The sad part is that somehow along the way, we were led to believe perfection was even possible!
It is not.
But that hasn’t stopped us all from attempting to achieve it, has it? In fact, Life itself has the very audacity to have , relatively speaking, such a short shelf life, that knowing no better, we think if we can achieve perfection, maybe, just maybe, we can live forever.
But if there ever was a flawed notion, a genuine definition of
imperfection, it’s the idea that
immortality is something to strive for! Life sucks, so why prolong it?
These grey sad thoughts were filling Adelaide’s brain, as she slunk out of another lousy audition.
Why was she battering her singing and acting skills against Stone walls and every opportunity in the hopes of one day, landing an actual job as an actor on a stage, with a paycheck at the end of every week. Going into it, she knew show business was a tough one, but she didn’t figure it was this tough. She was the best thing in her high school acting class, and in college, she distinguished herself by winning even the best actor award her senior year.
New York city and all the dreams she had of achieving success here was another story altogether. True she had only been here a little over a year, but she couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t on Broadway yet. …..she would read the Sunday New York Times every week, she saw her friends names in it, people who had far less talent than she did and she would rip the paper into shreds at knowing they have achieved something she had so far been unable to. Every room she walked into she felt she had to be perfect. She felt she had to meet the expectations of the people behind the table who had the power to give her a job and because they held that power, she experienced a nervousness and a terror she never had experienced before.
When would she actually get a job? When would she actually land a role? She had lost sight of the fact that auditioning was part of every Actors work, and that auditioning sometimes was as close to perfection as an actor could achieve because there would always be critics who would take issue with the work you do ……your idea of perfection would never be someone else’s.
And that was the awful power and the wretched glory of living an artistic life.
Then one day, having hit rock bottom, one glorious Wednesday morning, she walked into a room, not caring anymore, and as a result, she didn’t much care what they thought of her. All she thought about was how good it felt to be singing a song she loved
and she felt gratitude. That she had the voice to sing it. She really experienced the ecstasy of not caring, and as a result, they asked her to come back and read from the script, even then she was filled with the perfection of knowing she could walk away at any time, survive it and as a result, having that glorious moment of self possession, she landed the job.
From the depths of despair to the height of ecstasy, later that day, she left her agents office with a signed contract and treated herself to a pound of good chocolate.
Nibbling on it as she rode the bus up eighth Avenue, chocolate melting in her mouth, contract securely in her purse, she knew that moment of perfection was brief, but she seized it nonetheless. She hugged it close.