Girl Act (5 page)

The Tennis Actor was dressed and going over lines when I shouted, “Hey, I got a real movie audition!”

He gave a quick nod. Okay, so actors are competitive! Even when a casting director isn’t going to cast a male actor for a female role. Ugh. Someone please remind me not to date anymore actors, ever again. I didn’t have time to get pissed-off. I had to call Ray back. He was fast in giving me the location, (Sony Studios), the room, where to park and what to wear. Thank God, the lines were in an email on my cell phone. Before he hung up he said, “Kid, this is the big one we’ve been waiting for. Do good!”

Those words were fuel for me. I was a skyrocket ready to blast off, still hungry for my Hollywood dream. Maybe the “yes” was about my career. Maybe it was about me landing a movie role. Wow. Being on location with A-list actors. Wow, working with an A-list director.

Acting is all about becoming and being a ‘character’ unlike myself, but coming from within myself. Okay, so here’s where I’ve got be totally raw, as in nude from my soul—the truth is I’m a hard-core dyslexic. See I’ve got the emotional life always brimming in me and I can picture a character’s history—inner/outer life. It’s the damn lines that I have to go over and over, and over—just to memorize. Once I’ve memorized my lines, I can go in and be it.

I once was up for a really cool PSA (Public Service Announcement), and a top female casting director booked me for the call back. I was so excited, but at the call back they asked me to read new lines off a poster board. I was like, “Oh, shit, I’m going to fail,” and I did, because I was too ashamed to tell them that I’m dyslexic and that if they’d let me ad lib, using the same meaning, I could do it justice. The casting director marked me off the list and I’ve never gotten to audition for her again. It’s like having my name written on men’s room wall, “VIVIEN’S WORTHLESS!”

Also, I graduated high school at a tenth grade level after being dragged to tutoring four times a week. I gave the tutors hell. I was an original ‘Mean Girl’—because I was so angry at being dyslexic. So, now you know why I type with only my right hand. But I love reading. In fact, every time I read I’m utterly thrilled. So, yeah, I’m a Tom Cruise fan, because he had to work really hard to overcome his dyslexia and look where he is! Join me if you want.

I popped out of the shower, dressed, and was heading for the door with two granola bars and a bottle of apple juice, when I spotted Shadow, eyeing me and his leash. I looked at the Tennis Actor and he looked at me. I was about to speed dial Sam when he said he’d walk Shadow, but that I’d owe him a favor. I knew what that meant: a BJ, and not a quick one—the kind where he’d tell me when to stop sucking. Whatever! Why did he always make it seem like I owed him, when all he had to do was ask. Go figure.

All I really knew, as I headed for the Sony Studios, was that I had memorized my lines and that I loved Hollywood, and that I had been happily addicted to movies all my life. Drugs or booze never did anything for me, or to me. It’s true! Whenever I felt blue, I watched four or five movies in a row; when I was bored, I watched four or five movies; when I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw an actress. I have a classic nose and high cheekbones, and my hair and eyes are brown. I can look like the best friend, the wife, the mistress, the slithering-shoplifting-backdoor slut, the domestically abused girlfriend, or the stoner.

Just before I found a parking spot, my best friend Paloma, an actress who stayed in NYC, called me. Paloma gets the standard ‘Latina’ parts on TV, AKA the slut, the bad girl, the thief, the drug dealer’s gun-toting girlfriend, or the knocked-up street troll. She doesn’t care. Acting is acting in her mind. We both think that acting work is work, no matter how small the part is.

We made a pact years ago not say the name of the show or film we were auditioning for unless we booked the role. The list of rejections is longer for me than her. Rejection sucks. No five-letter word better expresses it than ‘sucks’. It’s hard seeing pictures of stars in Vanity Fair magazine or reading about the latest projects in Variety or even in the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) magazine, knowing that I didn’t get to work with them in some movie, even the ones that went direct to DVD. Sucks. Ugh, I could have been in blah and blah with so and so; is so awful to think, let alone admit it out loud.

So I quickly tell her, “Top movie director, Mr. Oscar winner and the cast is going to have a sexy heartthrob man (Mr. X) and a sexy ingénue (Miss Y), and then me, the unknown, playing the ‘bad’ girl who’s blind in one eye and looks like a model for crack and heroin. But the good news is that Mr. X is romantically attached to my character (there’s a make-out scene in the script). Only he dumps me for the sexy-just-over-21-hot- thing (Miss Y), and then there’s a car chase and a heist and gun shots, and I either die or wander off with a bullet in my back. Medium budget, but still, my name in lights.”

