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I’m assuming is $14,000, a year while I try for acting jobs.”
    “Not so fast,” Deb chimed in. “Those are all 9-to-5 jobs. Even if you only worked half the shift, they’d expect you there when 42
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    you were supposed to be. And those are prime hours for auditions.
    “What are you going to do if you get a callback, but it’s in the afternoon, when you’re supposed to be checking some budding Hemingway’s spelling? Tell them to forget it?”
    “The idea is to remain flexible, I get it,” Joyce said. “I’ll be a waitress somewhere, I know I’m good at that.”
    Debbie grandly slid a dime under her dish and winked at her roommate.
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Chapter 7
    A short while later a tall, thin man in a light overcoat blew into the apartment, as if he lived there and had forgotten his keys.
    Debbie didn’t seem alarmed, so Joyce sat back and waited for the introductions to come. First the fellow squeezed Deb’s butt while he turned her so he could stare at Joyce.
    Then he whipped off his coat and flopped into a chair with a heavy sigh and an affected manner.
    “This is Ron,” Debbie said.
    “I’m the best, but I’m taken,” Ron said, feeling up Debbie’s rear again.
    “Ron is a jerk,” Debbie said, pulling away but smiling at them both.
    Ron was an actor too, at least back in his hometown. Joyce discerned by his accent that was somewhere in the South. He hadn’t had much more success than Debbie, but Ron had cast himself in the role of aspiring actor, and he delighted in playing himself, Joyce discovered.
    He insisted on reading a scene with her, and Joyce cringed inside. This kind of self-absorbed person would need to be the center of attention, she thought. Not the kind of partner you want for a cold reading.
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    He rejected most of her suggestions for material. “Streetcar’?
    That’s practically a cliché. Nothing left in it because everybody reads it,” Ron proclaimed.
    They settled on Christopher Hampton’s play “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” because there were two copies in the apartment.
    Ron was the manipulative Valmont and Joyce took the role of the Marquise. Amelia made several unscripted appearances as the pet of the salon, and Debbie was their appreciative audience, perched on the couch with a bag of Doritos.
    Joyce had only seen the movie version, but felt that the key to her role was subtlety and an almost eerie inner calm. Ron was all over the place, full of broad flourishes and hammy asides. He badly wanted to do the duel scene, but the women wouldn’t go along with him.
    Debbie sat transfixed while the two read all of their characters’
    speeches. When Joyce had said her last line, “In the end, all there is is the game,” Debbie didn’t applaud or call out.
    “Ohhhh…You radiate evil,” she said after a moment, in the context of the play a glowing review. Ron started to preen until he saw that Debbie was talking to Joyce.
    He sulked for a little while, but Deb massaged his shoulders and fussed over him. Ron brightened when Joyce asked him for tips on how to audition; he missed her wink to Debbie.
    “When you’re reading, ignore the stage directions,” he said.
    “They are what the playwright saw in his mind, but you are free—
    encouraged—to find the character in your mind,” he said.
    “The obvious ones, like “she walked out,’ of course you follow. But stuff like “she whispered” or “she was upset’, those are up to you.”
    Joyce nodded, interested in spite of herself.
    “In Michael Shurtleff’s book he says to ignore transitions, and I think he’s right,” Ron continued.
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    FRANK JULIANO
    The women smiled again—Shurtleff was a famed casting director. Joyce wondered what he would think to know a self-absorbed novice agreed with him.
    “In life, we don’t stop to show how we got from emotion A to emotion B, we just do it,” Ron said. “There’s no need to show the audience a transition, and it feels false.”
    “Another