Acting and mayonnaise

I will try not to turn this blog into a lesson by lesson chronicle about my acting class, but I promised I would dwell on it and it kind of made my Wednesday evening. So here it is: why knowing how to make mayonnaise matters in an artistic journey.

So last Wednesday, for my acting class, we had to tell about something we knew very well (in my case, I thought about making mayonnaise and then tell people about something we knew nothing about (I picked up plumbing). Of course, when I talked about plumbing it was ridiculous, but I talked about making mayonnaise with confidence: you need about a cup of oil, two or three spoons of lemon or vinegar (but I prefer lemon), an egg of course, some mustard for the taste (I use Dijon), then you... Well, you get the drift. I was good at explaining how to make mayonnaise. The teacher mentioned it after the exercise: I managed to make people see, feel and taste the mayonnaise (and boy was I ever proud to talk about mayonnaise!). This is what we do in acting, our character live in a context and we have to make it believable, we have to feel it. If the play is set during winter and it is cold outside, we have to feel the cold, the dampness of a room, the smell of the place, etc. This is what good actors do. This is what I aim for.