Ranty rant: actors.

Before I start ranting, I feel it is necessary to mention the fact that I am an actor and most of my close friends are musicians, so I know what I'm talking about.
Today, while waiting for my mom to hurry up and drive me to rehearsal, I picked up a book that has been lying on my shelf untouched since Christmas (don't you just love it when grandparents buy you books for Christmas? Side note: when I was about fourteen and reading the "sisterhood of the traveling pants" series, my sisters grandma actually confiscated it because she thought it "wasn't age appropriate". A book targeted at teenagers wasn't age appropriate for a teenager. Whatever! There isn't actually a sex scene, it's just implied. Grandparents don't know anything.) and I read a little short story, supposedly written from the perspective f an actress. She talks about how she's never cast in anything because she doesn't have the "right kind of personality". How all the actors who are cast as leads wear crazy outfits and are super loud and dramatic and always need attention
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Let me tell you something about actors. This is the difference between a good air and a shitty actor that nobody wats to work with: good actors are just regular people who like acting. Shitty actors are people who try to have the "right kind of personality" and dress crazy and draw all sorts of attention to themselves.

This winter, I was a stage hand for my schools musical (I go to a performing art school, btw, so this wasnt just your average high school musical. We got to go to an actual theater downtown and had really nifty costumes and everything. It was a good show). The show had about 4 or 5 main roles and about 45 chorus members. I feel like you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat ceratin people-such as waitresses, cashiers and stage hands. A lot of the chorus members were normal and just let us do our job. A few of them, however, were unbelievably rude. I won't name names or get into specifics, but in short, they acted as if the entire show revolved around them. Like "I'm an actor, you're a stage hand, I'm obviously more important". Your stereotypical actor personality
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The leads, however, we're great. They were all so friendly and helpful. Sometimes in a really crazy scene change, the director will ask the actors to help move ate pieces. Cme on, we had 50 actors and 6 stage hands. And sme of these set pieces were crazy-not the sort of thing that six people can move in 5 seconds, no matter how fast we move. On one occasion, we asked someone to help us with something really simple-there was a box on stage, and in the scene change we needed it moved to a mark about three feet away. When it came time to do that, the person never showed up! Why? I don't know.  I asked them and they said they were no longer willing to do it because they had "more important things to do". They weren't in the next scene, so it wasn't like they needed an urgent costume change. That I would have understood. This person offered no good reason
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A lot of them were like this.  They weren't willing to help out, but if we were having trouble doing it all by ourselves they got on our case about it. (I would also like to point out that tech week exists so we can do things like work out the scene changes and make sure they are perfect so that doesn't happen during the actual performance. If we mess something up in rehearsal, WE KNOW and we are dying to fix it. Also, you can pretty much guarantee that the stage manager already bitched us out for it. We don't need the actors to do it too.)

The leads were always willing to help out with set pieces when we didn't have enough hands.  They kept track of their own props and costume pieces and didnt blame us when they misplaced something. They didn't put food or drinks on the prop table. And if they had an issue with something that we did, they say it nicely, like "hey the set piece wast on its mark and it messed me up a little bit..." to which we would probably reply "oh yeah I'm so sorry about that, we got a little mixed up but we worked it out". Whereas one of the chorus members felt it was necessary to run up to me yelling "THAT CANNOT HAPPEN DURING THE PERFORMANCE! YOU'RE GOIN TO FUCK UP THE ENTIRE SHOW!" 

Guys, do yourselves-and the techies-a favor and quit taking yourselves so damn seriously. When you are the next Meryl Streep or Patti LuPone and you have earned the right to be arrogant, by all means go ahead. But for now, just act like a normal person who happens to like acting instead of a diva. And for gods sake, take responsibility for your own shit! No, I do not have your tie. No, I haven't seen your tie. No, it's not my job to keep track of your tie. Ask the costumer.