Wednesday Blahs

I've got a good case of the Wednesday blahs, which actually go very well with my Tuesday and Monday blahs.

Here's one of the reasons why I have the blahs.

I got a job with a casting agency as an assistant and lost it without having worked a day.

Back in the early 90's when I was first living alone in my little studio apartment I really liked it. Being alone. Living alone. It was nice and that feeling lasted for a long time. After I stopped working a part-time job in addition to my full time job that feeling turned to loneliness a few years in. I realized that I had been spending too much time working and not enough time making friends and developing a life outside of work.

To combat that lonely feeling I started planning different activities for myself. I joined gyms but inevitably failed each time because I didn't really gel with anybody at the gym. I would have one conversation with someone and then never speak to them again. In addition to that, I always felt very intimidated in the gym and would stop going. So I started working part-time jobs again.

I found one I liked that I thought would lead to meeting people and making friends. It's the job I'm doing now. What actually happened though is that the job just served to put me in the same place as many different people. That worked too for a while because I wasn't alone. But I still felt lonely.

Watching shows reminded me how much I used to crave working in entertainment so I started taking acting lessons - which helped me with my loneliness problem. I was spending quality time with other people, rehearsing scenes, going out to dinner with classmates after classes.

But I learned that I didn't like acting - found it too personal, painful, revealing. I joined up with some friends and in 2000, we put on a production at the American Theater of Actors on 54th Street. I was a producer, a director, a stage manager and casting director.

So, I got the idea that I might be good at casting. I went to those workshops that they advertise in the back of Backstage and learned that you have to work for slave wages or for free to get into casting. Living alone and on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis I could never really do that.

But now, things are different and while I still have to work, I'm not stuck in the same spirit crushing poverty that was my situation back then.

So. . .I met with a woman who runs a casting agency who told me that I could work for her for free and she would teach me everything she knows about casting. She was willing to work around my theater schedule and accept any time I could give her.

I was going to start this past Monday. Sunday night she called to tell me that her accountant had given her bad news - that to be an unpaid intern I would have to be a student working for credit. We couldn't do it. I couldn't work for her for free and she couldn't pay me.

But she did tell me to register with her agency to do some extra work.

So I guess that is something.