking sort of book that was kind of interesting.

One chapter in particular caught my attention. It claimed that our minds could influence our physical bodies, and as an example explained that one of the first challenges novice Buddhist monks undertake was silencing their hiccups using mere meditation. Clearing their minds of distraction, the book read, and deliberately slowing their breathing, the young monks used visualization to relax their diaphragms, effectively curing their hiccups.

Well, this was plain crazy talk! I anxiously awaited my next bout of hiccups, hoping to put these preposterous claims to the test. I was finally rewarded with a good case on which to experiment, and I promptly found a quiet place to sit and relax. I didn't know what my diaphragm looked like, so I closed my eyes and substituted a shiny red balloon, carefully imagining it smoothly inflating while slowly taking deep, deliberate breaths. Thirty seconds passed, then a minute. I eventually opened my eyes and realized, to my utter astonishment, that my hiccups were gone!

Positively remarkable! Who knew that hiccups could simply be wished away? I tried it again the next time the hiccups struck and immediately met with the same success. In fact, the more often I cured my hiccups, the easier it got, as though merely believing that it would work was somehow the most important part.

Sitting all alone waiting for my first ever callback audition with my heart in my throat gave me another opportunity to explore my newfound relaxation technique. Could I slow my speeding pulse and fight my stomach-flipping fear using meditation? I took several deep breaths and turned my attention again to the black & white pictures around the bar. "One day," I encouraged myself, "my headshot will be up there, too." I took another deep breath, "One day I'm going to be a famous, successful actor, dazzling celebrity of stage and screen." I easily imagined my name in lights on the Empire marquee.

"One day," I thought, continuing my breathing and scanning the 8x10's for the prettiest girl on the wall, "One day I'm going to star in a show opposite THAT girl right there, and we'll fall helplessly, hopelessly, madly in love, and we'll get married and have 2.3 kids and a white picket fence and live happily ever after." I distracted myself for a few minutes imagining her favorite color, her secret birthmark, how she broke her wrist when she was twelve.

"Imagine how bad-ass you'd swagger with that girl on your arm," I mused. "That's how confidently you're going to walk center stage. Just like walking into a party with the prettiest girl in the room." Before long the stage manager poked his head into the bar and called my name. "That's me," I said, needlessly raising my hand.

"You're up," he told me.

Butterflies swarmed me for a moment, but I noticed that my pulse had slowed somewhat and my palms were dry. I hopped off the barstool, no longer entirely terrified, squinting to see the neatly printed name under my future bride's photo. I smiled and winked at her for luck, wondering what the K stood for.

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