Acting Class (On-Line Edition)

by Kirk Woodward

[The coronavirus and COVID-19 have changed almost everything about our lives.  In addition to their effect on our health and livelihoods, it has invaded the arts as well.  Just about every aspect of the arts, from both the perspective of consumers and the artists, has been affected.

[Perhaps one of the least known facets of art, particularly the performing arts, that has been disrupted are classes for the artists.  Since this is an ostensibly theater blog, I’m thinking specifically of acting classes. 

[Since actors and other performers no longer have productions on which they can work, and acting, in particular, is hard to do on your own—however unsatisfying, a writer can work at his craft by him- or herself and a musician can play at home, socially isolated from others—actors need some way to keep the instrument tuned, the skills from atrophying, the “art in yourself,” as Konstantin Stanislavsky put it, from drying up.

[So it’s no wonder that actors have turned to the Internet to seek out ways to test themselves and get feedback on their skills—to exercise the disused muscles.  So along came online acting classes.  I think they started, or at least they proliferated, pretty quickly after theaters, studios, and conservatories shut down.

[My friend Kirk Woodward, who I’d say is mostly a playwright and director, is also an occasional actor.  Susan Knight Carlin, an acquaintance of his who’s an actress and acting teacher sent out a notice that she was starting an online class, and Kirk signed up.  In “Acting Class (On-Line Edition),” he gives a day-by-day account of his participation in and preparation for the class, conducted on Zoom.  I’ll let Kirk tell the rest; he does an excellent job of it.

[One last word: I’ve chosen to post Kirk’s report now, following the profile of his former acting teacher, Elizabeth Dillon, posted last Sunday, because he talks about working with her below and it seemed appropriate that this article come right after the one on Elizabeth.  (As it happens, Kirk also mentions my acting teacher, Carol Rosenfeld.  I’ll have some things to say about Carol and the work I did with her at the end of this post.)]

The computer application Zoom, originally designed primarily as a platform for virtual business meetings, continues to be used extensively by performers and performing groups during the time of social isolation required for fighting the COVID-19 virus. [See Rick On Theater posts “Theater Online – A Preliminary Report,” 19 May, and “The Diary of Anne Frank Online,” 29 May.]

For example, during the month of July I took an acting class on Zoom. It was organized and led by Susan Knight Carlin, a professional actor and teacher. I have mentioned Susan in this blog before, in connection with a production I directed (Spoon River in early 2020) [see “Presbyterian Avant Garde,” posted on ROT on 19 March 2020]. Susan, appropriately enough, announced the class by email, and eight of us eventually signed up for it.

This posting will be as much about the acting work as it will be about the medium (Zoom) used for the class, but I will draw a few conclusions on virtual acting classes at the end.

Susan told us that the class would consist of five sessions, the first one introductory, and would be based on the book Respect for Acting by Uta Hagen (1919-2004). This plan reassured me right away. I was familiar with the book, which was first published in 1973 by Macmillan Publishing Co. and is widely admired and used. (The book was reissued in 2008 by Wiley Publishing and is still in print; Wiley released an e-book version in 2009.)

Hagen was greatly respected as an actor. She won two Tony Awards for originating the roles of Georgie in The Country Girl (1950) by Clifford Odets (1906-1963) in 1951 and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962) by Edward Albee (1928-2016) in 1963, and a Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1999.

A casualty of the “Hollywood Blacklist” because of her close association with the actor Paul Robeson (1898-1976), she and her second husband Herbert Berghof (1909-1990) co-founded the HB Studio in New York City, where she taught a remarkable number of well-known performers, as well as my own transformational acting teacher, Elizabeth Dillon [see “‘Portrait of a Mentor’” by Alan Geller, reposted on ROT on 30 July].

I bought Respect for Acting when it was first published, read it, and have referred to it often since. The book contains ten activities often referred to collectively as “the object exercises,” the title of the chapter that describes them. They are designed so the actor can perform them either privately or with others watching. The word “object” points out that none of these are mime exercises; they call for using actual material items.

Although not all the names of the object exercises are self-explanatory, it still may be useful to list them, using Hagen’s names for them:

The Basic Object Exercise

Three Entrances

Immediacy

The Fourth Wall

Endowment

Talking to Yourself

Outdoors

Conditioning Forces

History

Character Action

The names of the exercises indicate that as a group they cover many of the things an actor does on stage. (I should note that Uta Hagen wrote another book, A Challenge for the Actor, published in 1991 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, also very fine, in which she provides a related but different group of ten exercises with the same purposes.)

