becke_davis wrote:
AveryAames wrote:
I have a couple of theater shorts that might give you a good laugh. I'll send them to you and you can post them.
~Avery aka Daryl
What fun!
Here's the first of Avery's pictures:
Lend Me a Tenor - I played an Italian diva, with accent.
Here's a jpeg image I found online:
AveryAames wrote:
Hi, Becke. I haven't done any acting in a couple of years. I moved out of California for a while and did mainly theater. I had a ball doing that. I love to sing and dance and act. It's a guilty pleasure, for sure. When I moved back to Los Angeles, I found that I was too busy writing to take part in the acting life here. Maybe in the future as things settle in for my writing schedule. It's difficult with my editor asking for virtually a book every 4-5 months.
As an actress (I acted under my real name, Daryl Wood Gerber or Daryl Wood), I was on Murder, She Wrote and Matlock and a number of other TV shows, mainly mysteries (oddly enough). I did a couple of small parts in movies. I did a TON of commercials, which is where I made most of my money and was able to support myself as an actress (one of the lucky few). And I did theater. I toured a couple of shows. And then, as a writer, I started out by creating the format for a TV show that was popular, "Out of this World." I turned to longer form (screenplays) and won a couple of awards, but I couldn't get those sold before my husband and I and our son moved across (and around) the country for my husband's terrific career in sports.
Best,
Avery
Becke, I am blown away. This means either the theater or my dear pal and director, Dennis Delamar, posted these pictures. You have to tell me how you found all of them. I want them. 
Oh, these are such fine memories, and I try to add these kinds of details into the theater experiences for my characters in The Cheese Shop Mysteries. Charlotte's grandmother runs the local (regional and well respected) theater. She puts on fun plays, similar to these eclectic plays that we did in Charlotte, NC.
Thanks for the memories!
~Avery
AveryAames wrote:
Becke, I am blown away. This means either the theater or my dear pal and director, Dennis Delamar, posted these pictures. You have to tell me how you found all of them. I want them.
Oh, these are such fine memories, and I try to add these kinds of details into the theater experiences for my characters in The Cheese Shop Mysteries. Charlotte's grandmother runs the local (regional and well respected) theater. She puts on fun plays, similar to these eclectic plays that we did in Charlotte, NC.
Thanks for the memories!
~Avery
Avery - I did a search of "Daryl Wood" and "Daryl Wood Gerber" on Google Images. Then I did searches with your name (your other name) plus the titles of the plays. :-)
Congratulations on your Agatha Award nomination for Best Short Story!
Best Short Story
“Disarming”, by Dana Cameron (in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
“Dead Eye Gravy”, by Krista Davis (in Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology)
“Palace by the Lake”, by Daryl Wood Gerber (in Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology)
“Truth and Consequences”, by Barb Goffman (in Mystery Times Ten)
“The Itinerary”, by Roberta Isleib (in MWA Presents the Rich and the Dead)
Boy, has this ever been an exciting week!
I found this wonderful Father's Day post at the Jungle Red blog:
http://www.jungleredwriters.com/2010/06/happy-fath
And Avery has a special tribure to her father--and to all of ours.By Avery Aames
My father is gone. Has been for years. So is my mother and I miss her dearly, but this blog is in honor of fathers, so I’m going to stay with that theme, if you’ll indulge me.
I still think of my father, my good friend, and know how proud he would be that I have followed my dream. Dreams. He died so young that he wasn’t able to follow all of his dreams. How many he must have had. Would have had. I knew some of them. I would have liked to know them all.
“Believe you can!” my father said to me. And yet he was also the person who said that achieving a dream takes hard work.
Over the course of my life, I have had plenty of dreams, plenty of goals. In my early twenties, right before my father died, I began my career as an actress. I was cast in a small play in Los Angeles, and he drove down to LA to see me act, dance, and sing. When I close my eyes, I can still see his smiling face, the twinkle in his teary eyes. He had encouraged me to follow my heart, and I had done exactly that. It didn’t hurt that he had given me an old car and had driven my luggage and me to Los Angeles to get started.
Over the course of my acting career, though my father had died, he cheered me on. Every time I performed, I could feel him saying, “Way to go!” When I wrote my first screenplay for myself to star in (every actress’s dream), I could feel my father giving me a thumbs up. [Side note: I never could figure out how to raise enough independent capital to get a screenplay on its feet.]
When it came time to move out of Los Angeles (don’t shoot me women’s libbers, but my husband’s career was on the rise), I gave up on my dream of starring in a TV series or a film. I’d had a good run. I’d made a living as an actress, but becoming a star was not meant to be. My father would have been the first to tell me that not every dream comes true, and it’s the journey that matters.
So I came up with a new dream of becoming a published author. When I was a young girl, I fell in love with Nancy Drew novels. At the age of ten, I thought I could write one—not an easy task, by the way. Kudos to all writers of YA novels! I think my mother stowed my manuscript in my Memory Book. I’ll have to dig it out. I’ll bet it’s not nearly as gripping as I thought it was at the time, but that’s another story. Because of my passion for mysteries and thrillers, I decided that was the kind of novel that I wanted to write.
At our first stop on the “See America Tour”—my husband, my son, and I moved to a number of cities. Orlando, FL was the first one—I crafted my first manuscript. It dealt with my father’s death, and it was not very good. I was too close to the material. As we moved to our second stop on the tour—Charlotte, NC--I wrote my second novel. Alas, that manuscript found it’s way into a drawer, as well. I wasn’t too close to the material; I just wasn’t a very good writer yet.
At that moment of realization, I could hear my father laughing. Know why? Because for years, Miss Perfectionist—his nickname for me—thought she could do anything the first time out. Oh, sure, he encouraged my dreams, but he also encouraged me to see myself clearly. I was too serious. I was too intense. I needed to laugh. I needed to lighten up. And I needed to realize that achieving any dream took work. Hard work. Ten years of semi-rejection as an actress had taught me part of that lesson. Ten-plus years of rejection as a writer was the Master Class. Meanwhile, I took writing classes. I joined critique groups. I got involved with Sisters in Crime and its online group, the Guppies. I wrote a lot of books—more than five, less than ten--before I was finally granted the contract to write A Cheese Shop Mystery series. With each book, I’d learned something new about writing, and more important, something new about myself. I had grit. Dreamers need grit.
I wish my father—and my mother—were here to celebrate my joy as this dream comes true. I’m thrilled to be the author of The Long Quiche Goodbye. I’m thrilled to be passionate about my work, about cheese, about writing. And I’m thrilled to be one of the lucky ones who had the tenacity to keep working to achieve my dream.
Don’t give up. As my father said, “Believe you can!”
Do you have someone—a parent, a friend, a spouse, a teacher—who inspires you to achieve your dream? Care to share who and why? Do you have a dream that you are trying to achieve now? Did you have one that you let go? Do you believe you can?
HANK: Happy Father's Day to all!
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