Free Fraud by David Rakoff Page A

roundabout grammatical construction of translated Japanese if it might be all right if he were to possibly read for us a Tibetan prayer called “Inexpressible Confession.” “Would that be okay?” he mewls. Yes! we answer, collective tantrum subsided, triumphantly forgiving and eager for dharma enlightenment once more.
    But I leave as he starts in on chanting the Tibetan. My taxi is here to take me to the train station. It is a scorcher of a Memorial Day, and as the cab drives away, the vinyl of the car seat burns the backs of my thighs. I am grateful for this small introduction back to
samsara
—the ocean of suffering, the endless cycle of life, death, and misery that is our world of pain. Cracking a window, I lean back and close my eyes, happy to breathe the stifling air.

LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT
    Within the canon of anthropological apocrypha—you know, those mythic studies about cultures with fifty ways of saying “mackerel” but no word for “love”—there’s that old saw about the underlying proportions of the ideal female form being the same the world over, regardless of epoch or region; the Venus of Willendorf is to Cindy Crawford is to a lovely young bride in Micronesia is to the paragon of Inuit beauty, and on and on.
    The woman running through her lines right now is walking, universal perfection. She is lung-collapsingly, jaw-achingly, fall-down-on-the-sidewalk-teeth-first-take-a-bottle-of-pills-and-throw-yourself-out-a-window beautiful. The planes and angles of her face are a mathematical equation adding up to a great cosmic Yes. She’s hardly alone in her beauty, in this rehearsal room of a major soap opera called, for the sake of discretion,
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
    Pretty well everyone here is beautiful. Even the older actors are finely preserved and good-looking, all silver birch and beaten gold, except perhaps for the oldest woman, who has a dowager’s hump and has been on the show for decades, since it started as a radio drama, when that sort of thing was beside the point. But the younger actors are the kind of people one generally sees rendered in oils on the covers of paperback novels, locked in heated, semiclad embrace beneath foil letters, as huge antebellum plantation houses burn in the background. That’s a lot of roiling passion at seven A . M . Passion from which I am intrinsically excluded. I am decidedly out of my visual league here. To pretend otherwise would be self-deluded folly. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man may well be king, but in the land of the incredibly beautiful and sighted, the one-eyed man is deformed and ugly.
    In the American pulchritocracy—this society ruled by the Beautiful, a term coined by the writer Mark O’Donnell—being on
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
is equivalent to being presented at Court. Daytime Court. I know that there are millions of people across the country who might literally give their lives to be where I am right now, meeting these actors, this aristocracy of a kingdom I know nothing about; a fabled land where the men are shirtless and the women’s hair swoops with the sculpted undulations of a Mister Softee. A magical place known as (I think) Pine Bluff.
    Everyone has told me both their real and character names. However, having never seen the show nor having read the script (tried to; physically unable), I’m not entirely sure which is which, although it’s not hard to figure out when someone says, “Hi, I’m Janet, I mean Crystal.”
    I am playing a two-day part on
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
I do not make my living as an actor—it’s a hobby. On the rare occasions when I find myself at an audition, it is generally to play one of two character archetypes: Jewy McHebrew or Fudgy McPacker. Jewy McHebrew is usually a fast-talking-yet-beset-with-concern Talmudic sort, whose rapid-fire delivery, questioning answers, and dentated final consonants speak to the intellectual grappling and general worry that is so characteristic of the Chosen People,