Missed a casting this morning. Skipping castings throws off my whole day’s game: in the eight-odd months I’ve been in this industry, this is only the third I’ve failed to make (the other two were in Paris: I once skipped a go-see at a magazine based in a Paris suburb during the Métro strike because the line that served the hamlet was not running, and I missed another that trailed at the end of my ten-casting schedule because of an hour-long line at a silly hair casting). Although I suppose sometimes I give the opposite impression, I do take this profession seriously, because it is how I eat. My approach to castings boils down to You Won’t Know If You Don’t Go! so I try to, well, Go.
Throw in residual Catholic guilt, workaholism, an overwhelming desire to share my modeliciousness with the world, and poverty, and you have yourself a heady cocktail of self-directed rage when a $0.50 shortfall in bus fare necessitates an embarrassing stepdown from bus 1 of 2, a mad 9 a.m. search for an ATM, a subsequent search for a corner store to buy a bottle of water to break the $20 the ATM upchucked, a subsequent (successful!) reattempt to board bus 1 of 2, and a final, abortive, fruitless, soul-crushing search for the stop for bus 2 of 2.
By the time I found it, my cell inexplicably beamed 9:58.
The casting ended at 10:00.
It was apparent no vehicle would or could come in time to whisk me there. I pursed my mouth, turned up Iggy Pop on my iPod, kicked at a paper bag straying down La Brea, and turned around to catch bus 1 of 2 back where I’d come from. I would have done an angry dance, but I’m not that cool. Dial the guilt up to 11, for the casting I missed was my first since Friday, and I could really use a job right about now.
Here are some pictures I took at an Indian grocery store I went to for lunch with my friend Sami. They serve a mean chicken curry, plus this spiced okra dish. Since my early May job inexplicably switched locations from the Maldives to upstate New York, I’ll have to get my fill of delicious subcontinent-and-environs foods here on the West coast.
Rice in bags pretty enough to imagine repurposing, like people did with flour sacks in the Depression. One time at Crafternoon! someone made a basmati sack into a tote bag.
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(This photo by Sami.)
Sweets solve even the worst modeling-related guilt.
1 response so far ↓
Albatross // April 17, 2008 at 9:49 am
*Phew* glad you’re back! I was beginning to wonder if the April Fool’s post wasn’t!
(Not that I’m any more diligent in my own posting but I have an excuse: I’m lazy and shiftless.)
I’m surprised that your modeliciousness was not sufficient to get someone on Bus 1 to front you $0.50. You need to practice the eye-flutter. the moue, and, if all else fails, the falling-down-in-the-center-aisle tantrum. That last works for me.
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