Tanna Frederick, a young actress from Iowa hoping for a break writes a letter to a famous director, which earns her an audition that leads to the part of a lifetime and rave reviews. Whatever her endeavor, Tanna Frederick brings passion and imagination, and seems poised to find great success on the road ahead.
Tanna Frederick - Actress
I remember working at the Mason City Country Club during summer break when I was a freshman in college…I was working 'Men's Night', a lovely evening of lawyers and doctors and other various well standing wealthy community members of the male status who would come in after golfing and order their usual Club Sandwich and Fries combo and play a round of cards. This one particular gentleman, after a few cocktails, said, “You're not really going to be an actress, are you? You're going to ruin your life. Why don't you be a lawyer? Don't do that to yourself…”
Those bits and pieces of 'wise' advice would follow me around for the majority of a decade. It's amazing how many people in the world will lovingly tell you 'no'. When I moved out to Los Angeles to 'become an actor', a phrase that still always makes me laugh - you don't really 'become' and actor, or at least I didn't - I had been one since I was two, or three years old…It was just a given, just something inside of me that existed
and would always need to be fed like a ravenous carnivore, that I needed to act. But despite being President of 'Phi Beta Kappa' at the University of Iowa, and President of 'Pi Sigma Alpha' the national Political Science Honors Society, graduating with both Honors in Poly Sci and Theatre, being University of Iowa Homecoming Queen, the recipient of at least twenty different scholarships, I came out here to 'risk' my life and well being with this thing called 'Show business'…All this list of accomplishments make me sound like a bit of a braggart, but I only list them off to demonstrate what an absolute devastation it was to many friends and family members that 'Nancy and David Frederick's daughter' (my wonderful and confoundingly supportive parents) was going to California to 'sell herself to the devil' and 'try to make it in Hollywood' when she was, 'too smart to be an actress'…
I went through years and years out here of not being able to afford even a Power Bar, discovering the best thrift store to buy three dollar blouses for auditions, begging the bus boys at my restaurant to help me with my broken down car for the eighteenth time, deciding I could go without health insurance for three months so I could get two-hundred headshots made up, sleeping next to cockroaches and giving them names (okay, that last one had a little dramatic flair to it)…
When I had been out here four years, I decided to run the Chicago Marathon with my best friend, Krystal Roberts, who then had just moved to Chicago. I couldn't afford to take any vacations but I decided that if I paid the seventy-five dollar registration fee and used my frequent flyer miles, it would be a heck of a good goal to focus on instead of my continual blockades of rent and rejection from agents, managers, casting directors, etc. I needed something to get my mind off of this insane goal with seemingly no promised end in sight, and I knew, my parents having run five marathons, that I could run a marathon, and it was time for me to do it.
With double shifts at Maggiano's Italian Restaurant, I worked five to twenty mile runs into my daily schedule, finding a buddy waiter friend of mine to drive me out to Santa Monica and rollerblade with waters while I did my fifteen to twenty mile stretches. While I heard talk of dismay from other actors and industry horror stories while folding napkins pre-shift at the restaurant for five months, my mind wandered to what I needed to eat that day to carb up, how long to ice my shin splints that night, positive messages to myself that I could make it through the next week's long twenty-two mile run. I kept amping up my times, too, deciding I didn't just want to finish a marathon, but wanted to finish in four hours or under, so while I was taking down orders I would sketch out a time sheet for each mile of the marathon.
This might sound like a small thing in life. Considering what I was up against outside of the marathon, the event was miniscule, and really wasn't 'getting me ahead' in any concrete way in the acting world. But I kept on forging ahead. But reflecting on what to write this article about for this great 'Shapes of Success' site, this moment in my whole history of trying to 'make it' stood out like a lighthouse's beacon in a mad, churning storm. When the pain in my life of defeat and the anxiety of fear invaded every strand of DNA in my being, I found something that made me even more scared, and seemed even more impossible, to do.
The time came to run the marathon. All my training and determination paid off, and as I ran that final half-mile (one of the most invigorating and moving moments of my life), I sped up, and I realized that I had done it, that I was finishing a goal that I set out to do, and I was at 4:04 - pretty close to my own goal of finishing under four hours (p.s. Never drink two Starbucks Double Shots before you run a marathon - not so good a mile seven when you have to stop at the port-a-potties and wait fifteen minutes - darn). As my arms started pumping and I ran faster and I looked over at the bleachers and the hundreds of strangers cheering all the runners, in my mind I thought to myself, 'This is for every casting director who didn't cast me, for every agent who said I didn't have enough credits to rep me, for every director who said my acting wasn't enough to carry their film - and this is for me - and every challenge that lies ahead and this moment that will get me through anything.” And you know what - that feeling has never left, and I now live by the credence, 'When the going gets tough, do something to scare the living daylights out of you.'
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