My memory of my day as a day-player on Law & Order
published in NYPress in 1996
Typecast
Mike the PA pages me to find out if I want to ride the courtesy van or if I can take the subway on my own. Even though taking the courtesy van means getting up at 5:15 AM and springing twenty bucks to take a car service to the van, I say yes. Because this is a luxury day and I refuse to settle for less than star treatment.
When I get out of the car, I see two guys with walkie-talkies and “Law and Order” baseball caps. They ask me my number and name. I say I don’t have a number and they ask if I’m an extra. I say, “I’m not sure. I have lines. But not many.”
“Then you’re a principal,” one of them up-talks. “Go to the courtesy van down the block.” They grin at each other snidely.
I wait inside the van for half an hour for all the other actors to show up. I introduce myself to one of the girls playing a hooker. But she’s not too social. She acts like this is Just Another Shoot, adjusts her pillow and goes to sleep.
The episode takes place at Columbia but we’re shooting it at Queens College because it’s cheaper to shoot there. When we get to the campus, a PA tells us to help ourselves to breakfast and then get back in the van. The breakfast isn’t bad. Oatmeal, bagels, doughnuts, coffee, tea, cold cereal, orange juice. I grab some of everything. I feel no shame in reaping them for all they’re worth because you never know the next time you’ll get a meal this good for free.
We enter the campus and stall behind a Lincoln Town. The door to the car opens and Jerry Orbach comes out and heads toward a PA in his slow hunched gait, sipping from a paper cup of coffee. He looks perfect with his hangdog eyes and that “I Love NY” coffee cup in his huge hand, wincing a little after each sip.
A PA shows me my dressing room. He apologizes that I can only get one channel on my TV, but I don’t mind. It is a room with a door and a bed and my character’s name is taped to the front. Myra.
An ugly girl name. A feminist name. The episode is called “Girlfriends.” It’s about a campus prostitution ring which gets busted when Briscoe and Curtis find out that the dead girl was one major professional. It turns out that Shelly, the dead girl’s friend, is running the ring with her dad, a shoe salesman, who uses the girls as perks for the out-of-town buyers.
At first, they think Shelly killed the girl because she was angry she was gonna quit the ring. Then we find out that Shelly’s father was boning the girl, so he might have offed her in a lovers’ spat. At the end, they arrest the dad and Shelly smiles evilly, like she is glad to see him get the rap for the crime she committed. My character is a campus anti-rape activist.
My agent submitted me for the head hooker but they thought I was more right for the activist. The audition was teeming with six-foot-tall model types with legs longer than my body wearing high black boots and short leather skirts. I dressed as butch as I could. Jeans, combat boots, boxy jacket. I actually considered trying to make myself look fatter, because I know exactly what they envision when they say feminist activist. But I figured you can never be too skinny for TV and plus I wanted to look like I was out for justice so I dressed in all black. It must have worked because after I booked it, the costume guy called me to say I should wear my own clothes to the shoot.
When I go into the wardrobe van to show what I’m wearing, they say I look perfect. Their only addition is a red armband which says “WAV, Women Against Violence.” The hair guy curls my hair like Annie. The makeup guy asks me who tweezes my eyebrows. I say Patricia Field and he shakes his head like that is a grave mistake. He demonstrates how to draw an imaginary line from the side of your nose up next to your eye and says that’s where you should tweeze to. Then he plucks the strays and fills it in with pencil so the curve is gradual instead of brutal. He whitens the circles under my eyes and glosses my chapped lips and I’m ready.
While I’m waiting for my call, I read Premiere in my dressing room and watch a soap. I write a letter and eat soup. I complain to Jackie, the other activist, about my agent making me lose weight but then still submitting me on fat Catholic school and homely funny girl roles.
There’s a knock at the door. A PA says they’re ready on set. I feel like vomiting.
Jackie and I walk up to the student activities building where they’ve set up a table that says “End violence to women” on a red and white banner. We’re told to wait inside the building and practice our lines.
We watch a van pull up and unload the lighting and sound equipment. A PA calls us outside and all of a sudden I’m face to face with Jerry Orbach. He shakes my cold hand with a gloved one and says, “I’m Jerry. You must be the feminazi.”
The director introduces himself and walks us through the moves. On my first line, I pick up a crate filled with fliers. The camera follows me to the table, where I put it down, cross around and pick up another crate, then cross to the other side of the table to say my last few lines.
There’s a crowd of students and extras watching as I fumble through the blocking. We rehearse it three times and I get it wrong a different way each time. But just as I think I’m getting the hang of it, the director says he wants to switch the positioning of the two cops and block the whole scene in reverse. So I run through it again and get it even more wrong.
I’m sweating and thinking how they’ll never hire me again and how my dreams of one day playing a perpetrator will soon be shattered, but Jerry smiles nice and this gives me faith. We do the first take. The director likes it, but wants me to pause before I say, “The cops wouldn’t do anything about rape if they did know,” so that the camera has time to pan to me. We shoot it again and Jerry thinks that one should be a wrap. But the director wants one more.
While we’re waiting for the crew to set up for the last take, Jerry says that stereotypes are a funny thing. Once, after a shoot in the West Village, he tells me, the cast and crew went to a lesbian bar nearby and the two women who ran it were cute as could be. He says they were such good-looking women that it wound up being an educational experience. I like Jerry.
We do the final take and break for lunch. I sit right next to Jerry and then Benjamin Bratt, the other cop, sits opposite me. I’m kind of attracted to Benjamin, but I know I can’t ask him out because it would be totally unprofessional and I don’t want to ruin my chances of getting cast again. After lunch, Jackie and I go back to our trailers, give back the armbands, and get in the van to Manhattan. The only disappointment of the day is that now I can’t be on for a year, even though I only had five lines. They do it so viewers don’t recognize actors from previous episodes.
Oh well. Maybe next year, when my hair’s longer and my ass tight and toned, my eyebrows perfectly plucked and my mustache hair waxed, and I’m going up against the next Winonas and Juliettes and Livs, they’ll cast me as a hooker.
With a hot girl name. Like Suzanne.
I’d get to cry fake tears on the witness stand and dress like a high class ho. I’d get big residuals. My name would be in the opening credits. And out of gratitude for their faith in me, I’d get custom T-shirts printed for my parents which said, “My daughter was a prime time prostitute and all I got was this lousy crop top.”
