On Auditioning for Rent | Part 3

Finding connection with my dead dad on stage...

May 23, 2024

This is Part Three, the final in a multi-part series. Read Part One and Part Two for some backstory if you’re curious.

I found his headshot. Glossy, black and white.

Tonight I’ll be there. Where he stood many times.

For just two minutes on a scuffed, wooden stage. Feet planted firmly and shoulders back.

He was so unassuming. So quiet. Almost to the point of meek.

I wish I could have seen him command the room.

Memorizing lines, rehearsing stage movements, charming the director, ready for the spotlight. The theatrical. The dramatic.

I never got to see that side of him.

Except as I see it in me, and maybe in my kiddo, too.

So, the anti-climactic, way-delayed update is that I didn’t get the (or a) part.

There’s not much of a dramatic flourish and no point “burying the lede,” as it were.

For a theatrical production, the conclusion is quite anti-climactic.

Callbacks night.

I sat staring at myself in a dressing room mirror on and off for three hours, surrounded by 22-year-olds.

After hours of practicing, practicing, practicing two full songs, we were asked to do a few lines of a non-singing part.

“That can’t have been it,” I was still thinking as they called the names of those they wanted to see again. Mine was not among them.

It was 10:30 p.m.

“I just want a burger,” yawned one of the other potential Maureen’s to no one in particular as we padded out, bleary-eyed, into the warm night.

“Bye,” I said, sort of to her and also no one in particular, as I made my way to my car.

That, as they say, was that.

I wouldn’t say I got bit by the theater bug early. I always enjoyed musicals, and my mom used to sing me songs from My Fair Lady and The King & I before bedtime.

Blasting Les Mis at full volume on long (and short) car rides became a “thing” in my teenage years.

“You could perform,” my dad would say. “You have a great voice.” I’d blush in the backseat and make excuses.

It was the first Broadway show I’d seen and the only one I saw with my dad. I was awestruck.

He kept the playbill. I found it amongst the playbills from my high school productions while cleaning out his desk this year. He’s been gone for 20.

He thought my role as “Fairy Godmother” on my high school stage warranted a keepsake next to a Broadway production.

(BTW: The second show I saw was Rent. My boyfriend at the time took me for my birthday. We were probably 14 or 15. His sister had to go with us. I mouthed along to every word, and it was all I could do to keep myself in my seat and to not run up to the stage like a wild fan.)

Getting cast as part of the chorus in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat soon followed. I had to wear a bright purple leotard and tap shoes on stage in front of my high school classmates.

A leotard.

Don’t make me say it again: a fucking leotard.

The production of Bye Bye Birdie was a student-faculty romp. At least for that one I got to wear a pink t-shirt and black leggings. I was cast for the general chorus but after things started falling apart, some of the more serious actORs abandoned ship. As a result, I moved up the ranks and landed the role of Ursula, granting me (what I thought was) the coolest opening of a show ever.

I played a small role in one of our Tournament of Plays, too.

In college, I auditioned for a role in a student-directed play called George Washington Slept Here. I used one of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues as my piece for my audition. I am sure I was nervous, but I don’t really remember much about the experience.

I landed a small role with very few lines.

I loved all of these experiences, as far as I can recall, but there was a sense for me that I just wasn’t quite “good enough” to do anything more with it. Secretly, I harbored a theory that I just wasn’t “in” with the right groups and hadn’t done enough to earn my place to be taken seriously.

I left the theater behind to focus on far more serious endeavors like attending frat parties and taking classes in the social sciences (teehee).

Perhaps I love the theater because it’s a way to be close to him or because I know he loved it. Perhaps it’s because a part of him is in me. I love that it’s something I get to share with him now.

I didn’t get a part, but he’d understand. He never “made it big” after all, which is why he gave it up.

He gave it up for us. For a “real” job to support his family. He put his dreams on the shelf for us, when we were just an idea, a new dream.

I get to dream now, but I don’t know what became of his.

Sometimes I don’t even know where to put my feelings about that; they overwhelm me too darn much.

I wish he could have been here to see me up there, just for those two minutes.

But, moreover, I wish I could have seen him up there.

An Excavation Journey

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