Our group from college was in Ft. Worth, TX for the Southwest Theatre Conference auditions in January of 1985. We were all hoping to find theatre-related work for the summer. (Wow! That was more than 30 years ago!)
I seem to recall that our entire group at breakfast at Denny's, which was within walking distance of the Motel 6. After that, we got in our cars and drove to the hotel where the auditions were being held. We got out went to the registration desk to get our audition numbers and see which groups we would be in. My number had me in the first group. Everyone else was scattered out among the four groups of actors that were auditioning.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we only got to show our stuff for 1 1/2 minutes. I had prepared a monologue and song. I brought sheet music for the song, but in case I didn't trust the person playing the piano, I had brought my boombox on which I had a recording of the accompaniment.
I was last in my group. I got to see everyone else audition and determined that the piano player was actually very good at what he was doing. I wouldn't need the boombox. I did my monologue and started the song. It was interesting to hear the piano player punctuate certain parts of the song. The way he played actually helped me to perform the song better. I was worried that I was going to hit the 1 1/2 minute mark before the end of the song. However, I had a couple of factors in my favor. One was that I was last. It wasn't going to matter if I went two or three seconds over. The other factor was that I knew the woman keeping time because she was one of the participants in my trip to New York City the year before. We had actually become rather friendly, so she wasn't going to make me look bad by cutting me off short before I hit the final note. I got a generous round of applause when I finished. I felt really good about my audition.
After the actor auditions, they had the technical auditions. We got up on stage one by one and told the recruiters what we were able to do. I had my spiel written down on a piece of paper and read from it. In it, I listed the things I had experience with including "set construction and set destruction." Everybody laughed at that. I'd forgotten I had put that joke in there. I'm glad they thought it was funny.
I found that I had been called back by a few recruiters. I had to make an appointment for the first one. (I'll go more into detail about what transpired there in tomorrow's post.) After that meeting, I went to see another recruiter. It was for the Granbury Opera House. The venue was in a small town about 30 miles southwest of Ft. Worth. They basically produced revivals of classic Broadway musicals. The recruiter didn't set appointments. I just went into the hotel room and there were people there talking to the actors and technicians they had called back. They told me that usually they make job offers to actors there at the conference, but the person in charge of that got sick and couldn't come that day. They were telling everyone to come to their open audition a week later in Granbury. She seemed to indicate that they would actually hire me as an actor and that I had the qualities they were looking for, but I had to go through the one person who had final say. I told them I couldn't make that drive again, miss school AND rehearsals for "HMS Pinafore." And they would have hired me for tech. They had the authority to do that, but I really wanted experience as an actor. I was already doing plenty of tech at ENMU.
Chud happened to be talking to the Granbury people the same time I was in there. He was showing his portfolio for a technical position. (He didn't audition as an actor.) He would get hired by them and spend the next summer there. It made me kind of wish I had pursued the techincal jobs there. We would have at least had a good time together. But Chud told me it was rather disheartening to see actors who had been there for years and just couldn't leave.
I told Bid that I got called back by Granbury. He laughed and said, "You really don't want to go there. They're not very professional." He had previously spent a summer there. Chud told me that the Granbury people had a few things to say about Bid. According to them, they wanted him to play the part of Joe in their production of "Show Boat." He would have been the one to sing "Ol' Man River" (and he would have done a spectacular version of it). But problems arose when Bid didn't want to play the part as a "Yassah!" black man, even though that's how the part had been played for decades.
I know I got called back by a couple of other recruiters, but they didn't seem to have anything interesting. I had one final appointment set. The recruiters were from some college campus in Texas and were looking at me to do tech. Like the first appointment, there were two other people interviewing at the same time. What they offered was $50 a week to work for them. I didn't think that was so bad. It meant $400 over the course of two months, which would be more than what I would make at the radio station. However, they didn't offer housing. The school's dorms shut down over the summer. They also didn't offer any assistance in finding housing. The only thing they offered was to pay for enrollment at the school for one class that I was required to take. I didn't act too thrilled about the opportunity during the interview.
A few weeks later, they were the only ones who called me back and offered me a job. They did not offer more money nor any assistance with housing. I told them I wasn't interested. I had been hoping to hear back from the first recruiters I met with, but I guess they didn't think I was good enough for them.
After the auditions were done and over with, Bid, Chud and I went out to get something to eat. We went to this pizza restaurant that was sort of the predecessor of Chuck E. Cheese. We ordered a large pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms. At this time, I was just barely starting to like mushrooms on my pizza. However, the mushrooms on this pizza didn't look very good, so I had to pick them off. Bid gave me a hard time about that.
We went back to the Motel 6. Bid asked for the keys to the car because he wanted to go driving around. He was over 21, so I assume he was going to go hit up a bar or something. This was the same guy who just got a speeding ticket the day before, so I was rather reluctant to give him the keys to my parents' car. But he was able to sweet-talk me into handing them over.
He came back a few hours later. Chud and I were fast asleep and didn't hear him come in. He went and fell asleep on the floor. I remember getting up and asking him if he wanted to switch places, but he said he was fine. I kind of felt bad. We never did find out what he did that night.
The next morning, Bid, Chud and I hit the road. Nothing eventful happened. We had a recording of the second act of "HMS Pinafore" and rehearsed our parts all the way home. Bid played Dick Deadeye and Chuck played Admiral Porter in the production. I was in the chorus. We didn't go straight back to Portales like the people in the other car. We had to drive to Artesia first to give my parents the car back. We arrived and Bid was shocked at the size of the house. He got to meet my mother, who had seen Bid in the ENMU productions before. Then we drove back to Portales, just in time for rehearsals. They were rehearsing the second act that night, so we were fully prepared.
The only bad thing was that my parents got mad at me because I had ruined the starter by igniting the car in cold weather without plugging in the block heater. I tried to explain that there was no way to plug it in without other students messing with the extension cord, but they didn't want to hear it. They never let me borrow that car again.
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