The following post first appeared on Sheylara.com on April 23, 2004.

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Going to an audition is like taking an ecstasy pill and then not being allowed to party and dance.

I told this to Chong last night over ICQ and he said, “Like taking Viagra and not being able to have sex?”

I suppose that analogy works, too.

Auditions are very much like drugs. There are good ones and there are bad ones. Good ones make you feel good and crave more. Bad ones just make you sick. (If you’re cheapo and buy cheap drugs from dodgy suppliers, you might get fake or diluted ones which can make you physically sick.)

Mind you, I don’t actually do drugs and I don’t encourage anyone to. I just know a bit about them because there was a chapter on recreational drugs in my college Psychology course.

I had to add that disclaimer because I don’t want any gahmen bodies shutting down my site. So, here’s another disclaimer for good measure:

RECREATIONAL DRUGS ARE EVIL! They make you impotent and eat your brain cells and kill your kidneys and make your parents sad.

I am such a model citizen.

Now, back to auditions.

What happens at an audition is that, depending on what I’m asked to do, varying amounts of adrenaline will course through my body and my brain’s serotonin factory will work overtime.

The result is that my creative energy is up and I’m on a high and I want to dance and jump around and do all sorts of crazy things.

But auditions are short-lived. They make you do fun things and get you all excited. They let you show off for a while, and then they say thank you, now bugger off because I have 6,355 more applicants to see.

See what I mean? It’s like being invited to a rave party (keeping in mind that my knowledge of rave parties is purely academic), and they give you a party drug, but the moment the drug starts kicking in, they shoo you off home.

Can anything be more anti-climatic?

And then, there are bad auditions. Which is when you’re made to do things you’re not that good at or you’re feeling especially nervous because Najip Ali is the casting director (yes, that happened once).

So you do a lousy job and you feel like a fool because you’re sure that everyone thinks you suck because they’re staring at you like you have a piece of lettuce stuck between your teeth and you think the best solution to all your problems in life is to go home and lock the doors and board up all the windows and never emerge from the house again.

In any case, I don’t like the feeling I get after an audition. It’s like, I don’t know what to do with myself and I have all this energy to release but nowhere to release it to. And I’m trembling because my nerves are all fired up and I feel like I’m going to spontaneously combust.

AUDITIONS ARE EVIL!

But some are fun. I was at one of those last night.

I was given a monologue to learn on the spot and I did a crying scene and I had to do it TWICE because three phones started ringing in succession while I was in the midst of weeping tragically.

After that, the director played me a piece of music and told me to perform a mime to that music. I decided to act as a seed at crossroads because that was what the music made me feel like.

I told my boyfriend about it after the audition and he was, like, “How can you act as a seed? It’s an inanimate object!”

Boyfriends just don’t get it, do they?

Of course seeds can move. How else do they turn into trees and plants?

And if Garfield can talk and walk around on his hind legs, I don’t see why seeds can’t sing and dance and do income tax returns.

Anyway, that’s the great thing about being an actress. You can justify just about any shit and you can be anything or anyone you want.

But auditions are still evil.

SO ARE PARTY DRUGS!! OK??