Audition Update and Sidewalk Etiquette.

I have a god-damned mosquito bite on my hand. God-damned mosquitoes.My audition from this weekend went relatively well, I think. I read for the main female role opposite a couple of different people, and I didn’t do anything terrible like trip over my own feet and land face-first in the director’s crotch. Not like that’s ever happened to me before or anything. It’s just an example of a Terrible Thing. And it didn’t happen. Really. Which is good. In any case, I have a callback for Sunday.

After the audition was over, one of the men with whom I’d read came up to me and asked me how old I am. I thought he was joking, because we’d just read a scene together in which he asked me the same question, and I responded like the character in the play: “You can’t ask me that!” He was serious though, so I told him my age, which is twenty-two, and then he said that he was thinking something like that, but he couldn’t tell because half the time he saw me, I looked fifteen. I don’t think I look fifteen. Do I look fifteen? I don’t look fifteen. (Although, I suppose I’ll be grateful in twenty years’ time, if I still look fifteen then. Grateful, or a freak of nature. One of those.) Once he confirmed that I was of legal age, he told me that he liked my audition, and that he works for a dinner theatre that’s always looking for new talent, and could he have my phone number so that he could call me when he got home? You know, to let me know where I should call for information about seeing a performance and setting up a meeting. I gave it to him, but I left there honestly unsure if I’d been asked on an audition, or on a date. To further complicate matters, he called me yesterday, but I couldn’t answer the phone because — ahem — I’m out of minutes until October. I picked up his message today from work, and he did give me the number for the manager of the dinner theatre, but he also left me his number, in case I wanted to “um, talk, or something.” Yeah. I mean, nice guy and all, but I’m not going to date him, whether he gets me work or not.

How exactly does one turn down an offer of a date? I don’t like to lie, and I won’t be mean to somebody I’m going to have to work with, but I don’t know how to say “no” without hurting feelings. For a long time, I just said that I had a boyfriend, which was true, and then after that I would tell them that I was a lesbian, which I at least thought was true, and those were legitimate excuses that had nothing to do with the person I was turning down. What can you possibly say when you’re single and available, but just not interested?

There need to be lanes on the sidewalk the same way that there are on the highway. People who are going to walk slowly need to stay on one side of the path so that people like me who are ACTUALLY TRYING TO GET SOMEPLACE don’t get stuck standing still while trying not to be late for work. This is something that’s bothered me since before the dawn of time. I’ll respect a person’s right to walk as slowly as he pleases, even if I will mutter under my breath that he’s a fucking moron, but I will not put up with the people who walk slowly while weaving back and forth across the entire sidewalk so that swifter non-morons can’t get by. And by “swifter non-morons,” I mean me. But you knew that already.

I’ve been trying to find an old friend of mine, and it’s proving impossible because both his first and his last name, according to the 1990 Census database, are among the 15 most popular in the US. Typing his name into Google with quotation marks gives me more than 36,000 results. Without quotes, it goes to over 5 million. He hasn’t registered as an alumnus of the college we both went to, and I don’t know where he went to grad school, other than that it was out of state. I don’t know what else to do at this point. It’s not a matter of any urgency, but he was a good friend to me, and I want to see how he’s doing.