Auditions 4/12/06
I am waiting for a new voice student to arrive. As soon as I announced my impending move away from the area, I started to get a lot more calls for coaching in the area. This happened years ago, too, when I was about to leave New York City for Chicago. Suddenly I was receiving calls to audition for this show, that event...all very heady, and impossible not to think the movement was triggered by my intention to leave, and maybe I should stay and trick the Fates...but I left anyway, and that, Gentle Reader, is at least one reason why you never saw me in Cats.
Actors who audition all the time have such courage. I remember a friend coming out of an audition for some Shakespearean role, still fired up, and with a fencing foil in his bag. He did his audition scene for me on the street somewhere on the west side of Manhattan, I think, in what used to be called Hell's Kitchen. He was magnificent, but did not get the role, and I thought, how the heck does one screw one's courage to the sticking point over and over and over as theater folks have to do? Now, I can sing a song I barely know, accompanied by musicians I have met only ten minutes previously, in front of 25,000 folks without turning a hair. But auditions? Gulp. I can imagine founding groups the rest of my life just to avoid auditioning.
I am reminded, however, that I did a Ropes Course up in the Adirondacks. A friend gave me the ticket - I demurred, nauseated by the mere idea of heights, but she said, "Well, you ride horses, and that's much scarier." Clearly I had not previously thought so, or I wouldn't have been riding horses, either. But I know a gauntlet when it's thrown at my feet, and I took the challenge. It was exhilarating, and challenging, and terrifying. I never would have chosen it for myself. It, too, was like an audition. I was auditioning for a role as a woman who can jump out into the air hoping to catch a trapeze bar. Yow. I did it, jumped, even caught it, but my hands were not strong enough, and I couldn't hang on. Participants in these things are securely safety-harnessed at all times, but let me assure you that my amygdala (the part of the brain that REALLY wants to stay alive) didn't trust that harness for one single second and was screaming all the way down.
But then, if I thought deeply about all that can happen in the course of any ordinary day, that same amygdala would never let me get out from under the bed. Who's going to visit me there? MIght as well take a deep breath, offer it up, as the saying goes, and join the cast of the Great Great Show.