atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business by Peggy Pope

even applaud? Should you just go home and clean the oven? And then put your head in it?
    No! You’ve stepped onstage, into another world. Space. Light. You could almost see your script by it. Sometimes the paper shook. Sometimes it didn’t. You could never count on anything. You were introduced to a row of people halfway back in the auditorium. You couldn’t see them. It was dark out there. Sometimes they would say hello or something friendly like, “So you’re going to read for us? Well, go ahead.” But mostly they talked among themselves, whispered, laughed, and ate sandwiches.
    It was up to you to start or to signal to the stage manager who read with you to begin, depending on who had the first line, and you read a scene from the play that was going to be the liftoff for your future. The stage manager stood downstage from you at an angle, out of the light, with his back to the auditors so they would see only you and every aspect of and flaw of you. He read in a monotone so that you could do all the acting. You couldn’t touch him at an appropriate moment as you might in real life, because that would put you in shadow with him. He never moved. You never saw his face, and so nothing could happen between you emotionally that might contribute to your performance. You were as alone as you were ever going to be.
    When you finished reading, and shaking, and squinting, you would be thanked—with only a “Thank you”—from the darkness and led away like a dog in a dog show by the stage manager. Or you might be asked to read another scene, to wait and read again after they had eliminated some of the competition, or told to keep the script, which was a good sign because it meant they might call you back another day so they could determine if you were what they wanted, like a new car.
    And then you went and had coffee and wondered if there was a lightbulb on Broadway with your name on it.
    Today, when it costs a fortune to turn on a lone work light in the theater, auditions are held in office buildings. You get on an elevator with a lot of ordinary people, get out, sign in, wait in a hall, and go into a bare room lit by fluorescents. You read the script or sing the song to three people sitting ten steps away behind a table and in front of a window so you can’t see them against the backlight. They’re looking at you or not looking at you. It’s nice if they look at you, but often they’re eating the eternal sandwich and looking at your résumé while you’re acting. The reader they’ve hired to read with you doesn’t want to be touched any more than the stage manager did.
    So you do the best you can and go for coffee and wonder if there is a lightbulb left over for you.
     

Falling for Mr. Roberts 
    Trailer:
    At that point, Leigh Gutteridge got on the bus. It was six thirty in the morning, and we had been waiting for him. He had not been to bed, as far as I could see. Clothes askew, hair going every which way, tired, happy, handsome, and lovable, he pulled a woman’s sleeve out of his jacket pocket, a long sleeve from an evening dress. He looked at it, puzzled over it, and said, “Where the hell did I get this?” He climbed into the nearest seat and fell into a deep, satisfied, snoring sleep.
    That was San Antonio, Texas, where the women went wild over the hunks that Josh Logan had cast for the national road company of Mr. Roberts. It was the story of thirty-five men doomed to sit out the Second World War in the South Pacific on a freighter, never to see action.
     
    I had found an agent, Sara Enright, through my college professor. He gave me a note of recommendation to give her. That’s how Noel Coward got his start, so I was hopeful.
    Sara, her fine white hair piled on top of her head but occasionally straying off in other directions as well, sat in her chair in a narrow, wood-paneled office talking on the phone all day. She never said hello or good-bye on the phone or in person. Waste of time. It was dial,