my best foot flowered

i thought today would be a very long and painful day.
i've recently sat through numberless hours of countless auditions for our own movie in a position where i actually had some say in the matter. so when i got a call from a friend at cosmic, asking me to come in and run a camera for 12 hours of auditions, i was contemplating where my threshold of sanity would fall; even when people care about my opinions i'm climbing the walls after five hours.
and on top of all that, i didn't get much sleep last night.

me+little video camera+white limbo cyc = my day.
i brought a book on lighting to read.

instead of a stuffy agency, it was a rather cool and laid back dude from a local ad agency who was cool to talk with as i ate whatever food i felt comfortable eating out of their fridge and chatting with the colorist guy during the breaks between auditions.
[was that a coherent sentence? trying breaking it down into subject, verb, object and circling the topic]

the auditions were for a....what did he call them? a micro-site?
for their holiday campaign, staples is making 20 little websites that you can go to and just play around--no advertising at all. the two that this company is doing are:

1- a sort of 'mad libs' Christmas letter. i remember the 'fargo forum' did a similar thing several years ago, where you fill the blanks of whatever template you like, be it the 'perfect family' or 'dysfunctional family'. this site will feature a 'church lady'-esque character telling you the secrets of writing [and embelishing] that perfect letter.

2- remember 'a Christmas story' and 'flick', the weiner kid who licks the flagpole? imagine a site where you can have a kid with his tongue stuck to a flagpole sing you any of twenty Christmas carol selections [and have a secret code that will get you aaron neville's greatest hits]. genius stuff, i tell ye.

thus, the first six hours of auditions were ladies and dudes in dresses and other creative apparel [how do you spell that?] reciting a monologue that was rather funny. personally, i thought i could have done it better myself. and so i did. i auditioned and didn't make the callback list.
meh.

the second half of the day was in some ways more interesting. first off, people [from both sessions] started thinking i was someone of importance, because they would ask me questions, and after a few rounds of this i began knowing enough to answer. this must have worked well for the real guy, because i ended up running the auditions, even to the point of giving these kids direction during their performances.
and speaking of which, seeing kids ages 8-13 singing 'jingle bells' whilst holding their tongues can run the whole gamut of interest, from pitifully dull [some kids just don't have it, despite what their mom's may think] to genuinely and incredibly funny [some kids do have it, especially the one who brought in a broomstick to act as the flagpole, doing an entire monologue, or the kid who mimed the pole actually coming out of the ground and falling on him].

good people to work for, i read the entertainment weekly article on this new 'borat' movie while waiting for the dvds to burn, and made it home in time to see the final few episodes of season 3 of 24 [and yes, that had us gasping on the edge of our seats, understanding what phil meant when he said he wasn't sure if we were ready for it--in 24, they will do anything].