Free Why I'm Like This by Cynthia Kaplan

for the lead in an independent feature. I have already been in one independent film that actually made it to the Sundance Film Festival, but my part in it was so small that my character did not have a name. On my résumé, though, I call her Janice.
    The character I am auditioning for, Sarah, is the out-of-work wife of a millworker and she is having an affair withSusan, the college-bound granddaughter of Sarah’s black neighbor. The focus of the story isn’t the sex, the director assures me; it is about Sarah wanting to be Susan. Sort of a Catskills version of Persona . After the audition I go home and read the script. There are a series of funny, pathetic scenes of Sarah lying her way through job interviews in a crumbling, town-that-time-forgot town. I am interested, that is, until the scene where Sarah has sex with Susan and has to simulate orgasm-face on-screen. Is it a tasteful but explicit scene? Or is it soft girl-on-girl porn?
    The director calls and tells me I’m the front-runner for the part of Sarah, and she asks if I will come read with a bunch of prospective Susans. The director and her crew are now ensconced in a room in the offices of a film company on Washington Street. The building has been renovated expensively using a lot of exposed cedar beams and moldings and it smells like a freshly cleaned hamster cage. I read scenes with a succession of attractive black actresses, the last of whom makes the greatest impression. She is beautiful. She wears boys’ suede sneakers, jeans low on her straight hips, a tank top, and a baseball cap on backward. I could never pull that off. And her acting is very sullen, almost as if she isn’t acting. As it turns out, she isn’t. She’s a poet and she has never acted in her life. This bit of information will eventually be the source of one of Life’s Great Ironies. If you can’t guess what that might be, don’t worry, I’ll fill you in later.
    In late August, the poet and I are officially cast. Rehearsal is a strange affair. Nonactors can be more temperamental than actors. It’s not their fault; they don’t know the protocol, like the one where you act with the other person in the scene.
    We shoot the movie over the month of October in upstate New York, the cast and crew all living together in a big house. Someone shoots at us through a window one day because they think we are making pornography. My greatest success is that I manage to convince the director that the orgasm close-up should be of the poet’s face, not mine.
    We run out of money.
    A year later, with more money, we return to the Catskills and finish the movie. In the hiatus the poet has taken acting classes and becomes more fun to work with. We get into a bunch of festivals, including a prestigious festival in New York. The film gets some very nice and some okay reviews. I get some very nice reviews, too. My friends call me and say, “This is it, your life is totally going to change.”
    In fact, nothing happens. Well, one thing. Two months after the film screens in New York, my father-in-law passes away. He was a fairly conservative, old-school gentleman, and it is intimated more than once that seeing me locked in an erotic embrace with a black woman hastened his decline.
    I finally get a theatrical agent when I perform a piece of my own at a reasonably hip theater company and am a hit. There is a sense of legitimacy an actor gets from having an agent, and all these years I have wondered what that feelslike. Now I know. It feels mostly like my agent sends me out for things I am not pretty enough for.
    A year later the poet appears in a highly publicized film at Sundance. Her picture is in the New York Times .
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    Maybe the best I can hope for now is that everything will collapse and I will have to move, I don’t know, somewhere horrible, so I can rise again from the ashes like the phoenix, and I, too, will write of those harrowing days and