Rudy and I went on our first date a year ago Monday. To celebrate the truly outrageous year we’ve spent together, we headed down to Long Beach for a trip to the aquarium. After a couple hours amongst the crustaceans, starfish, and mid-day field trips, we skimmed through the gift shop (which, according to our roommate Mary Ann, “fucking sucks cock”), briefly considered taking a $35 novelty photo of our faces surrounded by the cartoon vestiges of some jolly octopi, decided against it, and headed home to Black Diamond.

That afternoon, we had an audition for Lingo. I’d never heard of the show before meeting Rudy, but he’s a huge fan of the game. Lingo and Sudoku are his favorites– both logic-based puzzles I never understood. I’m a member of a subscription casting website that offers listings for both background and principal roles in just about anything imaginable. I’ve seen listings for soap operas, summer-blockbuster films, foreign TV ads, USC student projects, reality shows, PSAs, and of course, obscure Game Show Network programs. I’ve been a member for maybe four months and after submitting for countless roles without a word of response from a brethren of anonymous stone-cold casting directors, I decided to submit Rudy and I for a Lingo audition just for fun, not expecting anything to come of it.

I was so surprised when they called us back to “confirm our audition,” that I eagerly acquiesced and thanked them with complete sincerity, before even realizing that the audition was to take place on our one-year anniversary. Luckily, Rudy was more excited than I was and we began practicing Lingo online. At first I couldn’t solve a puzzle to save my life, but after a couple hours I got the hang of it and I was doing pretty well for myself. We played a few practice games before our audition and then headed out.

“How many other people do you think will be there?” Rudy wondered on the way to the audition.
“I don’t know…” I said, and suddenly my image of a relaxed and laid-back meeting with the producers was shattered as I thought about it logically, and realized there would probably be dozens of people in the hectic and unnerving waiting room. I haven’t been on an audition since my child acting days, over a decade ago, long before I developed a helpful adolescent sense of insecurity and self-consciousness. We arrived at Sunset-Gower Studios half an hour early, and the blasé security guard told us to take a seat in the tiny lobby. There were already two couples waiting: a clearly homosexual Asian couple with their arms interlocked, and a bespectacled Asian man with a brazen, anal-retentive female friend. We sat next to the latter couple, leaving only two seats open in the room, which were soon filled by other applicants.

We silently surveyed the lobby as the potential contestants began to fill its tiny confines, and the security guard continued to answer their queries with bored nonchalance: “Just wait here. Please take a seat,” when there clearly were no seats remaining. The brazen girl to my right was telling her shy counterpart about her job. She’s one of those nerve-wracking people who enunciates just a tad too sharply, like her words are ready to collapse from prolonged operation in an unstable environment. She’s a social worker for a schizophrenic actor, and she was entertaining her partner with anecdotes about being called onto sets in the midst of a crisis and convincing him to put his clothes back on before a traumatized cast and crew.

“Wow,” said her timid partner, laughing nervously, “Does that happen often?”
“The naked stuff? Not so much,” she responded through through a pair of perfectly aligned teeth. “The outbursts? About two or three times a week, I’d say. Excuse me for a second. I’m going to find the bathroom.” As she walked with marked precision to the other side of the lobby, another Asian man approached her.
“Julia?”
“Oh, my gosh, Mark! Wow. Is that you? Good too see you! What– what are you doing here?” she asked with a Cheshire smile.
“I’m auditioning for ‘Lingo’… what about you?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m here for, too,” she said.
“Brian, this is Mark,” she said to her Lingo partner, alternating her wide-eyed gaze between the two of them. “We went to high school together. He’s my… old… acquaintance.” She looked back at him with a pronouncedly blank expression. “Friend… He’s my high school acquaintance.” Satisfied with this, the three of them shared an awkward silence before she said, “Excuse me, I was just on my way to the bathroom,” and abruptly left.

If that sounds like an exchange from a bad screenplay to you, welcome to Hollywood. I meet characters like Julia, the anal-retentive social worker/game show contestant, every time I go to work. Many would-be actors seem to adopt a two dimensional set of character traits to their everyday persona, in perhaps what may be best described as an attempt to share their craft with the world. Those of you who were and/or had traumatizing run-ins with Drama Club kids in high school know what I’m talking about.

Before long, the room was full of unsung heroes: kooky middle-aged girl-friends poised and ready for a guest spot on “The Real Housewives of Orange County”. Basketball-loving ordinary-guy best-friend roommates, pretentious British expatriates, and collegiate hippies/homeopathic doctors. Rudy and I silently ran through five-letter words in our minds while the room filled up, and eventually they led us into an anonymous audition room deep within the Sunset-Gower complex. After photographing each pair in a “playful” photograph and a stoic one, we were seated in folding chairs and given clipboards to help us fill out a three-page personality questionnaire with questions like, “What’s the most outrageous thing you’ve ever done?” and “What celebrity do you think you look like?” Michael Jackson’s Thriller played throughout this portion of the application process.

After they had finished with the photographs and the questionnaires, they played us a truncated episode of “Lingo” for anyone who had never seen the show. This turned out to be a good number of the contestants, most of whom were actors, struggling to get by. I recognized a couple of them from background work. They announced several times that we were greatly discouraged from writing “actor” as our occupation. The producers weren’t interested in contestants who were clearly just trying to get on TV. They had to be marketable as real people. As the auditions began, it wasn’t hard to tell who was who. The actors and actresses often sounded canned and talked about having “occupations” like “Birthday party clown,” and “Macramé crafter”.

The casting director, who looked like Lisa Loeb, and at one point revealed that she had done casting for “Flavor of Love” smiled as she went through the motions, but was in no mood for bullshit. A couple of teams were auditioning for a teacher/student themed episode. One of the teachers was a young disciplinarian and the other, an an amicable bungler. The disciplinarian’s student was a shy girl with long hair. “What’s on your iPod right now?” asked Lisa Loeb. “Uh… I like Muse and Elliott Smith,” responded the student, quietly. “Oh, you’re a little hipster, are you?” said Lisa. The lovable goofball’s student was an aspiring actress, and the only one at the audition who’d brought a resume and head shot. She stumbled while reciting a memorized monologue about the first time she met her teacher.

Couples talked about their funny/romantic/on-and-off relationships. The gay Asian team were huge fans of the shows and claimed to be life-long friends whose mothers had gone to college together in Shanghai. Yeah right, fags. I was comforted in the taste of the casting people when I overheard their bitchy patter after the social worker and her timid teammate had completed their audition. “I’m a social worker for a psychopath,” the toothy stranger eagerly said, “and in my free time, I like to go on walks and write children’s stories.”
“Is there a full moon out tonight?” whispered Lisa Loeb’s assistant.

We were the second to last team to be called, so we had the benefit of seeing how all the other auditions had played out, and watch the other applicants trudge through their practice Lingo games. Although I was nervous enough that my mouth refused to stop convulsing in tiny twitches, I think our audition went pretty well. Lisa Loeb took a shine to Rudy and when she found out he DJs in Silver Lake, said, “That’s my hood!” We solved our Lingo puzzle in only three turns, while most of the potential contestants took five or six turns to figure out the word. I’m optimistic.

After the audition, we made our way through rush hour traffic to our favorite Los Feliz restaurant, Home. It’s where we went on our first date. I wore the same outfit I’d worn a year prior, just cause I’m a cheeseball like that. Over dinner and a steaming hot piece of elaborate apple pie, we laughed about the absurdity of our audition and reminisced about the amazing year we’ve spent together. Then we went home and really celebrated.

1. Rudy

2. The Aquarium