Pretends

Funny thing is, just this time yesterday, I received a congratulatory email that I have been casted in a pilot for a TV show based in Indianapolis.   Unlike the Irish lottery emails that congratulate me, I actually had heard of this project before, because I did actually audition for it last week.  This was my first audition for any acting gig since high school.   I had planned on not getting the part. In fact, I have set up several such auditions just simply to practice and meet people in the industry.  It is a funny and dangerous thing to expect things to not work out, I am learning.  How to gracefully decline?  I had to ask some friends for help on this one.  Meanwhile I seem to be burning bridges before I knew I'd built them.  Note to self; don't audition for stuff you can't/don't want to do.  
The crux of the problem is this; The gig was acting, which is something I at least would like to try.  But it was not the kind of project that I want to be involved in.  I could guess from the name that the series was going to deal with material that is beyond my moral boundaries.  Not wanting to jump to conclusions, or be judgemental, I decided to go through with the audition.  The audition script, in fact, was not objectionable.  The sight-reading script, however, was very objectionable and, though my character was not reading any of those lines, I still would not want to be part of the project.  No worries, I thought.  I'm an amateur and they won't want to cast me anyway.  WRONG.
I am content to live without success in acting, comedy, or any pursuit for that matter.  I am not content to live a life that is not sincere and true to myself.  I do not want to be someone else just for a gig.  I would rather be rejected because of who I am, than have success for being who I am not.  Sounds simple, but in this industry it is easy to sell out.  After all, acting is about pretending to be someone else.  Once again, I find myself asking questions I cannot answer and pondering the complexities of a world I do not understand.  

Online Date

I've recently begun a social experiment* in which I am the lab rat.  I set out on this adventure to learn a thing or two about love, life, and women.  Unfortunately, I think I may have lost more than I've found along the way.  Take, for example, the awkward first meeting, after weeks of chatting, texting and phone calls.  There she was, lost and alone crossing the street in front of the restaurant where I had arranged for us to meet.  I shot a glance of recognition her way, hoping to have it returned, but instead, as she turned her head toward me, I could see that she was on the phone.  Since my phone was in my pocket, distinctly NOT ringing, I knew right away she wasn't on the phone with me.  We paused together as our trajectories converged and shared a moment of not talking to one another.  Things were off to a bizarre start already.  As I stood there, I expected to hear an excited dismissal of the phone conversation.  Something like "Oh my gosh, here's here and he DOES look just like a younger Brad Pitt!  Girl!  He's even hotter than I expected!!!  I gotta go, I'll call you when we're done!" with girlish squeals exchanged in the process.  Nope. 
Instead what I heard was something much more serious, "Well you know better than that and you've going to have to fix it when Mommy gets home.  And you better be in a good mood too, or you'll have even more..." 
"Hey!"  I said, making sure she knew without me saying that I'm youngbradpitt1979 from the online dating site that had arranged to meet her here.  She nodded at me and diverted her eyes, as if the silence was not enough disengagement.  We stood awkwardly on the street in front of the restaurant.  Although I don't think she was aware of the awkwardness because she was wrapped up in something stupid her little Johnny did moments earlier from an undisclosed location.  I know those moments.  Two people both need your attention at the same time.  It is frustrating.  The honk of a horn breaks the mood as I realized that we were still standing in the middle of the road.
"How about we go inside?"  I offer in a stroke of pure genius.  I reached past her to pull open the door only to find it was a push-open door.  Now I am nothing more than an obstacle between her and the restaurant, with my pride, chivalry, and center-of-gravity far behind me.
"Ok honey, love you, bye."  And just like that the date, for her, begins. 
"Hi!"
"Hi, you must be Jen." 
"Nope."  My hunger pangs quickly turn into a knot of embarrassment in my stomach and I reach back to push open the door that has betrayed me once already.  It is unmoved.  So, too, is her face as she gazes into my eyes.  She does kind of look like an older Tonya Harding, I think to myself.  I looked at her one last time, my eyebrows clenched in painful confusion, when I remembered our running joke about fake names.  Smiles washed over our faces and we looked into the crowded restaurant for a place to sit.  It begins.












*To protect the image of the writer and other characters in this story, and for the sake of humorous/creative license, less than half of the details in this post are true. 

Tacos and conversation

This wasn't my first plan.  I gave her the address to a bowling alley across the street, where I figured we could talk, bowl and grab whatever food they served in the thingie.  If parking hadn't been so hard to find, I would have never even seen the Mexican restaurant.  But after parking there, and staring inside, I began to crave Mexican food.  Even despite the crowd and the inevitable wait for a table, I started to change my mind about the entire evening plans.  Mexican it is!
We stared each other across the table with an new element in our relationship -flesh.  I can see her, she can see me.  We can hear clearer, touch, laugh, nod -all in real time.  It was great, just like real life!  All my frustrations with the online crap were over and this was just like a real date.  Then the questions creep up.   Is this the kind of girl I would have picked out for myself in person?  Does she live up to the exceptionally high standards of quality that I expect?  I liked her pictures, and the texting went well.  Now here we are at some Mexican place on a cold Friday night, and I haven't really satisfied the first criteria of my typical dating checklist.   I gotta throw this thing out.  Of course she's good enough.  But like a good meal I need to whet my appetite.  I need a few moments to think it through, to anticipate. 
We both ordered pork tacos.  They were terrible.  The conversation was informative, but not amazing.  She declined a ride to her car several blocks away.   If it was my sister I would have told her not to get in the car with anyone she met online either.  It caught me off guard but didn't ruin anything for me. We walked a little while in the general direction of her car and then stopped for a moment of good-byes.  Nothing short of ordinary.  "We should do this again."
"Definitely"
"Yeah, when are you free?"
"Yeah, I don't really know.  But we should definitely hang out."
"Well, we'll talk."
"Yeah, oh, definitely."
I'm not sure what the rule is here, but I think either the second or third time "definitely" is used in the answer to the same question, it starts to mean the opposite.  My heart was not broken.  If it works, great.  If not, that's fine.  I still haven't told her my name.