Jim Sturgess can’t stop making out with Evan Rachael Wood and I can’t get in to see Gloria Swanson’s beautiful estate in Englewood.

It’s after 1am in New York, what am I doing? Getting ready for bed, but what where hundreds of actors doing Sunday night at this same time? Sleeping on the pavement outside the Knitting Factory downtown or waking up and showering to go audition for the open call of Spiderman the Musical. Insanity! Sometimes you have a feeling that an audition is going to be packed, in this case we’ll call it Spidey-Sense, but I had a feeling that Spiderman the Musical would bring out the crazys. They’re the same crowd that goes out to audition for American Idol (yes, I know I’ve done it — that’s beside the point). On a regular day of auditioning, you may wait all day, but if you show up at 10am in the morning, you will probably be seen before 5pm. At the most there will be 200 people. But today at the Spiderman auditions there had to be at least 2,000 people. Where are these people on a normal day? As I walked past the line I asked I guy I recognized from other auditions what time he had arrived – 6:15am and he was not anywhere near the front of the line. The sad thing too is that the auditions where just for the lead roles and they are supposedly already cast. According to the CEO of Marvel Comics, Evan Rachael Wood is supposed to play Mary Jane and Jim Sturgess is supposed to play Peter Parker. This makes perfect sense considering Julie Taymor is directing the play. Taymore for those of you who don’t know directed The Lion King on Broadway… oh and Across the Universe (one of the most underrated films of 2007 in my opinion), which starred, yes… Evan Rachael Wood and Jim Sturgess. Still, people where lined up around a city block and already beginning to wrap around a second block. Crazy.

I don’t care what the musical is, you won’t find me camping outside to audition… there’s too many shows I can be seen for. There was one however last week that I was hoping to audition for that I missed. While there where supposedly people that showed up at 6am for that audition, I didn’t even make it at 10am — but it wasn’t entirely my fault. I’d like to lay some of the blame with Zip Car. For those of you that don’t know, Zip Car is a car share/rental company. You become a member and then you can rent their cars by the hour or by the day for a fairly reasonable price. Very useful in a city where most people don’t own a car. My friend Mike and I, had taken a car to New Jersey. I’d accompanied him while he went shopping. He shopped and we joked and laughed and I kept thinking about the thrift store in Brooklyn I’ve been meaning to visit. On the way back he decided to show me some mansions in Englewood — one of which used to be owned by Gloria Swanson of Sunset Boulevard and silent film fame. On our way over there we were pulled over by the New Jersey police. Apparently our license plates weren’t visable. We dug around in the back and found the temporary plates. They’d expired three days earlier. Not good. The police also discovered that the vehicle had never been registered. Yowsa! So the police did the only thing that seemed reasonable. They towed the car. Needless to say, I wasn’t in bed early and ready to go to my audition at 10am or 6am or even 1pm. Mike decided that if I wanted to be an actor, I should avoid drinking and trips to New Jersey the day prior to an audition.