We both laugh, it’s so surreal: the story and the thrill of wanting the part.

“Break your ass!” Paloma shouts as we hang up.

I stare at Sony Studios; it’s massive, and reeking of cinematic success. My heart beats. I give my name at the gate and the guard marks me in. Wow, I’m on the list. I smile, because I feel important, special, and wanted. Okay, so I live for ‘mini highs’ like these. I find the building and head upstairs. I’ve got the sides (lines for the film) in my hands (thanks to my Smartphone). I’ve been rolling them over my tongue, even though Ray said not to be off book, that this was just a meet-and-greet audition.

I walk in; there are a few other women waiting. We don’t look alike, not like at commercial auditions where there are thirty 5’4” to 5’6” brunettes sitting in the waiting area in the same style pants and casual top with the same polished smile and happy faces ready. I sat down. I was so excited; I like audition waiting rooms. Just sitting, knowing that I was going inside the room in a few minutes to meet the Oscar-winning director, felt amazing.

Usually, you only get to meet the director at a callback, but this was a second run- through and I was getting to audition ‘as if’ I had already auditioned. I couldn’t help but glance at the movie posters, half of which the Oscar-winning director had directed. PR in Hollywood is huge, no matter if you’re yesterday’s ‘hot’ thing or today’s.

I watched a strawberry blonde actress walk out. She held her chin up as she swung her Bottega Veneta bag like she was going places, but really just out the door we had all entered. They don’t teach you how to exit in an acting class. Sure, they go over thanking the casting agent, showing no emotion as you leave an audition room, but walking past other actors, your competitors, they skip right over that. How to sit in an audition room and not get wigged out by bigger name talent than yourself, they don’t teach that either. One way or another, you teach yourself. Hopefully.

On a scale of 1-10 for self-esteem, ten being the highest, I’m a six. I used to be a four. Probably being dyslexic makes it lower. On a scale of 1-10 in bed, I’m a nine. I started out as five. I mean, I had read about it, and I even sat in a bedroom closet, watching while a thirteen-year-old neighbor went all the way. I was a Peeping Tom. Yeah, she left it ajar, by tossing a pile of dirty clothes in front of it, so the fourteen-year-old boy wouldn’t notice me. He was so scared, that he wouldn’t have noticed if her mother and stepfather had walked in. How do I know he was scared? Because he sounded like it. He made all the noise; she didn’t (which isn’t how it is in the teen coming-of-age flicks). Go figure! Oh, and she told me afterwards all about it. She said, “It hurt for a few seconds, and then it didn’t. It was smelly.”

On a scale of 1-10 about having career success, I’m four-and-a-half at best. So, being less than confident and not wanting to come across like a scared actress, I always tell myself, “You’re unaffected, and you’re totally emotional. You deserve this role, you’re worthy of this role,” over and over. I learned this technique thanks to Paloma, who lent me her copy of Shakti Gawain’s little book
Creative
Visualization
, which she swore by. It’s filled with affirmations for getting one’s mind to hold powerful thoughts, not fearful or negative ones, and that just made total sense.

Paloma’s affirmation is, and has always has been, “Give me the freaking role, cuz’ I am the character!” She used to text it to herself before every audition, but now that she’s had solid acting work on a cable show shooting in New York, and hasn’t needed to. Now her affirmations are just about men.

As for walking in ‘owning the room,’ which every acting coach suggests, I always wear clothes that make my pear-shaped body come across as natural and desirable. Looking good in Hollywood is no joke. It’s not that every director wants to screw every actress or actor—it’s just that seeing the clothed-up body has to be as good as if they were seeing it naked. So it’s ‘tits up,’ as Paloma and I figured out back in the early days of auditioning in Manhattan. I always walk in holding my head up, my shoulders back, with a relaxed expression. These rituals, my audition affirmations, poise, and memorization are key. The times I’ve forgotten my rules or had new lines thrown at me, I was too loud and my reading was off the mark—and they’d just stare me as if I was garbage.

“Vivien!” My name was called and I jumped up.

