Today I played the distraught Hispanic maid in the most unglamorous role ever, for a video game that will help train criminal justice students via an online course. Make-up by Kat from Denmark was simple, hair looked positively and purposely bad (this after my spending $110 at Matin's day before yesterday for color, blow-out, and flat iron), and my formerly lovely aqua-blue blouse, having been drained of its original color (Chico's clothes do not keep their dye for long, have you noticed?), was the director's choice for the maid's scene. She finds her boss dead at the house! She speaks English with a heavy accent. She's being interrogated by a detective, but this actress, who received her script on Wednesday, and worked on memorization late Thursday and on drive down to Pasadena, with the little Sony digital recorder, has no clue what the questions being posed to her by the detective are! This took - not only memorization - but a bit of intuition and patience. When I watched one of the other older actors, playing a grumpy neighbor, deliver his lines, I didn't feel so bad. Really hard to work alone. Easier, by far, to have someone to interact with, to jump off from...Well, I did it. Mostly in three takes per chunk.
As my friend Beth, the ballet dancer says, paraphrasing an old politically incorrect saw, "We're in it for the money, right?" Those who don't understand never will.
Which brings me to the highlight of my week: I've been cast in an old play by Marcel Pagnol, being produced later this year in San Francisco. More on that when details become public. I play a fishmonger in Marseilles. Lots of research to do.
I'll say this - it was one of the most relaxing and fun auditions I've ever been to, at a house up in the Berkeley Hills on a spectacular day, with a teensy cute doggie nestled in the crook of my arm, like a fuzzy good-luck charm.
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