The Next Best Thing by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online

list any special skills: juggling, or riding horseback, or even things like being able to speak with a Southern or a Southie accent, or owning a car and possessing a valid driver’s license. “Then,” Grandmasaid, “there’s a number you call every day, and you hear what parts are available, and you submit yourself, and then . . . you get picked!”
    “You got picked!”
    “I got picked!” she confirmed. “I’m going to be an extra tomorrow on Major Medical. ”
    “Wow.” It sounded too good to be true. Grandma looked like she couldn’t believe it, either, happy and almost dazed as she smoothed her skirt (black cotton, pleated, trimmed in black eyelet lace) and said, “I wonder if I’ll get to meet Brock Cantrell.” Brock Cantrell was the star of the show. He played a hunky neurosurgeon tormented by his wife’s tragic death (she’d been beheaded by a helicopter’s blades on a sightseeing trip to Hawaii).
    “I’m not sure how that works.” I didn’t want her to expect too much. My suspicion, as yet unconfirmed by any real-life TV experience, was that extras were treated in the same manner as furniture and props, that they were kept as far away as possible from the stars and were actively discouraged from making conversation, or even eye contact, with them. But the next day, Grandma came home beaming, dressed in her very best Chanel suit, the one she’d bought for my bat mitzvah, with a signed headshot of Brock in her hand. “To Beautiful Rae,” he’d written, then scribbled his signature. Better yet, she’d booked a week’s worth of work on Major Medical.
    As it turned out, senior citizens like my grandmother, the ones who were both ambulatory and with-it enough to get themselves to a set, read a script, and take direction, were in great demand as extras. For our first three months, while I looked for a job, she was the one who’d earned a steady paycheck, starting with background parts and working her way up to actual speaking roles. She made a bunch of extra-friends and learned to speak Variety. Words like sides and stand-ins and blocking began to pop up in her conversation. “Can’t stay up late,” she wouldannounce, getting up from the table to begin loading the dishwasher. “I’ve got an early call.” She knew the names of the men, and the handful of women, who ran the studios, who headed comedy and drama development, who had “ankled” their jobs at the big agencies to set up shop on their own, who’d had his or her development deal force-majeured during the writers’ strike of 2008, and who, of the seven writers credited for a movie’s script, had actually done the writing (as opposed to who had merely gotten his name on the credits because of Guild arbitration). It was like living with Walter Winchell, but I didn’t mind.
    In six weeks’ time Grandma played a feisty old lady with a heart condition on Grey’s Anatomy, a feisty old lady with an STD on House, and a feisty old lady with a shoplifting problem on Law & Order: LA. (“Let go of me, pig!” she’d cried when the security guards had nabbed her in Macy’s.) Even on days when she didn’t have a single line, when all she had to do was show up, spend an hour in hair and makeup, and then sit under the lights in a pretend restaurant mouthing the words radishes cabbages broccoli to the extra sitting across from her, she was happy to do it. She liked being out of the house, spending the day with her fellow extras, close enough to the business of making entertainment that she could have a whiff of the glamour and the fame. She also came home with stories: the tale of the actor who refused to learn writers’ names and would make them wear numbered placards during table reads, or the executive who’d thrown a can of Diet Coke at her assistant’s head when she’d booked a car service for the wrong day of the week.
    While Grandma worked and cooked and established herself, I made the rounds with my résumé, hope in my heart