I Will Not Help You Pick Out Your F*cking Headshot

So I looked at the thing. And it hurt, man. It hurt like the first time you share funnel cake with someone at the carnival and they get all weirded out that you'd like to give them a nice shoulder rub to help with digestion. I was dying to find something positive to say, and there was nothing. Because here's the thing: not only is it cruel to encourage the hopeless, but you cannot discourage an actor. If someone can talk you out of being an actor, you're not an actor. If I can talk you out of being an actor, I've done you a favor, because now you'll be free to pursue your real talent, whatever that maybe be. Teaching. Accounting. Voiceover work, whatever. And, for the record, everybody has a talent. The lucky ones figure out what that is. The unlucky ones keep sinking all their tip money or grad school stipends into new headshots and asking me to help them pick out the best ones.

To make matters worse, this girl (and her boyfriend) begged me to be honest with her. She was frustrated with the responses she'd gotten from friends, because she felt they were going easy on her. We love the peace sign thing!, one would say. Do more with the tongue and the fingers, it's sexy and hilarious!, said another. What if you took some laying on a couch, while eating grapes? sabotaged yet another. They wanted real criticism. They never do, of course. What they want is a few tough notes to give the illusion of honesty, and then some pats on the head, maybe a shoulder rub while you're delivering the allegedly rough appraisal. What they want -- always -- is encouragement. Do you have any idea how hard it is to tell someone that they've spent literally an entire afternoon sitting on a stool while some guy with questionable hygiene sticks an SLR in their face? Do you know how much blood, sweat, tears, and wasted therapy hours that would be better spent on anxiety-related fainting issues goes into that criticism? Many, many hours. My therapist says sometimes I obsess about what people who give me their headshots to critique really think of me, which I totally don't. Who cares what they think? Not me, that's who. F*ck you, Dr. Horvath, stop putting destructive ideas in my head. So after I cleared the doctor's nagging words from my head, I finally got down to business.

My first draft was ridiculous. I got out my red grease pencil and started circling some of the tiny versions of her head on the contact sheet, scribbling notes and symbols (!, !!!, ?, etc etc) across the images, and after a while, found I'd marked up virtually every face on the page. So I wiped it clean and by the time I was done, I'd come up with something that was brief, easy, just a couple of circles around faces, light on !!!, and considerate as hell (smiley faces were involved). The main point I made is that she might've been trying too hard with the peace signs and off-putting pantomime cunnilingus. She was way more interested in standing out and looking mildly deranged than in just having an attractive representation of herself reproduced on a glossy sheet of paper. It was like buying scissors and hacking away at your locks without learning the basics of hair-styling. You'll learn a lot along the way, I said, but you'll wind up with an asymmetrical mess atop your head that might work if you're an anime character, but not if you're someone trying to land a commercial gig.

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