How many times has your inner self told you something?  That something that is so strong and so overwhelming that surely you couldn’t help but listen to it, right? Oh, but alas, you allow yourself to be convinced otherwise, and that inner light, that gut feeling that you had goes ignored.

Luckily for Denyce Lawton, she listened to her inner voice and it became a “Call For Acting.” Denyce always had the acting bug, but it was in high school where the bug bit her hard. “I always had it…I can remember watching the Cosby Show and thinking to myself, ‘I can do that! Rudy’s not special, I could do that’,” she laughs, “but the bug hit me in high school; I did plays and it carried me through college.”

Isn’t it funny in an ironic sort of way how our inner gut speaks to us, and often we are shown through some divine intervention answers to questions (known or not yet discovered).

Denyce Lawton had been set in her mind that medical school was her track.  Although she had been smitten as a youngster to acting, she only took a drama class in high school because she thought it was an “easy A” and literally the only elective left for her to take. This really became that intervention, that ‘voice’ truly speaking to her for the first time. The second intervention was in college, although it did cause her a bump on the noggin. “It wasn’t until I was in my medical seminar class; the one where I had my cadaver.  They gave me the scapula…I just remember waking up in the nurse’s office with a big ol’ bump on my head because I passed out and I never went back to class.”

But c’mon, how many times have you looked at something in retrospect and gave yourself a slap upside the head thinking, “Why didn’t I listen to myself,” or how many times have you wished you could smack your friend upside the head wishing they would wake up and smell the Folgers.

I’m sure if the nurse had clocked Denyce in the head, a fight would have broken out, so intervention or destiny did the next best thing.  Denyce recalls, “I continued to do my art studies and my acting, and it was something that I developed a really great passion and love for, and I saw other people were making a living out of it. I said you know what, even if I don’t make a living out of it, I just want to do it. Why not?  Life is too short.”

WHY NOT?!?!  How was this DMV (affectionate term for residents of Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia often used amongst the local Entertainment Community) chick that graduated from Largo High School ‘gonna’ make it in acting. According to most from the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area, It is very unlikely. I am from the DMV, and all I hear from other actors and entertainers is that D.C. will never be taken seriously in the entertainment industry. It’s too much of a political and governmental town.

To read more, goto page 10 of Elan Extreme Magazine Issue #5: The Candy Issue – http://issuu.com/magazinesandstuff/docs/whole-issue5-web