surge and purge

Had a big audition today. For me. Was auditioning for a Hollywood Death Cab's program called Extra Special People or ESP. It's our elite guides, they guides they let take around celebs, Saudis and rich people who live in McMansions. We charge more for a ESP tour, but you get to interact. We even have a hotel room rigged up, so you get to feel like you are overdosing on acid, like Sheldon Leonard did on his way to the grave. You're auditioning against your peers to get into ESP, so it's a different. I've had some auditions in this town, that I've approached anticipating all the negative things. Or just hoping to get-through them, to survive and feel it a physchological victory. But today, I wanted to show that I could book a job. Show my peers I was good. No one really knows if anyone is any good out there on the Tour. The last ghitng we want to do is take another guide's tour and hear the tour that torments us in our sleep one more time. If someone is funny in the breakroom, you assume there tour is good. I won't know until a couple weeks, but if I did not get this ESP, I'll be surprised.

The adrenline was surging through me today, I would find myself having to give war whoops during the day to let it out. I was to compose a poem for entry into ESP. The guy that runs it is VERY eccentric, even by Hollywood standards. Often goes around with a craveat or elizabethian collar. He used to require iambic pentameter for the poem, but now he allows you to do whatevever you want. The subject is taken from our training manual, a bit of fluff material we use if the traffic is especially heavy in Hollywood, and we are stuck. It's all about the stages a body goes through, from crime scene to burial.

I felt like I nailed it, I looked him in his beady eyes and just hammered home my limmerick on decline. I even called up friends of our who work in the funeral trade to make sure I had it down, and then I brought up real-life instances I knew, like what went on with Marilyn's body when she died.

So I learned all this new material that I wrote, I think that helps me over other guides who aren't good writers, and I puked it all out to Mr. Elizabethian. I've heard stories he can be quite brutal if things go wrong in your presentation, and he's also very competitve about his status at Hollywood Death Cab.

If I don't get this, then I will be quite surprised. Stranger things have happened in hollywood land, but it felt great to knock this one outta the park. Who loves and reads about death more than me? Who's more intellectual to get over in a morbidly funny way to high-end guests? I kept saying "just book it, baby," when I was getting nervous before the audition, and: I hope I do.