For those who don't know much about digital photography and image sizes, any image that can be fit onto a 1.44 mb disk is probably big enough to look great on a website, but too small to print larger than a wallet size. He couldn't give me the real image files, because, like printing without the "fun" scenes, the computer just wouldn't let him.

So after all this, I learned that there was no way I'd have a headshot by the end of the week. I took the disk to Kinko's late that night and printed it out as a wallet size--which I then attached to my resume like an idiot who didn't know any better.

Aspiring actors take note: you always hear the great rare tale about the dumbass actor who got a great part without even having a headshot. Yeah, the story's great, the story's rare. But it still makes you a dumbass.

Having failed at finding a suitable headshot in the very short amount of time I had, my next step was to learn some monologues. Playmakers called for four minutes total, including two minutes of Shakespeare and two minutes of something modern. I had a good speech from The Taming of the Shrew (one of my least favorite comedies by Wild Bill Shakespeare) memorized and pretty well worked out. But I didn't have any non-comedy modern piece even partially memorized for contrast. And quick-memorization is not one of my strong points.

I made a list of all the plays I was familiar with and thought about the monologues or even half-conversations I could pull from them. I considered Zoo Story, Art, and about every Tennessee Williams play I'd ever read or done. I picked up plays and monologue books from the local library (terrible selection) and even more plays from a local used book store (incredible selection at incredible prices), but nothing I found seemed quite right. I even looked at awful monologue books, even though I had no hopes of finding and reading the plays which housed them before the audition.

I ordered three short play collections to be overnighted to me the week of the audition, as I started to panic. There was Mamet, whose short plays I wasn't that familiar with, Tennessee Williams, whose short plays I used to be familiar with, and Terrence McNally, who wrote a piece called Andre's Mother. In my memory, at least two Tennessee Williams plays had great monologues I wanted to do, and Andre's Mother had one great one. The Mamet book didn't arrive until the following week. The Tennessee Williams book arrived on Thursday, and the McNally book arrived on Friday around five o'clock.

The audition was Saturday.

The two pieces from Williams weren't as I remembered them. It's nice to have the plays on my shelf, but they weren't appropriate pieces I felt for an audition. Not this late in the game. On Thursday night, I decided to do a monologue from Edward Albee's Zoo Story. There are many blocks of text in that play, and they are more stories rather than interaction--which is a shame, because plain old monologues can be pretty boring. But I didn't have much choice fewer than 48 hours before the audition. I needed to get memorizing and get working.

It was awkward, but I was doing all right with the memorizing. I kept second-guessing my choice, but kept coming back because I had no alternative. I kept working at it until the end of the work day and then McNally book finally arrived. Andre's Mother was exactly as I remembered, and I decided then and there that I had to start over. I cut and cut and did my best to memorize and work out the piece within the twenty-two hours I had left. I was memorizing and cutting up until the very end.

Filed under Acting, Carrboro Area, Journal, Vanity Smurf

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