These past few weeks, a good day was any day where at least one good thing happened. Today? Today felt like an embarrassment of riches. Or, like my mom said, it’s been quite a desert, it’s time you got to the oasis.
As I mentioned Tuesday, I signed with Ami Mariscal at Golden Artists Entertainment. You can go to that post for all the juicy details, but at the time, I was just happy to find myself one small step closer to following my dreams – or rather, being paid a living wage to follow my dreams. Wednesday was just an average day, nothing too exciting outside of catching up on my work for Grow the Dream.
Today, I was up early. To accommodate a doctor’s appointment, we shifted our GTD staff meeting a half hour earlier. The meeting went well — the work I’d done Wednesday to get us back on track for blog posts helped immensely. And my idea for implementing Tuesday videos for our latest client CSi Systems was well received by their staff.
After the meeting, I worked a little bit more on getting this site back up to its prime life, then took a phone call with a potential new client of my own. I can’t get into details here, but the call went very well. My unique set of skills and life experience appears to be exactly what the CEO was looking for. So I sent out a rate card and then headed out to an audition in Encino (about 40 minutes from where I live now).
The audition was booked last minute. I knew the contact’s name and the address, and not much else. She had found my profile on Backstage, of all places, and called me in to improv for an upcoming episode of a true crime show. I did my research, so I knew that the meeting was at Asylum Entertainment on Ventura, a producer of lots of varied pseudo-reality shows, as well as a couple of well-regarded docudramas on the Kennedy family. Not to be confused with THE Asylum, who produced the Sharknado films, among others.
When I finally got into the audition room, I was told that the show was In Ice Cold Blood, hosted by Ice-T, from Law & Order SVU. They wanted me to improv a scene as a murder victim arguing with his eventual killer. I think it went well, and I’m hoping they call me for a couple days work. I also got a call from David Palamaro, the director of Murder Made Easy — his survival job was editing for that very same show!
Afterwards, since I was already across town — and at almost 4pm, it would take me over an hour to get back to San Gabriel — I headed over to my storage unit in Reseda. Yes, if you know LA outside of Tom Petty songs and Mullholland Drive, you know it’s ludicrous to be that far away, but hey, it’s cheap.
While I was pulling out clothes, kitchen gear, and digging for the DVD’s I promised to loan a friend, the US Census called. The caller ran me through a painfully long, drawn out “interview,” then put me on hold for 3 seconds before offering me the job. The Census is weird – every 10 years it’s different people, and every operation is stand alone. So I have to get another fingerprint, background check and ID photo taken, even though I did all that back in August and worked until October on the Address Verification operation.
Regardless, he offered me the job and I accepted. So within a few hours time, it looks like the financial stress of the past couple of months since I left the school and the Census operation ended is going away. And this time, I intend to more carefully budget, while working extra hours to bank the savings for the next lean month or two.
Oh, and on the way home, I stopped by the Burbank Post Office and found a check in the mail — my portion of a class action settlement against my former “employer” SPAR. I put employer in quotes, because they operated as a piecemeal business and didn’t properly pay or account for breaks under California labor laws. I didn’t care at the time, but I’m happy to have the resources now.
One final note — got home to see a couple emails from author John Zelenski. It seems that a production company wants to speed into production the feature film version of John’s novel, Walker’s Vale, that I adapted for screen, more years ago than I care to remember.
God is good all the time. All the time, God is good.