Free Emma Who Saved My Life by Wilton Barnhardt Page B

cleared his throat in short bursts: “No Ryke, if I’m not mistaken it was Experience 16 I allowed you to help me construct—”
    â€œALLOWED me?”
    After Ryke eventually stormed off to the printer’s office (“I might be back tonight and then again I might not…”), Ira had himself picked up by the assembled auditionees and passed around between groups of people, who held him high as they could overhead. The auditionees were told to make a chanting wooooooing noise as they held him aloft, and Ira recited something like poetry: “We touch … we hold … we touch … we are a oneness … we celebrate the beingness of being…” This part of the audition came to a close when a fragile contingent of short men and slender women couldn’t support Ira’s weight and dropped him, all of them crumbling into a heap on the stage. Ira just laughed:
    â€œMercy me! These things happen…” Then he clutched the arm of one of the boys, ruffled his hair. “I love the physicality of the theater, the touching, the inter-relating…” He slapped the boy’s thigh, then put an arm around his shoulder.
    Francine whispered: “Byyye-bye, Ira. Time to split.”
    Yeah, let’s get out while we can, I said.
    Francine and I walked to the subway stop together and we laughed about what had happened and shared all our other crackpot stories from auditions. I ventured we ought to get together sometime. She said yeah, wasn’t it a shame she had to rush off. I said, can I call you? She said yeah, sure, and had a pen in her purse but no paper. I hoped she’d write her phone number on the balled-up Kleenex and she did and gave it to me.
    My first phone number in New York! You’d have thought I would have gone home and had it plated in gold, had it raised upon a DAIS, built a SHRINE for it, but instead I managed to lose it. I’m sure, by the way, Francine Jarvis was the Great Love of My Life—if I’d not lost that Kleenex, history would have changed, like Abraham we’d have founded a nation, a people …
    There was the Time I was standing in line to go out onstage, and I made idle conversation with the guy before me and discovered we had the same audition piece. There was the Time the audition was a private audience with the director who explained how he could not direct someone he hadn’t known sexually at least once. There was the Time it was so hot and miserable backstage waiting to be called, that I fell asleep and missed my audition slot. There were countless times that I traveled down to the theater to learn the play was cast, the audition was canceled, my résumé (all lies) didn’t get by the audition manager.
    There was the Time I Walked Out of An Audition:
    There was this petite little blond woman who went onstage before me. We were auditioning for this experimental work and the call was for lots of young people. Here we were.
    â€œAll right, love,” said the director, this paunchy man in a flowered shirt, a gold chain around his neck, rose-colored sunglasses, very earnest, very pleading. “Tell me about yourself, Diane…”
    â€œUh, don’t you want me to do my piece?”
    â€œNo, I don’t, dear. Tell me about yourself.”
    This revealed that the girl had been brought up in Jersey, went to high school, got started in acting, she and her mother still lived in Weehawken—”
    â€œYour mother’s divorced?” asked the director.
    â€œNo,” she said, “my father passed away—”
    â€œHow?”
    She looked around as if for support. “Well he, uh, had cancer. Lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker, he—”
    â€œDid you love him?”
    â€œWell yes, I—”
    â€œDid you tell him? Before he died?”
    She was a bit irritated now. “Well yes, I did but I don’t see what this all has to do