Cowan Palace: My Nightmare Audition

Ashley and her friends sit around the Theater Pub campfire and tell tales of horror…ible auditions.

Comedy Month continues here with the Theater Pub gang where we’re all about laughing at our errors! And since I love dishing out tales of my own awkward struggles in this theatrical world (remember when I wrote this blog?) I thought it’d be fun to dedicate this week’s entry to nightmare auditions!

Thanks to some Facebook pals, I managed to get a few great tales. But if you too have an audition horror story, please feel free to leave it in the comments section! Let this be a time to celebrate our mistakes and laugh about them together! Besides, when I used to try and sneak-read Cosmo in study hall, my favorite section was always the embarrassing stories. And some of these stories are sexy too – two of them involve boobs! But first, here’s mine:

I’ve had a lot of bad auditions. Luckily, I’ve had a few good ones too but eesh, some of the bad were just awful. The one that comes to mind first when I think of “nightmare audition” was my audition for URTA (University Resident Theatre Association) my senior year of college.

New England was experiencing a brutal winter that year and I was in tech week for my senior project, acting in The Fox, a play by Allan Miller based on D.H. Lawrence’s novella by the same name. I was getting ready to begin my final semester of college and I was absolutely freaking out. Beyond terrified. So I thought, hey, maybe I can hide in grad school for a few years while I figure things out! Genius! But, ugh, I don’t want to go into more debt, I’m gonna need a school to pay for me to go there. Cool! I’ll audition for URTA, where I’ll get seen by schools all over the country and then go wherever I get in, even if it’s in rural Alabama.

That was my big plan. So my cast mate, Dave and I boarded a train surrounded in four feet of snow to head to New York City for a few hours before having to rush back to Rhode Island to finish getting our play ready.

We arrived around 1am to our college budget friendly hotel and woke around 5am to prepare for our early call. I wore a cream colored sweater and a conventional black skirt because the URTA Suggestions Guide mentioned that auditioning actors looked good in light colored tops and dark bottoms.

We got to the fancy hotel where auditions were taking place to check in and I discovered the “headshot” I brought with me (which was just an enlarged passport picture I got the day before from Walgreens) had fallen into the snow and had been ruined beyond repair. I sucked it up though and was given my audition time. (My one proud moment of the day was being placed in the time slot with the auditioners with the highest GPAs – holla, theatre nerd alert!)

Finally, it was my turn. I faked some confidence and walked into the room with a smile, my plain skirt swishing behind! I started my Moliere monologue and then blanked. Like just the worst blank in the entire world. I even asked the panel of viewers what I should do and they were boggled. They looked pained for me. Finally, I just started in on my second monologue from The Rainmaker. I completed it. But it was nothing special. After that, in a daze, I walked out of the room feeling like the entire world was collapsing in on me. I had just ruined my future. I was lost in a cloud of despair when I passed Dave. He asked me how it went and I shook my head unable to even cry. “I need to go.” I told him and I wished him luck on his audition.

Then I walked out of the fancy hotel into foreign streets. I was unfamiliar with New York City and had only been there a handful of times on school trips as a kid. It was freezing and my shoes were soaked with snow. But I walked trying to put back the shattered pieces of my dreams until Dave called me.

“I lost it,” he said, “I just blanked.”

I hurried to meet him and within seconds of looking at each other like we wanted to cry, we were laughing. We were two idiot kids with no business being at that audition. We weren’t prepared, we just wanted the safety of a place to hide in a bit longer before having to try and make it in the real world.

We immediately sought to find solace in pizza. I didn’t yet know the type of magical healing powers found in New York pizza, but let me say, it can cure many woes. And while we sat shoveling feelings and slices into our faces, I caught the eye of a man outside. He entered the restaurant and sat down at a table near to us. He kept staring at me, which I assumed was probably thanks to my smart outfit, but after a few minutes he approached us. I was prepared to hear him ask us for money but he did not. Instead, he showed me something he had been working on while sitting in the corner. It was a drawing of a crowd. All different types of people standing tall and gazing out from the page. That’s when I saw it. I was there. He pointed to the sketched version of me and said in broken English, “I wanted to draw you too.”

Dave and me acting in The Fox. While we did not get a single callback for any of the URTA schools, we did get an A on our senior project!

Suddenly, through some very kind and thoughtful strokes (homegirl looked way prettier than the snow soaked Ashley looked that day), was a new me standing beside other New Yorkers. That’s the moment I knew I was going to move to NYC after I graduated. Perhaps I needed someone else to see me there, who knows, but that’s exactly what I did. The man quietly walked away and we finished our pizza. Simple movements that forever changed my life.

