I hate the 110

So I went to my audition at USC the other night. What an ordeal! Getting there and back - the audition itself was pretty simple.

I gave myself an hour and 15 minutes to get there. Took the 134 to the 5 to the 110. Traffic was horrible. There's just no easy way to the 110 in bad traffic. There's several exits and streets you can take to USC. I THOUGHT I was taking the best one but it turned out to be the worst! I went a certain way because I wanted to park on the same side of the street as the campus because I know there's parking there and so I don't have to cross a massively busy street. So I take the route that will get me driving down that side of the street. A little longer that way but I didn't want to have to make a U-turn or find somewhere to cross the street. That was a HUGE mistake. There was massive traffic on the street I needed to turn up so I go down one more street and backtrack. Well, when I get to the intersection there's police cars everywhere and one is blocking the street I need to go down. So I turn onto the street where the big traffic jam was and I see that street is blocked off in the opposite direction which is why there was so much traffic. There was plenty of parking on that street and I'm probalby not going to be able to park any closer and now it's almost my audition time so I decide to park and walk - I wasn't far from the campus, just across the street, but not near the section of campus I needed to be. Cops are walking around, one even has a dog, and there's a helicopter flying around. I don't even know if they'll let me on the campus. Or if I should be walking around by myself with all this going on. But there's tons of people who look like students walking around and there's cops everywhere, so it must be somewhat safe. And I have no way to get in touch with the people auditioning because it was all set up online through Actors Access so I can't even call and say I'll be late. As I'm walking down the street I see the cops with some dude in handcuffs. Don't know if it has anything to do with what's going on. I head over to the campus and the cops tell me I can't walk down that side of the street so I have to cross the street - now I'm walking down the side of the street I was trying to avoid parking on! And there's traffic going that way so I should've just taken the shorter route and driven down the street that way. I find a place to cross the street and there's plenty of parking on the campus side of the street and now cars are driving down that side of the street. Ugh! I had almost driven through the campus from the other side but was scared I'd get lost and if I had done that I would've gotten great parking. Oh well. As I get onto campus I'm thinking, man, I'm late. That's so bad. Then I'm like, okay, it's a student film, and I'm sure with all the police activity going on other people were late too, and there was nothing I could do. I find my audition - it's in a new building and I was trying to find it and all of a sudden I look up and I'm there - this HUGE buiding with arches and courtyards and fountains. It looked deserted but I tried a door and it was open and there was a board in the lobby that listed where all the auditions were. I had the room number but still felt better it was listed on the board. I found the room somewhat easilly and filled out some sort of info sheet. Then some dude comes out and asks if I'm there to audition and I explain why I'm late. The guy doesn't mind, asks if I know what's going on, they could hear the helicopter flying around, and says he's been hearing bits and pieces from other people who auditioned.

The audition went fine - the diretor explained a few logistics to me, had me do it, gave me some direction, had me do it again, then had me do one more thing in another part of the script. Then they went over the schedule with me and that was it. All that for a 5-10 minute audition. But that's how it usually goes. One minor amusing thing happened - there's one part in the script where my character blows a whistle. I happen to have a whistle on my keychain and before I did the 2nd read I said I happened to have a whistle and I could use it if they wanted. So they told me to use it and I did. Okay, I have never used this whistle full-blast and it is LOUD! It's the horribly shrill whistle. MY ears hurt after using it. I can't even imagine what it will sound like on the tape! Oh well.

I wanted to leave a stack of postcards at USC - I was going to write something like "please consider me for your next project" on the back of them - but something more clever. But it didn't look like there was anywhere for me to leave them in the new building. So I go next door to the old building where I know a lot of film stuff goes on. There's a bunch of boxes in the lobby but I see the little place where I was planning on leaving the postcards - there's a bulletin board and a shelf. I try to open a door and it's locked. Oh well. All of sudden this guy who was doing something with a trash bin in an alley starts telling me how it's a ghost building and nothting's in there anymore and it's all moved over to the new building. I thank him and leave. I could go ove to the new building again, but it was somewhat empty and I didn't see anywhere to leave my postcards. Oh well.

So that was it. Then I sat in traffic for an hour going home. My plan was to go to work after the audition and I had put a salad in my car to eat at work. I was starving so ate it while I was sitting in traffic on the 110. By the time I got back to the valley it was almost 8:30 and I was exhausted and still hungry and decided I could get more done at work if I just went in the next day so I went to Ralph's, bought some food, and went home. I kind of knew I wasn't going to make it to work after the audition so it wasn't a big deal. It's times like this I remind myself why I stay at this job - because I can make my own schedule pretty much as long as I get everything done by certain deadlines.

I got my new hard drive up and working this weekend! It was much easier than I thought - when I installed the operating system on the new drive it gave me the option to move all my settings, applications, documents, etc. from the old drive to the new drive so I checked everything and said yes. Took a little while to copy it all over and do but it was easy - just press yes and it's done! My new hard drive is now the main drive and I'm slowly deleting things from the other hard drive and will eventually just wipe it out and use it for extra storage. Everything is backed up anyway in case I delete something I shouldn't.

I'm trying to decide whether to audition for that play tomorrow. I never did find out the rehearsal schedule which could be a problem. I'll see how I feel tomorrow.

I'm also supposed to find out about the internship sometime in the next few days. Now I'm a little worried about scheduling. I managed to arrange some things at work so that the only time I ABSOLUTELY have to be there is for about a 3 1/2 to 4 hour time span on Tuesday mornings. The rest of the time I can make my own schedule. Now someone is making it difficult for me and it may interfere with the internship...