Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,54

that when they make it into the audition room, they’re feeling inadequate in the sparkle department. The secret, I have learned, is to simply let these people tucker themselves out. Having had the foresight to bring my Discman along, I popped my headphones on and let Whiskeytown’s “Strangers Almanac”—the first we would hear of a young Ryan Adams—drown out some desperate attempts at psychological warfare.

At around 8:00, some production assistants came around with forms to fill out, including a questionnaire, to which a Polaroid would be stapled. How would your friends describe you? What’s the last CD you bought? In high school, you were voted most likely to…I wrote in “…introduce the latest Savage Garden video.” I had had extensive comedy training, you guys.

Just before 9:00, they started letting people in, and once we got in front of 1515 Broadway, the line began to snake back and forth, like we were waiting for a ride at Disneyland. As the line moved, I kept passing the beautiful androgyne in the army jacket—this way, then that way, then this way. She was a foot taller than anyone else in the line, and she seemed in a very real sense to be in her own atmosphere. Her face was serene and hopeful. Or just completely blotto. It was hard to say.

At 9:15-ish, I got through the doors, up the escalator, and down the hallway full of backlit promo posters of shows (Singled Out! The Real World! Dead At 21!) and artists (Madonna! The Fugees! Hanson!). Shit was getting real.

Finally, I walked into the 1515 Broadway studio. The studio was, I would later learn, actually three studios that could be turned into one massive one, like a hotel ballroom. And if this were a movie, which in my memory it is, the camera would do a full 360-degree circle around my head before settling on my dazzled face as I took it all in. It was huge and humming with activity. Twelve audition stations ringed the room, against floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Times Square, a part of town I’d always done my best to avoid, but with which I was suddenly, deeply in love. Production assistants hurried to and fro, toting clipboards and following instructions their bosses gave them through their earpieces. The big wigs, who in this case were a maximum of thirty-two years old, sat along the periphery and surveyed the action. Carson Daly, handsome as on TV and somehow taller, prepared to do a VJ segment from the middle of the action, just as I might do someday. There was a palpable sense of joy in the air. The MTV gang was busy, but busy doing something they loved and were happy to do. Following their bliss, even if their bliss stressed them out a little. It was a world where people devoted all of their energy to all of the silly things I loved, and it was right here, eight blocks down from my office. It had been here, right under my nose, the whole time. Like Narnia.

We were called up to the audition stations twelve at a time. I went to station #5, where a guy named Joe sat me down on a stool and talked me through the process: “ ’Kay—we’re gonna just talk for a minute, so just be natural and be yourself and don’t worry about it, ’kay? And then we’ll read some shit and then that’ll be that, ’kay? S’gonna be fun.” ’Kay. I was ready. He bent down to grab his clipboard of questions and his T-shirt rode up, revealing a tattoo of two cherries, like you’d see on a slot machine, just above his ass-crack. I loved Joe immediately. I have no idea what we talked about or what I read or how long I was there—I remember it the way one would remember a really fun car crash—but apparently Joe saw something in me. He pulled a yellow slip of paper from his clipboard, signed it, and handed it to me. “ ’Kay, girl—here’s what you’re gonna do next: you’re gonna go over to the Downtown Studio and you’re gonna talk to the people there, ’kay? Just ask one of those bitches with a headset how to get there. You got it?” I had it. “Go. Now!”

I went, then. There were two more auditioners waiting by the door of the Downtown Studio, two young, fabulous types, whom I could immediately picture on MTV. I looked back at the audition area and watched as the other