---

Today’s soundtrack: with the box of flash

---

Today at 10:09am: turning my cell phone off

---

#

Hey, so I blew that movie audition. Which I didn't really mind because acting is not my thing. Not getting this part was like losing out on a chance to date a really great guy, when I'm not even gay.

Then again, maybe I should be sorry I didn't get it; maybe being in a movie would have been really fun and interesting to write about. And that's where the gay parallels end.

---

#

The auditions were held in some theater up in midtown on the east side, so the deck was stacked against me from jump. I go down to 50% power above 14th Street, and anything too far off the spine of 5th Avenue subtracts what little scraps of mojo remain.

I showed up at 10am on the dot. The actor waiting there ahead of me was apparently not my competition; I was auditioning to play a Japanese guy and this cat was blond.

Blond Actor Guy was corn-fed and good-looking, with hair that required at least ten minutes in front of a mirror, an appropriately distressed wardrobe from Urban Outfitters and clear blue eyes. Midwestern kid I'm guessing. He seemed like one of those guys who took the bus in from Iowa six months ago with five hundred dollars and a dream, and now he does auditions when he's not telling you the specials at T.G.I. Friday's through a forced expression of cheer that belies a sad, reticent fury. In some ways New York is not a very pretty town.

The waiting room was filled with mismatched Salvation-Army-style chairs. Blond Actor Guy sat in one of these. We acknowledged each other with a curt nod--actually the inverted curt nod, where you kind of jerk your chin upwards and raise your eyebrows.

"You the ten o'clock?" he asked.

"Ten ten," I said. "Yourself?"

"I'm the ten o'clock," he said, making me wonder why he asked.

Next he began behaving like a crazy person, muttering to himself and making all sorts of emphatic gestures to no one. At first I thought he was telling the T.G.I.F. specials to an invisible customer, but when I didn't hear him say "bacon cheddar potato skins" I realized he was rehearsing his lines. I've never been to an audition before, you see, and I don't have much experience with actors.

---

#

The actress who came in after me--in her fifties, but trying to pull off someone's thirties--had peroxide hair, so I found myself sandwiched by blondes in the waiting room.

A door at the end of the room opened, and a short brunette with a clipboard called the blond guy in. "You'll be auditioning for the part of the drunk," she said, though he already seemed to know this and bounded through the door gamely.

The brunette turned to me and the other blonde. "Help yourself," she said, gesturing to a metal folding chair that sat just outside the door. On it was a half-dozen half-sized bottles of Poland Springs. The door shut.

"You the ten-twenty?" I said to the bottle blond, and she nodded. I felt a weird little moment of satisfaction, like I had correctly completed some inane equation.

There was a few moments of silence, then from the other side of the door came a pretty damned good rendition of drunken screaming and yelling. It went on and on, with foot-stomping and what sounded like a chair being slammed around. If you didn't know what was going on in the next room you'd have called the police. Blond Actor Guy was going for broke.

---

#

I'd memorized my one page of dialogue, but figured a little more practice couldn't hurt. At the other end of the waiting room was an open doorway.

I walked through it to find a depressing little room filled with dented lockers along the wall. Mismatched scraps of fabric were taped crookedly across dirty windows, filtering the sunlight. A single Oliver-Twist-style metal twin bed with a headboard and footboard made of vertical bars sat in the corner. The striped, worn mattress was bare, with two crumpled blankets of different patterns scrunched up on the side. This looked like the type of room you move into after you've just murdered your wife and child and need to figure out what your next move is.

After several minutes of pacing and saying the lines in my head, I headed back into the waiting room.

---

#

Presently the door opened and Blond Actor Guy came out, shiny with sweat but with a calm face. The brunette came out after him. "You did very, very well," she said. "You responded very well to the direction. Great job. Great, great job," she said. He thanked her and left. She called me into the room and I walked through the door.

At a table on one side of the room sat a middle-aged guy with a beard. He had presence, like he was a Somebody. I expected his eyes to be cold and evaluative but they were calm and inquisitive. Behind him sat two younger guys, hipster-types in their twenties. A tall actor in his twenties stood in the middle of the room near me. The brunette introduced them all, then sat in the corner next to another woman.

"Okay," said the director at the desk. "Andy will be acting opposite you," he said, indicating the tall guy. I addressed Andy, and launched into it.

I recited every line and pulled every scripted pause exactly the way I had rehearsed it. I forgot nothing, and each word came out of my mouth just the way I had practiced it. After forty, fifty seconds I was done and I looked up.

"Okay," said the director. "Have you had a chance to look at the script?"

"Just the one page," I said, which was all they sent me.

"Okay, he said, calmly. "Let me give you a little background on your character. Now, he's very [this*]. And he's feeling very [this]. So try to show us that," he said.

Holy cow. I had spent so much time practicing the accent, getting all the enunciation right, I had totally overlooked the fact that there would be actual acting involved.

I addressed Andy and ran through the whole thing again...and delivered exactly the same performance. Like a robot programmed to deliver the same twelve lines in a monotone Japanese accent.

"Okay," said the director, after I'd finished Take Two. "So, here's the situation: Yesterday, your character [did this]. And tomorrow he's going to [do this]. So you can imagine, he feels very [this]. So you've got to make us feel that."

I could see a floating red line that said "In order to succeed at acting you must be above this line," but it was floating about three inches over my head. I tried it again anyway...and it came out exactly the same as I'd done it the first time.

The director's expression stayed the same. He tried prompting me with more emotional cues and I tried it a fourth time with identical results.

"Okay, thank you very much," he said, and that was that. The brunette escorted me to the door and opened it.

The blond in the waiting room had been joined by the ten-thirty and the ten-forty. One was a short, rotund metalhead type. The other was one of those tall, broad-shouldered Asian surfer-looking guys that has no problem getting laid in the East Village. The bottle blond and I traded room positions.

The brunette smiled at the ten-thirty and the ten-forty, and gestured to the bottles on the metal chair. "Help yourself," she said, and after she'd shut the door, I did.

---

#

Out on the street I opened my free water and made for the train while I drank it. I'm not really sure why I do the things I do. Sometimes I feel like a character in some Mario-esque videogame, running around dodging obstacles and jumping high into the air to collect inane floating prizes, in this case a half-bottle of Poland Springs. With any luck I'd find a power-up or an extra life on the subway ride home, and maybe one of these weeks I'll figure the board out and get to the next level.

---

#

---