Audition, Ad Infinitum

I don't know if I'm still an actress. My theatrical agent told me he'd submitted me for a Molly Shannon movie months ago, but the casting people never responded. Maybe I'll have to take it into my own hands. I know Molly, she's seen my shows. She's a really cool person. I have friends who know her really well. I hesitate calling my friends and seeing if they can contact Molly for me -- I don't want to be one of those blood sucking friends. However, I DO want to work.

I had a few commercial auditions today, though. My first "On-Camera" auditions in WEEKS. Pine Sol and AT&T Yellow Pages. Products that will change your life! Well, they'd change MY life if I book one, the ad runs a while. It could mean the difference between health insurance and the Venice health clinic.

As for my auditions, I was brilliant. And a lot of good it'll do. What a crap shoot. The first audition runner said, Let's tape the rehearsal because you're always good.

A guy I knew from the The Groundlings, a comedy superstar and a guy who worked all the time, came over and said hello.
I asked him how it was going?
Hanging on by a thread, he said.
Even for comic superstars.

The audition office has dozens of auditions going every day. They must have been casting a beer commercial, because there was a parade of gorgeous, leggy, titty babes in various levels of undress, going in and out of the Ladies Room, which I was sitting across from. Two other 40-ish "at home casual" actors were on the bench with me. We watched silently as the cheesecake chicks giggled in and out, checking their pasties or thongs. Finally one Chick with a loosely-laced boustier giggled in to check her placement. I looked at my fellow 40ish actors and said, I think I should audition for that spot.

I went into my second audition. A suburban couple, "casual at home" dress, are camped out on their front porch waiting to catch the Yellow Pages being delivered. The actor paired up with me didn't really look like my "husband." He had snow white hair, looked about 60, and was dressed like he worked for Morgan Stanely (he probably walked out of a Morgan Stanely audition).

The time was coming when we'd slate: smile and give our name to the camera. Do I comment on the disparity between him and me? I know what I'd say, but would it insult the man? The words were on my tongue, the thought in my head. Do I say it? How many shots to you have to distinguish yourself?
I thought of my friend Catheryn, who usually goes for it.

So the slate came.
Me: Hi, I'm Susan Isaacs.
Morgan Stanley Man: Hi, I'm Cooper Harriman.
Me again: I'm his trophy wife.

It worked. I was brilliant. The rest of the audition went fine. But who knows if they'll even see it? Maybe they'll fast forward and never see my brilliant quip, because they'll only see Morgan Stanley and Mismatched Woman.

When we finished, the young guy running the audition said, I see you in a lot of things, you work a lot don't you? Which has its own kind of desperate hope in it.

I had a few Voice Over auditions at my agent's office the other day. There was an actor in the waiting area. I recognized him from somewhere. He played a doctor in one of the DVD’s I’d just watched. "Shop Girl" or "Broken Flowers."

He chatted me up. He went into the booth ahead of me.
When he came back out, I almost asked: Did you play a doctor in "Shop Girl?" But I chickened out. Instead, I got into the booth and said something to the engineer.

I saw him in a DVD this weekend!
Good Night and Good Luck? the engineer asked. He was brilliant in that!

Then I realized, the actor also had that meaty role in GN&GL of the Newscaster who committed suicide. I'm glad I didn't gush over his two-line bit part as a doctor in Shop Girl.

Even after GN&GL you gotta get back on the horse and audition.
Again. Again. Again.
No matter how brilliant you are.

Prayer

Two days ago Larry decided to go on a 24 hour fast to pray about the future. I love this man: a man who takes God seriously when it comes to planning his future, and ours. I joined him in the fast, so did his family and friends. Larry said he was awakened at 5 AM in the middle of his fast. So he got up, walked around his neighborhood, and prayed.

