I just saw a wonderful film tonight at the Directors’ Guild. The whole audience (men and women) was weeping with joy at the end. It’s heroic and inspiring.
This is why I love movies. It’s the story of a young person’s willingness to do what it took to get out of extreme poverty and – through sheer will power – overcome insurmountable odds.
You will cry and you will laugh.
Go see it and be inspired!
Sometimes you have to open lots of doors and go on new adventures before you find the riches at the end of your rainbow.
As Talulah Bankhead said when asked if there was anything she would have done differently, “I would have made all my mistakes sooner.”
Go explore what’s behind many, many doors.
That’s how you’ll find what’s beyond your comfort zone.
That’s where all the goodies are.
Tuptim was the first legit soprano role that I ever performed. Up until that time I thought I was just a “belter” (a singer who “belts” out pop songs in the middle of their range).
It was truly a surprise to me when I was cast as Tuptim by one of the directors who worked at the Music Center in Los Angeles.
I was also terrified.
I had two legit songs to sing: “My Lord and Master” and a duet, “We Kiss In The Shadows.”
When you’re rehearsing and performing a musical, the first thing to give out from exhaustion is your voice. Rehearsing for weeks and then performing all those high notes show-after-show, eight shows a week, can be particularly exhausting… especially if you are a tired “belter” who hops across a stage as big as a football field every night.
So I quickly went to work with Seth Riggs and his amazing wife Florence Riggs.
There I learned some very weird and wonderful vocal exercises that blended the middle of my voice and opened up the high notes.
Thank goodness!
Even though I was terrified and wondered what I was doing there before every performance, all went well. Everyone just took me to be a delicate Lyric Soprano when I knew in my heart I was born to belt out Annie Get Your Gun.
Ahhh… Life! We make plans and Life just plays jokes and spins us around.
NOTE: In this installment of their seven-part interview series, publicist Bill Murphy (BM) and multi-talented Udana Power (UP), discuss Udana’s life now…and her exciting plans for the future.
BM: In our previous interviews we talked about your screenwriting, your commercials, your Broadway work, and your TV and movies. That brings us up to the present year, 2015. Tell me what are you doing now and what do you plan to do in the future? What’s next for Udana Power?
UP: Oh, my gosh. That’s a wonderful question because when I began to realize that we stand on everything we have already done that we stand on our past. We stand on our mistakes. We stand on our “approximations,” which is what I call “mistakes” now. There are no mistakes. We stand on the good and the bad and the wonderful things that have happened, and from there move into the next place because life is all about change. It’s all about blooming as. It’s not just random change. I believe that when we are accessing energy from our inner source like all the great religions say, it is blooming us. It’s inside of us. Enlightenment is inside of us. Everything we are looking for is inside of us, and we forget that at every sound, and so that inside of us is just what I call the Law of Blooming.
So right now I am working on a book about that, and I am also working on a book called, the Friendchise. There are two parts to this.
Number 1, it occurred to me, oh, about ten years ago. I saw it in a flash of inspiration. I thought, oh, my gosh, why does the law of attraction not always work? Why doesn’t it work for me all the time? Come on, what is this, God? Tell me. And because you know you plant a sunflower seed, and it’s not going to grow up and be an avocado tree. It’s just going to be a sunflower. It’s not even going to be a daisy. It’s still going to be just a sunflower. I was sprouting things for many years and eating living foods, and I would sprout mung beans and I would look at that little tail that comes out of a sprouting mung bean and go, “Wait a minute. Where does that tail come from?”
I asked that question of audiences all the time. They always stop and consider and then someone says, “Uh, uh – inside the bean.” I always look back perplexed and say, “Well, it’s too big to be inside the bean.” And then nobody knows WHAT to say.
[Here’s a video of a mung bean sprouting that I think is fantastic.]
When I asked myself that question and seriously considered it, it made me realize that everything organic and alive and growing is an opening to Continue reading
I am excited to be training with some amazing people this coming weekend at “Follow Your Bliss” in St. George, Utah, November 6-8.
Such an opportunity for us all to transform lives – our own and others!
We are delving deep into the Quantum Physics of how our mind, thoughts and Being-ness actively create whatever we choose to create in our lives. We will be going beyond the Law of Attraction.
This is a turning point.
The key to learning anything you want to learn is to study with people who have actually DONE what you want to do…not just talk about it or read some books.
We are all magnificent Beings with amazing power…pretending not to be.
I saw a BEAUTIFUL movie that is getting rave reviews.
It’s called Brooklyn and it will be out November 4th.
It’s about Home…being home, leaving home, being homesick and discovering what home really is.
A beautiful piece of filmmaking with exquisite performances.
I love movies.
Here’s the official trailer for Brooklyn.
Vision is EVERYthing!!
Create your vision….then love it, nurture it and hold it dear like you would a magical plant.
As your Vision grows it will nourish you back again and again.
We stand on our past in order to create our future…and the only thing that matters is drinking in the Joy of the Now.
Our Vibrational Signature of who we are BE-ing sets the tone for everything that unfolds in each new moment. It’s like we are blooming our thoughts into the physical reality.
Here is an example of the hard science behind this phenomenon – the fractals created by the Mandelbrot equation.
It’s a never-ending pattern that evolves and evolves and evolves…in variations on the same theme… until we change the equation: You want to change your life? Change your thoughts by changing who you are Be-ing.
Well, I finally realized that rather than try to push myself to go to the gym I would go back to my roots – dancing!
Why didn’t I think of that before?
I was a dancer at one time.
Yesterday I went to the dance store and bought my first pair of ballet slippers in many, many years. When I slipped them on I felt like Cinderella…or The Red Shoes…my body knew exactly what to do.
I have longed for something physical that I could be in LOVE with that would pull me into the studio!!
Yippeeee!!!
Dancing at any age!!
The photo below is by Harry Langdon when I was 32.
I had a wonderful time last Sunday re-connecting with my long-time friend, Sondra Currie (star of The Hangover, The Hangover II, and The Hangover III) at the Aging Fantastically Festival in Los Angeles.
We are re-inventing what it is to be “of a certain age,” alive, vibrant and looking forward to the next 30 years of living full out and doing all the things we forgot to do in our 30s and 40s. Youth no longer has to be wasted on the young! EVERYthing gets better when you stay healthy and maintain a positive mental attitude!
Sondra and I started our careers together in a TV show entitled Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Yikes!! What fun. Erik Estrada had a small role…wearing a 3-piece pink suit. Egad.
Here is a screen snapshot of that episode (“Legacy of Terror,” 1975) from Kolchak: The Night Stalker with Yours Truly seated in a fancy uniform.
Here, you can see Erik Estrada making his TV debut in a hot pink 3-piece suit (I’ll bet you thought I was kidding). The beautiful Sondra Currie is on the right. She looks the same today. Darren McGavin is on the far right.
For the record, I had a nice little scene here, flirted a lot and then got killed off in the next scene. Ahhh…such is the life of an Ingenue.