December 7, 1998
Where do I begin?
The audition itself was nothing to write home about (or even write on the internet about). There was something just not right about it. The gentlemen in the room chuckled softly on occasion, but it seemed more like they were trying to encourage me to make it funny than that they thought it was actually funny. The first of the two scenes needed to be very smooth and it really wasn't. The second scene was appropriately goofy but without having nailed the first one, it didn't pack the same punch.
Let's go back an hour. I strolled into the offices down on Wilshire Boulevard and about 4:10pm, ten minutes after the scheduled 4pm audition time, but they knew I might be coming late, so that wasn't the problem. The problem was that all the auditions had been pushed back to 5pm. "You're a little early," one of the producers said as he came walking past me. "They moved the auditions to 5pm. Didn't you get the word?" I hate not getting the word. Now I'm the guy who's not important enough to get the word. When I go into the room to audition, this producer is only going to think, "Oh yeah, that's the guy who didn't get the word." Why didn't I get the word?
Well, there's an answer to that question. Let's go back eight hours to me waking up at the MGM Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas to the sound of my pager. It was my agent making sure I was coming back to L.A. today for the audition. I told them I was but wondered what the latest I could arrive was. They called and found out it would be OK for me to come at 6pm. And the die was cast. They assumed I would now arrive at exactly 6pm and didn't need to know that there was no 4pm at all any more. So I didn't get the word.
So why was I in Las Vegas? Let's go back five days to when the plan was spending the weekend in Las Vegas while my girlfriend worked on the Billboard Music Awards and got a free room at the MGM Grand, and how that was going to translate into attending the Awards Monday night in the Grand Garden Arena and then enjoying the V.I.P. party afterwards with all the music biz big shots. That was the plan. My V.I.P. party turned into a V.I.P. audition and I had to fly back to L.A. a day early and miss out on the shindig.
"Why not skip the audition?" one might ask if they were still actually interested in this story and following along at home. For that we have to look at four days ago when I was in Koo Koo Roo for lunch with Rachel Reenstra. I ran into my old friends from the office of Ulrich/Dawson/Kritzer Casting, who were responsible for my first two big jobs, Matlock and Perry Mason, way back when. They hadn't called me in for an audition in a while, but they assured me that they hadn't forgotten about me. About an hour or so after I returned home, the phone rang with this audition scheduled for Monday. With a synchronistic occurance like that, how could you defy the forces of the universe and skip the audition?
And that takes us back to the beginning of the story, which is really the end of the story. I just didn't give them what they wanted in there. No Billboard awards. No V.I.P. parties. No Guest Star on V.I.P. It seems to have been a lose-lose day. Oh well. I've had worse.