When I graduated high school, my plan was to make my way to NYC after my freshman year of college and go study theatre at Tisch like Idina Menzel. I wanted to become a Broadway actress, and I was willing to go to whatever lengths needed to get there. I knew that to get into a school like Tisch, I’d need to go through an audition that included speaking lines, singing a few bars, and going through a dance lesson to learn a small routine to see where I was at physically. Not having taken dance classes in years, I planned to join a studio, work out, and get to the most optimal shape I could be in. I planned to act in my school’s theatre company for the year I’d be there before hopefully transferring to NYC. I was already to be in the vocal music department, so there would be enough practice singing throughout the year. I went back and forth about which songs I could sing for my far-away Tisch audition, which bars from different songs I could sing, which monologues I could perform, how I would dress, etc. I dreamed about NYC life and how incredible it would be to attend the drama school that my queen, Idina Menzel, had attended herself. I imagined how incredible it would be to even get cast in a minor role or as an extra for a big Broadway show. I imagined going to workshops and coffee shops and meeting other actors who were just as passionate about theatre. I didn’t have a backup plan. It was acting or die, make it to Broadway or fail.

But that dream of mine was confronted by reality in the fall of my freshman year of college here at Alma. I came into the year still planning to use my time here at this liberal arts school in Michigan to prepare for what would hopefully be acceptance into Tisch, transferring there for the rest of my college career. I would take general education requirements while tuning up my voice, my body, and my acting. One way I planned to prepare was by becoming involved in the community theatre here in the small town of Alma. Although they were, for the fall, planning to perform the show Grease (a show which I have bad memories with from my high school years and, thus, don’t like very much) and I had never been involved in a community theatre before (again, bad memories), I decided I would get myself downtown on one of the audition days to give it my best shot. This was my dream after all!

So I did. I went down to the community theatre to audition for Grease. I didn’t particularly have any roles in mind because I was really willing to take any part they’d give me. (Everyone who is an actor probably just laughed that I said that because… well... we all know that’s never true. There’s always some parts you really want/don’t want, but you have to be open to whatever they give you.) The problem was that I had never had a real audition before. My high school’s productions were, for high school me, a big deal. But compared to the theatre programs at other high schools around the country, our small-town productions weren’t anything to marvel at. Our auditions consisted of reading lines and singing a few bars from a song of the selected show (for example, Tarzan). That was it. There was no dancing involved and it wasn’t stiff or stressful. It was very relaxed, you had very little competition, and only a select few could sing and recite lines well. In short, my auditions in high school were not remotely similar to theatre auditions in real life.

Real life auditions, as I learned, required possibly being given a number. It required singing scales in a room literally full of people that you’ve likely never seen before in your life. Your competition, especially if it’s a community theatre, is solely the members of the theatre that get cast in every production. You’re just an outsider trying to make it in against these actors that have been performing here at this theatre for years. Real auditions require reading for multiple parts, sometimes in groups. They require learning some quick choreography in a short amount of time and having to perform it in front of everyone. There will be people more prepared than you, and it will be obvious who, out of those around you, have had the luxury of being immersed in the theatre world longer than you. Real auditions are intimidating.

I was so underprepared for my Grease audition. I’d watched the movie again before going down, practiced a few bars from a song of two from the show and knew what songs I’d maybe choose if I could sing something from a different show. I stretched and walked down to the theatre in comfy pants for moving around in and brought my water bottle with me to keep hydrated.

When I entered the theatre, I filled out an availability sheet and a questionnaire. I was assigned a number and went to sit down in the house seats. It was a small theatre, but the stage was approximately the same size as the one I’d performed on in high school. As I waited for numbers to be called and the auditions to start, I noticed that everyone else knew each other. They shared jokes and stories about previous shows. I started to feel alienated and nervous. I almost got up and left without even trying, but my dream of Broadway kept me there. Finally, it was time to go. Actors were split into three groups that would rotate between reading/singing, dancing, and having a rest period. I was in the group who did the dancing first, to my surprise. While learning the routine, I felt as though I couldn’t keep up. Sure, I could dance, but the choreography was complex and the rhythm was a little fast. It was hard to pick up quickly. I felt defeated when we performed it and knew I didn’t do nearly as well as many others. Already I felt as though I’d lost to all the returning actors of this theatre company.

