As it turns out, I guess I am too lazy to blog every day. Maybe it's because I am such a busy guy. Anyway, I am sure all my readers are dying to know what I have been doing between my last post and this one.

Well, the Friday before last I had two auditions for the U.S. Census. Very glamorous. When I realized that one was on Cotner in West LA and the other was near Santa Monica Blvd. and Vine and I had only 45 minutes between the two, I decided to ditch the lower paying one in Hollywood and go balls to the wall with the one on Cotner.

If I may be permitted to go on a wild terrible tangent, I have been nothing but amused with my decision to audition as a male model for print and commercial jobs. I have probably gone to more than 20 auditions. They have been located all over this sprawling mess of a town and a few have even been in the valley (like Howard Stern, I have a small penis so don't get any ideas about the valley, ask my wife, except she doesn't even read this thing). Usually the audition spaces are cramped and random and located in places you would never expect them to be. For example, one space, where I auditioned for a German magazine (956 for lovers, and I must break you [Drago]), was a small craftsman style house in Hancock Park. Another, for a T-mobile add where they made me remove my shoes and took pictures of my feet (I promptly got my one and only pedicure afterwards), was above the Hooters in Santa Monica. And another, an audition for a Hyundai commercial (the only one that I have really wanted since I would have been suspended by wires 50 feet in the air), was in an office building in Korea Town. I have also learned that there are large audition spaces (warehouses really) which have multiple audition rooms so that several different and unrelated casting directors and producers can operate simultaneously. These are also in nondescript locations. There is one on Beverly just west of Robertson and another on La Brea above Petco. Y0u can get idea of the types of auditions taking place at these large spaces by looking at the disparate groups of people waiting to be auditioned. For example, at one of these large spaces where I auditioned for an Audi commercial (I had to sit at a pretend table and drink pretend coffee and pretend that an Audi drove past me that was so breath taking that I literally could not breathe, I just sat there pretending not to breathe [secret: I was breathing]) there were many swarthy men from the middle east and the sub continent in one section of the waiting area, six foot tall size zero blond girls in pumps and wedding gowns in another (maybe a wedding reality show about tall Aryan whores??) and a gaggle of children ranging from five to eight years old in soccer uniforms screaming, picking their noses and complaining about being hungry while their parents combed cow-licks and scowled at the other parents. As you can imagine I tried to sit as close as possible to the amazonian blonds (whores) since the swarthy dudes smelled, well, swarthy, and the children had a vague scent of feces.

As for the auditions themselves, some are what they affectionately call in the industry, "cattle calls." You get there, sign in, wait until someone feels like getting off their ass, and then they call you in, tell you to stand at a predetermined mark and hold a number written in Sharpie or Magic Marker on a piece of paper, take a frontal shot, two profiles and then they shove you out the door (and kick you in the butt if they can). It can't take more than five minutes. I estimate that if they hold auditions like that for several days, using this method, they must see hundreds if not thousands of people. You can actually hear the moos in the waiting room. Sometimes they have hay to tide you over. If it's going to be more than a cattle call, you may be asked to remove your shoes (see above) and sit on a couch with a telephone (T-Mobile), drink beer in the woods with your vampire buddies (HBO - True Blood), drive a car through hyperspace (Japanese car commercial), hit the sweetest drive of your fucking life (Cobra), change the score of a cricket match (Intel [the only one I have landed so far]), cheat at Blackjack (Ace of Spades, whatever that was), comment on the engineering specs of a new car hopefully while suspended 50 feet in the air (Hyundai) or snap into a Slim Jim like Randy "Macho man" Savage (I made that last one up, nobody can crank up the excitement more than the Macho man).

So, the U.S. Census audition. Apparently, the U.S. government is concerned that minorities will avoid welcoming fresh faced white college kids into their home to ask about immigration status, cleanliness habits and the abundance of children on the premises. To combat this, the government has devised a print and television campaign to run in minority magazines and television stations that feature people of the same minority as the intended audience of the magazine or TV station joyously carousing with census workers and/or proudly mailing in their census information. Thus the audition (the one on Cotner) was, as you can guess, full of Indian people (it's easy to tell which ones are the FOBs by the way, they usually smell like curry).

Permit me to go on another tangent, this time about parking for auditions. Audition locations never have parking for those that they actually want to audition. If there is parking, it is expressly noted that it is not for people who are there to audition. And there seems to be some kind of inverse relationship between the size of the location and the severity of punishment for parking in what looks like the numerous spots designated for parking there. This means that one is usually relegated to street parking. And since everyone and their mother (and their mother's mother) is there to audition and at the same time, there is never any parking. One time it took me 45 minutes to find parking (I looked like a wild hyena by the time I walked into the audition) and another I parked in the driveway of someone's house and just hoped they wouldn't come home before the audition was over (but who doesn't want a Porsche in their driveway?). I suspect the no parking on the premises thing is just another power play by casting directors. Since it's verboten these days to fuck out your dignity on the couch they'll try to fuck you out of it by denying you a parking spot :)

Anyway, after having to troll up and down Cotner for 25 minutes before settling with parking in a yellow loading zone, and after having to wait what felt like an absurdly long time with spicy/curry smelling Indian dudes (it rubbed off on me), the casting director ushered me into the audition room. I was there to play "groom." Unfortunately, after seeing me, the casting director explained that I should audition for the role of father. When I expressed my concern, she stated that it would be better if I play father (and she added that father paid more). It was in that moment that I realized that I am old (in the sense of what I thought an old person looked like when I was 18, which is someone above 30). Father is certainly not groom but father does pay more, does that make it okay? And what was father supposed to do, I asked? Well, she said, father is supposed to help his little girl mail the census information by putting it into the mail box which is too high for her to reach. Groom probably got to make out with the three non-hairy girls waiting outside while father probably has to hold hands and hug the hairy ones and then pick the hair out of his teeth. It should also be noted that there was no actual little girl, no actual mail box and no actual census information to be mailed. Once again, I had to pretend. Thus, after a demonstration by the casting director, it was my turn. When she yelled action, I looked into the wrong camera, then too high above the correct one, lifted up my "girl" in such a fashion that "she" must have been a three pound Keebler elf (rather than a 25 pound child), made "her" put the envelope in a mail box probably made for Andre the Giant (may he rest in peace) since I lifted "her" above my head, and then praised "her" for doing a good job, just like I do with Elke (the Schnauzer) when she takes a dump on someone else's lawn i.e. good girl, good job, good Schnauzer (pretty sure I added Schnauzer by accident). Needlessly to say, it's been two weeks and I have not received a call back. And it shot last week.

Other than that I think Ayesha and I went out to dinner that night from some good sushi. Saturday we hit the SC game with big Jay Mahapatra and A. Dugdale but not before Ayesha and I played a mean round of golf at Penmar. Sunday I can't remember and then Monday we saw Blitzen Trapper. I will skip Tuesday and Wednesday and save Thursday through Sunday for my next post about a wedding in Florida (think Pakis, white trash, and lots of Jim Beam).