Coming back to the creative process of being an actor after stuffing it under the couch pillows for 2 years has been scary. All the old actor baggage and artist neurosis came back and suddenly the one audition I’ve had in, gosh, maybe 2 years, is of paramount significance.

So this weekend I started working on my audition for Speed-The-Plow, a play by [URL=http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc31.html]David Mamet[/url], which they are doing at [URL=http://www.act-sf.org/]A.C.T.[/url], my alma mater.

I was so surprised when I got an email from the casting director titled “Trying to reach you for an audition”. What!? Really? I thought it was spam….seriously. But I won’t go into why I thought that, ’cause it’s just my silly-neurotic-actor-brain again.

Anyway, so I accepted the audition last week. I printed the script on Thursday. I read the play on Saturday (and finished it Sunday). I was doing all the necessary things to prepare except actually rehearsing it. I even took the scenes to work and enlarged the text for ease of reading. (Mamet’s text is athletic and difficult, like Shakespeare, only not at all. So I thought if it was bigger then it would be easier to see and therefore make it easier for me to be ‘good’. Ha.)

Back to the point. Finally, Sunday afternoon R came over and we read through it. We read through it twice and then we left it ’til after dinner. We had a couple of margaritas. We came back to it and read the scenes some more. And then I cried. I buried my head in the couch and wept. R, in his sweet way, thought he had made me cry, but no. It was just my utter fear that was paralyzing me. I was reminded of my early days in Los Angeles, the miserable ones, where my life depended on one 3-line role on a show like Numb3rs. And because I only had 1 audition a month, if that, I would rest my worth on whether I got called back to say three lines. All that baggage came back and I was ready to cancel the audition.

And then R made me read it again. Thank God he wouldn’t let me quit. And then tonight, I worked with my new acting teacher (See? It’s like I knew this was coming or something). And now I’m ready, and actually excited about it. Because guess what I have now that I didn’t have 3 years ago? I have the knowledge that it doesn’t matter if I get the role, or whether the casting director thinks I’m a good actress. Because I have this whole other life to go back to the minute the audition is over. My life is not dependent on this single audition, role or casting director.

Thank God! ‘Cause that’s so much pressure…

So, tomorrow, at 12:30pm Pacific time, think of me, playing actor in my audition and having a damn good time doing it. For joy. For me.

Then, I will get in my car and go back to my real job.