A Spork in the Road

It was a busy weekend. In addition to starring in “Italian American Reconciliation” (okay, so I had the smallest part, but I was STILL a star) for our second weekend of performances, I also auditioned for an independent film.

This was really the first time I’ve seriously auditioned for anything since “Bye Bye Birdie” in junior high. (I’ve either been precast or stepped in to replace someone in all the plays I’ve been in this past year.) My auditioning skills have not much improved in the past twenty years. I got up in front of the director and swear. To. God. My brain emptied. The sheet of dialog they handed me? The single sheet with, like, two lines for me to hit? In 12-point Courier and margins the size of Oklahoma? Yeah, I could barely read it. Totally blew my lines every single time.

I’m not sure what I said during the bit they wanted me to improv, but it could not possibly have been intelligible. I was supposed to be an angry wife yelling at her good-for-nothing husband in the morning, but I think I said something like “Banana forest? Banana forest? Emerging fossils slather up purple bubblers! How can tentacled brain wraps scare jittery keyboards?! You epicenter! You, you, you prostrate penguin muff!”

I did manage to stay between the green tape for the screen test, though.

After this Humbling Experience, it was lovely to run our play that night and the following day. And I will give myself full marks for an elegant bit of improv to compensate for dropped lines during Sunday’s show, which was a nice salve to my ego.

Of course, the audition process was made a whole lot more fun by being a group experience. Mat, LeAnn, Cintia, Jason and I all showed up and strutted our stuff, and it was a lot more fun sitting around waiting for callbacks with a roomful of boisterous fellow actors than it would have been alone.

Really what I found most interesting about auditioning is that I was not most concerned with what the director thought about me. I never met the guy before, and although he did seem awfully nice, I’m not likely to spend much time around him ever again. I wasn’t all that worked up about what the auditioners thought about me. What got me was what I thought about me. Things like auditions slam me up against my beautiful little image of myself and show me the chinks. The areas where I’m not as impressive as I like to imagine myself.

The ego cannot possibly keep up its charade of self-importance when your brain evaporates on contact with the audition room.

And that’s a good thing to experience every so often.

(Of course, Jason did not get this wonderful ego-deflating experience, since he was cast in the role for which he auditioned. Poor guy.)

I would, however, like to pat myself on the back for going to the audition sans hair and being not a bit worried about it. I advertised my “insta-haircut” feature and wrote down “unavailable alternate Tuesdays” on my audition sheet; other than that, I just did my thing and blathered my improv and generally had a good time.