With a theatric sneeze into her tissue that would have won her a Tony had she been back on Broadway, Leah looked miserably into the camera. “I don’t know which is worse,” she said in her best stuffy-nose voice. “To have the aches and pains and the stuffy runny nose that goes with the flu? Or to have really rough tissues?” she exclaimed, shaking a fistful of them at the camera before tossing them aside. “I need a cottony soft tissue!” she cried into the camera, then pulled several more tissues from her box of really rough tissues and blew her nose into them, wincing with pain the whole time.
And then she started shuffling across the stage to a bedroom. When the commercial aired, this was the point someone would be telling the world that there was a cottony soft tissue for her tender nose. She had to make the shuffle last fifteen seconds, which meant she had to pause and sneeze twice on her way.
When she reached the bedroom, she picked up a box of cottony soft tissues from the dresser, which was really stupid, because why would her character be complaining about rough tissues when she already had a box of the cottony soft shit? But when she’d asked that during an earlier take, Marty Scorsese over there almost had a seizure. She glanced at him from the corner of her eye; he cued her, and she put one of the cottony soft tissues to her nose and sighed with relief. “Now that is a soft tissue.”
She did some more dabbing around her nose, waiting for the director to say “cut.” But he didn’t say “cut,” he just stood there on the other side of the camera, his hands braced on his knees, staring at her. It was so bizarre that she could actually feel the giggles building and began to panic. Why didn’t he just cut? CUT! CUT! CUT! What was wrong with this asshole?
“CUT!” he shouted. “Print it,” he added, and hitched up his pants like he owned the thirty-second commercial world.
The wardrobe guy was instantly yanking the skanky robe from her shoulders, as if he was afraid she would steal it. Leah leaned over, rolled down the jeans she had worn under the robe, then dodged her way through the crew, tripping over a cable and nearly face-planting in her haste to make her way to the makeup girl’s rolling cart of treats. Once there, she picked up a towel and wiped her face as best she could. She didn’t even bother with the janitor’s closet they tried to say was a dressing room—it smelled awful in there. She tossed the towel aside, grabbed her sandals and her backpack, and walked out into the bright California sunshine.
She paused, looked up through the newly planted palm trees at the cloudless blue sky, flung her arms wide, and cried, “What am I still doing in L.A.?”
Naturally, the heavens didn’t deign to answer. They never did.
With a growl of exasperation, Leah marched across the parking lot to her old car.
She’d been asking herself that question since her car’s transmission had started to tank a few months ago. Five years ago, she’d been the hottest actress on Broadway, the one everyone said was “going places.” She worked in plays that paid some serious scratch, had a beautiful rent-controlled apartment, loads of friends—her best friend, Lucy, who still lived in New York, was constantly reminding her of that.
But Leah had left all that to come to L.A. to pursue a career in acting because it was what she’d always wanted to do. From the moment she’d been cast as a pussy willow in the first-grade play, she’d had the acting bug. In high school, she’d acted in every production, and when she couldn’t act, she joined the stage crew. When it came time to go to college, her parents—who still lived in an upscale Connecticut suburb—said acting was frivolous and they would only pay for her college if she majored in finance or law or even humanities. But not acting.
She was wholly unprepared to make her own way, but nevertheless, Leah stepped off the money train and headed to NYU to study acting. She started doing community theater around New York, then landed a couple of minor roles in Broadway productions, and then began to get good, decent roles. And finally lead roles. Her agent and the critics started talking Hollywood. They said she was fresh and original, that she glittered on stage.
But then Michael Raney, former love of her life and sorry-ass bastard, dumped her out of the clear blue sky. Just when she was riding the huge crest of love and success, he pushed her off the ride, and she’d plummeted to earth. For months afterward, she walked through a very thick and emotional fog. She suddenly hated acting. She suddenly hated New York, because everything there reminded her of him. She hated leaving her apartment at all because she couldn’t face the “Where’s Michael?” question she would invariably hear. She stopped getting calls from her agent. She stopped getting auditions. Everyone worried about her.
And then one day, several months after he’d crushed her, Leah had had enough. She didn’t tell her parents she’d cashed out her retirement, bought a used Ford Escort, and left to find fame and fortune in L.A. until she was already in L.A. To this day, they were still a little prickly about it, especially since fame and fortune had eluded her completely since her fantastic fall from grace. Fast forward five years, and the best acting she’d done had been in a beer commercial. Granted, it was a Budweiser beer commercial, the cream of the beer commercial crop, but still . . .