With one Second Teamer busily stapling together head shots and her lengthy resumes for an upcoming showcase, another one away who has a steady weekend side gig as a flight attendant for an airline, I felt a tiny pang of guilt.
Mind you, it wasn’t a throb by any means, but there lingered yet a twinge that perhaps I should be more proactive in the pursuit of additional income and/or exposure in The Biz…
Was I striving to achieve my full potential? Was there more that I could offer the world? Had I become complacent in the face of the Network gift of receiving constant (albeit irregular) employment on my sit-com until March?
Surely I could at the very least stay for a couple of show nights, remain on the clock and bank a bit of overtime pay… But hearing “THAT’S LUNCH!” at 2pm on a Tuesday audience taping and knowing that I was free to go if I wanted to and wouldn’t hit any OT until 9pm, I couldn’t scramble to find my car keys fast enough!
And motoring home to attend to nothing more than a few baskets of seriously-crying-for-help laundry (including an unfortunate handful of thrice-worn jeans that were ready to get up and walk around the room by themselves in their own food-stained personal denim militia), I mulled over the situation logically:
A: Most of my fellow co-workers are in their hungry twenties and thirties, with years and years of all kinds of experiences still ahead of them.
B: Whilst there’s no such thing as “resting on your laurels” in this Industry, there IS some comfort in knowing that you’ve established yourself with a small community of people that actually know your skills and keep you in mind for employment.
C: I would have to be OUT OF MY EFFING MIND to not embrace every single day off as a gift wherein I could sleep, write, or do nothing more than to hone my craft by simply watching other actors on television!
So with a mind at peace, my Zen in tact and a heart free of guilt, pangs, and twinges, I splayed happily on my bed; my feline best friend curled up equally content by my side.
The work would come, if the work was meant to be.
>>><<<
Ring!
“It’s probably a wrong number this early in the morning” I assured my kitty who heard nothing and continued to snore like a lumberjack.
Ring!
“Probably a FAX machine…” I sighed, reluctant to remove my arm from underneath the sacked out five pound bag of fur flopped over my limb cutting off all circulation to my left hand. (People who love their pets know the feeling – or rather the lack thereof…)
Ring!
“If it’s my show with a call time, it’d be a text” I added to my four-legged companion, who only raised her head momentarily to give me the stink-eye for obnoxiously yapping while she was napping.
Ring!
But eventually dislodging myself from the clutches of the jungle cat clinging to an imaginary dream tree branch somewhere in the Serengeti, I managed to answer the phone with my wearily/cheery voice, fully prepared to politely inform the caller that they had the wrong number, and pleasantly wish them a nice day.
“Hello?”
“Hey Pen!” the voice beamed, identifying herself as the Director of my previous series. (WTF???) “Are you coming back in January?” she wanted to know, as I scrambled (still half asleep) on the spot for a politically correct response.
“Well… um… I’m actually booked on a Network show until March…” I finally blathered as to my unavailability – knowing full well that whilst ‘honesty is the best policy’, I may have unintentionally been burning a critical bridge by blurting out the truth.
“I’m booked until March too!” she laughed. (whew!) “But anyway, I’ve got this uncast part in the sit-com that I’m directing now; it’s just a featured Background Player, but she’s been in a car accident and crying uncontrollably, and I just KNEW you could nail it if you had the chance and I thought of you immediately! Any possibility you can play the role this Tuesday?”
“I’m not on hiatus until Wednesday, the very next day…” I added for clarification (should the scene happen to be able to be pushed back in their schedule by 24 hours.)
“Well that’s too bad, but I completely understand” she sighed, duly respectful of the first and foremost important loyalty to my current crew. “I guess I’ll just have to start searching the barrels of people who aren’t quite as talented as you!” she laughed as I thanked her most profusely for thinking of me.
And curling up once again with my kitty, I mulled over the situation:
A: With a mind once again at peace, my Zen in tact and a heart free of guilt, pangs, and twinges, I splayed happily on my bed, proud to have owned the Truth. Sure, I always prefer to say “yes” to every opportunity availed to me, but in this case, the decision had already been made.
B: Clearly I’d made a decent impression on a consistently working Director, and whilst I may never rest on my laurels, I did own the right to rest on my pillows. And I was almost back to sleep until…
C: In just what kind of a bizarre screwed-up Universe does a well-credited veteran Director physically pick up the phone sans an assistant or casting personnel and call someone in my lowly job capacity PERSONALLY???
Oh, perhaps I’d made a horrible mistake!
Had I not joyfully stayed up so late the night before, maybe my slothful pea-brain could have come up with a magnificent quickie solution wherein I could get someone to fill in for me on my current show for one day? Maybe I could’ve rearranged my schedule in order to accommodate the Director’s request? And maybe I could’ve had the chance to prove my acting abilities to an entirely new group of people?
But let’s face it: I have a gift horse with my Network sit-com, and I’d be a complete FOOL to look that pony in the mouth!!!
>>><<<
If ever I doubted The Universe and Its Exquisite Sense of Timing however, It proved Itself most fantastically last week:
A: Freed from my job at 2:45pm and spiraling down the parking structure at Sony Pictures (aka the old MGM Studios), I screeched from the 6th level to an immediate halt on the second, happening to make eye contact with a pedestrian walking towards the lot.
“Narvel?!” I squealed, rolling down my window, confirming the identity of the fabulously musically talented husband/Manager of the one and only Reba McEntire (whom I had stood in for, for six and a half years on her sit-com). And playing a five-minute verbal catch-up until I needed to move my car, we wished each other well before heading our separate ways.
“Please give my love to Reba!” I shouted as he headed off to perform on a stage directly across from mine.
“Will do, Pen!” he yelled back with a friendly wave.
B: Having crept along Santa Monica Blvd. in an effort to spy on my recycling center and its approachability at a local gas station, I deemed it finally the right time to recycle some (translation: a monstrous load of) accumulated aluminum soda cans.
And waved like a VIP to back up my unobtrusive Toyota towards the truck on a slow afternoon when a lot of, um, less-organized people were continually sifting through their multitudes of shopping carts, I unloaded seven pristine gargantuan sanitary garbage bags which were weighed quickly and lobbed like free-throw basketballs into the hands of the receivers inside the processing center. “Please sign here” the helpful gentleman smiled, clearly enjoying his job as he disappeared to retrieve my CA deposit money. ($24.65, thank you very much!)
C: Scooping the weighty plethora of solicitations out of my tiny apartment mailbox slot – not sure which mailing list I’ve landed on, but every single charity known to animal/mankind seems to be pressing me for a first and forever monetary contribution – I sifted through the envelopes to find a paycheck, as well as one residual payment from a few repeat performances on the original tweenager series known as “Saved By the Bell”. (Almost $75.00! – well, before taxes…)
>>><<<
All things considered, I still think The Universe does conspire to assist us.
After all, I probably would have made about the same amount of money as a “sobbing Background Performer”, minus all the fun I had that day!
>>><<<
Personally, I think we can strive for all we want to be, to get to where we think we need to be; but I also believe that we’ll always end up finding more happiness when we simply embrace the unexpected joy of appreciating the moments in our lives where we’re meant to be…
Esoterically yours,
~Philosophical P
Author’s Addendum: My parents are HUGE fans of my current show, and after having watched our season premiere, I think they got a taste of just how weird my job may be on any given week.
Cheers to having crawled into bed (fully-clothed of course) with our tiny blonde actor, pulling the sheets over our heads, and quietly lying side by side in the darkness with said actor until the Producers and Network Execs made their way onto the set, as only one Zen thought occurred to me…
“Hold your breath in case he farts!”
No comments:
Post a Comment