March 31, 2001

Yeah, it was a pretty sucky day.  I had this audition, and I had managed to snag the play from a friend of a friend of Ashley, instead of just whatever sides I could get from the casting director.  And this play was good.  It was REALLY good, dammit, a Southern gothic potboiler about a girl who quits her job as a temp and moves back home and in her restlessness starts poking around her family's history, and figures out her father's not her father.  Ethan coached me all week long, reading all the other roles, everything from a eighty year old matriarch to a pregnant sister to a cheating brother in law to a long lost high school crush.  All the time he kept telling me how I could do it, how this role was totally totally me.  And I had already thought that too, but I hadn't told him yet, and the fact that he was helping me and encouraging me and that well hell, that he BELIEVED in me.  And if HE says I can do it, I know I can.

Like his approval is the bar, and if he gives the go ahead, well, hell.  I know I can do it now.  Maybe I wasn't sure if it was just me on my own.  But with him saying I can, then HELL YES I can.

And so I waltz up to this audition thinking I own the world.  Of course I do, Ethan said so, and I've always heard that confidence in an audition does things that the actual audition can't do, and I've got balls the size of Montana thanks to him.   I know I've got this nailed.  I'm gonna get the part and we're gonna go to Johnnie's Pizzas afterwards because I haven't had carbs in like, a month.

I go up to the stage when they call my name, and I deliver.  I know I fucking deliver.  I nailed that character, I know it, I could feel it, and I would be the first person to admit if I was just showboating to save my own ego, but it wasn't that, dammit, it wasn't, it really really wasn't.