yes please(43)

The script was for a movie called I Don’t Know Because I Threw It Away. I was angry for a few reasons. I don’t like it when people wake me up. Being a bad sleeper, I have a hard time opening my eyes. I am amazed at people who wake up and talk like normal humans. These are the same people who don’t thrash around when they sleep and have never been told that they snore “like a dragon.” I was also angry because I don’t like to be solicited. My years of living in New York City make me very sensitive to the random encounter. When I walk down the street and someone asks me, “Excuse me, can I ask you a question?” I immediately put my hand up and firmly say, “No!” No one needs to ask me a question. There is no reason to talk to strangers. I do not want you to hand me your homemade CD or talk to me on an airplane or try to upsell me on drink specials. As I get older I get a real pleasure from maintaining boundaries with strangers. I have come to enjoy telling the cheese guy at the farmers’ market that he does not value my time. I like letting my massage therapist know that she is putting her needs before my own. It may be difficult to tell my family I feel pressure to entertain them, but it’s easy to tell the UPS guy that he needs to respect my personal space.

When someone randomly hands me a script it means I have already disappointed them. I don’t like disappointing people. Some would say this is “codependent behavior,” which I have discovered is a term that explains how most everyone acts all of the time unless one is a sociopath or a Russian computer that plays chess. PLUS, when someone hands me a script it only reminds me of how I should write more scripts and get my shit together and stop sleeping on trains. I don’t care that you add an attached note that says, “My wife and I are lawyers by day but screenwriters by night and we think you could act in/produce/direct/rewrite this with us.” I am not impressed when you assure me the story has “lots of twists and turns.” I doubt it does and how dare you.

See? I am not as nice as you think I am.

Being a working actor whom people recognize sometimes means you occasionally get the young up-and-comer who thinks that meeting you is their chance to break in. The good version of this meeting is when someone tells you they are inspired by you and are hoping to follow in your footsteps. This makes your heart warm. It also gives you just enough of an inflated sense of self to justify eating an entire bag of Doritos later that evening and eventually falling asleep with your hands down your pants. The bad version of this meeting is when someone hands you something. Or asks you to do something for them. Or announces loudly that you better remember their name because they are going to be famous one day.

Good or bad, the reality is most people become “famous” or get “great jobs” after a very, very long tenure shoveling shit and not because they handed their script to someone on the street. People still think they will be discovered in the malt shop, even though no one can tell you what a malt is anymore. Everyone wants to believe they will be the regular guy from Sioux City who becomes a reluctant movie star despite his best attempts to remain a sensitive tattoo artist. People don’t want to hear about the fifteen years of waiting tables and doing small shows with your friends until one of them gets a little more famous and they convince people to hire you and then you get paid and you work hard and spend time getting better and making more connections and friends. Booooring. It’s much more interesting to believe that every person who makes it in show business just wrote a check to their mother when they were eighteen for a million dollars with an instruction to “cash in a year.”

I was never great in auditions. When I was nervous I would often underprepare and act too cool for school. I would try to reject them before they rejected me, which was confusing since I had decided to audition and acted angry to be there. I remember one particular time I auditioned for the Coen brothers. I realized I was doing a pretty shitty job and I overcompensated by also acting like a dick. The Coen brothers were very nice. I think. I have blocked it all out.

It took me awhile to step out of my comfort zone and put my neck out to audition for something. College was filled with small parts in big musical productions. What’s-her-name in Brigadoon. Who’s-her-face in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That lady in that other play. All small and usually comical. All satisfying in their low level of risk. I surfed in a very cool and confident zone and my ego was snuggly and warm in a sleeping bag of safe choices. Then I moved to Chicago and the shit hit the fan.

I started going on cold auditions, the kind where your agent sends you in and you have no idea why. The worst auditions were what we called “bite-and-smiles.” This is when you go in for a Wendy’s spot and have to pretend to eat something and smile. No words, just the simple fact of presenting your face to the camera and hoping someone likes it. I had the presence of mind even then to know I would never book one of these. One, my teeth were kind of jacked up, and that never bodes well in close-ups. Two, I don’t have symmetrical good looks and therefore I like to think that my personality is my currency. I remember the Chicago casting director asking me to pretend to bite into something and then smile. I did my best and was about to leave when the casting director asked me to stay and put something on tape. I got excited. Maybe she saw potential in me. Maybe I would finally get to play the blue-collar white-girl arsonist on my favorite show of all time, Law & Order.

Instead, she asked me to sit on a stool and tell her my “most embarrassing moment.” I asked why. She said she just wanted to have some tape of me talking. I asked her if I could talk about something else and she shook her head and said, “Tell me your MOST EMBARRASSING MOMENT.” And I said no. She never called me again.