Joyful Recollections of Trauma by Paul Scheer

Author:Paul Scheer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

The Interview

#1

Name, please?

#2

Jack Smith.

#1

Jack what Smith?

#2

I beg your pardon?

#1

Fill in the blank space, please. Jack blank Smith.

#2

Oh, I haven’t got one.

#1

No middle name. How bizarre.

Confused? Me too. I still don’t understand this at all, and I watched the video of the performance five times in a row while transcribing this opening bit. But I must have been good, because in the next showcase, I got a real scene. This was a big deal. I was cast as a fifty-three-year-old Brooklyn pickpocket, a Willy Loman of crime, who was depressed that his son (who was played by a kid older than me) was more interested in playing the violin than using a tommy gun. In this scene, I did it all: I had a monologue, I had jokes, and I even got angry, which translated into me stiltedly standing up, raising my hands up to the heavens, walking to my mark one foot away, and then immediately returning to my chair. The scene crushed.

After the show, Lillian informed me that her friend who saw the show was casting a new project in NYC and wanted me for a part. I guess she was looking for that rare thirteen-year-old who could play fifty-three? The audition was on a school day. My parents hesitated to take me out of school. I pleaded, “Just this once!”—a catch-22, of course, because I was essentially promising that even if I was good, I’d never ask to miss school for another audition—but logic be damned. There was no script, a situation I’d already been trained for at Lillian’s house. I was told to dress “cool,” so my mom, who always loved the challenge of making a costume, put me in an outfit that consisted of ripped jeans and no fewer than three bandannas tied on different parts of my body.

We arrived at the casting office, and I bounded up the stairs, excited to start my new life as an actor, thinking this meeting was just a formality—only to enter a room packed with kids who all looked like me, minus a bandanna or two. Later, I would understand this type of audition as a “cattle call.” I was so green I thought I had gotten the part, and I hadn’t realized I was auditioning for it. I didn’t even know what auditioning was. I sat in between my parents and waited for about an hour until my name was called. Then I was brought into a room, and they asked me to pretend to play video games, “but no speaking.” They watched intently, and after fifteen seconds they said, “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”

A casting director ushered me to the door back into the waiting room, where I passed the next kid sitting in my still-warm seat. That was it. The experience was a mix of being incredibly exciting and an absolute bummer. I replayed my wordless audition over and over in my head. What could I have done differently? Every day I came home and

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