CONFESSIONS OF A LATINA SITCOM STAR
By Yeni Alvarez

It started out as a noble idea, which later turned into unrelentless passion. I didn't know at the time that it would end up being my career. I'm talking about acting. At the age of seven, as I stepped onto that marionette stage in Cuba, I experienced an incredible high, this followed by a torrid emptiness when it came time to get off the stage. I spent the following years trying to get that high back. And as incredible as it may have been to my Cuban parents, I decided to be an actress. "Is that a career?" My Mother asked. "Can you really survive on that little?" My father was, at least, little more pragmatic. "Please try computers for a few years first, you know, they are the future." How many times I heard that, I cannot tell. But it seemed that the whole world regarded acting as, "not a real profession." Three miserable years in computers and a few acting classes later, an acting teacher opened my eyes. He actually said I was good. He said I could make money at it. What a concept! Mr. Rachelle made me an actress. The rest is history .. and my story.

Yes, acting is a real profession, a real job. Most 9 to 5ers would not agree, seeing us at coffee shops during office hours discussing idealistic works in progress. But, they do not realize all the work that has to be done before an actor gets the job. Which, by my count, takes a lot more than eight hours.

And as difficult as it may be for some to fathom, we are not all waiters. We are writers, painters, sketchers, singers, poets, artists, and therapists. And that's the thing you can't bottle.

Let me raise the banner and say that we not only work hard at our craft by attending classes, we endure countless auditions and interviews every week. We are scrutinized by casting directors. We get turned down more times than we actually get work. We're too fat, we're too old, we're too tall, or not tall enough. Rejection is just something you deal with in our profession.

And it is a profession. We are constantly calling our agents, sending postcards, staging showcases, selecting acting teachers, and buying books on gearing our careers. All this, while improving our image to abide by the ever-rising Hollywood standards.

By the time we actually get the job, we are tired. We've been preparing for years. How many 9 to 5ers have lived through or survived those odds? Not many.

And in some sneaky way, we are doing what we love from day one. We are living our dream. We have followed our destinies down the road less traveled. And as neurotic as it may seem, being that acting is actually living in someone else's shoes, it takes courage to leave your own shoes behind. It takes balls. Brass ones.

In my own quirky way, what I am trying to say is .. don't dismiss acting as the easy way out, because there is nothing easy about it. And don't ever tell an actor to get a, "real job." We deal with enough rejection in the job we've got.

Well, this didn't start out to be the article it turned into. I am not here to preach the word of Stanislavsky or Stella Adler. I am simply hereby sharing with you all the pesky details, all the fabulous adventures an actress goes through in Hollywood. Educational, it won't be. Sophistication, it does not attempt. Entertaining and eye opening to the Hollywood experience? Now we're talking. So sip your coffee, read on and tell Mr. Rachelle I'm doing just fine.

Yeni Alvarez starred as Anita on the popular Cuban-American sitcom, Los Beltrán, has appeared as a guest star on many television shows, and in numerous major studio motion pictures.