Dave and I moved to NYC together a few months later and ate a whole lot more pizza. And both of us auditioned for a play together right away… we got in it… only to learn it was an anti abortion play… ah, but I’ll save that story for another time. The lesson here is that nightmare auditions are going to happen to even the best of us but there’s always something to take away from them, even if it’s just being able to laugh at yourself for being an idiot. Who else would be stupid enough to put themselves through so much rejection and heartbreak? We need each other to commiserate with, to celebrate with, and to keep encouraging each other to laugh. So in honor of that idea, here are some tales of audition horror from some of my fellow actors and friends!

Dave Collins (the guy from my story!):

So, I’m not sure if this is my worst audition story or my worst audition story from LA but either way it was pretty awful.

I was called in for this Danica Patrick commercial and thought I was just going to be one of three or four guys basically drooling over this beautiful race-car driver. This is what I came in prepared to do, not a very big stretch. This was not the case. I get into the room in front of the casting director and she proceeds to tell me that the joke of this commercial is that they want to show three dudes watching a clip of this beautiful woman showering and then pan to a dude’s naked chest… that these idiots somehow mistake for hers… Then, the camera would slowly go back up to the dude’s face. What?!! So the casting director asks me to take my shirt off and squeeze my very masculine, hairy, breasts together to try and put one over on these unsuspecting dbags. It was weird, humiliating, and I did it. And I didn’t get the part. I guess my male breasts weren’t feminine enough. Gross. I need to go shower now.

Shay Wisniewski:

I moved to New York about 3 months ago and was ready to hit the ground running with auditions. So I went to a call for Peer Gynt by Ibson, it’s one of his lesser known plays. I headed to Brooklyn for one of my first auditions. I show up and start filling out my audition form. Pretty standard. They even asked how we felt about nudity on stage. At this point in my life, I felt I could show off my breast if needed for a show. No big deal. Also, I told myself I wouldn’t turn anything down since I’m new to the city. So in I went.

In the room was an older man. White hair and a pony tail, along with his daughter who was handling the music in the show. They had me sing, improvise some dancing, do a monologue. Things were going great. I even get a callback which was even better than the audition. Full of viewpoints and group movement work, Meisner technique. Everything was right up my alley. He sits us down at the end of the callback and says, “so, I want to clarify the nudity aspect of the show. I love women, I love sex and I think both are very important things in a man’s life. Mothers, lovers, sister and so on. So at the end of the play, I want the main guy, to be breastfed by all the women on stage.”

…

Oh, I’m sorry. That’s not nudity, that’s porn.

And one of the guys in the audition group even went up to the director afterwards to let him know he was okay with the nudity in the show. Of course you are! You’d be getting a titty parade in your mouth! Sucking on multiple breasts is way better than having some strange adult man breast feed when you aren’t even dating.

I ended up getting cast. No, I didn’t take it. I couldn’t have something like that show up on YouTube one day when I’m famous. Whenever that is. Oh, and it paid zero dollars. So, no, you will not be seeing my breast feeding premiere this fall in New York.

Alex Harris:

You know what? When I saw your post on Facebook I immediately thought of a TERRIBLE one I had on Wednesday! Have you ever had an audition where, like, you read what they wanted, you knew what they wanted, and then when you go in there, you do absolutely everything you’re not supposed to? Well, that was me at this commercial audition, yikes bikes!! I walked in and the taping happens right in the audition waiting area so while you’re auditioning, you’re being watched by the other girls who are there (BIG HELP TO THE NERVES). And I just like had a lapse of where I was. I did exaggerated expressions like I was on stage or doing improv, instead of understated looks and reactions for simple commercial shots, oh it is awful Ashley. Awful.

Natalie Ashodian:

I once auditioned a woman for the very serious part of a Planned Parenthood nurse. A woman (in her 50’s or older, mind you!) showed up in a sexy nurse uniform. You know, Halloween costume 1940’s pin up style nurse. Needless to say, please don’t over-do character auditions. Unless the show is, you know, inherently campy.

Lea Gulino:

My last on-camera audition in LA – a 3rd callback for a Visa ad and the 3rd time I put everything I had into bleating like a goat…

Christi Chew:

He said, “Well now we know you can sing. Can you do it again, but crawl around like a cat?” It wasn’t CATS.

