Check Out Penny Orloff’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Penny Orloff.

Hi Penny, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I was a working actor and dancer in Los Angeles when a Juilliard scholarship took me to New York, where I sang more than 20 Principal Soprano roles for New York City Opera and played featured roles on Broadway. In a career spanning over 50 years, I starred in 100+ productions off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally. Symphony, theater, and opera engagements took me all over the US, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. I am a founding member of Rogue Machine Theatre of Los Angeles. My one-woman show, “Jewish Thighs on Broadway”—based on my award-winning comic novel, available at Amazon.com—toured the US for a decade, including a successful run off-Broadway. At the age of 76, I’m currently touring in my new one-woman show, “Songs and Stories from a Not-Quite-Kosher Life.”

As a young actress in LA I had NO success in my quest to squeeze through Hollywood’s gleaming gates. But, late in life, with my mane of silver hair and my Botox-free face, in the past 12 years I’ve acted in a range of shorts, Indie, and feature films. Mostly horror/supernatural films. In the words of one young director, “Your hair is WAY cinematic, Man!”
See more at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5387696/?ref_=fn_all_nme_1

At 60, I finished my Psychology degree. I have been a professional Tarot reader for over 50 years, and use the cards in my counseling practice. For ten years I worked as the Art Therapist at a residential drug and alcohol rehab facility in Malibu. In addition to my comic novel, I am the author of Art as Lifework, Life as Artwork, a creativity seminar and workbook offered nation-wide since 1991. I’m currently at work on my new book, Who Would You Be If You Had Nothing to Bitch About? I’ve served as editor of the Arizona Authors Association Literary Magazine and bi-monthly newsletter; and written plays, opera librettos, short stories, and newspaper columns. I have contributed several stories to the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. My personal development system, Wishful Thinking, synthesizes the human proclivity for magic and symbol with practical steps to the manifestation of your fondest dreams.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There were challenges along the way, to be sure. Loneliness was a big one. Decades of unemployment and poverty. But the biggest challenge was the constant neccessity to prove my worth in thousands of humiliating auditions.
I remember watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies with my mother on TV. I was still learning to feed and dress myself when I knew I would squander my life on Busby Berkeley’s vision of Heaven. Like Ruby Keeler in 42nd STREET, I was a little trouper. I would never give up. No sacrifice was too great if, at the end of everything, I could be up there in the light when the curtain opened.
Broadway audiences would fall at my feet. . . As I blazed up the Great White Way, my True Love would materialize, and we would dance in each other’s arms . . . Music up. Curtain. Thunderous applause.
I should have paid more attention to those scenes in Stage Door, where aging actresses live alone in boarding houses and the girl who doesn’t get the part throws herself out the window.
At twenty-three I left Los Angeles and moved into my New York City apartment to go to Juilliard. A bathtub squatted against the wall of the one room at the top of a five-floor walk-up near the East River. A steam radiator hissed in the corner. The toilet gurgled in a closet under a cracked tank that dripped orange-brown water stains down the peeling wall. Under the 100-year-old roof, the ceiling leaked filthy rainwater all over my stuff whenever the precipitation lasted more than an hour. But the rent was $44.16 a month. It meant I never had to wait tables or work in an office. If you wait tables, you’re a waiter. If you work in an office, you’re a clerk. If you strum a guitar and sing on the street, you’re a singer.
At first terrified of the danger in that neighborhood, I began to have confidence in my ability to kick the shit out of the smaller muggers. Confidence is a good thing to have if you’re an actor. Showbiz is not for the faint-hearted. Auditions are murder.
“The face is okay, but God! That hair… Next. Too short, next. Too tall. Next! Too fat, too thin, too young, too old… NEXT!”
But I was a little trouper. I would hang in there and give it all I had. I decided if nothing had come of it by the time I was 35 I would do something else.
Years passed. One evening, it all came crashing down. It had rained all day, and the roof was leaking pretty badly. I placed pots and pans around the room to catch the water, and draped a tarp over my bed. I was rehearsing in front of the full-length mirror for yet-another humiliating audition for yet-another stupendous part I wasn’t going to get. Dirty rainwater dripped on my head. All of a sudden, I couldn’t kid myself any more — it was hopeless. I had promised myself I would hang in there until I was 35. I was only 28. I had seven more years of this.
I dialed my parents’ house. “I can’t do this any more, Mom.”
“This was your dream.”
“Please, Mom, please tell me to come home.”
There was a long moment of silence.
“No.” And she hung up.
Seven more years…
The apartment building was only five floors – forget throwing myself out the window. I would slit my wrists. I lit some candles in a memorial to the career that would never be, took a last look in the mirror at the “Okay” face that would never play the Palace. A trick of light from the burning candles, and a silent movie seemed to flicker…
Broadway audiences fell at my feet. . . As I blazed up the Great White Way, my True Love materialized, and we danced in each other’s arms . . . Music up. Curtain. Thunderous applause.
I had promised myself I would hang in there and, by God, I would!
Six more months passed while I continued to take acting classes and singing lessons, and went on audition after audition. And by the time I was 29, I was singing principal soprano roles at New York City Opera, and playing leads off-Broadway. And between paying gigs, I lived alone in my cockroach-infested apartment. Still, no sacrifice was too great if I could be up there in the light when the curtain opened…

