The dance call went long, alright.  By more than an hour.  When they finally finished up and cleared the room, no one could find George Wolfe.  A search ensued.  As a team of people scattered to the four winds to find him, his assistant wandered in and out listlessly and the audition monitor tried to minimize the situation by letting me use her cellphone to call my job.  I did
so incessantly.  With each call, the fistful of dollars I thought I'd make that night dwindled down to a handful of loose change on my dresser that patiently awaited me.  I passed the time by mentally counting all of it and realized that I probably had enough to pay my Con-Ed bill that month.

"Is he even in the building," someone near me wondered aloud flatly, stifling a yawn.  Only God knew for sure. I was too anxious to speculate.

Believe it or not, it took awhile to find him.  He was probably in the bathroom or something obvious like that.  By the time he was located, I had been waiting past my allotted audition time by almost two hours and was on the verge of not only losing my slot to work the private party that night but possibly my position at the restaurant entirely.  Could I be seen on another day or maybe at another time, I asked.  No, the audition monitor intoned. And she actually felt for me. She knew the rock and the hard place that I was in between: either I stayed there and was seen for the role, thus losing the private party job that night and risking the loss of my day job completely, or go and keep the private party and the day job but lose the chance to audition at all.   Should I cool it or should I blow?

My immediate NYC situation flashed before my eyes.  I thought fast. The last roommate moved out a few months before.  I had fallen behind on my rent and bills and I was scrambling to stay afloat.  I knew that things were dire, but I didn't care.  Whatever was going on--good or bad--wouldn't last.  It never did.   Living in the city had always been feast or famine.  For some reason, that's just the way it worked for me.  I knew that I'd be living high on the hog soon enough. This was a big loop but remarkably, I was unfazed.  Taking a day job so seriously that it squeezed me out of my creative opportunities was inconcievable.

So I decided to cool it.  Sort of.

Thanks to that sudden jolt of reality, I was still way more wound up than I needed to be.  Somewhere in the middle of all this, someone gave me a stick of gum. By the time I got into the room to be seen, I was ruminating so pensively that I'm sure I looked like a baby truck driver.  Everything happened very quickly.  I left feeling as though I'd done a lousy job.  I didn't even realize that I'd gone into the room--singing, cold reading, everything--with gum in my mouth until I hit the sidewalk.  Mortified, I ran to work only to be sent home.  I was so late, they'd found someone else to take my place.  And they were real bitchy about it, in spite of the fact that I'd called repeatedly.  Dejected, I went home.  When my managers called to find out how I did, I told them that I'd ruined everything.  They tried to encourage me but I couldn't be consoled.

Imagine my surprise when I got a callback.