Do you have an audition horror story to share? Come join the party and leave it in the comments section!

Cowan Palace: Our Big, Fat, San Francisco Theatrical Wedding

This week Ashley Cowan (Leschber!) thanks eight special people who helped make a San Francisco wedding even more theatrical.

 

I’m sure you’re feeling a little tired of all this “Ashley and Will’s Wedding” content floating around the internet. But forgive us. We promise in two weeks we’ll be on to other topics. Most likely.

As I’m still floating on Cloud Nine’s layer of exhaustion, I was tempted to make this blog a collection of my favorite pet pictures. Instead, I decided to perhaps make better use of it by offering a thank you to some of our theater friends who deserve a bit of recognition. Besides, there’s still plenty of time to post an all pet related post!

As Marissa mentioned in her blog, putting on a production can be a lot of like planning a wedding. And for Will and me, the reverse proved to be true. As you can imagine, planning a wedding in San Francisco comes with its fair share of challenges. When the going got tough, we decided to think outside the wedding box and look to a group we knew we could count on: the theater community. And we were overjoyed with the individuals who helped make this event even more meaningful.

In honor of the eight months we had to plan it, here are eight theater makers who helped make our day:

Chris Quintos Cathcart: Will and I thought long and hard about who may be a good match to officially help us tie the knot. We knew we wanted our officiant to be a San Franciscan who knew us both, who had a way with words, and who could comfortably speak before a group. We brainstormed a few options but nothing seemed quite right. We kept coming back to Chris: the person who Will and I had both separately opened up to during Twelfth Night rehearsals, the woman who offered us fantastic love advice and young adult fiction suggestions over various pieces of cake, and the friend who made us laugh during times of insecurity. Throughout the entire planning process, Chris listened and collaborated with us. Most of the time she magically incorporated the thoughts we tried poorly to articulate with unbelievable ease. After working together on theatrical projects of the past, Chris proved once again to be a master of the stage and we can’t thank her enough for lending her talent to this new union.

Stuart Bousel: As he mentioned in his reading, Stuart is the reason I’m here writing this blog. Along with letting us write for Theater Pub, he’s also played the leading role in our meet cute story. Aside from using his magical theater ways to inspire a romance, Stuart was also the one person we knew we wanted to perform a reading. After surviving an already crazy year of rehearsals and multiple shows, we asked Stuart if he would write something for our ceremony. We were not very helpful with the specifics of what we wanted (sorry, Stuart). But we had faith in his words considering they had, in fact, brought us all together in the first place. Once again, he blew us away with a beautiful, humorous and thoughtful retelling of our story together. My friends and family outside of our theater circle haven’t stopped raving about it and we’re left thanking Stuart for his treasured part in our relationship.

Tonya Narvaez: Will and I have the pleasure of living with Tonya and that poor lady has probably seen more wedding induced sweat and tears than anyone else. She calmed our nerves by suggesting we take a moment to focus on the emotional journey of Felicity instead of our own stress. She made us laugh by creating unique talkative voices for each of the pets. But most of all, she was a friend to us when we simply needed a calm voice telling us that everything was going to be okay. Tonya also saved the day by writing all the text on our various chalkboards (and my goodness, we had a lot of them), helped us to arrange our centerpieces, and incorporated her creative ideas into our overall design. Tonya proved to be so many things to us during this process and we’ll never stop singing her praises. (Literally. We sing A LOT on Treasure Island.)

James Grady and Christi Chew: I got to know James and Christi through Theater Pub’s glimpse into Rent. Not only are they incredibly good looking but they’re also super talented. So when my job at the time needed performers for a summer concert series, they were at the top of my list. And wowza, they hit it out of the park. Will and I crossed our fingers they would be willing to play at our ceremony and cocktail hour. When they said yes, we probably high fived each other at least a thousand times. They were willing to quickly learn the song we envisioned as our “walk down the aisle jam” (Gold from Once, for anyone curious) and they performed it with skill and passion. Once the reception started, James and Christi continued to encourage the party atmosphere we had hoped for by impressing guests of all ages with their dance moves. Fun fact: several of my friends asked me to introduce them to Christi because they believed she was the “inventor of dance”. James and Christi, we love you and thank you for your music.