Many acting teachers have organized classes based on these exercises, and Susan proposed to do the same. She suggested a five-session class. The first would be introductory; the second through fourth would use the first three of Hagen’s object exercises; and the last would be devoted to monologs

I said above that Susan’s plan for the class reassured me. Actually this is only partially true. For two years in the 1970’s I studied and applied the principles of the object exercises in technique classes at the HB Studio (not led by Elizabeth, whose classes were entirely scene study), and was an abject failure at them. Carol Rosenfeld, the instructor and a fine one, still teaching and well regarded in the profession, must have wondered what in the world I was doing there.

[The New York Times ran an article by Elisabeth Vincentelli called “Time for Your Close-Up” in the “Arts & Leisure” section on Sunday, 3 May.  It’s about online acting classes and one of the teachers who conducts such a class is Carol Rosenfeld of HB Studio.  The article is available on the Times website as “‘The World Goes Away’ and Other Lessons From Online Acting Class” at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/theater/acting-class-online-coronavirus.html?searchResultPosition=1.]

How did I manage to fail so badly? Some of it was due to simple lack of preparation; the object exercises aren’t improvisations. They require preparation and practice (like being in a play!), neither of which are my natural strong points.

Much of my procrastination was due to a feeling that I simply wasn’t very creative about the exercises. As well as I can remember, my ideas for what to do in the exercises (we had to come up with those ideas; Carol didn’t assign them) didn’t excite me, which meant they certainly wouldn’t have excited anybody else. Carol remained patient . . . .

So when I accepted Susan’s offer of a class, I also wrote her that object exercises were “the bane of my existence.” She refused to accept my statement, which I appreciate. I mailed her my check and the classes began on the last Tuesday night in June 2020, continuing through the following four Tuesday nights in July.

CLASS ONE – Our introductory first session began with Susan’s review of the first part of Respect for Acting, which she had asked us to read in advance, and quickly developed into a discussion of the mechanics of Zoom and the possible problems we would face.

I had wondered in particular what anyone would be able to see of an object exercise, considering the small size of a laptop camera. Susan pointed out, and Jennie Cherry, a class member, demonstrated, that with proper placement such a camera could show most of a good sized room, although of course it couldn’t do a variety of angles and distances without a second person moving it around.

In the course of this introductory session, I found insights into two things people often say about acting, both of which have always bothered me. The first goes something like this (I am not quoting anyone in particular): “We think we’re one person, but we’re really many different people. I’m one person when I’m with my spouse, another when I’m with my boss. I contain many different people.”

This kind of thinking seems to me simply not true. At its best it suggests that we can understand or perhaps put ourselves in the place of another person. At its worst, as a friend of mine has pointed out, it can be dangerous for an actor who is deeply neurotic (it can happen!) to think they have “no real self.” According to many accounts the actor Peter Sellers (1925-1980) was a classic example of this condition, and not a happy one.

The situation, at least for relatively healthy people, it seems to me, is, instead, that we respond in varying degrees to all sorts of conditions. An actor should be able to take in many kinds of circumstances, including – to name three obvious ones – the circumstances detailed by the script; those provided by the director; and those that arise from interaction with other actors in the scene or play.

In theory, at least, the better “receiver” should be the better “reactor” or responder, and many acting exercises, including Uta Hagen’s, are designed to make actors better “receivers” for that very reason.

This leads to a second insight concerning the well-known phrase “Acting is reacting,” which seems to me to be exactly half right. Acting is receiving and reacting. One can’t “react” in a vacuum. One needs to take in the stimuli first. Individuals differ in how and how much they do “receive.”

                                                                                         

A personal application: I am not a particularly good “receiver.” I have often said that I would make a poor witness in a court trial; I’m simply not a great observer. I’ve worked on this limitation over the years, with some improvement, I hope. I suspect the deficiency is a reason I never tried to act fulltime.

All the more reason to take another acting class! Here is Uta Hagen’s list of what “I have to know if I want to re-create . . . two minutes of experience:”

Who am I?

What time is it?

Where am I?

What surrounds me?

