Insight Courtesy of Tony Soprano

So I'm at the crib eating some Honey Nut Cheerios, or maybe Cinnamon Toast Crunch, either way I was eating some cereal. I'm watching one of my favorite shows, "Inside The Actors Studio". If you've never seen it I highly suggest you do. If gives you a different point of view of some of your favorite actors. But it depends on who's on. For example Eddie Murphy and Jamie Foxx were pretty damn good. Matthew Damon did a good job too. But Roseanne...not so much. Anywho, this particular episode had my man James Gandolfini on. And it was funny watching him, because he looked nervous...which kinda made him seem normal. Most times an actor would come onto the show and calmly tell how he or she got into the business and the moment they knew they were destined for the stage and later on the silver screen. Not Gandolfini. He kind of stumbled into acting the way I kind of stumbled into TV. Someone thought he'd be good at so they told him to take acting classes. Someone told me I was a pretty good writer, so they told me to try producing. So dude is telling this story about how one day he's in acting class and I think he was struggling with a scene or a character. So his teacher tells the person Gandolfini is acting with to do "something". Apparently this "something" (he doesn't say what it is) causes him to lose it. Like dude starts destroying the set and just wrecking stuff. Once he's finished wrecking the set his teacher tells him that's what you need in order to be a good actor. You need to tap into that violent side of your personality, because at the end of the day no one remembers the nice guy or the cat with "the heart of gold". They remember the guy who stole the crippled kids crutches. So once he finishes all that, he says something that's stuck with me ever since. He said (I'm not quoting him verbatim) at that time in his life he was really angry and he didn't know how to channel it. That's what happens when you're around that age (he was about 25), you're angry because you want to express something only you don't know what it is and you don't know how. And that really clicked with me, because I can't B.S. I have my days when I really don't feel like I know how to get some of my thoughts out hence the long periods of time between me writing something. It's just odd because I never I'd find out someone else like me exists. Let alone a middle-age, Italian actor. Go figure...