Rejection of the Week: Typed Out

by George Reddick

Back in my actor days, I got pretty used to rejection. But one audition I attended was particularly rejection-tastic.

It was a cattle call. Hundreds of people show up for these open auditions so you have to get there really early if you want to get out in time to work the dinner shift at your restaurant that night.

On these days, I usually was going on about three hours sleep after working late the night before and schlepping home to my tiny one-bedroom apartment I shared with a roommate out in Brooklyn and then schlepping back to get to the audition site by 6AM. The doors didn’t open till 9, so those of us who got there early had to form a line and rely on each other to honor the line order as we were taken inside.

When I arrived, I was twelfth in line. Three hours later, they finally opened the doors. By then the line was snaking out behind me all the way down and around the block.

This particular audition was being held at Chelsea Studios in Manhattan. To get up to the floor where the audition is being held, a moderator sends people from the line upstairs in two rickety old elevators.

The first six people in line were put in the first elevator and the next six people, including me, were stuffed into the second elevator with some other people who worked in the building.

And then my elevator got stuck. We stood there, body to body for a solid half-an-hour while one woman cried and we punched the alarm button.

Finally, they got us upstairs. While we had been on the broken elevator, well over two hundred people had been brought up in the working elevator. I was now 275th in line. The six of us who had been stuck pleaded with the moderators to be let in early and they told us they’d do what they could.

Six hours later, I was finally brought into a room with fifty other hopefuls. The men behind the desk were in the process of “typing out.” This means you line up in groups of ten and each line steps forward toward the desk of judges. The judges look for about thirty seconds and then choose if they want to keep anyone from the line. The line then disperses and the next line steps up.

I was typed out. This means I did not sing or read. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. And I was late to my dinner shift and caught hell at the restaurant.

Yeah, that profession was awesome.