” Well, you should think about it, at least as a minor. “Have you ever thought about acting? Because you’re very talented” he said. “I’ll just do an Acting course, it’ll be an easy A.” I wasn’t wrong, it was an easy A and I excelled in the class so much so that after my final performance I was pulled aside by my professor. I was told I needed an art class to finish my general ed. I was on my third year of community college with only a few more units to complete in order to be able to transfer to a nursing program. The financial struggles in our family were only getting worse and I decided that year that they were right and that I had to think of something to do where there would always be a need for the profession. When I said an acting career, like I had always planned for in my mind, they responded by telling me that it was only a hobby and I would have to think of something that was actually attainable and realistic. I was a sophomore in high school and my parents started asking the typical questions that come around this time and asked what I wanted to study for a career in college. Without the finances to help with the gas for the trips and the realization that I would be missing too much school also came the loss of my agency and quest of becoming a Disney Channel actress. I made the callback but didn’t get the job. The look on my dad’s face was one of disappointed and I could tell his mind was trying to calculate how this was all going to work. It was a Monday, which meant I had already missed school that day and was going to miss yet another day tomorrow. On the last audition, we were headed on the six-hour drive back home when my agent calls my dad to let him know I had a callback the next day for the audition I had just done. Once for headshots, and twice for an audition. We made the drive down here three more times. What about school? My dad assured him that we would figure it out. How would I make the auditions? My dad said he would drive me. My parents had three other daughters to think about and moving the whole family for a child’s dream was, well, to put it nicely unrealistic. Were we planning on moving to LA? NO, my family wasn’t one of those. However, the agent did have a lot of questions for my dad. We made the drive to Los Angeles to meet with the agencies that were interested and I was signed to one of them. Out of more than one-hundred agencies, only two responded that they wanted to meet me, and one even went on to reach out to my dad over the phone and yell at him for having the audacity to contact them. We waited, and waited, and waited, and well waited some more for responses. The memory of the excitement I felt while I helped put stickers with the addresses on the envelopes is engraved in my memory. I remember we sent out letters to all of them. He somehow got a hold of about one-hundred theatrical agency addresses. This was something so foreign to my dad and he was trying his best to support my dream. I should disclose that we had NO idea what we were doing. Around the same age, my dad started looking for agencies to represent me. I enrolled and continued my training at school. My dad assured me that since I was about to enter Middle School they would have art classes, one of them being Drama. I had to leave not just my school and friends, but also the theatre. On my thirteenth birthday, however, my dad found a new job once again, this had been our fifth time moving, and we had to move to San Ramon, CA. I was in heaven this is where I belonged. I trained and performed a total of four musicals in the two years I was there. I told my parents soon after about my desire to pursue acting and my parents immediately supported the passion they saw in my eyes by enrolling me in a musical theatre program for kids at the “Magic Circle Theatre” in Roseville, CA. Oh! And getting paid for it of course, which meant this was a job, something that I could do and most importantly knew at that moment that it’s what I WANTED to be doing. That’s when I remember realizing that these were tweens like me getting to be on Television and having so much fun doing it. I had never seen this one in particular, but since my birthday is around Halloween it caught our attention because it was a Halloween-themed episode of “Lizzie McGuire.” Once the show ended, they played the bloopers. We had just finished eating the cake and opening up presents when I decided that since the party was dying down, we should just turn on the TV and watch a show. It was my eleventh birthday party when I discovered the wondrous and fun world of acting. Hi Gladys, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself Today we’d like to introduce you to Gladys Bautista.
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