an actor's life

It's rare that symmetry exists. If you're caught posing by any director worth their salt, they'll permeate your hide with pepper to make you sneeze out your lines off-kilter. If caught acting, as the understudy one notch above the ticket booth seller, you can go over and wait in line at the punch clock behind the sweaty set painter and in front of the yawning script girl. Make sure you get the inked time lined up with the square on the yellow card or you get shorted. And, as understudy, forget the mirror with a ribbon of light-bulbs, you get to apply leftover makeup glancing into the glass of a roadside starving artist's painting.

With a little luck, if you listen, if you conquer symmetry in all her glory, you'll get more right-angle kisses than you are entitled too in perpetual give and take, so much easier than eating fifty eggs in one sitting, Baby.

photo: Woodward & Newman