“Go get him!” I said to myself. “Get this role.”

He was at the table with the script in front of him. He looked well-to-do, not larger than life, just a man who dug directing films and who did it really, really well. I sat across from him. I was primed, ready, and my emotions were at my fingertips. He asked me about myself and I told him about art modeling and my dog, Shadow (because he wanted to hear about non-acting stuff). And he asked me what I thought of the ‘bad girl’ character and I told him. Then we read the scene Ray had emailed me. Then he chose another scene and we read that. I liked my character; she was half-mad, and desperate, too. Then he sat back and looked at me, and I looked at him. I felt self-conscious, but didn’t flinch. When you’re an art model, every inch of your skin is exposed, so I had nothing to hide. He thanked me and I thanked him, and I walked out, closing the door behind me.

Wow. It was over. As I walked through the lobby and the other actresses stared at me, I gave them that look that showed I felt ‘good,’ and that my reading had been something ‘great,’ blah, blah, blah.

When I got outside, I took a long, deep breath. Reading with the Oscar-winning director was exciting, but the waiting to find out if I booked the role was the yucky part.

The Tennis Actor texted me; he needed me to run lines with him because he was up for a part on a top-rated doctor TV show. It was a recurring role, so I headed home. For some reason he liked to use my place to run lines, avoiding his spacious two-bedroom apartment for my cramped homemade style, with a rescue dog to boot.

When I unlocked my car door, I felt a lump in my throat, the kind I always felt when I realized that the guy I was sleeping with wasn’t going to fall in love with me—only this time I felt it about the Oscar-winning director, not anything sexual, just that he wasn’t going to cast me. He would wind up going with one of the other actresses with stronger credits. I felt gloomy, it had happened too many times before.

“Snap out of it, snap out of it,” I told myself.

Ray called to ask how I did and I told him word-for-word what went on inside the audition room.

“That’s it, kid!” he said.

I didn’t tell him my fears; every actor who hasn’t made it big, let alone one-tenth big, has the same set of fears, and every agent or manager has heard it all before.

Later, I ran the TV doctor lines for two hours with the Tennis Actor. I even coached him the way an acting coach would do, which he liked. He even joked about me doing it as a backup career.

“Listen, I came here to make it as an actress, not to become an acting coach. I could have stayed in NYC for that job,” I shouted and he told me, “Chill out, I want you to come with me to the audition. Listen, you might get the movie role. Babe, nothing’s a done deal just because you’re scared.”

Wow, he knew what I was thinking and why. Oh, wait, he’s an actor, he’s done it before. Go figure! I called Sam, the dog walker, to see if he wanted to take Shadow for a dog run, but he wasn’t in and I didn’t want to leave a message. “Bring Shadow,” the Tennis Actor suggested. After all, I could wait in my Volvo with Shadow while he did his TV audition; it wasn’t like I needed to sit in another audition waiting room when I wasn’t even going into read for a part.

The best thing about my hunter green Volvo station wagon is the size: Shadow could lay his mixed-Shepherd dog body out in comfort and I could load the back with goodies from any store I wanted. I had always bought vintage cars (this was my 4th one). I watched the Tennis Actor stride into the studio lot as I sat in a parking spot across the street. I turned on the radio and listened to Eminem singing,
Not
Afraid
, while Shadow chewed on a rawhide bone that the Tennis Actor had bought him (I know, totally sweet giving guy).

I felt sad, even though I shouldn’t have. It was like something was going to hurt; like my not getting the movie part, and the Tennis Actor booking the TV role, or that I was just spinning my wheels over and over for nothing. Okay! I think too much. So I muttered out loud “Stop thinking, no more thoughts,” causing Shadow to lean over the seat and sniff my ear with his wet nose. His dogface was what I needed to snap me out of my really dark thoughts. And then there was sex. I was looking forward to that; I needed it.

About an hour later, the Tennis Actor came out of the studio and crossed the street smiling; he’d just given “a great read,” as he put it. That’s when I remembered that I was supposed to water the backyard plants for Becky a location-manager friend who was working on transitioning into a producer. She had a house off of Benedict Canyon, so I zipped us over there. It meant three things: I could turn on the water sprinklers and Shadow could play in the backyard, and I could give the Tennis Actor his requested BJ. And that’s just what happened, in that exact order.