Freedman on the Go

I’ve been an artist for a long time. Specifically, my main areas of focus over the course of my life have been writing, singing, acting, and public speaking. Interestingly, however, I’ve very seldom thought about my “why” for each of these creative endeavors. With writing, I’ve always felt the need to write. It truly is my calling and can keep me up late at night or wake me early in the morning with a sentence or story tugging insistently at my consciousness. My desire to sing is almost as persistent as my calling to write. I don’t try to assign a reason for my singing beyond the fact that I truly love doing it. My public speaking experience came about as a result of my wanting to become a better actor. As a public speaker, my “why” is to be a better communicator and eventually educate people on a variety of different subjects.

Acting, however, has been a different beast altogether, and for a long time I’ve been very conflicted on where to go with it. I knew since I was a teenager that I wanted to create an acting career, but the reality is, my bilateral facial paralysis was always going to be problematic in terms of finding work as an actor. Even when I make the effort to speak more clearly, the lack of facial expression at best relegates me to being a specific type of character actor and at worst being treated as not much more than a stereotype. In some ways, this caused me even more headaches and sleepless nights than the stories that would flit through my head. I would often wonder, how do I create a career for myself as an actor when the odds are seemingly stacked against me because of my disability?

I’ve mentioned this next point in prior posts, but I’ll briefly restate it here. In 2007 I was inspired to go back into acting after reading an article about the successful career of another actor with a disability named Robert David Hall. Almost immediately after finishing that article, I sought out a teacher in television and film acting who in due course became my agent. In addition, I also began researching other performers with disabilities in order to discover how they succeeded in an industry where people with disabilities can often be overlooked or treated as a joke. Not surprisingly, if you do enough research, you’ll find that there are plenty of performers with disabilities in the entertainment industry. However, if you asked most people on the street to name five performers with disabilities, you’d probably get a few blank stares and maybe, just maybe, one or two responses to that question. And I guarantee you that very few of those performers with disabilities are working in any given year compared to their non-disabled counterparts. So while I was encouraged to find successfully working performers with disabilities in show business, it was disheartening to realize that we weren’t well-represented, let alone acknowledged for our accomplishments very often.

With all this in mind, even after getting an agent, I was justifiably terrified of going to auditions. I made some progress and scored a couple of projects very early on, but my fear eventually took over. There were times when I’d receive a notice from a casting agency, whereupon I’d look at the project and think, “Why would they think I’m perfect for this?” I would then blow it off and miss an audition thanks to my fears of how I’d be perceived as a person with a disability rather than realizing that the people who sent me the project notice already had access to my profile and realized I might be a good fit for them. In other words, I was a victim of my own self-sabotage, and I hated myself for it.

The inciting incident that turned things around for me was the pandemic as well as the realization during that time that I needed a hard reset with how I was doing things. My writing received a boost when I agreed to create a column for Voices! Magazine in 2021. My singing had never stopped, even during our isolation during the pandemic, as the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus created virtual concerts to supplement our season, ensuring that our audiences would still be able to see us. I kept active in Toastmasters as well, becoming an Area Director for a third time and attending all of my meetings virtually. But what was I to do about acting?

To this day, I’m still not completely sure how my acting career will work out, but figuring out my “why” was of paramount importance so I could create a more secure space for myself. Ironically, my “why” isn’t about security at all but instead its exact opposite: I act in order to face my fears as a person with a disability and to work past my concerns about how people perceive me. I act because I know there aren’t a lot of other people out there like me with facial paralyses who are working performers, and if I can be successful in my field, then maybe it will make room for other performers with disabilities to do the same. And I act because, frankly, it beats working at a desk in a crappy job that I hate. Yes, I know I could still go down that road, particularly since I’ve almost finished up my certification process as a medical biller and coder. But I’ll leave some grace for myself in that regard since I need a day job like everyone else to foot the bills to support myself as a writer and performer. I act because it matters to me, and maybe it will matter to other people who need to see positive representation in the disability community as well as in the larger society as a whole.

I don’t claim to have all the answers when it comes to finding or maintaining work as an actor. The one bit of reassurance I can give myself is that I’m not alone in facing my fears when I go out for a part. I see the nervousness in every person’s face when they go up on stage, and I know that nine times out of ten most of us will be rejected. But at least now I know why I perform as an actor, and maybe that’s enough to help me take the next few steps forward in creating a successful acting career for myself.

Tags: blog, disabilities, disability, disabled, theatre