Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pica Patter - David J. Loftus

Many different things will tell you that time is passing and – incidentally -- that you’re getting older.

There are the increasing number of aches and pains when you get up in the morning (and sometimes when you go to bed). There are the sports stars in the news and the parents with strollers that pass you on the street who seem to get younger and younger. Former schoolmates have children that shoot up at high speed and soon give your old friends grandchildren.

One of the more subtle ones is how the meaning or usage of a simple word can alter dramatically through the years.

This occurred to me the other day when I wore my black tee shirt that says “PICA.” In this instance it stands for Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. I earned it doing one of those crazy artistic gestures: reading literature aloud on a street corner to passing vehicle and pedestrian traffic. (I spent an hour reading from Don DeLillo’s White Noise on one day and an hour reading from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man on another.)

A 21-year-old friend saw my shirt and blanched. She told me that pica is the term for an eating disorder in which the victim chooses to swallow indigestible materials such as dirt, metal, sand, or wood chips. It was the first time I’d ever heard of it.

I thought back to what pica primarily referred to when I was a teenager. It was a term in typography and layout, back when printers actually laid little metal slugs next to one another, with a letter on the end of each one, to make a plate of print to run off multiple copies of posters and pages. Those days were coming to an end during my childhood.

A pica measured 1/6 of an inch, or the equivalent of a 12-point letter. Point size has actually become a more common concept since the advent of word processing on computers, which enables anyone to choose and reset type sizes on documents they create themselves.

But I graduated from college just before PCs and Macs flooded university campuses. I typed my college papers on manual and electric typewriters. Back then, there were only two principal forms of typewriters: pica and elite. Pica typewriters put ten characters per inch on the page -- most often in that classic old font, Courier, which looks positively dowdy when it comes out of a laser printer. Elite typewriters could fit 12 characters into an inch, and therefore dozens more words on a page.

When it came time to do my undergraduate thesis, the difference became crucial. My department limited students to a total of 60 pages for their theses, end notes and bibliography included. As I got into the writing, I could see I might want to fit in more text than 60 pages of pica type on my typewriter would allow . . . so I borrowed an elite typewriter from a friend to tap out the final draft of my thesis. I'm sure there were other students who probably preferred a pica typewriter because they didn't have as much to say.

All of this would have been so much easier to juggle – margins, font sizes, and everything else – if I had been able to compose on a desktop computer or laptop, but they simply didn’t exist for ready use at universities until a few years later. By then, pica as a typographic unit would have ceased to be an issue . .  . but increasing awareness of anorexia and bulimia had simultaneously raised medical and scientific interest in pica, the eating disorder.

That version of pica has not been subject to much formal research. Researchers think it may be attributable to a mineral deficiency, which the eater tries to make up by consuming materials that contain that mineral. Some scientists believe it might be more of a mental problem -- a form of obsessive-compulsive order. Possibly more as an act of desperation, the condition may occur in more than half of pregnant mothers who live in poverty-stricken African nations.

Being a recovering English major and continuing writer, I mainly wondered how the name came about. Apparently, pica as a term for the disease come from the Latin word for magpie, a bird reputed to eat anything. I don’t know how it evolved as a term for typographical measurement, although it sounds like it relates to the word for “small” in any number of Latin languages.

Anyway, it’s fascinating that the same word can turn up in such divergent applications.

Two Years Before the Cast

[We're back!  Obviously there's been a holdup in new commentaries to this site, and we're still not sure whether the permissions and traffic through the ISP is working out, but once all that is squared away, we can get back to timely remarks about the state of the nation and the world. In the mean time, the piece below is a slightly reworked and expanded version of a note I put on my Facebook page last July 17. . . .]

People who haven’t worked as a stage or film actor tend to have two opposing reactions to the notion of the actor’s life.

On the one hand, actors get to do fun stuff and the work’s gotta be easy -- anybody can act, right? . . . but on the other hand, the average person can’t imagine going through constant auditions and getting rejected, over and over, week after week, month after month.

There’s a bit of truth to both points of view, but a lot of falsehood -- or let us say, inaccuracy -- to them as well.

Two years ago, on July 17, 2009, I lost my job. That morning, with no prior warning, after nearly five years of steady employment in that office, my boss told me he was going to have to lay me off. After several hours of panic, my wife Carole said, you know, you’ve been complaining about how you don’t have your days free to audition for commercial acting jobs. I’ve crunched the numbers, and if you can get unemployment, we might be able to buy you a year to try doing that.

