Yet another big scary 2257 deadline today. Lunch is being ordered in as to prevent any of us from getting any sneaky ideas about leaving the office. Ali and I are going to share a Tia Mia Pizza. Considering how active I've been this week, I think I deserve it. In any event, I'm out of here by seven so I can make it to the Disquiet Festival in Oakland by eight. So I say now.

12:39pm

Learning the origin of Snake Tricks Monkey makes it no less disturbing.

3:08pm

Even though I tend to feel the same way about Halloween as Whedonverse vampires do, the preponderance of gourds is always pleasant.

On the public radio program “Fresh Air” several years ago, Terry Gross interviewed Gray about the piece and turned testy about his having left Renee for a younger woman, suggesting that other women would be distressed by this, too. Gross seemed to be saying that Gray’s behavior and its consequences weren’t clear to him, when in fact he goes on at some length about just that in the work. Gray says he was miffed that she assumed she had the whole story from an audio excerpt. “She was acting as though everything’s in the monologue,” he says. “I’m 58 years old and the monologue’s an hour and 40 minutes.”

When Lynnee booked me to feature at K'vetch last year along with his mother, some people objected that it wasn't a sufficiently diverse lineup since both his mother and I are white. Lynnee bemusedly observed that only in San Francisco would a six foot tall goth tranny and a seventy-odd year-old German woman not be considered diverse.

12:47pm

An employee at Walgreens just asked me if I got the part. I was in there last Wednesday morning getting headshots made from digital prints (my experiments the night before not having quite worked), I blurted out that they were for an audition for a teevee show. I think I was still trying to believe it myself.

In any event, I haven't heard back. I'm going to assume that's neither a good nor a bad sign, simply that the decision hasn't been made.

1:59pm

Since I'm not doing the gym thing anymore and therefore don't have the machines to give me borderline arbitrary stats on how much energy I expend, my latest physical record-keeping obsession has become using Yahoo! Maps to calculate how far I walk. I managed about eight miles yesterday.

4:46pm

Because it bears repeating, from an interview with Spalding Gray on Fresh Air in 1997, regarding his monologue It's a Slippery Slope (which I was fortunate enough to see him perform):

TERRY: At the end of your new monologue, you confess that you were having an affair with another woman at the time you were married, and in fact while you were married she became pregnant with your baby, and you've since left Renee. This is such a surprising thing to hear.

SPALDING: Yeah, it was a surprising event for me to have happened. If you think that I can fill you in what I think the underneath of all that is, I think I'm still processing it. What is the specific question?

TERRY: I'm not sure. I think part of my question is, for the first time I felt myself...instead of just identifying with you, instead of just saying "Boy, that Spalding, he sure understands neurosis," I was thinking, "Boy, that Spalding, he did something that really upsets me. I'm really upset that he was having an affair while he was marrying to Renee." I don't know Renee, but I feel like I know her through your monologues. From having followed your life, I know something about her life. She feels like a friend, the way characters in books that you read feel like a friend. I feel like, you betrayed my friend, and I don't feel good about that.

SPALDING: That's been a common response from women. I've gotten letters, and people have spoken to me about it. I expected it to happen. I felt that, too...I'm not a nice guy, Terry.

I'm not a nice guy. What a wonderfully powerful statement, regardless of the gender. To own it.

9:16pm

Everything is changing, again.

9:20pm

Collette and I were sitting in the waiting area of a photographer's studio in the middle of the Folsom Street Fair. On my way from the office to The Dark Room the night before, I'd noticed flyers advertising the-first-hit's-free digital portraits. Since Maddy got custody of the digital camera, the number of pictures taken of me this year has dropped considerably. What's more, my current promo picture is almost a year old, and newer, professional-ish one would be good. Collette suggested we get a picture taken of the two of us together, no in lieu of one of myself, but as well as. I was agreeably noncommittal at first. The more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. It wasn't that it would be a bad picture; indeed, we make a highly aesthetically pleasing couple. But it didn't feel right. The thought made me anxious, as it had in the past when she'd suggested doing a shoot with Reverend Michel. So, I declined.

