“Absolutely,” Kitty girl agreed. There was an easy familiarity between them which Alison envied. Goth Girl wasn’t, as it turned out, some kind of nut; she was an old hand, just as she had intimated. Alison felt her confidence in her own ability to at least make an impression seep away. The goal is the journey, she told herself, but the mantra was wearing thin, a magical spell that was losing its potency through overuse. She looked up at the clock. It was only 10:57.
Even though her appointment was for 11 a.m., they still had not called her name at 12:13. By then the hallway had been drained of its myriad bouquet of female witnesses, and had refilled itself with potential uniformed officers. There was apparently no age or weight restriction involved in the casting of this part—Alison couldn’t help but notice that all the actresses who were up for the part of the witness were young and pretty, and all the actors who were up for the uniform were not necessarily either. She knew very well that a television production office was no place to ponder the unfairness of gender politics, but you couldn’t help it when the thought wafted through your head, How come the girls have to be pretty and the guys can look like gargoyles? One of the gargoyles caught her glancing over at him and he smiled at her, shy and nervous, and she felt a pang of guilt for envying him his bulbous features. He was just another dumb actor who somehow thought that hanging around in a dirty hallway all morning in the hopes of landing a two-line part on a cop show would somehow eventually add up to a life. In other words, he was just like her, only with a big nose.
“Alison Moore.” Alison jumped, feeling both frightened and oddly reassured by the sound of her own name floating down the hallway.
“Oh yes, that’s me!” she called back, immediately feeling like an idiot. Hello Kitty assistant didn’t help matters any by raising her eyebrows in a gesture of obvious sardonic ridicule at how eager this girl without an agent was willing to let herself look. But there was no time, frankly, to worry about whatever the casting assistant might or might not think. The guy in the jeans and baseball cap was hanging in the doorway again, smiling at her. “Hi, Alison,” he said, as if there was no one on earth he would rather see. “I’m John Maynard, I’m directing this week’s episode. Thanks for coming in.”
“Oh, thank you! I mean, thanks for seeing me,” Alison replied, fighting her Midwestern impulse to seem overly grateful for absolutely everything. It didn’t matter; no one was really looking at her anyway. “This is our producer, Dan Chapek, the writer of the episode, Bill Wheedon, and our casting director, Leslie Frishberg.” John the director rattled off the names quickly, as if he assumed she would have no need to remember any of them, but Alison glued the names into her memory nonetheless, nodding quickly to each face at the table with what she hoped was professional charm. The casting director, the only other woman in the room, glanced up from the sheets in front of her.
“Ryan Jones from Abrams is representing you?” she asked, blunt.
“He’s hip-pocketing me for now.”
“I just saw him yesterday, and he didn’t mention you were coming in.”
“You’ll be reading with Michael,” the director noted, uninterested in the casting director’s clear if unspoken suspicions. Whether or not Alison and her friend had figured out a clever way to sneak her past the gatekeepers of the casting office to get her a reading for this unbelievably minor part, it wasn’t worth the time it would take to call her out on the lie. The crowd of actors waiting in the hallway was, in fact, enormous, and growing by the second. They had to move this ship along.
“Great,” Alison nodded, turning her attention to Michael in the corner. He was sitting next to a camera on a tripod, and he looked bored out of his mind.
“Can you slate yourself?” he asked rhetorically. She nodded. “Good. Whenever you’re ready.” There was no friendly eye contact or extraneous banter. He tapped a button on the camera and flicked his gaze at her, impatient before she had given any cause for it.