Casting Out Loud

That which doesn't kill you gives you a great anecdote. In her early days as an actor, Barbara Bragg starved in the New York trenches with a young director named Richard LaGravanese, who went on to conspicuous success in the movies. Bragg didn't try to cash in her friends' success -- and the one time he apparently tried to help her, things went sour.

It was an audition for the film "Living Out Loud." The casting director was Margery Simkin. Recalled Bragg: "So her assistant calls me in the afternoon and tells me that the director wants me to come in, and how excited they all are to meet his friend, blah blah blah."

The part was a nightclub singer, so Bragg dressed "to the nines: fishnets, heels, lots of red lipstick. And I walked in and the casting director screamed, 'We're not looking for that!' " Worse, Simkin's assistant didn't remember placing the call to Bragg. Mortified, Bragg said she "ended up weeping in a broom closet." But she mustered the courage to walk back in tell Simkin she was an old friend of the director. "She looked like she had eaten several lemons," said Bragg of Simkin's reaction. Still, she did let Bragg put the audition on tape and leave with a shred of her dignity intact.

"It was the worst day of my life," Bragg said, with typical drama-queen hyperbole. "I did not get the part, but I did succeed at getting out of the broom closet and marching back into the room and finishing off the audition. After all, it took me four years to get into Yale -- and what could be harder than that?"

Maybe Yale should teach a course on auditioning. Bragg could do a master class.