Since my last, disastrous audition on January 18th, I did not hang up my tap shoes and stop acting. What happened that next day was something that happens more often than it should in Hollywood. I had booked a commercial for January 20th for a product called "Instant Lift," for well-endowed women like me who need a little extra boost. It is a British product, and the spot was to run only in Great Britain, but the producer said they were fine with having a few Americans give their testimonials. But as of around 4 p.m. on January 19th, I still hadn't gotten any word on where and when to go for the shoot, and I was starting to get worried.
About that time my phone rang. It was Beau Bonneau Casting, calling from San Francisco, wanting to know if I could work as an extra on "Trauma" the next day. This is the only network show still filming in the Bay Area as of right now, and I have worked on it one other time. I don't like to say no when they call me. So I said, "Let me check to see if I am still booked for tomorrow, and if not I'll call you right back." Sure enough, when I reached the producer, he stammered that he thought he had e-mailed me that the Brits had decided not to use any Americans on the spot. "Great - thanks for letting me know," I told him sarcastically. It was a good thing I had gotten another job, at the higher $139 AFTRA day rate, or I would have just been out $120. This happens about once a month to me right now, and there's no payment if the job just gets canceled. This part of being an actor sucks.
So I called Beau Bonneau Casting (BBC as we will call them) right back and got booked on "Trauma," with a call time of 11:30 a.m. It was now around 4:30 p.m. and I had a six-hour drive ahead of me. I had not planned on leaving until Thursday, and I was not ready to go, so I went into overdrive, packing as fast as I could. One advantage of having an apartment in Hollywood is that I can leave a lot of wardrobe here. I have a set of toiletries here, my laptop stays here, acting books are here, my (fake) Oscar is here (for motivation)...you get the idea. So packing is usually not too much of a chore, except that this time I had a lot of dirty laundry, and I was going on vacation right after I got home. So I just crammed that into two big shopping bags like a college student going home to Mom, grabbed the wardrobe items that travel with me because I use them the most (lab coat, karate kid, judge, and waitress), and was on the road by 5:15. Along with everybody else getting off of work in LA County.
Ah, driving in LA. The drive to and from my apartment in this city is the single most difficult aspect of this entire experiment. It is 364 miles from my home in Foster City to my apartment in East Hollywood (Little Armenia, to be exact). When the traffic is lightest, which is usually at night, I can make it in five and a half hours, driving about eight miles over the speed limit most of the way. When traffic is heavy, it can take seven hours or more. And gone are the days of driving eighty miles an hour or faster once you hit the wide, flat expanse of I-5. With California verging on bankruptcy, traffic cops and CHIP officers are stopping as many violators as they can, and they never just give a warning. It's not personal - the state just needs the money. I have been ticketed only once since I started making this drive regularly in 2005, but I was driving 90 mph in a 65 mile an hour zone, AND talking on my cell phone (before it was illegal), so I was lucky to get away with just a speeding ticket for $270. Now I set my car on cruise, eight miles over whatever the limit is (usually that means 78 miles an hour), and go.
When I first started making this drive, it was early spring, and most of the rain had stopped. For those of you who are unfamiliar with California seasons, and we do have them, here is the scoop: it usually starts raining in November and stops in February. It can run longer in the north and shorter in the south, but that's basically the rainy season. And the rest of the year, it doesn't rain, and we have that glorious California sunshine that our state is so beloved for. Eight months of sunshine is pretty great. But when it rains, it really pours, like a monsoon, sometimes for up to two weeks in a row (again, this is mostly in the north, and mostly in January), and in the Bay Area, where it is not as arid as the LA desert is, it can feel very damp and cold in the winter (and the summer, when SF is covered with fog most of the time). But one advantage of all the rain is that the mountains that bookend my trip are lush and green, whereas the rest of the year they are golden brown because they are dry. And after a long dry summer, they frequently begin to burn. Twice I have driven close enough to watch retardant being dropped on raging fires near LA, and at night the fires looked like they were coming from Hell itself.
