A Spork in the Road

We watched Rachel Getting Married over the weekend, which I liked even better than I expected. The acting was superb, the writing was, with very few exceptions, feather-light and natural. It captured family tensions and longings and love with beautiful, painful clarity.

One of my favorite moments in the film was during the post-wedding party, when the camera captured Kym (Anne Hathaway) standing amidst the music and dancing looking dazed. There was no big drama, no epiphany, just a visual that looked exactly like I’ve felt numerous times.

So much of art’s function is simply to reassure us that our experience is not unique. That someone else has Been There.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »