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If only it were that damn easy.
I still like to think I could have been all those things I wanted to say to her back then, a way for opportunity to translate into, if not happiness, at least a manageable contentment; a warm body that makes you laugh and can be counted on to be there.
For now; with my eyes exploding and my skull a bubbling cauldron of primal gray matter, I head to the auditorium at the Summerlin Public Library for my audition with the most prestigious community theater organization in Las Vegas, the artistic status equivalent of the most prestigious pantomime troupe in Los Angeles; it sounds more glamorous at first than it should. In front of an audience of two dozen competitors, a girl younger and more beautiful than Dana, which is to say less experienced and thus, less attractive, melts down completely at the beginning of her improv assignment and scurries off the stage murmuring “I can’t I can’t I just can’t do this and I guess I’ll see you guys down at the mall or something.”
I nail my improv. I get the spot in the prestigious workshop. I know now what I’ll say to Dana. I come back the next night to pick up my uniforms from the Al Phillips Cleaners with my rap and my approach down pat.
But Dana’s not working that night. The frump says something about her having a hot date. Heading back to the Sentra it seems to me this particular dry-cleaning shop does an incredibly lousy job of pressing and creasing my uniforms and I swear I will never return to this place for my business again. I try to convince myself that I am somehow different, that I am somehow better than the meltdown girl at the audition sure to be hanging out at the mall I am now headed towards with a handful of Mexican diet pills shaped like pink hearts, gripped firmly in my right hand, quivering.
Previously appeared in “Shoots and Vines” and “Sparkle and Blink.”
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