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
When I was a child, my mother’s family was five generations deep, five generations alive at the same time. Some of those people lived well over a hundred years. Their stories and the stories they told of their ancestors’ ancestors were part of a six-thousand-year-old oral tradition. By the time I was seven, I was consciously collecting stories that had been in the family for generations. When I grew up, I would be one of those Old Storytellers.
At the family table, it was understood that nobody under the minimum age of 40 had anything to say of any imaginable interest or importance. Shut up and listen—you’ll learn something. Those people had outlived the pogroms, the post-WWI influenza epidemic, the great depression, Hitler. They had survived to tell the tales. So would I.
Time has chipped away at the sharp corners, sanded down the jagged edges, smoothed out the rough and rocky terrain that was a younger Penny. I am “colorful” and “eccentric” now, instead of weird. Cinderella has become the Fairy Godmother. Sometimes, from here, I look back on a younger me, and I remind her who she’ll be when the scars are healed, when the back-against-the-wall fight to the death has ended in survival, when the foolish, forever life-altering choice has given the inevitable result.
More than any successes—and there have been great successes—I realize that, during every meaningful challenge, from time to time this Me I have become used to appear to the girl who was becoming, and said, “Hey, Pen, look who you get to be!”
I didn’t know all the strange details of the journey to that future Me, but I must say I’m about where I expected to be. This is Autumn. This is the Harvest. The wounds are healed. I like my scars. My heart has been broken. And broken again. And will break, again.
One of the great gifts of Age is permission to tell the truth. Another is independence from the good opinion of other people. At 76, although certainly mellower I still feel like the snarky little me I have been, all along. But, sometimes, when I catch an unexpected glimpse of myself in a mirror across the room, I’m astonished to see this old gal, this Old Storyteller I always imagined I would be.

Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Never compare yourself with others. Strive to be better today than you were yesterday. Do not be distracted by what or how others are doing. As a singer in New York, performing in the top tier at Lincoln Center, nevertheless I perpetually compared myself to the greatest singers in the world at the time; and, of course, I came up short. I worked and worked to improve. It was never enough. But as I listen to recordings of some of my live performances, now decades past, I’m astonished at how good I truly was. How did I not know?
Greater than that advice is this, from Goethe: Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Fear of failure is the one evil that keeps many talented and motivated artists from manifesting their fondest dreams. Some of the most talented colleagues I knew at Juilliard – JUILLIARD!! – had such paralyzing fear of not reaching their impossibly distant goals that they never took the chance of finding out if those goals might be attainable.
The only way to learn to fly is to step off that cliff. Again and again.
It’s always a choice.
To try, and fail, is to know that at least you tried. To fail to try is never to know what might have been.

Pricing:

• Tarot Readings: $150
• Counseling: $250/hour
• Solo Show, house concert: $500
• Solo Show, 99-seat venue: $1000
• Author Event with guitar: $100

Contact Info:

• Website: https://pennyorloff.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/penny.orloff.7/
• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5387696/