What are the given circumstances? (past, present, future, and the events)

What is my relationship (to events, characters, and things)

What do I want?

What’s in my way?

What do I do to get what I want?

And since I’ve made an issue of my preparation, here is a day-by-day account of my preparation for the first exercise (second class session), the “basic object exercise.”

The assignment of the first object exercise is to prepare a two minute slice of life in which you do something you do or might do in your regular life – not perform it, but simply do it. (I thought a requirement was that the exercise involve at least three objects, but I don’t see that Hagen mandates that, and Susan didn’t either.)

DAY ONE – found a monolog, Henry Drummond’s speech about the rocking horse he coveted as a child, from the play Inherit the Wind (1955) by Jerome Lawrence (1915-2004) and Robert E. Lee (1918-1994). Emailed Susan and told her what I’d selected, typed it out, and read it through once out loud.

Thought about what I might use for an object exercise. Tried to think what I do in my home office, where I usually work. Remembered the photo albums on one of the book shelves, thought that might fit the bill.

Experimented with the laptop to see if it could show the book shelves, my desk, and most of the room at once. Found that it could. Came up with a rough beginning outline of the exercise – take a photo album, find something and look at it, decide not to dwell on it, get another album, start sorting photos. Watched myself on the camera, which seemed to cover the space.

DAY TWO – Susan approved the monolog. Read it out loud again, trying to read it “neutrally” – to not force “line readings.” Decided that I’d use two photo albums, one that didn’t contain the pictures I thought it did (with pictures of my late wife Pat in various acting roles), and one family album. Tentative “want” or objective: to find a picture that a family member asked me for, of him in a play with Pat. Decided to let my subconscious work overnight.

DAY THREE – subconscious gave me orders. Situation became a letter from my aunt, asking for a picture of the family together. Made prop envelope and letter “from my aunt,” decided I’ll begin with bringing the mail into the office, read the letter, look in one album, find it interesting, put it back and get another album, start looking for the photo. I did the actions and timed them – took two minutes or so. Fine.

Read the monolog out loud again, as neutrally as possible. Realized it’s not “due” for a month. Wrote the nine “what I need to know” questions (see above) on the monolog, not consciously trying to answer them yet.

DAY FOUR – did the exercise again. It dawned on me that I really don’t have to “show” or “indicate” anything – just do it. Felt good about that. I like this exercise! Realized I need an ending – taking out a photo, putting the album back on the shelf. Planned to add that tomorrow.

Read the monolog out loud, and worked on learning the first section. Just two typed lines. How’s my memory these days? Worked more on answering those nine questions, using the information in the script and the fact that, my father and grandfather were lawyers, like Henry Drummond. 

DAY FIVE – object exercise again, adding the ending. Seemed fine. I love not having to “show” anything, but it’s still a temptation I have to consciously resist.

Worked on the first two sections of the monolog. As I divided it, there are six. Monologs aren’t “uninterrupted speech” – we just don’t hear the interruptions, which often come as thoughts or images. I’m trying to remember to make the images in the speech(es) real to myself.

DAY SIX – I was still finding it difficult to do the “object exercise” without trying to clue in my imaginary audience somehow as to what’s going on, like saying “Hmmm!” when I open the letter from my aunt.

Started memorizing the third section of the monolog. These are all short – not huge chunks of prose.

DAY SEVEN – time to try out the object exercise in the morning, so I set up the computer, started the camera recording, and did the exercise. Aside from my horror at seeing myself on camera (the words “old” and “fat” come to mind), to my amazement it was too short – 1:26 including turning the camera on and going to position, and I need two minutes. Changes: make sure not to rush; end by putting the photo album back, sitting at the desk, taking out paper, and beginning to write a letter to Aunt Emma.

Practicing the monolog, I tried to keep from being inaudible on words that begin or end phrases in the speech, and to make mental connections to help with the words I’m substituting other words for in my head. The originals are better. I realized today that the speech is pivotal for the play, because Drummond recognizes in it that for the sake of fighting for justice, he has abandoned the charm and lightness of his childhood.

CLASS TWO – after some preliminary discussion, we did the object exercises, one by one. Susan was supportive and enthusiastic; she asked two or three of us to repeat a section of the exercise using a “heightened circumstance.” For example, she asked me to become more absorbed in the first photo album I looked at, imagining that it contained, for example, pictures of Pat (which it actually did).

