I'm Glad About You(11)
“She’s going to get it,” Rae informed Alison under her breath. “Everybody wants Hispanic right now. Nobody wants a white girl. You would not believe how many times my agent told me, you had that except they wanted to go Hispanic. That’s why I went for this Goth thing. It doesn’t matter how good you are, you got to have a look or thing, something they can buy. You can’t just be white. I mean, I’m sure you’re good? But you got to know what you’re up against.”
“Thanks,” Alison said. She had been glad enough when she first sat down that this person seemed like a friendly chatter, but now she wished Goth Girl would just shut up. For an instant Goth Girl oddly reminded Alison of her mother, who, the one time she had visited New York, had talked to absolutely everyone she sat down next to on the subway. Rose even showed photographs of all her children to the elderly black woman seated across from her.
“I’m just telling you don’t take it personally if you don’t get it. That’s what I learned from experience, don’t take it personally,” Rae continued, biting her thumbnail with a worried glance down the hall. The door swung open and the Hispanic girl swished out, moving quickly past them with that continued sour look on her face. “Well, guess that didn’t go so good,” Goth Girl muttered, clearly pleased. “They don’t always go for the Hispanic thing. I mean, it’s not like you can count on that. You have to be good. As long as you have a look, something that pops you out, and you’re good, you got a shot.” She was clearly talking to herself now, and had been all along. It was a lot of people running, there were so many people, Alison thought. The journey is the goal, and the goal is the journey.
“Rae Leavitt,” called Hello Kitty assistant girl. Rae stood up and straightened out her skirt, revealing a massive hole in her black wool stockings. She was wearing worn-out red Converse sneakers as well. The Goth thing she had going was a whole look, top to bottom.
“Wow, look at you,” said Hello Kitty. “Rich said you were going for something different but he didn’t say what.”
“Yeah, I thought it might be kind of fun to just switch things up,” Rae told her.
“Absolutely,” Kitty girl agreed. There was an easy familiarity between them which Alison envied. Goth Girl wasn’t, as it turned out, some kind of nut; she was an old hand, just as she had intimated. Alison felt her confidence in her own ability to at least make an impression seep away. The goal is the journey, she told herself, but the mantra was wearing thin, a magical spell that was losing its potency through overuse. She looked up at the clock. It was only 10:57.
Even though her appointment was for 11 a.m., they still had not called her name at 12:13. By then the hallway had been drained of its myriad bouquet of female witnesses, and had refilled itself with potential uniformed officers. There was apparently no age or weight restriction involved in the casting of this part—Alison couldn’t help but notice that all the actresses who were up for the part of the witness were young and pretty, and all the actors who were up for the uniform were not necessarily either. She knew very well that a television production office was no place to ponder the unfairness of gender politics, but you couldn’t help it when the thought wafted through your head, How come the girls have to be pretty and the guys can look like gargoyles? One of the gargoyles caught her glancing over at him and he smiled at her, shy and nervous, and she felt a pang of guilt for envying him his bulbous features. He was just another dumb actor who somehow thought that hanging around in a dirty hallway all morning in the hopes of landing a two-line part on a cop show would somehow eventually add up to a life. In other words, he was just like her, only with a big nose.
“Alison Moore.” Alison jumped, feeling both frightened and oddly reassured by the sound of her own name floating down the hallway.
“Oh yes, that’s me!” she called back, immediately feeling like an idiot. Hello Kitty assistant didn’t help matters any by raising her eyebrows in a gesture of obvious sardonic ridicule at how eager this girl without an agent was willing to let herself look. But there was no time, frankly, to worry about whatever the casting assistant might or might not think. The guy in the jeans and baseball cap was hanging in the doorway again, smiling at her. “Hi, Alison,” he said, as if there was no one on earth he would rather see. “I’m John Maynard, I’m directing this week’s episode. Thanks for coming in.”
“Oh, thank you! I mean, thanks for seeing me,” Alison replied, fighting her Midwestern impulse to seem overly grateful for absolutely everything. It didn’t matter; no one was really looking at her anyway. “This is our producer, Dan Chapek, the writer of the episode, Bill Wheedon, and our casting director, Leslie Frishberg.” John the director rattled off the names quickly, as if he assumed she would have no need to remember any of them, but Alison glued the names into her memory nonetheless, nodding quickly to each face at the table with what she hoped was professional charm. The casting director, the only other woman in the room, glanced up from the sheets in front of her.
“Ryan Jones from Abrams is representing you?” she asked, blunt.
“He’s hip-pocketing me for now.”
“I just saw him yesterday, and he didn’t mention you were coming in.”
“You’ll be reading with Michael,” the director noted, uninterested in the casting director’s clear if unspoken suspicions. Whether or not Alison and her friend had figured out a clever way to sneak her past the gatekeepers of the casting office to get her a reading for this unbelievably minor part, it wasn’t worth the time it would take to call her out on the lie. The crowd of actors waiting in the hallway was, in fact, enormous, and growing by the second. They had to move this ship along.