I did nothing of the sort. I didn't pray much, not the kind where you sit in silence and wait. Whatever prayer I carried out was thinking out loud in the car, praying as I typed, typing what I was praying; or praying while I was juicing ten pounds of fruits and vegetables I planned to drink on this fast. Larry's fast is over. He inadvertently ended it early when he went out to lunch with a friend. I've got a quart of carrot-apple-ginger juice and a gallon of Master Cleanser in my fridge. I guess I've got a lot more praying to do.

Coincidentally (or not?), tomorrow is the National Day of Prayer. Today I came across a radio program on which an old man was talking about prayer. He said that many years ago, he realized that if God wanted him to grow into a man whose character resembled Jesus', he better start spending time with that Person: in prayer. He also said that, before every major decision Jesus made, He went out alone to pray. I thought of my Larry doing the same thing, taking the time to pray. I feel proud and honored to be with a man whose character resembles Jesus. (actually, so does his hair. Hmmm). And I thought it more-than-coincidental that I stumbled onto this radio program not a day after Larry had fasted and prayed. I love this man. I'm so freakin lucky.

The old guy on the radio said his great-great grandfather prayed at least an hour a day. These people didn't have TV or the internet. Go back further, they didn't have electricity. So what did they do in the dark? Besides make babies? They prayed.

Anyway, this old man lamented that our prayers today tend to be shallow: unloading our problems, asking for things. Not that asking was wrong. But it was clear his experiences in prayer had gone much deeper. I could hear it in his age-weathered voice. It was calm and grounded.

He talked about how wonderful it is just to have a prayer life with God. He said he tried to talk less and listen more. He prayed for his children. I thought of my mom, who was up at dawn every day reading her Bible and praying ... mostly for her children.

I heard that still calm in this man's voice, and I started to cry. I cried not out of guilt, but out of envy and longing to have what this man had. Longing for what my mom had. Ache for what I've had in the past: A deep solid calm, grounded in a history of getting quiet and listening to the Person who loves you, who knows you, and whose character you'd most like to resemble.

I still have all that juice in my fridge. I think I'm going to keep on this fast until it's gone. And until I've had some of those moments in prayer I've been longing for. The kind you can't get when you're shoving carrots into a juicer, or trying not to murder the driver in front of you.

Amen.

Inspire Me!

While a certain Christian conference was going on (which I recently blogged about), Larry and I met my friend Todd to see The Peaceful Warrior at the new agey Inspiration Film Festival. I was struck by the similarities between the two events. The Inspiration Fest speaker talked about making movies that matter, and the power of the human spirit. In the film Q&A, the producer said the Universe wanted this film to get made. Replace "the Universe" with "the Lord," and, Bob's Your Uncle, Christian film fest.

Beforehand Larry and I were having a conversation with a journalist next to us; when a bunch of rowdy men in shaved heads, Buddha beads, and dashiki-Nehru-granola shirts sat in the VIP row behind us. They were squirrelly and loud, and I couldn't hear the journalist talking.

I turned around. Hey guys! You are outta control excited! What's up?
We're here friend of the "The Peaceful Warrior" producer! they gushed.
Well you sure look like warriors! Not very peaceful though.
They laughed. I mentioned I did yoga and they lit up. Yoga! That's what it's all about man. Oneness!
I liked them. Even if they were rowdy.
I turned back around.
Larry smiled at me. You did great.
Why? Did I "engage the culture?" I was "salt and light?"
No, you just got them to quiet down.

The film was The Karate Kid meets Ghandi. Obsessed gymnast meets mysterious mentor (Nick Nolte) who teaches him a new way of living, how to let go of the results, let your dreams die so they can be reborn. "Be here now" and all that.

Larry hated it. It was so preachy and obvious. They even ripped off GOLLUM! he cried. And he was right. The music swelled in Olympic grandeur so many times, that when he finally got to the Olympic trials, I had no more grandeur to feel.

But I still liked it. A lot. It was inspiring! We ALL need to follow our bliss, die to the results, and learn how to 'be here now.' Jesus said the same thing in Matthew 6: Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Seek first God's kingdom, and all these things will be given to you as well. Don't worry about tomorrow tomorrow will worry about itself.

