March 29, 2001
It's a long road. Sometimes it feels like there's no light at the end of the tunnel. You plod on, you work hard, you don't give up. When all of the voices tell you to stop, tell you it's not worth it, tell you you'll never make it, you just have to block them out. And then one day, one glorious day, you stand there, all alone, trying to remember everything you've ever learned and forget it all at the same time so that it just flows out of you. And today, at my test, it all came together. After nearly three months of hard work and many grueling classes, I tested this evening and got my yellow belt in Tae Kwon Do. Sure, it's the second-lowest belt, but it was my first testing situation and I passed with flying colors. Flying yellow colors, to be exact. And it felt very good.
Oh yeah, I also had a Network Test for a television show today. I had been trying to keep my energy and excitement in check for the last 48 hours in anticipation of today's event. I believed that a lot of things were coming together for me today. Was it a coincidence that the Network Test and my Yellow Belt Test were on the same evening? "No," I thought. "This physical challenge I have undertaken is a metaphor for my recent lack-of-success as an actor. The perseverance I have evidenced in both arenas would pay off two-fold in a three-hour span that would find me, most likely, the only Tae Kwon Do yellow belt shooting a sitcom pilot for NBC this season. Except maybe Tony Danza.
So you can imagine my surprise when my agent called 45 minutes before I was scheduled to read for the network to tell me that I would not be going any further. No Network Test. Stay home.
The production team called the casting director, Debby Romano, and told her that they were adding two new people to the list of actors testing for BENNETT and that they only wanted to test four people. So number five had to go, and that turned out to be me. "Tell him when he gets here that he won't be testing," they said.
Tell him when he gets here.
Does it get any meaner than that? It's not enough that I have spent the last two days excited and nervous about the upcoming test. It's not enough that they filled me with false hope only to take it away at the last minute. No, to make their lives complete, they had to let me get completely prepared, drive to the lot, go up to the door of their office with the sides in my hand and an eager smile on my face, and then be told that I would not be auditioning today. That was their plan.
"No."
Thank God for Debby Romano who told them no, that they were being ridiculous and that she would call my agent and head me off before I got to NBC. It's bad news, to be sure, but please deliver it to me in my own home where I can sit and cry about it instead of in the hallways of the NBC Administration building where I have to be nice to everyone and polite and walk back away from their office with the same smile frozen on my face, for fear that if I show any other emotion I will disintegrate into a lifeless shell.
And so I only had one test today. I passed it. One for one. I am not the star of an NBC sitcom, but I am a yellow belt, and no amount of unfriendly, uncaring, ruthless behavior from any studio executive can take that away.
Hi-yah.