What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw by Leah Stewart

Author:Leah Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

Two.

It would be an injustice to Josie to assume she is always as uncertain as she has been of late. It’s an injustice Josie herself has been guilty of committing, constructing her self-image out of her weaker moments. We all shape-shift, of course. But not all of us know we’re doing it. Not all of us do it on purpose. Not all of us embrace our ability to transform as our essential quality. When you know you can be different people, sometimes it’s hard to figure out which one you are.

To understand Josie—to understand an actor—first understand what it’s like to audition. Know that to seek love and approval is to court their opposites. Auditions hold out the promise of joyous achievement for which you must risk the far more likely possibility of rejection, disappointment, humiliation, despair. Still, far worse than auditioning is not getting an audition at all. You want those auditions so badly. When you get one, your agent tells you that you have an appointment, maybe several days in advance, maybe the night before. You get a script and are told to prepare certain scenes. You and your competition all arrive around the same time in an office in an office building. There’s a sign-in sheet on a clipboard by the front door. Past that you see a desk and a guy texting behind it, indifferent to you or doing a good job of pretending to be. Don’t ask him for his stapler because you forgot to staple your headshot to your résumé. He’ll be annoyed and won’t hide it. This is why he keeps a dish of highlighters, pencils, and staplers beside the sign-up sheet for the newer actors who failed to highlight their lines before they came in, who failed to do their stapling. If you use these supplies, that will mark you as unprofessional or a novice, and either you’ll be flustered already by your own obvious inadequacy or you’re so annoyingly oblivious that you’re probably not any good. Maybe you’ll get the part anyway, for being handsome or beautiful. If you are neither handsome nor beautiful nor good, then what are you doing there? You sign in. You’ll be read in the order you appear on the list. The sides—the pages you’re to read—are there, too, and if you know what you’re doing, you check the sides to see if the scenes have changed since you were given the script.

Then you find a chair and wait. The room is full of people who look like you. If you’re a middle-aged white woman, like Josie, the room is full of middle-aged white women. The auditioning room is the great equalizer. Some of them used to be famous. They’re doing the thing that people do when they used to be famous, making themselves unnecessarily visible, either by trying too hard to be seen or by trying too hard not to be seen. The ones in the former category might, for instance, find it necessary to have a loud phone conversation with their agents.

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