Being an actor in New York is really hard.

I’ve been to three Equity Professional Auditions (EPAs) as an Equity Membership Candidate (EMC) since I came to the city. For those of you unfamiliar with this ritual, it involves waking up at the ass-crack of dawn (6:30 AM), arriving at the audition center an hour before the audition starts (8:30 AM) waiting in line to sign up for an EMC alternate slot for when the audition begins (9:30 AM) and waiting/hoping that either a) the auditions slots do not fill up with Equity members (which has never happened so far), or b) aforementioned Equity members fail to show up for their slot and thus you are picked up the alternate list to audition. Of course, part b comes with the caveat that Equity actors can always come late and essentially cut in front of all EMC and non-Equity actors for a place in line. If you are Equity, this is a godsend. It means you can have a life, a job, a nap…

If you aren’t… well this means you wait in uncertainty until the audition is over (5:30 PM) and you might not get seen. That’s 9 hours of waiting for naught for those of you counting at home.

This has happened to me twice.

And this is why I am ecstatic. Today, I broke the unlucky streak. Today I had my first New York audition. I don’t expect to get a job from it, but I had a chance to act, for 2 minutes, in front of a casting director who just so happened to have come down to see us at the Humana Festival! I got in the room!

Awesome!

p.s. I was the very last person seen today at #15. I forgot to say that. I was about 15 seconds this morning from losing 9 hours and feeling really sad. I still feel bad for the friend I met from the second EPA who was #16 on the EMC list. We went to lunch together. He’s a nice guy. It will be nice when we’re all Equity. *sigh*