Community theater

In Saratoga Springs, you drive to your audition in the small theater in Saratoga Park. There’s a lush golf course now brown under pines along the entry road on the left, and the Hall of Springs classically sprawling to the right, celebrating the healing waters of Saratoga and holding, oddly, the National Museum of Dance. Once we saw Tony Bennett perform live, a courageous solo concert, bold and sweet and filled with adoration and fame. The audition I attend is quite the opposite, local and almost moribund, with that community theater taste and smell and suffocating personalities who strut and stammer, fret and flounce, waiting to read for Witness for the Prosecution. I am one of them. I recognize a few, those who recognize me pretend they don’t, while a rehearsal for a loud children’s musical yells from a nearby stage. I'm in Saratoga Springs with a Saratoga theater crowd, and some chat among themselves as I try to identify who will be vying for my role. Inside me I am quiet and tired and spent and I know I am only there to observe and walk away, there’s nothing here for me except the delight of a small place of hope and braggadocio, bad English accents and actors a bit unlovely, unglamorous and not quite compelling, and I am there to compete, and I am not.