Then came the singing. Now, again, because I don’t like Grease that much, I had decided that, if I could, I would sing a song from either Tarzan, the last musical I had done, or be cliché and sing a song from Wicked. But everyone else in my group sang a song from Grease, so I felt as though if I wanted to be seriously considered I also needed to sing a song from Grease even though I’d not really prepared to do so. I did anyway though, not wanting to throw myself out of the running. It was… terrible. I didn’t know the melody well enough and my voice wasn’t warmed up to the point where I could sing the high notes the song required. I didn’t do well at all. And when it came time to do the readings? I botched it. I tried a couple of voices out while reading the lines and it just… wasn’t good. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I botched it.

After auditions were done, I walked back to campus defeated. I knew I hadn’t done well. I was so embarrassed at how underprepared I was for the audition. Although I couldn’t have possibly known what a real audition was like, I still kicked myself for not having done better than I did. I had no hopes that I would get cast. I knew I had done poorly even though my boyfriend at the time and my family tried to convince me otherwise. They weren’t even there to witness it. I knew that I had done poorly. I knew I wasn’t at my best and could have done so much better had I known. When I got back to campus, I plopped myself down in one of the open buildings and cried.

I cried because I realized that maybe I wasn’t cut out for the real world of theatre. Maybe, if this was how theatre was – the rough auditions and the underprepared-ness – I didn’t quite belong there. I couldn’t dance like the other girls at the audition who had been doing real productions since they were five. I couldn’t keep up with the returner actors. I, a girl who hadn’t begun acting until her junior year of high school, just could not realistically compete with the kind of caliber other actors would be bringing to the table. Some of them were lucky enough to have been pursuing theatre for years, but I had only been nurturing my dream for two. I just didn’t have the practice or experience. This was why I didn’t audition well. The missed opportunities would, I thought, forever keep me down and out. I could never catch up to the level of professionalism many others my age had already reached. If this was how a community theatre audition for Grease went, how would my Tisch audition go in Chicago, surrounded by more theatre veterans with more experience competing for a spot at the renowned Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in New York City? I was a nobody in the theatre world and I knew it.

For the next two weeks, I held out hope that maybe I would get cast in the production at the community theatre as an extra. Even that would be enough for me. Eventually, the call came and I let it go to voicemail. I hadn’t been cast but they’d “like to see me audition for another show sometime.” I was disappointed but not heartbroken. My heart was already broke and my dream had already been crushed. It wasn’t a surprise not to be cast, but it still hurt.

I gave up on Broadway. I just knew that I could never be equal to theatre veterans my age who have been performing for years even if I did drill myself and go to dance classes and be involved in theatre productions and even possibly take voice lessons. It wasn’t going to happen to me, and it hurt to realize that and let my NYC dreams go.

In the end, although I sometimes wonder how my life would have turned out if I hadn’t stopped pursuing my Broadway dream. Could I have made it to the room where it happens? Could I really defy gravity? Or would I always be waving through a window? My bad audition helped me to realize though that as much as I loved theatre, it was a dream of self-fulfillment. It was for the purposes of making myself happy, and I wanted to do something to directly impact and help others. It was then that I turned to becoming a teacher. I never would have become a Secondary Education major and realized I wanted to teach students and help prepare them for the types of challenges they might face in the real world if I had never been confronted with the idea that perhaps I wasn’t meant for Broadway.

Did the audition suck? Yeah. Was it heartbreaking? Yeah. But without it, I would have never realized what I really wanted to do or found out that I wasn’t meant for Broadway after all, and that’s okay too.