In requesting this, Susan put her finger on the weakest part of my exercise; redoing it strengthened it. It exasperated me not to have “nailed” the entire exercise the first time, but after all, that’s why we’re in class – to improve.

The session concluded with discussion of next week’s “three entrances” exercise, an “object exercise” in which we come into a room three times, each time coming in from a different experience which changes the way in which we enter.

I started immediately thinking about what kind of circumstances I could use for the new exercise. I decided I was returning to my home office after a day’s meeting with a possible publisher for several of my plays. One meeting would have been long and inconclusive, and I’d be exhausted; one would have been a failure, and I’d be furious; one would have been successful, and I’d be thrilled.

(WEEK TWO) DAY ONE – I found a “messenger bag” and put a folder and a script in it. I had decided overnight that I won’t be back from a publisher, but from someone who was interested in producing my play. I did the three entrances – tired, furious, and happy – pausing in the doorway each time before “entering,” and they all were great fun. I like this stuff! 

                                                          

Without trying too hard I was close to having the entire monolog basically memorized. It struck me now that Drummond is recalling his childhood incident for the first time in decades – he thought he’d forgotten it. That’s how it can bring back all the feelings it does. He’s lost something in the struggle, though, and he knows it.

DAY TWO – severe resistance to rehearsing the exercise at all, but I finally did it about 5 PM. To my surprise it was very different this time, and fun. It dawned on me that I might do it differently every time – I don’t have to repeat it. If you had already figured that out, well, I hadn’t, at least not that I’d noticed.

Monolog nearly memorized. If I let myself “remember” the events I’m talking about – let them come to mind as I’m trying to recall them – and visualize the images, it works, or at least it feels right.

DAY THREE – was I becoming too comfortable with the “three entrances?” The monolog was very close to memorized.

DAY FOUR – added a new bit or two to the exercise. I found I could be freer with it. Same for the monolog.

DAY FIVE – freer with the object exercise, somewhat less with the monolog, but I nearly had it memorized.

DAY SIX – changes continue in the “three entrances,” apparently organically. Monolog so-so.

DAY SEVEN – as before, I video-recorded the exercise to see if it fit in the camera, and to sneak a look at how I’m doing. Seemed all right, although I hated the way I look in profile! Monolog steady.

CLASS THREE – the class went well, and I was happy with my “three entrances” – I believe the first time I’ve ever felt good about any of the Uta Hagen exercises. Susan commented that she’d never seen me “mad” like that before. She emphasized how strong “previous circumstances” carry a scene forward, and the actor doesn’t have to worry about the audience “getting it” – the playwright will take care of that. 

At the end of the class, a brief review of the third exercise, hunting for a lost object, which Uta Hagen calls “Immediacy.” Here we go! 

DAY ONE – I decided that for the “Immediacy” exercise I’ll look for a missing check, because it’s something I can do in the office (and therefore in camera range), and because it actually happened. It would be funny if in the course of the exercise I actually found the missing check! I tried out the exercise and liked it.

I did the monolog closer to actual conditions – looking in the direction of the camera, “placing” the listener somewhere specific. (I have to work more on that.) I’ll do it sitting, since my character is exhausted after a brutally long day.

DAY TWO – trying to raise the stakes on trying to find the check. Only one mistake in the monolog.

DAY THREE – after doing the exercise, I wrote Susan to ask how long our segments should be. We could go on looking for the lost object forever (in actuality I never did find the check I was looking for). For the monolog I’m intensifying my character’s frustrations with the court system, which is leading to a more forceful delivery. 

DAY FOUR – Susan wrote the group in an email that we need to be sure we have high-pressure reasons for looking for the lost object in the Immediacy exercise, so I decided I needed to deposit the (lost) check so I can get the money into the bank to pay my city taxes. It seemed to work. Small imprecisions in the monolog, but it’s growing.

DAY FIVE – timed the Immediacy exercise – four minutes. Perfect. Found new significance in a line in the monolog.

DAY SIX – took the day off! Didn’t want to get stale . . . maybe . . . .

DAY SEVEN – did the Immediacy exercise with the computer camera on, to make sure it’s all visible to the class. Doing the monolog, I realized how much I’m thinking during it, on one level of my mind, about what the class, and in particular Susan, will think of it – how they’ll respond. A very bad element, which restricts what I’m doing.

