Personal Narrative: Why I Love Acting

It was a beautiful evening in April, and the weather was finally starting to get warm again. After a tough and bitter winter, little buds were appearing on flowers and trees, and some color was returning to the world. Above, the sun was setting creating various shades of red, pink, and orange across the blue sky. Among an audience, darkness encompassed the room creating an anxious silence. Only after a few seconds the stars came out. The stage lights came on nearly blinding the audience, and the actress said her first line.

My name is Samantha Norton and I'm an Adjunct professor with the Theatre & Dance Department. I teach acting 110.

I have never thought that I would be put into a situation where I would have to be the mediator for my family. I have never in my life liked conflict, yet here I am putting myself in the middle so that the people I hold dear to me will not end up getting hurt. Never have I thought that I would be the one to get hurt.

Though I didn't start acting professionally until my late twenties, even as a little girl, I've always loved people and telling stories. Being an actress provides

Throughout my twenty two years of life I have had a love/hate relationship with writing. In school I’ve had English classes in which I enjoyed immensely. Then there were the classes I did not. Sadly a majority of the time it was the latter. Subsequently during my adolescence I was never really interested in writing. I cannot remember a time when I was angry or anxious while preparing to write a paper. I just wouldn’t go as far as to say I enjoyed writing papers. I viewed it as a chore that I wanted to be finished as quickly as possible. But at the same time I’ve always considered myself a average writer and viewed most of my work as well written papers with solid ideas. Yet I would still find myself receiving grades that were much lower than I expected.

I experienced my pop culture moment when I was a senior at my high school. My transportation to go to my school was buses. I took the same buses to school from freshmen year but I have never notice what I notice in my senior year. Every morning I wake up to go to school at 8 a.m. I would see people going to work, school etc. but one day I notice there was a group of white women who went to work wearing sari (sari is a garment which is long and elaborately draped around body. Asian women mostly wear it). I found that very odd because they didn’t look like to me that they would know anything about the culture that the sari is originated from. I used to see them wearing traditional Indian cloth and I used to wonder how did they get interested

The first part of our rehearsal was in class during a free session. We sort of just got together as a group and try to figure out our topics and what everyone wanted to do. It was hard for us at first because our schedules were busy so all we had was the time that was given in class. We had time to start working on the PowerPoint. We chose the websites that we thought we wanted to do and that could relate to the topic of the subject the best. We made a PowerPoint that everyone could edit and add what they wanted to. Each individual added some content about how and what they did or have done to help the youth of empowerment. I feel as if we got a lot achieved for just one class period of time, also with a couple of students missing.

A lot of my current art consists of class projects and personnel study that I've done over the past year or so. My "anticipated evolution" however, and not just for the coming semester, but probably for the rest of my life, is to someday be able to say there isn't a thing I can't do. It's a bit of an ironic conundrum considering graphic design and other skills associated with it are an ever evolving medium, but that is perhaps why I love it so much. It's constantly changing, constantly challenging, and in my book that adds up to being constantly satisfying.

I have experienced failure many times in my life, but the one that sticks out the most to me is when I took my first ACT. Going in to the test, I knew I wanted to get a 27 or higher. That was the score a lot of colleges use as their honors score, and I thought that was a reasonable starting point. I had taken an ACT preparation course before, but that was the only studying I chose to do. Test day arrived and I was very nervous, like most people before the ACT, and I had to drive an hour to get to the test site. Four hours later, I finished my test and thought that I did pretty well and that I should have no problem reaching my goal. A couple weeks later, the test results came back and I had received a 26 on my ACT. I felt horrible. I was so

All the years i’ve been in school i’ve always hated writing. Writing was one of my worst subject to do it was hard and challenging. But there was one i had to learn to write cause i will need write my whole life. I always sucked at writing i could never spell or write. I would always fail on my essays and other writing things i had to do. My mom will make me write all day long until i remembered how to write and spell.

I love acting; everything I do is full of emotion. Interpreting someone else's work and then putting your own emotion and feelings into it, is one of the greatest things to do of all time. I love acting with all my heart and soul, I will always love acting and the emotion and the thought and care it involves.

My experience as a writer although I need a lot more practice to become better at writing in general and learn how to be detailed with my information correctly. I would say my strength in writing will be knowing the subject on what I would want to write, but once I'm typing all of it down I over think and then does not make sense at all. For example, I get a topic talking about dogs and have to describe how they live, eat, etc. Like that topic is easier than doing one about a scientific method and at the end it helps because you learn a new topic about a subject you might have not known about. Overall, my strength would be knowing what to write about but my weakness is not knowing how to put it in a essay. What I have read affects how I write

It was a beautiful early september day before the school year started. I was still nervous no matter how perfect the day was. It was my first rehearsal with the Grand Rapids Youth Symphony I had just been admitted into. I looked for familiar faces in the rehearsal room. Only one girl who played violin looked familiar. Nervousness began to take over as the new faces crowded into my head. I looked around and found a group of guys with trombones, the instrument that I play. Not sure how they would respond I decided to go join them.

Most of you probably don’t know this, but I have a very large love of theatre. It seems like a stretch seeing as I’m most likely shaking while reading this right now; however theatre has been a part of my life for a large portion of it, eight years to be exact. The idea of taking on the persona of someone else gives me a rush of excitement only few things can. I have done multiple shows in that time: A Christmas carol, Hairspray, The Wizard of Oz, Greater Tuna, The 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Most of these shows took place on the same stage in the Hillcrest High School Theater. This stage has special meaning to me as it is where I met a large number of my friends, it is where I met my girlfriend,

As I was scanning the crowd in The Bolshoi Theater through the lenses of my decrepit Galilean binoculars, waiting for the opera to commence, I noticed something strange: a distinguished, young man looking particularly anxious, fidgeting continuously with the opera play bill. Unconsciously, I grabbed my grandmother’s ancient broche and I held it tight. It was my good-luck charm and the only memory I had left of her.