Stories from inside a creative life — the messy middle, the pivots, the parts that don't make the highlight reel. For anyone living a life that doesn't fit neatly in a box. Hosted by Stephanie Arapian — actor, writer, filmmaker, entrepreneur and former bartender. Still figuring it out.
Stephanie finds her first LA acting class the only way she knows how: Craigslist. She shows up to an audition in a converted craftsman near Hollywood, gets three lines into her scene, and every word she memorized disappears.
She doesn't panic. Outwardly, anyway. She stalls, catches up with her scene partner, and finishes the audition convinced she's blown it. The director disagrees.
This is the story of the moment she found out what she thought was a failure was actually a superpower, and the community she didn't know she was walking into.
SPEAKER_00
Welcome to the Centered Creator Podcast. I'm Stephanie Arabian, actor, writer, producer, and now podcaster. This is where I share stories about my creative life, my travels, and my any questionable decisions. I hope you laugh, feel a little seen, and maybe learn something along the way. This one's about blanking on my lines in the middle of an audition for a class, getting in anyway, and how that led me to my people. I found my first acting class in LA on Craigslist. Yes, I know, I know, I do know. This was in the days before TikTok was huge and Instagram was still like puddling along and getting more popular. And I didn't really know about the resources that you had to get more information. I was a baby in LA. I mean, I had a master's degree and I traveled the world at this point. But when I landed in Los Angeles, I didn't know anybody. I didn't know anything about where to go, who to talk to. I had no resources. I didn't have any people on the ground here. So I was kind of really going in blind, completely blind. I'd also just had a very different experience of the last eight years than anybody else living in America because my filters were all outside of the country. So things that seemed in the public consciousness of Americans for the last almost decade, I was out of step with. I might have gotten the really big news stories, but they would have different coverage when you're living in a different country because that's just how news works. So I had already been looking for my job, my apartment on Craigslist. I thought, if I'm already looking for my job and my apartment, why am I also not looking for acting classes here? I see they're offered, so why not look into it? So after I had secured my housing and then several weeks later, my job, I knew, yes, I need to be in an acting class. Or if you're going to continue in this career, you're going to keep working at it. I was very excited to find something I could sink my deep into in acting and get my journey started as an actor in LA. So I found a class that seemed reasonable rates. I did my research, and it turned out to be a director who had some films behind him. Nothing huge, but he's a working professional, and that was enough for me at the time. I reached out, they reached back, I got an audition, and I did my work, I memorized my lines, I came prepared to work my scene and audition for them in a very lovely craftsman residential building that was partially converted into a studio-ish space in mid-city near Hollywood. I go into the room, I start really well, and then in the middle of the scene, I blank. All words are gone. There are no words. If you're an actor, you know how painful that is. I did not panic. Uh well, internally I panicked, but outwardly I did not. I held the moment, I kept staring at my scene partner, I very calmly kept what I'm feeling at that moment very prevalent. I very slowly looked down, caught up with my line, came back to the actor, and continued on. But I was already judging myself that I'd bombed it. I was like, oh bombed it with my line. Fuck, I did this. And I managed to push through it, because I'm really good at that, and saw it through because I wanted to finish my work. But I was very I was disappointed in myself. I was like, I have just finished all this training to become an actor, and I just proved that I don't have what it takes. Damn. And then the director said, Great, I love that. You're in. And I was like, uh, okay, that great. Woohoo! I have an acting class, yay! But what happened? And he told me later, I really liked your stillness. I could tell that you were so in the moment that you stayed in the world, you stayed in character, and you held that connection. And I could see all the things, the emotions, the thoughts, the feelings that were happening there, and you didn't lose it. You stayed in it. And I love that. I can work with that. And I thought, well, yeah, that's what I do. Eventually I learned that was actually closer to a superpower than I have. So I got into my first acting class. Yay! As it turned out, it was kind of sketchy, which you might expect from Craigslist, but not the director. He was a lovely man, and unfortunately, a little obsessed with a script that he had been wanting to make for quite some time. And our acting classes were pretty much focused on workshopping scenes from that script of a film that he wanted to do, which was his life's dream, apparently. It was probably not the most amazing class. But the reason why it was so cool was because I got to work with other actors. I started my journey toward my community. Because when you get actors together, we love to talk about acting. Because in some ways, it's very difficult to share our passion with people who aren't actors. It's so hard to find someone who really just kind of gets what we're trying to do. And we can gush and talk about this forever. We'll talk about techniques. Who are you studying with? Where did you go? What classes are you in? How'd you get your headshots? Who do I talk to about marketing? Who's your agent? All of these things get talked about when you're around other actors. And at the time, as a baby actor who knew nothing, this was amazing. I was like, yes, I'm getting all the information. This is how I got into BGB Studios. I learned about Sam Christensen, about UCB and Groundlings and Second City and Stankirsch, and all these kind of amazing classes that were going to help move me along to the next steps of my journey. And eventually I found Dallas Travers when she was still working with actors. And that led me on to who is still now my coaching group. I was just so grateful that, yeah, I was in an acting class that wasn't really feeding my acting soul, as it were, but I was getting into my acting community. And that's really what it's about. And over time I learned where my boundaries were with other actors, about sharing my energy and resources. And when I'm in the right space, I'm always ready to share and help other actors in a way that I was helped. Even in a sketchy, Craigslist acting class, you can take away gold. It's about you and what you're able to open yourself up to. You can learn from anybody at any time. It just might not be the lesson that you thought you were going to learn. You can go to an Ivy League school, you can go to a community college, you can go to a Craigslist acting class. And all of those can provide gold for you if you have the right mindset going in. I'm just grateful that I've found a class and a community to get me started. And I'm actually still have some contact with those people that I first met when I first landed in LA. So yeah. Thank you for being part of my community and for listening. Take care.