CLASS FOUR – good results from the Immediacy exercise for the whole class, including me, and spectacularly for one member who actually did find her genuinely lost object during the class presentation.

“I wasn’t acting,” she said of that moment, and in a lot of ways that’s what Uta Hagen’s exercises try to accomplish – to bring actors to a point where they can behave on stage in ways that aren’t stagy. Ms. Hagen would endorse the famous advertising slogan “Just do it” as a model for how actors should approach a role. 

Looking ahead to the monologs in next week’s class, Susan advised us to think of the fact that our monologs will be on camera rather than on stage – they don’t have to “reach the rear balcony,” because there isn’t one on Zoom. It’ll be interesting to see how that works.

DAY ONE – no more exercises, only a monolog now. Nearly word perfect. I tried to let the remembering start much earlier – when I first mention “Golden Dancer,” the rocking horse I had as a child. Recalling is much richer than when just telling.

DAY TWO – monolog a little freer.

DAY THREE – okay, but I held back a little on the climax. Saving it for class?

DAY FOUR – a bit more adventurous. I felt ready to go on and perform it and see how it went. I thought I might even ask someone at home to listen to it – a big deal for me, since I prefer to do my floundering around in private.

DAY FIVE – a little more force to the ending of the monolog.

DAY SIX. I hadn’t found time for my son Craig to listen to the monolog, but today we found time. He liked it and seemed to feel I was communicating what I needed to.

DAY SEVEN – one more runthrough of the monolog. Go for it!

CLASS FIVE – at the beginning Susan mentioned that she usually begins classes and rehearsals with relaxation exercises, and she led a brief set of them, aimed particularly at unclenching the jaw and the vocal apparatus. All the monologs went well.

Jennie Cherry did a piece from the play Wit (by Margaret Edson, first performed in 1995) so well that I felt I didn't need to see the whole play. That’s quite a result. I can’t say I felt the same about mine, but I was happy with it.

                                                                                           

So what conclusions can we draw from doing an acting class on Zoom? Most obviously, we didn’t test working in pairs. In theory there’s no reason a scene with two actors shouldn’t succeed on Zoom, but it wouldn’t be the same as an in-person experience.

One issue would be the sound delay between computers that’s inevitable in Zoom events. Another would be a severe limitation on physical movement, which Zoom doesn’t handle well. Even small gestures on Zoom may create a feeling in the viewer akin to seasickness, and a scene with “blocking” – planned walks and actions – is likely out of the question. A pair of actors in a scene on Zoom, each actor working at a separate computer from a different location, would have to be “talking heads.”

Susan pointed out another aspect of the experience: acting on Zoom is literally “in your face” – a viewer can detect the slightest emotional shift, because the camera’s focus is so close. Typical acting class rooms are small, so actors seldom practice “projection” of voice in them; “projection” on Zoom is unthinkable.

The other side of that coin is that intimacy is part of the experience of acting, and Zoom encourages authenticity. I believe the participants of this class sensed that aspect of the medium, which I would say helped produce a high quality of work. How that result would transfer to the stage is another question, of course, but then we won’t be working on stage for a while.  

[In “Acting Class,” Kirk recounts that he took an acting technique class at HB Studio from Carol Rosenfeld before he connected with Elizabeth Dillon.  In his estimation, his work with Carol wasn’t satisfying, unlike his classes with Elizabeth.

[Acting technique classes are intended to teach the student actor the basics of acting by using exercises as well as scenes from plays, films, TV shows, and even novels and short stories.  The skills the actor learns in technique classes are what I think of as the basic building blocks of performing a scene before an audience.  Each teacher teaches the acting style of a particular system; Carol’s technique classes are focused on the acting skills stressed by Uta Hagen, who’d been her teacher.

[While the result of a technique class isn’t to solve a scene—the actor is learning or honing skills—scene study classes are where those skills are applied to acting problems—that is, scenes.  One, but more likely two actors prepare and present a scene, usually assigned by the teacher (though some teachers allow and even encourage the students to choose their own material), and are then critiqued by the teacher (and sometimes their classmates).  The scenes are reworked several times based on the feedback until the teacher feels the actors have solved the acting problem.

