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Hey! This is my first blog post on my site. I haven't tried something like this before, so I guess we'll see how it goes. I also haven't tried making it public, either, so of course I'm concerned about how it'll look to visitors to my site... Not that I expect many people to look at this unless they're stalking me or something, but I guess you never know! It is the very first post, after all, hopefully of many.

So the main point behind this blog is I want to expose a bit of my process. It's more for me than anyone else, honestly. I find that for every show I've been on where I really focus on the *process* I tend to do better and learn a heck of a lot more than other shows where I'm not as vigilant. For my Senior Capstone at NAU - The Yellow Boat - I was required to journal about the entire process, as it was for a grade. But after a certain time it just became second nature, rather than a chore. And it was super helpful and helped reveal a lot to me. Ever since, I've sort of adopted journalling as a form of therapy. I tend to write three to five times a month, just trying to make sense of everything... Don't worry, I'm not gonna get terribly deep here, this is meant to focus on my theatre work. The very last thing I'd want to happen is as I continue theatre work for another few years, then realize I've learned nothing since I wasn't paying attention. Growth must be a continuous effort, and I hope having a blog like this keeps me on top of it and stops me from falling into "lazy actor" habits - ooh, now that would be an interesting topic for another post!

I'll say it's an interesting difference going from educational theatre to "real world" theatre in the Phoenix valley. I've definitely learned a lot, and met a ton of super great people of all ages and backgrounds. I'm 25 now, and I've been out of school for... Jeez, almost four years now? It's kinda hard to believe! Feels like I'm old, but I know I'm still very very young, and have a heck of a lot to learn. Besides theatre I work in tech right now (hence why I know how to create cool sites like this one!) but I'm still doing theatre now. I view them as two parallel careers, both of which I need to be a fully-rounded person... one to pay my bills and the other to keep me sane.

I've also realized lately that for any length of time where I'm *not* working on something theatrical, I tend to get very antsy. I just get so much satisfaction from it I really can't live without it, and wish I could do it all the time. There's really nowhere else I'd rather be than at rehearsal or a show, so I'm very thankful for all the opportunities I've had, and now that I'm in-between shows I hope I can minimize the downtime. This summer in particular was bad - I didn't have much going on from May to August or so, which is a long time for me! But that's why, if there's no opportunities out there, I'm going to make my own. I'm still working on my first play, *End of an Era*, and I really hope to get it ready for a staged reading soon. It's hard to find time to work on it, but I'm going to try and get it done by the end of the year. It's almost there!

Well, this first post was kind of all over the place. I didn't really have an impetus for this post besides putting something on this site in the meantime, but later on I'll definitely have a purpose behind each post. I want to write a reflection about the last show I was in, The Cannibal Diaries with B3, possibly something about the work I've been doing with the Murder Mystery troupe, and a post or two going more in-depth about End of an Era. And then whatever comes to mind whenever I feel like doing some good ol'-fashioned word vomit, because you know I'm really good at that. See you next time!

Spencer Beckwith

Hey, I'm Spencer.

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