I even cried. But that was because something deeper was going on for me. Something that the film helped to touch in my deepest heart. The real inspiration was about to happen on the way home, when I talked to Larr about it.

More later...

Jesus Jargon, Yoga Jargon

I’ve made a stink about how Christians can talk and write so … Christiany: mission statements filled with buzz words and clichés, engaging the culture, unpack … Jesus Jargon. If you remove the Jesus Jargon, you’re left with writing that doesn’t really mean anything.

It’s also artists. We're plagued with this magnificent obsession to create, use art make sense of the world, to make a difference to others. Everyone wants to matter, but artists want to matter more.

So take the artist's obsession, add the religious burden, and you’ve got a recipe for either (A): profound and redeeming art; or (B) grandiose, narcissistic, megalomaniac, mediocre art. Jesus Junk, Jesus Jargon.

So why do Christians have to get so churchy about everything? I ask, self-satisfied and evolved. Well, it's not just artists, and it's not just Christians. Every group religious or not, has its own agenda -- I mean, vision. And they have their own jargon.

Take the yoga studio where I "practice." The people are nice, it’s pay by donation, and most people are there because they’re on a spiritual search.

However, Yoga people have their own Jargon. Spiritual practice, spiritual path, journey, evolve, set your intention, bliss, equanimity. I love equanimity, especially when my teacher trips over it. Yoga, he purrs, is about achieving equaninnim ... equanit... balance. Yoga is about balance.

A Buddha head rests on the side counter. I don’t park my mat near him. At the end of class, we say "Namaste" to the teacher. Namaste (nah-mah-STAY) means the god in me salutes the god in you. At the end of class, I look at the Buddha and say, Namaste: The God in me CRUSHES the god in you. No, not really. When they say Namaste, I say God bless you. if they say Ohhhhhhhm," I say "OhAAAhhhhhhhmen.

I stay away from the classes that get too Hindu. There’s this one really young yoga chick teacher who irks me -- not because she goes all Big Sur on me. It's because she gets smug. She sashays around, dispensing her 31-year old wisdom ... her voice all velvety smooth and blissed out -- from the triple nonfat latte with six Splendas I watched her drink at the Starbucks across the street. First time I went to her class she purred: Unlike Western religions, Yoga is rooted in the pagan tradition, which sees ALL life as sacred. WHAAAT? Hindus are very religious. They’ve got like 300,000 gods. And Christianity believes creation is sacred; matter actually matters. (Not that you'd know, the way the current "evangelical" administration is raping the environment.

I never returned to Yoga Chick's class. My other yoga teacher, however, is loving, humble, and open. She knows I'm a Christian. She wants there to be room for everyone. I like that. So, I stick with the yogis whose jargon I can handle. After all, I’m spiritually evolved enough to affirm them in their spiritual search, maintain healthy boundaries, and guarding my heart from psychos.

Namaste.

Sedaris, Interruptus

My wonderful writing teacher Terrie Silverman came into three tickets to see essayist David Sedaris at UCLA's Royce Hall Wednesday night. Terrie teaches Wednesday nights, and a celebrity is in her Wednesday class. Celeb chose to go to Terrie's class instead ... which says a lot about Terrie’s class. And the Celeb’s commitment. Anyway, Terrie gave them to my friends Catheryn, Ann, and me. We’re all Sedaris fans and aspiring essayists/solo show writers. Our seats were not just good, they were Celebrity good. Front row center. Literally. Front row center seats to hear an essayist. David Sedaris. We could have been literary groupies. But we were phantom celebs.

First of all, a 12-year old skateboarder kid walked out, stood on an apple box behind the lectern, and said, "Hey everyone. Um, so I'm Jesse Portnick. And --- Oh hey, Grandma! She's in the audience freaking out. Anyway, please welcome David Sedairs.

David was terrific. He read three or four new pieces, including two essays recently published in The New Yorker. One was about buying his boyfriend a human skeleton as a gift; another about a conversation between a crow and a sheep; another about a scary babysitter. He also tried out a commencement address he’s working on for a certain Ivy League school. Afterward he answered questions, one of them mine. Pays to be front row center.