Spring and fall are definitely the best times to make the drive. After I make it through the mountains to I-5, I enter the great Inland Empire, known as "the salad bowl to the world." All kinds of fruits, vegetables, and nuts are grown in the great Central Valley that stretches for about 250 miles between the Santa Cruz Mountains along the coast and the Sierra to the east. On clear days, you can see both ranges, but when it is hazy, you can't make out either. The land stretches out flat and empty for miles in all directions and looks just like Nebraska. The population and politics aren't that different from Nebraska, either, except for the ethnicity; most of the inhabitants are Latino migrant workers and farmers who are deeply religious and deeply conservative. Politically, California may be blue along the edges and in the cities, but it is deep red in the center.
So in the spring, with all the flowering trees like apples and oranges and almonds and pistachios, the vast orchards are beautiful with their pink and white blooms. And in the fall, when the grape harvest comes in (there are a few vineyards in the valley, not like Napa, but enough to make it picturesque), you can see clusters of grapes on the vines before the pickers go to work. After they are done, the leaves of the grapevines turn a beautiful orange and red, almost like the maples back East. There are even a few cotton fields along I-5, which always make me nostalgic for "dem ole cotton fields back home" in the South, from my childhood. I don't think there are any in Huntsville, Alabama, where I grew up, now, but we have them in California. Thank goodness, they use machines to pick it, because it is back-breaking work. But the fields always look a little like snow to me after they have finished, because they don't get it all, and the leftover cotton looks like a melting snowfield.
Speaking of snow, we do get it in the mountains on the drive. Twice I have barely made it over the nearly 4200-foot Tejon Pass coming out of LA, "up around Grapevine" as everyone calls it down here, before the State Highway Department closed I-5 due to heavy snow. And I mean heavy, like two feet! I was surprised it would be that much, but it gets really cold up there. Once I left LA when it was 80 degrees during the day, and by the time I made it over the pass the temperature had dropped to 45 degrees (it is less than 50 miles). Because LA is built on a desert, such dramatic swings are common from day to night, and then add to that the change from sea level to over 4000 feet, and you can get some big changes in weather. I always have a jacket with me.
I used to enjoy the drive, just looking at the scenery and listening to CDs in my car. Then my CD player broke, and I haven't gotten it fixed. I use my iPod, but frequently I forget to charge it (I'm sensing a little irresponsible theme here), and then I have to resort to the radio. And boy, I-5 in the Central Valley is not a happening radio place to be unless you like Mexican polkas or gospel music. They do have "Love Songs with Delilah" on at night, but I can only get that from about the halfway point to LA on, and once I hit the Tejon Pass I can't get any reception at all. It's the same way with the cell phone - I try to talk to Keith or my mom (on Bluetooth, legally) but the reception is spotty and once I get out in no man's land, near towns with names like Lost Hills and Buttonwillow, I might as well give up. So I have lots of time to think, and that leads to boredom, and often that makes me sleepy.
The drive can get really dangerous. Because most of I-5 is a long, straight road with very little to look at, it is hypnotic. I used to get up very early sometimes to avoid an extra night away from home. The last time I did that was the first time I dozed off and ran into the back of another car as I was exiting to get some Diet Coke to wake me up. It was a pretty bad accident that nearly totaled my Acura, but fortunately no one was hurt. I have had one more incident since then, when I ran off the highway into the median and nearly lost control of the car. The cops stopped me for suspicion of DUI, but I was just sleepy! After that, I quit getting up early. Now, if I have to be down here early I just come down the day before. I'm not going to risk my life doing this.
Anyway, on January 19th, I made it home fine, in exactly six hours, beating the two-foot snowstorm that fell that night by two hours. I was in bed with both of my sweethearts, Keith and my pug, by midnight, and I slept until 9:00 a.m. and still made my 11:30 call. We had an easy day on the set of "Trauma," playing diners in an Italian restaurant in North Beach. One of the stars, Jamey Sheridan, was playing drunk, and stumbled into a girl at my table, and we all glared at him, so we will probably be seen in the scene. I think the show has been canceled, so it will be one of the last three episodes that airs. But for a canceled show, they still served an awfully good craft service lunch!
After my nine-day vacation with my mother in Orlando, I am back in LA now, having made "the drive" once more only one day after I got home. This time, I had to be down here on Tuesday, February 2, for an On-Camera Acting class. This will be taught by the Artistic Director of the Hollywood Underground Theater Company, which I was invited to join last month, effective February 1. So I am about to learn first-hand whether I need to be taking acting classes or not, and what happens when I do. And that, my dear readers, is a story for my next post.
Til then,
Jennie
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