As we waited, a beautiful girl in a finely detailed corset approached and asked if we had any liquid eyeliner she could borrow. I dug some out of my bag and gave it to her, only to watch in mounting horror as she used it on a shirtless man with a beard and long shaggy black hair. My horror and dismay only grew when I discovered that the corseted girl and the other girl sitting next to him were his slaves.

Oh, wrong wrong wrong. I have no problem with the whole d/s thing, master-slave relationships and the like, but goddamnit, I would have really like to have been informed not only on a man, but a straight man, and a straight man whom these girls called "master," and whose look exemplified everything I find icky about bio-boys in the kink scene, especially tops. I've since replaced the eyeliner, since I can't get past the cootie issue. Yeah, I'm sexist. Deal.

As Collette and I left after our individual photo shoots (when I told the photographer that while Collette and I had arrived together we weren't going to take pictures together he gave me the first in what would be a series of incredulous looks, the next being when he saw my arm), she stopped in front of the "master" and told him he was blessed. As usual, she's much more generous than me; the word going through my mind was undeserving.

And then, back out into the throng.

sometime after midnight

please think about what it is you want.

In the plus column, I got to work before my boss (doubly important because he's returning from a long trip, and it's the day after Folsom), and the threatened biteyheadedness doesn't look like it's going to happen. She says, jinxing herself.

2:44pm

We've been spared the rampage. Hooray for small miracles.

4:07pm

New shiny black PVC pants have been found. Not acquired; simply found. It also occurs to me that my increased amount of walking means I really need to get new footwear. Which is to say, new boots. Yep, back to that.

Now, I head into the clusterfuck.

6:20pm

I had a surprisingly good tuna sammich from Subway at about half past seven on Friday night, a veggie or two from the snack table at Folsom ForPlay at Studio Z around eleven, and nothing else until a bowl of tofu at about four on Saturday afternoon. I also got all of about an hour of sleep (Vash, sleeping next to me, managed about three; the sun was already coming up, so we were doomed), and a lot of energy was exerted both before and after. It may be good for the soul, but it can't be good for the body, even though my body felt good at the time.

wow, it really does happen.

I'm now at the office, eating a Veggie Biryani I picked up from a nearby Indian restaurant. (In retrospect something with protein would have been a better choice, but hey.) I'm here because I've heard highly plausible rumors that our fearless leader is going to be biting off heads regarding productivity when he returns to the office on Monday morning, so I figured getting a few more hours of work done couldn't hurt. Granted, it probably won't make a difference, but this kind of thing is triggery for me—if I know a man is going to be mad at me, I'm going to damn well do everything I can to soften it. Harm reduction, I suppose. Something like that.

So very tired, and I anticipate another late night. Opening for Lynnee should be fun.

sometime after midnight

Typical of me. I was dead to the world after Lynnee's show, having gotten almost no sleep the night before, and I also walked about three miles over the course of the day. I would have gone straight home, but a cute girl asked me if I wanted to get something to eat, so we did a late-night Bagdad Cafe run. Got home around three in the morning. And slept.

On the signup sheet, you're supposed to write the name of the part you're auditioning for. Several people wrote "hippie." That cracked me up.

7:47pm

Though I was far from flawless, the only thing I know I empirically did wrong was to forget a line. Blanked. Worse, I didn't even say line! Thankfully, the person who read the lines opposite me (whom I'm already starting to think of as "my agent," which is rather dangerous), picked up on my frozenness before long and fed me th eline. They were videotaping, naturally, and that's the take they used, insisting that it was perfect, brilliant, etc. I was problematic, though. Aren't I always? Isn't that what makes me, me?

Beyond my brain locking up, my main problem was inflexibility, adhering to the script too closely. It said "She takes off her sunglasses," so I insisted on keeping them on until the script tells me to take them off, although I did take them off for the slating (the camera panning up me, and me saying my name and the character's name). Because I may be a prima donna, but I'm not a fucking prima donna. I want to work in this town again. Or even once.