When the practical, managerial member of the team says “why don’t you give that dream a shot?” you’d best get on it. It is now well over two years since I last had a full-time day job, and I have begun to suspect I may not have to look for another.

Between that July 17 and the most recent July 17, by my rough count I went through 130 auditions -- for video commercials, print ad shoots, feature films, musical and dramatic stage productions, staged readings of plays, voiceover jobs for radio or video ads and animated films, even part-time work as a tour guide.

That calculates out to little more than one try-out per week over the course of 104 weeks -- except that Carole and I also took four weeks of vacation outside the country during that time. So perhaps it’s closer to an average of 1.3 auditions per week, although in some weeks I didn’t have any and in others I did three or four -- often two in a single day.

And does it feel like constant rejection? Not really. When you do that many, that regularly, the sting of most of them lessens to almost nothing. It’s not that different from many of the going-through-the-motions tasks you have to do in the typical day job. Most of the time you’re not brooding over the audition you just had, or the job you didn’t get, so much as planning for the next audition or possibly wondering about the results of three or four still out there hanging.

It’s like lying on a bed of nails: when there are so many, they hardly cause the kind of pain you’d feel if you stepped on just one.

And to set up those 130 auditions, I had to pursue at least 279 queries or referrals. I posted multiple emails or made telephone calls in response to Craigslist ads, Internet discussion lists, tips from friends, and even an occasional invitation from a director or producer who knew my work. It required constant hustling.

But if you keep at it and develop good work habits (staying patient and polite, knowing your lines, remembering directors’ comments), you will land projects. During the two years after I lost my day job, I got cast in at least 60 projects, from print shoots and industrial videos to film extra work and voiceovers. I didn’t even do six of them due to scheduling conflicts or because I didn’t like the job or the terms (usually, a small role in a stage show for long hours with little pay). Not all of them paid money, of course, but they all entailed on-the-job acting experience, new networking connections, and often a little food or video footage I could use to market my talents elsewhere.

I did a minimum of 64 shoots in those two years, more than one every other week, from posing as a surgeon at Oregon Health and Science University or a potential Infiniti buyer at a Beaverton, Oregon car dealer to multiple sessions on sets as an evil genetic scientist, a movie producer, an Arab archaeologist, a police detective, an orthodontist.

Can someone make a living at this in Portland? If you’re not also a teacher or freelance acting coach, probably not. And for most of the past two years, I didn’t think I ultimately would be able to survive without a day job. I drew unemployment benefits, I did a little temporary office work, and in the back of my mind I just assumed that sooner or later I’d be looking for another full- or part-time office job.

But Craigslist came through last October with a classic work-at-home, set-your-own-hours freelance writing job that uses all my past journalism, research, editing, and proofreading skills and experience -- and more important, leaves me in control of my days so I can continue to audition for commercial acting jobs and do them when they’re offered. Pending the approval of my client, I may tell you about that in another commentary.

As recently as three years ago, I couldn’t have imagined making it as a freelance writer OR actor, but somehow life has allowed me to put together a combination of both. Perhaps 85 percent of my current income derives from the writing, and the rest from acting and modeling.

None of this would have been workable if Carole and I hadn’t already simplified and slimmed down our lifestyle. We gave up car ownership ten years ago, moved to a 667-square foot urban apartment at the center of town, have no mortgage or consumer debt, and simply live on a lot less than we used to -- all for the freedom and flexibility that lifestyle can offer, and long before either of us knew I might be plunging seriously into acting and modeling.

So what was I doing on the second anniversary of the day I lost my job, which happened to be a Sunday? Why, a commercial video shoot -- the 2011 version of the Web ad for the rollout of the AutoCAD/AutoDesk software for Mac computers which I did for the 2010 version the year before -- of course.

And working on memorizing 3 to 4 pages of script each day for the next week and a half in preparation for another video shoot, scheduled to occur over three days. And over the 10 days until then, an audition for a TV show, a meeting to discuss a junket to a national storytelling festival in Utah next February, a rehearsal for a job doing a lead character’s voice for a film screening, and a video shoot for a proposed Web series.

I think I’m doing okay.

[Photos: at top, the author as Sitting Bull in the current Lakewood Theatre Company production of "Annie Get Your Gun"; at bottom, the author as a technogeek in an architectural firm, in a Web ad for the 2010 rollout of AutoCAD/AutoDesk for Macs -- my first paid commercial job landed through my talent agency, and shot on Aug. 14, 2010. For the entire ad, see it on YouTube.]