Monkeys

OK. So yesterday I’m at this on-camera commercial audition, and I’m out in the waiting room and it seems to be moving really, really slowly. Then, when the group that had been auditioning finally comes out, they all look completely freaked out and frazzled. I peek in the audition room, and sure enough, there she is. The casting director. Let’s call her Claudette. I know her, and seeing that she’s running the session explains why it’s running so late and why everyone who comes out of the audition looks shell-shocked.

Claudette is nice enough, she has a certain flair, but she’s also very temperamental. And she really doesn’t care too much about time. At least not yours.

My group goes in. And Claudette is really, really directing us. Not the typical short, quick, “I want more this less of that,” kind of commercial directing -- oh, no. She’s digging in.

We do a take. She talks for about ten minutes, then we do another take. This goes on and on. The voices in my head start screaming all at once. I don’t know which is worse, Claudette talking about Orwell, Beckett and existentialism at an audition for a commercial, or the monkeys screaming in my brain.

Finally, I decide to take action in the only place I can. In my head. I silence the chatty voice in my mind that keeps saying, “Holy cow. Is she serious? Is she drunk? What the heck does she think this is?!” Then I silence the voice that keeps screeching, “There are probably 50 people out there right now wondering what is going on in here!” I even shut up the voice that is picking on me saying, “If you were any good she wouldn’t be directing you so hard.”

I give the monkeys bananas and I shut all those voices up.

And once I shut them up, I really concentrate on what the casting director is saying, and what she is trying to say. And I super-focus and hunker down and do exactly what she’s trying to get me to do. (Which I don’t totally agree with, but I’m the actor and she’s the director so I go with it. That’s my job, after all.)

And, once I stop the monkeys and focus I can tell she’s getting more of what she wants from me and we do take after take after take.

We spent at least 35 minutes on that commercial audition. I don’t know if I’ll get a callback, but at least I got a refresher course in commercial auditioning. And I also learned to quiet the brain monkeys. Now that’s something.