Then there was the matter of my clothes. (This gets a little tricky, so you might want to make a flowchart.) My plan was to wear my hooker dress for the audition, since the character is a hooker (duh), and at least one draft of the script described her as wearing a "slinky red dress." It's more trashy than slinky, but I rather think it gets the point across. A primary aspect of the plan involved me wearing a black dress over the hooker dress, then taking off the black dress at work and going out to the audition wearing my Spike jacket so I wouldn't be tooostentatious on the bus (though, upon reflection, it would have been a swell way to get into character). Unfortunately, it was most definitely not heavy jacket weather out. Feh. It had to be gray and windy yesterday, not today when I could really use it. So, I kept the black dress on over the hooker dress but didn't bring my jacket when I headed to the audition, intending to take off the black dress as soon as I arrived. Long story short (too late, I know), I was still wearing the black dress when I did the first few takes. "My agent" though it was fine, tasked as she was with moving things along and not having time for costume changes, but when the president of the eponymously named casting company joined us halfway through and I showed her the hooker dress underneath, she liked it. So off the black dress went.

After seeing me in the video monitor, she asked if a lighter lipstick was an option. For as much as she was liking "the goth thing" (yay! i've still got it!), the dark purple of the lipstick was making my mouth lose definition on video. (This is something I've observed in still pictures, too, but I've yet to find a substantially lighter shade that I'm comfortable with.) So I wiped off the topcoat of $1.99 Wet 'n Wild Blackberry Mega Colors, revealing the faded but still visible layer of Lipfinity beneath. They seemed happy with that, so I went back in front of the camera.

Now, the character (she's not my character yet, if she ever will be), has two scenes. The first is in the pre-credits teaser, as she solicits the soon-to-be-murder victim. He's in motion, walking past her, so I played it that way, turning to follow him. My agent told me to A) slow it down and be more natural, and B) act directly towards her. We ran through it a few more times, only recording the final one, which she really liked. I have no idea if that's typical or not, especially given the time constraints...though it only now occurs to me that maybe they had a bit more time to work me, since I was scheduled for 1:05pm but they started with me a 1:00pm, the person scheduled for 1:00pm presumably nowhere to be found. Were someone to flake, I can only hope it was one of my competitors.

Speaking of such things, as I was leaving, I glanced back and saw a tranny going in. If it's verisimilitude they're after then they're in luck, because she sure looked like a Motherlode girl, the sort of sex workers you're much more likely to find in the Tenderloin than crackers such as myself. I imagine the real deal might be considered a bit much for a primetime audience, and producers might lean towards what would be considered a more "classic" beauty, tall and blonde, the goth thing notwithstanding. Of course, if I get the part they'll make me up however they see fit, though I'd certainly be fine with continuing said goth thing. There's even a precedent on this sort of show, not that this character would be anything quite so high-profile, even if she does become recurring like "my agent" implied.

The request to tone down my lipstick notwithstanding, they seemed really taken with my appearance, telling me over and over how great I looked. Maybe they'd taken Tranny 101 and guessed that my ego would need all the help it could get, or maybe they do that with everyone, or maybe they really meant it. At times, it seemed as though they were really enthusiastic about me in particular getting the part. In all likelihood that's just how professionals do their thing, making their clients feel loved to foster loyalty. I'm easy, though, so I liked how it felt.

Anyway, we did a couple takes of the longer dialogue scene, and...ugh. As I mentioned, I totally forgot a line, and it never quite felt as comfortable then as it did when I'd practiced it by myself. Well, of course not. There was also the problem that I'd been thinking in terms of interacting with the other person, but "my agent" was several feet away out of camera range. She would do the gestures of the other person, pretending to hold up a photo or a badge, but it was still difficult to relate at that distance. Gah. Good learning experience, if nothing else.

Here's the deal: I probably won't get it. Even though there isn't much competition—she told me on the phone yesterday that they only had four people auditioning for the part, and based on the signup sheet, many more were trying out for the part of "hippie"—the odds are stil against me. Yes, sure, I might get cast, and I really hope I do, but I'm also accepting the probability that I won't. And that'll be okay. Won't be the first audition I've failed (if you include plays), and it sure won't be the last. There's no shame in it, and it just means I'll be open for other things.

I have no idea when I'll find out how I did. Could be tomorrow, next week, next month. Not a clue. So, I go on about my business. (Which, of course, doesn't mean I won't still talk about it.)