Awash with no Shore in sight

Feb 17 - Day Two of Auditions

Another productive day. We were privileged to find our Lola, Jorge, Milo, Handler, Miss Grace, and the Health Inspector. Willam came in full drag and we were all so completely intimidated by how gorgeous he was that we barely knew what to say to him. Needless to say, he nailed the audition, and I had to keep myself from becoming supine and begging him to be in my movie.

The 'Rules' for Casting

• Be friendly but inscrutable
• Wait at least two days before you call them and offer them the part

I broke rule #2. I only waited one day before I called Willam. To his credit, he requested a copy of the script before he would accept the role. Fortunately, he emailed back fairly quickly that he would take the role. I would like to add, And the rest is history, but we're still history in the making.



If you take careful inventory of the list of roles we had cast thus far, you may notice we were missing one key ingredient: Shore - our manic paranoid schizophrenic homeless brilliant adorable 20-year-old male lead. The scene we were using to audition the Shore wanna-be's was the one in which he catches Cass cutting herself, and then attempts to distract her with a rambling monologue about the moon, teleportation, the CIA, and returning to college. We were looking for someone who could impart a manic energy as he switched mental gears faster than a cyclist going uphill.

The actors we'd invited in to read for Shore looked beautiful in their head shots. We wanted these guys to knock us over. However instead of manic, we got mostly wistful.

Tip #2 for Actors - Move around the stage. Don't stand there like a fence post.

Macauley read for the part of Lola not long after Willam came in. For a straight guy who had never done a transvestite (that I know of), he was amazing. If Willam had not come in, Macauley certainly would have won that part.

We auditioned six Jorge hopefuls that day. They ranged from decent to frightening. One of them explained, at length, about a fight in which he had participated at a nightclub the previous evening. None of them demonstrated the "soul" of our philosophical Mexican gardener - except one. Mario was the only one who truly listened and reacted to the other actor in the scene. There was true intelligence, and something almost tragic, in his expression. As soon as he left the room, we all looked at each other and nodded.

Who is the "we" in "we all"? That would be me, Michael the director, my husband Craig (who I introduced as Executive Director), and Michael's friend Shanna, who was running the camera. I loved Shanna and managed to convince her to work for us on the weekends as Assistant Director.

But here we are at the end of our second and what we thought would be last day of auditions - and no Shore.