I found her!

I am so very excited. After a couple weeks of casting, I have found a comedic goddess. She is hilarious. Her name is Suzi Barrett, and she will totally be famous some day! She is just so darn funny. We've cast her for a series of commercials, and I'm just so totally relieved to have found someone so great and funny. I was so worried I wouldn't!

After this round of auditions, I do have one for my wall of shame. Perhaps it's a bit tacky, but I have a wall of shame behind me at my desk at work. It never fails that, at least once in every round of auditions I have someone so crazy that they wind up with their headshot on this wall. I will protect their names, but here are some stories:

1. Let's call her "Montana" - she crashed the audition where we were looking for a pretty girl, complete with unibrow, extremely masculine body type and resume with nothing but drill sargeant experience!

2. "Greg" - I was looking for a sexy straight man. He lookes straight in his headshot... but then he walked into the audition with no shirt on (for real!), asked me to get him some water!, and then proceeded to do his best straight man impersonation, which was not very convincing. At our front desk there's a little candy machine that spits out M&Ms. You have to turn a handle and they go through an obstacle course to get to the bottom. Usually, very bold people visitors may walk up to it and turn it once to get 2 candies. The girls at the front desk told me he walked up there shirtless and turned it 20 times in a row!!!

3. "Elaine" - Very blonde. This may be tough to re-tell, but she came into an audition where the girl was supposed to talk on the phone to an answering service. I encouraged auditioners to use their cell phones rather than miming a phone. When it got to that section in the script, she picked up the cell phone and proceeded to dial. I was reading the other part off camera, and said hello... and she looked at me... then down at the phone... then at me... she didn't seem to understand why the voice wasn't coming from the phone! So she then hid the phone behind her back and proceeded with the scene. Cause that makes sense.

4. "Sarah" - Actually in this last round of auditions. She came in and did a very dry reading. (PS this is for a dental commercial) I told her she could do it again... but to PLEASE bump up the energy and give it her all. She said, do you really want me to go for it? I said yes, of course. So she ran over to her bag and pulled out a huge bag of sugar and a spoon. And she ate it. Big spoonfuls. While doing the EXACT same reading that she did a minute ago! Just chewing sugar! For no apparent reason except that it is a dental commercial and she was supposed to have neglected her teeth... but it had nothing to do with the scene! At the end she said she felt sick. I wanted her to leave the room as quickly as possible, and I knew she was a real estate agent as well, so I tried to make a joke about how hyper she was going to be after all that sugar and said "Well, go sell some houses!" To which she replied "Is that a hint?"

Well, yes, darling, in fact it is.