audition had not gone well, not even by standards set by earlier failures, a very high bar indeed. The previous winner for Most Debased Audition was for a brief role in a cheap slasher flick being lensed in Vancouver. You havenât honestly withstood career humiliation until youâve been yelled at by an epithet-spewing German director on a low budget tax-dodge of a horror film for not bringing the necessary level of terror to your portrayal of scared victim number four.
It is one thing to be turned down for a role because of a bad line reading, or a height requirement, or an abundance of age lines, or a refusal to sleep with the casting director. All had happened to me. All were things I could deal with.
This had been different. This was an audition that made one seriously question an entire lifeâs worth of vocational choices, an audition that showed me that, even at thirty-seven (the new twenty-five, I kept telling myself), the world was passing me by, and I did not understand its rules anymore.
Acting is a sucky way to make a living. It sucks eighty percent of the time, it sucks big-time another ten percent, it suckles at the nadir of your soul for a further eight percent, which leaves two percent for something tentatively approaching happiness and normalcy. A life of acting is a life devoted to the absence of pleasure. Every friend is a competitor. Every job temporary. Every compliment back-handed.
âReality is where itâs at, Shelley, and you know it.â Rowan had finally worn me down. Despite my threats to let her go, thereby denying her the fabulous wealth she received by leeching a percentage off my increasingly rare paychecks, she wielded all the power in our relationship. I told myself as many times as necessary to keep from slicing my veins that I was an artist, I had a craft, I was in all improbability an unrecognized virtuoso, but it was all so much shit. I was product. I was synthetic material processed into a vaguely human shape and thrust into an indifferent marketplace. I was a PlayStation in a PlayStation 3 world. And people werenât buying. âThereâs nothing major filming right now, the recession is hitting everybody, studios and producers included. Reality is cheap and popular, and if you want a little bit of that easily earned money, you are going to have to get over yourself. Tell you what, consider it âtelevised improvisational theaterâ if it helps you sleep at night. Itâs
commedia dellâarte
for the hillbilly and housewife set. Now suck it up and get going, they need someone in your age bracket to round out the housemates.â âTheyâ being the producers of
House Bingo
, Fox Televisionâs latest entry into the âhow low will someone sink for a chance to be on the teeveeâ sweepstakes.
âOh, and sweetheart?â she said as I was about to hang up.
âYes?â I dreaded what was inevitably next.
âDonât forget: do
not
act like yourself.â Her motto for my entire career. I should have had the phrase crocheted into a decorative wall hanging to display at my front door, to read as I left the house for another dayâs worth of whoring my body:
Do not act like yourself.
The concept behind
House Bingo
was simple, the execution ridiculously complex: a house â located in some atypical netherworld where no one questions where a house with twelve separate bedrooms, a pool, and a Starbucks in the basement could be located â was populated by a variety of personality types, all of whom were competing for the grand prize of a quarter of a million dollars (U.S.). Ideally, the roommates were to be stereotypes, a representative cross-section of the population:
a body-builder
an airheaded bimbo who probably votes Republican
a smart-yet-devastatingly-sexy brunette
a still fit septuagenarian
a nerd or two (both sexes)
a more mature professor type (either sex)
a rocker (either sex)
a religious