Backing

"What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell."

-- Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin


--

Been almost a month, I think, back in Nebraska. I brag to distant friends and former co-workers that I have accomplished a lot in a few weeks, but really I have settled a lot. I've settled more than I've sought, attained, conquered. I feel like the heyday of my comeback (such as it is) was the second week, when I nailed three auditions in a row, callbacks subsequent.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

And the truest accomplishment in the days following? I finished White Noise. Helluva book. Those last 50 pages are a vicarious speed race confrontation with death and a smooth denouement chaser. And somewhere, a voice on a TV said, "Woo hoo!"

--

So, the jobs. I'm in a show at the local children's theatre, The Rose, which runs in a little over a month, for a little over a month. Rehearsals start next week. I'm getting paid--plus--and they've cast me in a spring show, too, playing a flamboyant-tortured-artist-teen. Through the bam-bam auditions, a director funneled me to a talent agency's auditions, where I read one day as a confused patron chewing beef jerky and the next as a puppeteer/cashier trying to sell a lottery ticket. And aside from a brief, ill-prepared foray into the world of Aussie accents, and a grungy visit to read for an independent film, this is what I've got. By way of auditions and roles, anyway.

I'm teaching, too. My high school drama teacher owns the local dance academy, and every Thursday night I teach the "Broadway" classes: improvisation intro, voice control, expressive movement. Brief lectures. All girls. Forty-five minutes. Out by 7:15.

And yes, I'm working at a restaurant. Chic and corporate, with bulbous chandeliers and onyx walls, steps of service, pricey cocktails. Had the first blowout VIP party last night, and I bar-backed. Never done it before, gonna do it lots more. There is education in the handling of wine bottles, life lessons in the observation of drinkers, parables in the crating of glasses. It means I'm on a track (of sorts) to becoming a bartender. Months. Until I can flip and shake and twist and shout. I'm also one of few employees allowed into the wine incubator, a glassed-in tower in the middle of everything like a wine phone booth, a shoe box of silence. And maybe it was the deejay's choice of music, the smell of citrus squished into mats, the trimness of the clientèle or the impossibility of crowding behind that bar, but I had a lot of fun. It's challenging, but fun.

Being a server's assistant is cheesecake. Bar-backing is peanut brittle.