Ellery Schaar: I was introduced to Ellery thanks to Chris after she heard me moaning about not being able to find a headpiece to wear with my wedding dress. I have a decent sized head and everything I tried on looked just ridiculous. As soon as I met Ellery, I knew I was in good hands. She greeted me with such a positive and creative force that I knew my hopeful vision of a birdcage veil could be brought to life with care and dedication. She somehow managed to match my love of vintage books with a beautifully detailed piece to wear. The veil included a quote from Twelfth Night, the light peach color from the bridesmaids’ dresses, and the bling that every bride can appreciate. Honestly, I anticipate several future evenings of me alone in my room putting the veil on and remembering the wedding day. Ellery is truly a gifted artist and I’m very grateful I had the chance to be a canvas.

Ashley Ramos: Not only does Ashley have a great name but she can do all the artistic things I wish I could do. Earlier this year, I was super impressed with her draft for the Olympians Festival surrounding Allison’s take on Cerberus but she really delighted Will and me by creating our very own large book where guests could take a picture inside it and literally become a part of the story. She crafted this giant beautiful piece and managed to draw a gorgeous image of The Golden Gate Bridge on the book page. Ashley took a crazy idea and helped bring it to life. She was so sweet to work with and we were truly blown away by her design. So much so, that we plan to hang the creation on the wall. Ashley, you’re wonderful and we can’t wait to see your next creation!

Wes Crain: I first met Wes over beers and margaritas (which Tonya and I had combined… obviously) at a “cleavage and mustaches” birthday party for Chris. After I purchased my dress from Glamour Closet, I needed to find someone to slightly alter the straps before it was ready to wear. I investigated a few options and quickly found the price of altering a wedding dress was almost as much as promising your first born child. Yikes! One place said that if I simply wanted to ask an alterations question, I would have to pay them $35. Regardless if I chose them to fix the dress or if they knew the answer. Barf. So when Tonya suggested I ask Wes to take a look at the dress and see if perhaps he could fix it, I was both anxious and hopeful. Not only did he fix my dress within an hour of first seeing it but he also went on to help my bridesmaid, fellow blogger-Allison Page, with altering her dress as well. I’ve since been bragging that the talent behind the San Francisco Ballet accepted my freelance job but in all seriousness, Wes was fantastic. He made me feel comfortable in a situation that would have otherwise made me feel vulnerable and insecure. He did a perfect job with the alterations and I will continue to suggest him to anyone in need of a seasoned costume master!

As you can see, our wedding was made special by the many talents of the San Francisco Theater Community. We’ve found a family here in this city. Will and I are so thankful to know you all and we’re so happy that our big day was a celebration made better by the immense theatrical talent you all possess. Thank you for supporting us and believing that where there’s a Will (and an Ashley), there’s a way.

Don’t Miss Our Friday The Thirteenth Fundraiser For The Lemonade Fund!

The San Francisco Theater Pub and the Individual Services Committee of TBA, in association with The Exit Theatre, presents a one night only, open-mic night to raise money for the Lemonade Fund!

The Lemonade Fund is a confidential resource for theatre practitioners with terminal or life-threatening illnesses who are in need of supplemental financial assistance to improve the quality of their lives as they deal with medical conditions. Since 2000, Theatre Bay Area has distributed over $100,000 through the Lemonade Fund to theatre workers in need throughout the Bay Area, much of it made possible by generous donations by fellow artists.

Theatre Bay Area’s mission is to unite, strengthen, promote and advance the theatre community in the San Francisco Bay Area. The ISC (Individual Services Committee) is the working advisory group for TBA’s individual membership that often acts as a sample focus group and resource for Theatre Bay Area on issues concerning the individual membership of Theatre Bay Area. The San Francisco Theater Pub seeks to be a leader in bringing the Bay Area indie theater scene together to create, converse and collaborate in casual venues that break down the barrier between artists and audiences.

What better way to unite all these great organizations than with an open mic where our best and brightest get to strut their stuff? Our exciting line up includes performances from Blue Diamonds Belly Dance Group, the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, James Grady, Ramya Vijayan, Brian Vocalist, Sara Breindel, Anthony Miller, Allison Fenner, Helen Noakes, Christian Cagigal, Melissa Keith, Rachel Bublitz, Jim Fournidias, Sam Bertken, Meg Cohen, Dana Goldberg, Christie Chew, Elliot Weiss, Juliana Egley, Annabelle King, Jovelyn Richards, Yasmine Love, Theodore Love, Marga Gomez, Dale Albright and many more!

The show is on December 13th- as in Friday the 13th at 8 PM at the Exit Theatre (156 Eddy Street, San Francisco)! No reservations required and admission is a $10-20 recommended donation at the door! Come support our local theater artists! See you there!