I walked into the small, yellow audition room and stopped twelve feet in front of the cheap plastic fold-out table.
There were three of them sitting in there, bored, distracted, glancing at their watches.
The big heart inside my chest was pounding on the rib cage, hoping this was the one.
“Hi, uh …. Mr. Bruise is it?” No. 1 said.
“Yes, it’s actually Bruce, but thank you, I …”
“All right, what do you have for us today?” No. 3 said.
He was looking down, rustling some outstandingly important paperwork into some sort of crucial order.
“Yes, thank you, I, I’ll be doing a short monologue from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and another from Sean Penn’s turn in Carlito’s Way.”
I heard one of them groan under his breath.
With sweat pouring down my chest and into the front of my new shirt from Ross, I began acting like nobodies motherf***ing business …
“All right, thank you, that was beautiful, that was really well done. You’re beautiful Bruise, we’ll call you …” No. 2 said.
I walked out onto the street, and into six more years of small yellow rooms, fold-out tables, and “We’ll call you …” promises.
I’d gambled it all, and at 30 ended up humiliated, broke, and directionless.
Years later, after my time in Hollywood was over, I was sitting next to a very old man at a bus stop. We chatted for a few minutes, turns out he’d been an extremely successful businessman in the midwest.
I told him my experiences, my many failures in work, and he listened patiently.
Then he uttered something that changed the way I looked at work, success, failure, and everything else related to human industry — forever.
“You know, those casting directors really...
