Follow-Up to "Aargh" aka The Audition From Hell

[Eryn]

(Perhaps I'm exaggerating. Read on and judge for yourself.)

 

The good news is, I managed to find transportation. A long-suffering friend from school offered to drop me off at the venue and pick me up afterwards as long as I compensated him for gas.

 

The bad news is pretty much everything else that happened.

 

I packed extra clothes, a water bottle, and my sheet music binder in my work bag- did I mention the audition was the afternoon of my first day at work? And that I get off work at 5:00, while the audition started at 7:00? And that it was a good 20-minute drive from both work and my sister's, where I was going to change clothes? Yeah.

 

But Dad picked me up and had me en route to said sister's by around 5:05. At this point, the usual nervous energy had set in and I was fidgeting in my seat like galvanized frog's legs. He kindly took me to the Wendy's drive-through; I snarfed down a 10 chicken nuggets faster than I ever have before. And around 5:10, we hit traffic.

 

The city in which all of this took place is not an especially large one, when compared to New York or Boston or even Atlanta. But it still manages to have heavy traffic between 5 PM and 6 PM; on this particular day, it had also been raining. We finally arrived at my sister's around 5:38, after being rear-ended by a woman who'd been talking on her cell phone.

 

My ride was arriving at 6:00. Panic ensued.

 

It was quite possibly the fastest I've ever changed clothes in my life. I stretched, did some vocal warm-ups, and went over my audition song (thanking heaven for my sister's piano), then set to pacing like a madwoman. By the time my ride arrived, I was pretty much pure nerves.

 

Things went smoothly for a while. I got to the venue in plenty of time, met the director, signed in, and sat down to wait. The other auditionees and I talked a bit, and I started to think maybe things wouldn't go as badly as I'd feared.

 

Then it happened. It turned out one of the assistants was the mother of a girl I'd known in elementary school. We had the obligatory catching-up chat, established where her daughter and I had gone to college, etc. But at the end of our conversation, she smiled and said, "Good luck!"

 

Any degree of relaxation I'd managed jumped out the window. I'm sure it was out of ignorance rather than intentional ill will, but that made no difference. You fellow theatre geeks out there can already guess that the actual audition went about as can be expected after that. Even if I wasn't superstitious, it had sort of a reverse-Felix Felicis effect on me; I botched everything because my confidence was shot.

 

So "Into the Woods" was a bust. Now there's nothing to do but wait for September and auditions for the Theatre Guild's production of "Spring Awakening."

 

(There are no words for how much I want to be in Spring Awakening. No words. ^^")