Do you miss Mother?

I called my mother this evening to discuss the piece on CBS news about Sandra Day O'Connor's husband getting a new girlfriend. Her response: "So, are you projecting that this is what is going to happen to me and your father?" Let me just mention here that both of my parents are in extremely good health and showing no signs of senility other than the typical amount parents seem to inflict on their children. Well, um, no, I wasn't. But it seems that a new spot has just opened up on the extremely lengthy list of Things I Worry Vaguely About. Yay.

We move on to happier topics, or at least ones that don't involve aging and/or death, and as we wrap up the conversation she says, "Call and let me know how the audition goes tomorrow."

For those who haven't ever done an on-camera audition for a commercial, let me promise you one thing right now: it is less exciting than you can possibly imagine.

"Sure," I tell her. "Yeah, I'll call you up and tell you how I stood in front of a blue screen, acting out the two partial lines I have telling my husband to stop calling up our auto insurance company in the middle of the night, while the very sweet, but seemingly incompetent, intern at my agency stands off-camera, reading the lines of the husband. Then I'll pretend to be a Rachel Ray-style cooking show host whose show gets interrupted by auto insurance experts who want to make a burrito. Or something. I might have three lines in that one."

"Well," she says. "You can't do that first one without lying down with a pillow."

"And yet, I'll be standing up, miming an invisible pillow, and trying to decide exactly how much I can get away with closing my eyes while feigning sleep, before whoever ends up watching that tape starts thinking I don't have any eyes. 'Cuz that's what they're looking for to sell their product."

And that will probably be the high point of the audition.

Don't get me wrong, it's better than the audition I didn't go to last week where there was no dialogue, and my friend had to mime grocery shopping as a "struggling single mom" (so, I guess, the bags are heavier?). This one may even be enjoyable.

But still, I can tell my mom exactly "how the audition went" right now.