He was funny and sad and deep and delightful. I wish I could say I enjoyed every moment, but I was distracted. Partly by the fact I'm madly in love and it's hard to keep my mind off of my Sexy, Jesus-Loving Boyfriend. And partly because, in the second row to our right, sat a woman who wouldn’t stop laughing. It was a loud, flat, cackling, rat-a-tat tatt, like a big Pink Girlie Tommy gun. Sure, you laugh when something's funny. But she laughed all the time. At the ends of sentences, in the middle of them, for no reason. She laughed at words like "through " or "and" or "the."

It was clear she was laughing to get attention. The whole of her was trying to get attention. She was overweight, wore Lisa Loeb glasses and that almost-current hairstyle that’s bleach blonde on the top, and dark brown underneath. Like a root beer float, or Uncle Fester’s wife. She wore a Medium trench coat over her Extra-Large body, pulled so tight she looked like an overripe peach ready to split. I figured with that laugh, she was pushing her luck.

Everyone around her started looking at each other: Who’s gonna say something? There was a tall man directly behind me. I know he was tall because his knees were crammed against the back of my chair, like a basketball player flying in coach. I wanted to ask him to kill the Tommy Gun laugher. But Catheryn whispered that he was the producer on HBO’s Project Greenlight. And the thing with celebrities is, you’re supposed to ignore them. You pretend you don’t know them, or that you do know them but don’t care.

Then it occurred to me that maybe Project Greenlight was there because he was trying to talk to ME -- he'd expected Celebrity to be sitting in my seat; he'd spent a year tracking her down, but instead I'm sitting in her seat. Now he's wondering, who I am so he can pretend not to care who I am. Then I drifted to thoughts about the Man in My Life: his wit, intelligence, talent, spiritual maturity and vision, I respect him so much I just want to rip off all his clothes. But I can't: I"m a good Lutheran Girl. And --BRAT-A-TAT TATTTT! I can’t even daydream without that laugh interrupting me.

About 30 minutes into the show – right the middle of an essay -- Fat Pink Machine Gun writhed out of her seat and climbed over a dozen people to get to the aisle. She was only a couple seats away from the right aisle, but she chose to writhe over 12 people on her left, including Project Greenlight Man.

Once she left, we breathed a sigh of relief and went about enjoying David Sedaris. He was now reading an essay that had been published in a recent New Yorker. Good. I could read what I missed live because of the Pink Machine Gun and my day dreaming.

Sedaris is so good with the dry delivery and word choice. He described this scary babysitter as having skin the color of Vaseline. If you haven’t read him, I recommend Naked, or “The Santaland Diaries.” David Sedaris is the first guy I ever heard reading his own essays on the radio. It made me want to do it myself.

Unfortunately, Fat Pink Machine Gun came back about 20 minutes later. Catheryn said she came back smelling like smoke. If you paid $50 to see an hour-long show, would you spend 25 minutes smoking?

Anyway, if you want to hear David Sedaris and haven’t, here’s one of my favorites of his: Go to This American Life

Get Episode 104: “Music Lessons."

It includes Sedaris and Ann Lamott. Here’s an excerpt from Ann’s essay:

My friends like to tell each other that I’m really not a born-again Christian. They think of me more along the lines of that Jonathan miller routine when he said: “I’m not really a Jew. I’m Jew-ish.” My friends think I’m Christian-ish. But I’m not. I’m just a bad Christian. A bad born again Christian. And certainly like the apostle Peter I’m capable of denying it ... of presenting myself as a sort-of leftist liberation theology enthusiast, and maybe sort-of vaguely Jesusy bon vivant. But it’s not true. And I believe when you get on a plane, if you start lying you are screwed unto the very Lord. So I told the truth: I’m a believer, a convert. And I’m probably about three months away of slapping an aluminum Jesus fish on the back of my car. But first I want to see if the stickem interferes with my lease agreement. I just love the guy. I just love Jesus, it’s that simple.”

