of gastrointestinal bacteria aren’t even the culprit. No. The real story is that after nearly three and a half months of waiting for this audition, I’ve given up my physical form as a human and reconstituted completely as a knotty bundle of overstimulated nerves.
But today…today is finally the day of my first real audition. Not ten-year-old me auditioning for the elementary school rendition of Beauty and the Beast and losing to Susie Marren because her mom was the president of the freaking PTA, but a real audition for a real film that will eventually be shown in movie theaters across the country and streamed on all sorts of online platforms.
Basically, millions of people could end up watching this.
Gah.
What if they cast me in this film and I ruin it?
What if I end up like Mariah Carey in that movie Glitter?
What if critics crush me like they did Britney Spears when she did Crossroads?
I kind of loved that movie, and that in and of itself makes me question my taste altogether.
What if I’m so bad in this movie that I have a total mental breakdown and end up reenacting Britney Spears’s 2007?
I can’t shave my head! I don’t have the right bone structure for that!
I’m so close to telling the driver of this limo to turn this big bitch around and take me to the airport so I can escape LA like a coward, that I start digging in my purse to see if there’s anything in there I can fashion into a tail to tuck between my legs.
Any reassuring thoughts—if there even were any—from my lunch with Billie and Rocky a week and a half ago are officially out the window, bumping violently down the freeway, and about to get run over by the traffic behind us.
I’ve played shows for thousands of fans, I’ve sung the national anthem at the freaking professional championship football game; I know I’ve been in a thousand situations that huge percentages of the population have never even dreamed of, but I’m also certain I’ve never been this scared in my entire life. This is different. Unfamiliar. And so, so unsettling.
Just breathe, Birdie. Just flippin’ breathe.
I pull in a huge gulp of air and let it out. I say namaste fifteen times in my head, I pray to the Big Man upstairs, and I try to channel my inner happy place. I do more mental freaking gymnastics than a therapist who teaches yoga on the weekends, and still, my fingers will not stop fidgeting with the material of my dress.
Why on God’s green earth did I agree to this?
It doesn’t matter that they personally invited me for the audition, flew me from Nashville to LA courtesy of a private jet, put me up for a swanky stay at the Beverly Wilshire, preordered an over-the-top room service breakfast, and arranged this smooth limo ride through LA traffic—it doesn’t matter how much they try to convince me this is where I belong.
I’m a pond fish, taken way out of its little body of water and dropped into high seas in the middle of the ocean. The last twenty-four hours have been filled with the kind of luxury I never knew existed when I was a fifteen-year-old girl living in my granny’s small house in the mountains of West Virginia. My success in country music over the last nearly seven years has thrust me into plenty of rich circles, but I’m still the same twang-talking, simple girl I always was. And quite frankly, I always will be.
The thought of upending that—of squeezing myself into a lifestyle I’m not fully equipped to take on—downright terrifies me.
Billie’s found her place here with Luca, working toward her goal of becoming a Hollywood producer, but she’s had her fair share of bumps in the road. Not to mention, happy in Hollywood is not the norm. All I have to do is look to my friend Raquel to know that this place has the power to eat you alive.
I moved to Nashville at twenty-one. It’s what I know. It’s where I’m comfortable.
What in the hell made me even consider setting my sweet, seaworthy, dependable boat to rocking?
My final destination, Capo Brothers Studios, juts into the palm-tree-dotted blue sky out the window of the limo, and my heart skips a beat.
It’s really happening. I’m really entertaining the idea of taking on an acting gig. For an actual movie. That people will watch.