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basking in the glow of compliments and having envious thoughts about hair when I should have been preparing. I can’t afford to mess up an opportunity. My heart is pounding hard and fast now.
    “Ready?” she asks, with a listless half-sneer that she might intend to be a smile.
    “Um, yes. Totally. Totally ready.”
    I would be great in a car crash, or at giving CPR. I’d be the one you’d ask to perform the Heimlich maneuver if someone started choking in a restaurant. Because in a crisis, I get very, very calm. I’m calmer in a crisis than I am in actually calm situations. So while she puts film in the Polaroid camera, I quickly scan the copy, remaining calm, focusing on my lines, ignoring the stage directions. They won’t be helpful for this kind of commercial anyway. They’re usually descriptions like “she inhales the intoxicating scent of the fluffy towel.” There’s never anything real: “She sits at laundromat breathing through her mouth due to sweaty guy hogging dryer nearby.”
    The lines , learn the lines: “… smelling like a fresh spring day … waterfall take me away … Niagara—honeymoon in a bottle.” I don’t quite have them down, but I’ll be fine. The material doesn’t seem particularly original, thank God. For once, I’m relieved to have just the same generic mom commercial I’ve had a dozen times before.
    I take a deep breath as Vintage Glasses snaps a Polaroid of me against the stark white wall, stapling it to my eight-by-ten head shot and résumé so the casting people can see what I actually look like today, in contrast to how my face looks when I’ve had a chance to have it enhanced and retouched.
    I follow her into the audition room, which is carpeted and windowless and bare, except for two chairs where the casting people are sitting, and a rolling cart with a TV and VCR on it. A video camera is set up on a tripod, which is pointed at a T-shaped mark made of masking tape on the floor where I’m supposed to stand. Facing me from about fifteen feet away are two women, both in their thirties, with matching parted-down-the-middle stick-straight hair. Vintage Glasses pops a tape in the camera and a red light near the giant black lens comes to life. The lens feels like another person in the room, a person who never speaks or smiles, who only stares without blinking, never looking away.
    “Hi, Franny, how are you, great? Great. Really great to see you,” one of the stick-straights singsongs without looking up from her clipboard. “If you don’t have any questions about the material, then state your name and agency and go ahead whenever you’re ready thankssomuch.”
    I try to swallow, but my throat is too dry. This is the kind of room that’s hard to do well in. If they’re in the mood to talk, I can crack a few jokes, make a small connection, and give myself a moment to settle down. But these girls are all business.
    I look down at the paper. I’m not going to panic or ask for more time or tell them I didn’t really have a chance to go over it yet. I’m going to remain calm, as if I’m a professional. What does your character want more than anything? Stavros always asks us. Clean laundry , I say to myself. More than anything , I wish I could get my laundry cleaner . I try to breathe, I can only manage to suck in a tiny bit of air. It will have to do.
    “You know what’s hard about being a mom? Nothing.” Clean laundry . I smile, as if I’m sure I’ve got this whole mom/laundry thing under control. There’s nothing I want more than whiter whites .
    “I always have time for my kids. They’re my number-one priority.” I relax a little, picturing a kid named George I used to babysit in high school. He liked to be tickled, and he couldn’t say his “F”s, so he called me “Whanny.”
    “I always have time for my friends. It’s all about balance, ya know?”
    The stick-straights are giggling, I think, or is that my imagination? I can’t hear that well due to