[Kirk also explains that Carol’s technique class made use of Uta Hagen’s Object Exercises as laid out in her book Respect for Acting.  I’m very familiar with the OE’s, mainly because I also took acting technique with Carol—as well as scene study—and stayed with her for several years. 

[I left HB in the fall of 1975 and enrolled in the newly established Master of Fine Arts theater program at Rutgers University’s School of Fine and Performing Arts, now the Mason Gross School of the Arts.  Carol was the head of the acting section in the MFA program.  I was at Rutgers for two years, 1975-77.

[While I was at Rutgers, I was appointed to a Teaching Assistantship, teaching undergraduate acting classes.  I adapted Carol’s technique curriculum, which, as I said, is based on Uta’s object exercises, and made it the foundation of my first-semester acting classes.  In the second semester, I moved onto scene study.

[While I was reading “Acting Class,” I thought of many things I wanted to say about the object exercises and my experiences with them in Carol’s classes, as well as in my own teaching.  I realize now that those remarks would be very extensive, making this a very long afterword.  I’m going to cut my thoughts down to one specific idea.

[Kirk allowed that his experiences with the OE’s hasn’t been good.  It sounded as if he’d changed his mind somewhat after successfully doing a few.  He said he hadn’t “exactly about the OE’s, but about my ability to do them.”  I told him I could tell him some very specific benefits I got from using them, practical lessons I learned.  That was part of why I used them as the basis for my own technique course.  I’ll relate one incident that illustrates what I mean.

[In my first year at Rutgers, I was cast in a university production of Anton Chekhov’s The Wood Demon.  It’s a large cast show, and the first scene is a huge meal served outdoors at one long table arranged near the front edge of the proscenium stage.  The actors were arrayed all around the table, but mostly on the upstage side.  Since this was 19th-century Russia in an upper-class family, the table was set formally; there were a lot of props, in other words, in a somewhat crowded setting.

[There were 11 people around the table, all of us eating and passing bowls, plates, and pitchers back and forth, handling utensils, napkins, and glasses.  As I said, a very proppy scene.  Now, when I did plays as a college student and an amateur in army productions, if anything went wrong with a prop I was supposed to handle—say it wasn’t in the right place on the set or it had tipped over, anything so that it wasn’t the way it was “supposed” to be, as we’d rehearsed it—I’d get nervous and flustered. 

[‘What if I screw up,’ I’d be thinking.  I’d lose focus and concentration for seconds.  I was in danger of dropping a line, maybe, or letting the audience see that I was out of the moment.  Well, you can be sure that in the organized chaos of this luncheon scene, that sort of thing was bound to occur—and it did from time to time during the run.  There was also a fair amount of improvised table conversation under the dialogue, just to add another potential distraction.

[Carol always came to see us in our productions and said a few words to us afterwards—not a critique like in class, as she might do during rehearsal or after the production was over.  The night she came to see Wood Demon, she said two things to me that I’ve never forgotten.  The second thing was that she was pleased to see that I was no longer showing my work on stage. 

[When I asked her why that was, she told me that my technique had now become integrated into my working process and was no longer a separate step on which I had to concentrate.  I couldn’t have been more proud of myself than if someone had just told me I’d become a father!

[The second thing she complimented me on was how engaged in the world of the play I was.  It dawned on me that I was no longer afraid of the props, so I could work in rehearsal on being in the scene with the other actors/characters., to be “receptive,” as Kirk put it.  I mentioned this to Carol—who’d been working with me by that time for about two years—and she pointed out that the work had been paying off.

[It wasn’t until much later, when I started doing Off-Off-Broadway shows with and for people I didn’t already know, that I saw that this confidence, if I can get away with that word, was a direct consequence of the Basic Object Exercise, the first one that Kirk describes above, and the work that led to in Carol’s classes and others I eventually took—not to mention rehearsals for actual productions. 

[The BOE is all about manipulating objects—there’s no more fundamental skill for an actor than handling and maneuvering objects—props.  It used to frighten me, and now it didn’t.  The BOE, the simplest of all acting exercises, showed me that it’s no different to handle objects on stage than it is in my living room, and if something’s out of place or askew—well, so what?  Just get it from where it sits, just like at home.  I do it all the time.  The only difference is, now someone’s watching me do it.  I still do it the same way.

[Earth shattering?  No.  But it had never entered my head—until someone made me see it.  And it made all the difference.  QED.]