Growing Up Geek: The Beginning of a Child Actor
Having grown up with a dad who was an actor and singer for a living, the acting bug kind of rubbed off on me. There was a little local stage theater where I grew up called The Glendale Center Theater. My dad would do a lot of plays there, and I was hanging around that place a lot when I was about 10 years old. Little did I know it would lead to a short lived child acting career.
At one point, while I was hanging around the theater, I was asked if I wanted to try out for a part in their annual holiday play, A Christmas Carol. I did, and I was cast in the role of young Ebenezer Scrooge and the boy in the courtyard that buys Scrooge the turkey on Christmas Day. It was a pretty exciting time in my life.
The cast was a decent size and there were a lot of kids in it that I became really good friends with. I had such an amazing experience with this production. The first time I was up on stage was a thrilling experience! I loved the adrenaline rush. I never got nervous, I just did my scenes and when they were over I left the stage to an applause. It was just a really cool thing for a kid, and acting is something that I wanted to keep doing.
I loved the the whole experience of this stage production, from the rehearsals all the way through the run of the play. On top of the acting part there were a lot of fun hijinks happening behind the scenes. My friends and I had some ridiculously great times, and it led to us discovering dry ice bombs, but that's a whole other story for another time.
The Christmas Carol was just the beginning of a really interesting and fun young career in acting. From there I went on to do other plays such as The Music Man, Snow White, Fiddler on the Roof, Oliver, and others. These plays led to me getting an agent who helped me get into a couple Nintendo commercials, a music video, and some really interesting movie auditions that I was really close to getting, going up against young actors that have since become very big stars.
The next several Growing Up Geek articles I write are going to focus on my adventures in the acting world and where it led me. There were a lot of "what if" moments during this time in my life. You'll have a better understanding of what I mean by that when I start to share some of these stories with you.
I really loved these years of my life that I spent acting. I learned so much about myself and the world. I got a first hand experience at a young age of the fierce competition that exists in it.
The photo above is of me, and it was taken shortly after I got an agent. I was 11 years old.