Thank you David for an almost perfect evening. And thank you, Terrie, and Generous Celebrity.

I Can't Believe They Just Said That

I admit, I'm a cynic. I derive some kind of schadenfreude by observing others' failures. And lately, nothing makes me more freude at others schaden than by watching evangelical Christians make a mess of language.

My beloved writer-boyfriend Larry Wilson sent me a link to an upcoming Christian media conference, and the following caught both of our attention:

We’ve assembled a stellar team of luminaries in film, TV, radio and journalism to ask the hard questions and push for more than easy answers. We want to tap their collective, Christian wisdom, to figure out how to leverage, with humility and grace, our new standing in Hollywood.

First Of All: Why is the collective unconscious always tapped? You don’t really hear about nudging the collective unconscious, or even waking it up. Or else it would no longer be unconscious, now would it? But to tap the collective Christian wisdom? Do they mean "tap" as in "nudge," or as in "beer-on-tap?" In which case, they’ve mixed metaphors. But who am I to criticize? I’m barking up the wrong door.

Second: Is it grammatically correct to leverage your standing? You don’t leverage your own standing -- you use your standing to leverage something else. Further, can you really leverage ANYTHING with humility and grace?

And as long as they’re using “humility and grace” as a compound phrase, I’d feel better if they added “engaging the culture” and "relevant" in there somewhere. And "pagan." Then the clichés and insults would be complete.

Third:Our friend Anna enjoyed the conference's boast of a "stellar team of luminaries." Why not a stellar team of black holes or dark matter? Anyway Anna recalled her years as a proofreader/editor for a Christian non-profit: I found the best typo ever, and I almost let it go:"___'s mandate is to clothe and feel the naked.

Hey, Cut Them A Break I don't want to be a total Captain Bringdown. This media conference is trying to do something worthwhile. They get an A Plus for intention. They just need to fire their PR writer.

Moving On Larry and I were snickering about a possible coffee table book, along the lines of “A Field Guide to Evangelicals and Their Habitat” which was recently published. (I know what you're thinking: how did those two sick, dark minds ever find each other? Praise the Lord.)

Let's say we call it: I Can’t Believe They Just Said That:Malaprops and Other Embarrassing Moments In Christendom. (I'd stick to literary genocide since the Spanish Inquisition has already been covered.)

The book could have chapters on:

• Mixed Metaphors and Malarpops
  
• Bad Grammar and Syntax
  
• Please, Don't Overuse the Formatting Keys!!!!
  
• Us Vs. Them: referring to non-Christians in negative terms such as pagan, anti-Christian, Jesus-haters, the Non-Elect, Those Chosen For Destruction
  

Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, does a yearly cartoon called “Forbidden Words," enumerating the overworn catch phrases that have got to go. His 2005 list included:

• BLING-BLING
  
• BRING IT ON
  
• CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC
  
• COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE,
  
• EATERY
  
• HEGEMONY
  
• IT'S ALL GOOD
  
• METROSEXUAL
  
• SWEET!
  
• THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX
  and of course, it’s time to fire:
  
• YOU'RE FIRED

I think it would be funny to do such a coffee table book, and include a chapter on “Forbidden Words” for evangelicals. “Engaging the culture” would be at the top of my list. What does that mean, to engage the culture? Is the culture idling in neutral? Sorry, the culture has already von von von down the autobahn. It's the evangelicals who've had their foot on the clutch.

As my intellectually cogent writer-friend Mark Kellner wrote: "Tempted as I am to think outside the box and unpack the sublimity that is your writing, while pushing the envelope ... I think I'll stick to a quick "hi" ...

Thanks, Mark. I totally forgot about "unpack." Next time I hear a pastor say he's going to unpack something in a sermon, I am going to throw my Samsonite at the lectern.

Anyway, while engaging the culture and unpack are at the top of the forbidden words, “leverage with humility and compassion” could get the trophy for Beyond The Literary Pale.

More later ...