Girl Act by Kristina Shook Page A

TV. I felt lucky—go figure!
    Las Vegas, to me, looks like it does on all the postcards and in the landscape photo books. You can’t help but laugh that some money-making-organized-crime guys got together to create it. Or maybe it was all due to Bugsy Siegel. Who really knows? I felt a rush driving into it, almost a fear, and a giddiness that I could get stuck and become a Las Vegas showgirl, or a high-paid whore with my name monogrammed on thigh high-boots. It was easy to see that if I wanted to, I could create a new life in Las Vegas. The buildings are high and advertising is everywhere. The neon lights are art in themselves, designed to get your attention and it got mine. This was where scenes for Godfather 1 and Godfather 2 , Clear and Present Danger , Casino, and Top Gun were filmed.
    My overeducated, over-read father (refuses to watch any current movies) he had forced me to watch the black-and-white film The Misfits , starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe—the last picture they made before both dying tragically. It was filmed in the desert, too. I guess I just love the idea of being immortalized on film. I guess if I don’t go onto make “indie films,” (as has been suggested twice), I can always sell my soul and become a reality TV star who creates a sewn-on-words-clothing line, or an organic juice beverage or jars of veggie pet food. Nowadays, actors and actresses have to decide if they should audition for mainstream or break into the reality world; either way, they still have to hope they make it.
    But, here I was, in Las Vegas, with two options: to turn back or go forward. Shadow barked, waking me out of my absurd worry, and I pulled over to a tiny green patch while my GPS continued to say, “recalculating,” over and over again. Too bad it didn’t come with a pause button. Of course, I’m jealous it’s not my voice as the GPS guide. Why do all the good parts always go to someone else? Why ask why?
    Okay, so thinking like a loser doesn’t bring results—that much I learned during three months of therapy at the Y in the heart of Hollywood. I got fortunate and ended up with a young female ‘counselor-in-training’ for $25.00 an hour (one hour sessions only). She kicked my ass in the right direction, mentally speaking. I was only a year into my new LA life and, well, I was hanging out in various trendy Hollywood bars out of total loneliness and a lack of friends. The bars in LA are the best for finding quick company
    and I don’t mean for screwing, although that’s always an option—but people did just sit and talk while they got drunk and I nursed one beer.
    The ‘in-training-counselor’ got me to enroll in an actors group, to join a yoga class and to go to a café in Venice that held an open mic for poetry and monologue readings. She accomplished this by saying, “I dare you to find two things to do in the next two weeks besides barhopping,” and, well, I guess I’m competitive, because I said, “I’ll bet you that I can find three things and never go back to Hollywood bar hopping again,” and of course I won. Go figure! I don’t think a real ‘shrink’ would have ever said what she did. They just want to poke around in ‘loneliness’ issues and ask dumb questions about how has my mother’s ‘abandonment’ affected me, and other such crap. That’s just my opinion. Anyway, once I was out of the bar scene, I thanked her and quit going to the Y.
    “Nothing lasts!” I shouted to Shadow who had parked himself on the grass. I told him to get in and turned the car towards the freeway, glancing at the ‘Los Angeles’ sign. “Thank you, Hollywood, for Shadow,” I called out. Shadow had been just a thirteen-week-old puppy when I saw a man hitting him one afternoon in the Silver Lake Dog Park on Silver Lake Boulevard. I used to do my one-hour exercise walks around the outside of the reservoir and often watched the dogs running and playing, but this time I marched into the park and right