Saturday, December 3, 2011

No Actor Parking


On a good day, I leave an audition and run errands, wearing a lot of makeup and clothes without stains, in a decent mood. The mood of someone who has done her job. On a bad day, I can’t get back to my house quickly enough: to change clothes, rinse my face and my brain, and set about forgetting the thirty shifty seconds I spent in front of a camera. It’s hard to tell what factors contribute to the audition being good or bad: was I just not right? Did I drink too much coffee? Too little? Did I misunderstand something pivotal, like the location of the audition or where the product to be sold falls on the aspiration meter? Or perhaps I was late; perhaps I got the audition notice at ten and had to be there at eleven and I just couldn’t wash the conditioner out of my hair quickly enough, perhaps I couldn’t find a meter and the empty lot was plastered with signs saying NO ACTOR PARKING.  

Most of my work day, as an auditioning Angeleno, consists of getting to and from casting locations and, once there, waiting on benches. Commercial auditions rarely span more than five minutes. It’s the preparation (the side streets, the car sing-alongs, the tongue swipes over the teeth to remove any lipstick traces, the studying of copy that is often short or even non-verbal) and the after-effects (trying to convince yourself the job, an often life-changing job that could be like a row of three cherries on the slot machine, meant nothing to you, to tell yourself that you can’t even make note of what you wore because that would mean assuming you would have to remember it for a callback, which would mean imagining you would even be invited to the callback, which would mean jinxing yourself) that consume time and energy.  

The space surrounding auditions is dangerous: it seems ideal to house despair and self-doubt. On a big white wall in the corner of your mind you can screen a mental tape of you in a bright room wearing a bikini, you stuttering and asking in a high-pitched voice to start again, and then being denied and slinking off, out the door, putting on your smudged glasses. In one scene you are drinking whiskey on a Tuesday afternoon and wiping mascara off your cheek; in another you are coming home to see the piece of spinach that was lodged in your teeth all along. Included in the footage is the time you sang a song in your off-key alto about shaving your bikini line while wielding a hedge trimmer. And were denied, denied, denied.  

Illegitimi non carborundum, but like most experiences that require you to submit yourself for evaluation regularly, auditioning can leave you feeling rather raw. The events surrounding your brief period of performance congeal into a vast and disjointed perception of your own work day: three hours to get ready and get there; three hours after to cleanse my brain of any psychic wounds. In between, the audition itself: “Carol, I didn’t know you were a coffee drinker!” (To which the client casting this coffee ad replies “I wasn’t but then I discovered the delicious new taste!”) Carol, I didn’t know you were a coffee drinker! Carol, I did not know you were a coffee drinker! Carol, oh Carol, I didn’t even know!

by Tess Lynch, n+1 | Read more: 
Image: "Beverly Mirrors." From aberg86