Learning How to Fly

Nothing was coming my way in Seattle acting-wise and my friend Michael Simms, who had moved to Vancouver from Los Angeles where he hadn’t been getting enough work and now was working practically non-stop in Canada, told me I should get an agent up there and give it a shot. So I sent  my pictures and resumes to a few agencies in Vancouver, interviewed with the two best prospects and picked one who seemed the most interested in me. They immediately sent me out on an audition for a role in a television show in which I was cast, and then an old friend from Darryl Hickman’s acting class, Bob Saget, came up to Vancouver to direct a movie and he cast me in a small part as well. Going up and down to B.C. for auditions became a normal part of life and I came to know Vancouver as well as I did Seattle.

I was sitting on my bed in the middle of a familiar daydream imagining myself in the mountains of Norway in my cousin’s cabin hiding out from the world, having mercifully lost every shred of ambition when my agent called and told me I had an audition for a film being shot in Seattle. I made up my face, dressed for the part and got into my ancient clunker for the drive into the city. I passed the University of Washington and crossed the bridge going over Lake Union, looking at the breathtaking views of Seattle and the car started making funny noises. I was almost to the Union Street exit when it died. I steered it over to the tiny triangle that separated the freeway with cars going seventy miles per hour from the cars entering the freeway at sixty miles per hour and stopped. Cars were whizzing by me and no one gave me a second glance, including two highway patrol cars that I tried to wave down. I sat in the car hoping that no one would hit me, even though a few weeks ago, when I was feeling sorry for myself, this would have seemed like a really good opportunity to get smashed up and killed. Now that I was there where it was a distinct possibility, it didn’t seem so appetizing. I hoped and prayed that the car was merely overheated and that after awhile it would cool down and I would make it to the exit and down the hill. I figured I would be so late to the audition they would assume I wasn’t coming and that was the end of that.