The SoCal Years 23: The Sunniest Place On Earth

The Riveting Adventures of A Filipina-American Actor-Girl in the Southern California Jungle

The SoCal Years hubs comprise a series of narrative essays from the late 1990s, pre-9/11, immediately after grad school when, knowing she would run screaming back to the East Coast in the end, a young-ish Pinay New Yorker, armed with her new Drama MFA, decided nonetheless to dip her toes into the Hollywood swamp.

One pretty good Shakespeare reading and a couple of exceptional singing auditions this week. Doesn't look as though they'll be very fruitful, but at least I didn't choke.

Until the dance call Tuesday for the Broadway adaptation of Saturday Night Fever (you can stop screaming now). I am weak and clunky. My old New York cronies would never recognize me. I was BAD. It was phenomenally humiliating. Worse, my atrophied dance muscles have been shrieking colorful epithets at me ever since.

This will sound odd. Standing in audition lines in New York was one of the ways I met people who would later become dear friends. The struggling actor community tends to hang together—help out, ask advice, share audition experiences, sheet music, accessories, cosmetics for heaven's sake. Forget your dance clothes and someone's sure to have a pair of shorts, a tee and an extra pair of jazz shoes.

Here in The Land Called LaLa, if they don't know you, you're a bother. Or worse yet, completely invisible.

What was that rumor going around about New Yorkers being assh-les?

Here in The Center of All That Is Ego-Oriented, where much depends on what you say to the right people and what you don't say to the not-right, you can be assured that it's just as likely that someone who's singing your praises to your face will be making ugly faces at your back the next minute, as not.

Last May, during showcase week in NYC, an agent sat opposite me in his windowed office overlooking Times Square and crucified one of my classmates, "well, it's no good, CapriCat—she can't act...!"

Here in The Land of Cheese and Glamor, where everyone pretends to remember you from last week's networking party—then unloads in a staccato stream the details of their busy life, with a myriad many projects "in the works"—even the bigwigs near the top fear to slam any actor, no matter how new and unknown, because he could turn out to be the next Leo DeCaprio, and you his oldest friend from high school.

So they gush and ooh—oh, you'd be perfect for this—I'll send you there—call me tomorrow. And you do call, and um, actually today's a little slow—this whole week really—can you try again, maybe in a month?

And you've forked over ten bucks to register, sometimes twenty, for the chance to sit in the back behind the star and move your mouth.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Oh it's not so bad. I had my tantrum-throwing phase back in the Apple when I was but an unformed little gypsy. Now, still little, but jaded into a disturbing complacency, I have no illusions left about the industry, and I'm in a sometimes-too-comfy zen state these days.

When I was a kid, I held all those rejections as so maniacally of import, I'd paralyze myself for days. Even though I worked consistently, paid my rent, had a blast, honed my craft and finally arrived, taut and ready, on Broadway.

And now I'm here, in The Land of Road Rage, Drive By's and Mind-Boggling Car Insurance Rates, without the energy to throw a snit about having been released from the set of Frasier, the day before the taping, because the big suit decided she didn't like my look for the waitress with seven lines.

(David Hyde Pierce, by the way, is bigger in person, a little shy—the actual heartthrob among them.)

These days I vent about the traffic instead. And even that—after traffic school, which changed the way I drive forever—has disintegrated down to a dull roar.

I'm a feeble excuse for an artist—all my neurosis gone. Which constitutes a bit of a worry, because it's always seemed to me that the best and most exciting of our thespian celebs are the ones with the most extensive personality disorders.

Well, let's see. My three years of grad school were hell...but I've been so hyped about getting out, I feel like I've been shot full of happy-bug juice. I am Someone Else. I'm panicked I'm so mellow. What if I lose my edge?

I'm sure you're all out there snickering behind your open palms, since reading these pages have you convinced that no way in hell could this Cat be anything less than a quivering lump of debilitating angst.

But not in an audition room. Maybe it's burnout, but I'm not caring near enough to come in exquisitely prepared like before, adrenalin-bolstered and vibrating with the music of my nerves. Where has my hunger gone to?

Maybe once the extraneous little gratis projects are complete and I start to focus—get into dance class, find a great acting teacher (in L.A.?), start working for a wage, begin some serious writing—my natural, finely-tuned instinct for competition and insane ambition will kick back in.

Or maybe the fake smiles, customary inaction, passive aggression coupled with oily hyper-insidiousness of the denizen-on-the-make culture of the Land of the Lexus (hand-washed daily) and the White Meat Pizza will send me, arms wide open and SHRIEKING back to NYC, the rosy-red Apple of My Eye...

• • • • • • • • • • • •

...Where the seasons change and people read books instead of magazine covers. Where I can run downstairs and WALK to one of several Korean delis on the block for a pint of Macadamia Brittle Haagen-Dazs at three a.m. Find an exceptional bagel, pizza, precious tub of cold sesame noodles.

Plan a cabaret benefit for Equity Fights Aids, in my Village apartment with exposed brick walls and polished, uncarpeted hardwood floors. See Denzel Washington for free, a strapping, robust Richard III—wrong but gorgeous—at the Delacorte in Central Park.

Sit out on the fire escape over Bleecker Street and write about my strange days in the Land of Assorted Natural Disasters (the bridge-collapsing quake, the freeway-burying mudslide, the heath-swallowing brush fire, the short, but unrelenting, torrential, river-flooding rainy season).

But...but...the beaches are so beautiful here in the Land of the Career Surfer-Dude and the Outdoor Mall, and the climate so accommodating year-round, and sex without commitment is plentiful and free...New York is dirty and the people are assh-les.

Oh. I forget. Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the Apple. Put all those cops on the streets, sold Times Square to Disney and threatened to flog the natives if they weren't nice to each other. And the homeless—I fear he put them all on a bus and sent them...where?

I was back last May, and New York is an alien place. It's denizens are still whip-smart and broody. Still carry themselves with a dark, electric energy. But the store clerks are helpful and the cabbies frighteningly personable.

Ninth Avenue is gentrified, all tiny boutique restaurants and gourmet markets. All of one scumbag harassed me on the street (and that was just a leering "Konichiwa," from a lowlife who thinks all Asians speak Japanese). I thought, "Where am I?" and conceded forlornly that New York had lost its crazy fire.

Maybe a good thing. Maybe not. Some say it now combines the best of both worlds. A friendly metropolis, still chock full of deeply interesting people and an unbeatable intellectual and artistic culture—the world forever a suburb of New York City.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Well, why not go home, then, Little CapriCat?

Because in order to live in the Apple as an actor, and live comfortably—in an apartment bigger than a closet, allowing an occasional night out during the week, and not have to convince myself not to buy that Riverside Shakespeare I really wanted—I'd have to be on Broadway. And I did that already.

Now I want to create films.

And to achieve such a goal—unless one of you can prove to me otherwise—I have to be here, perfecting my craft, searching for my handhold, my niche, my community, in the middle of the action, in the heart of the game.

In a lonely city of (ostensibly) perpetually pleasant people, groveling as they grope and grab for the quick nod, the brief camera pan, the single line—the all-too-elusive place in the all-too-elusive sun of the Sunniest Place on Earth.


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