My leg kept moving up and down repeatedly driven by my anxiety. I haven’t felt like that in a long while. Me, auditioning at fifty years old, who would have thought! I was never an actor or anything, I was just described as “funny” and “smooth” sometimes, nothing more than that.
Around me, the other candidates—my opponents—were pretty much having their own version of my tick, some hedging towards breaking down, others more chilled, a couple touching their nose with the same frequency I was moving my leg, clearly for other reasons.
This person was sitting in front of me, serious, immobile. Their pose was a bit weird, they were like holding their knees but the thing that made me feel uneasy the most was the sunglasses and the—supposedly—staring at me. They could have been sleeping for what I knew but the impression was screaming: “I am staring at you, deal with it”.
"Do I look like a man or a woman to you?" out of the blue they said something, I looked around me, trying to understand if I was the target of that simple yet extremely complex question. “Are you talking to me?” I asked, pointing at myself like a five years old. “Of course, I am talking to you indeed! So, am I a man or a woman to you?”
Damn, I felt like the anxiety I was feeling before was nothing compared to this pressure, everyone now was suddenly looking at me, were they going to ask me they same question? Hopefully not!
“I think, I think that you might be a woman but if so, you are trying to make it hard to figure out, no offence, just reporting what my retina and my brain told my mouth to say” I politely replied, pretty proud of myself, I thought I had avoided the thermonuclear social awkwardness alltogether.
“You think you are smart, I see. Pfff you are so privileged. Horrifying, also, what is someone your age doing in a place like this? Did you look around yourself? We could all be your children, luckily we are not, I am pretty sure about that… ha ha haaa” they had replied stinging like a wasp, somebody else chuckled in approval.
“I don’t care about the contents of your trousers, I answered out of courtesy, now if you don’t mind…”
“Told you, you are so privileged that you can’t even say what you think, you have to evade a tough conversation because you know that I would destroy you otherwise” they interrupted me with another blow.
“You are right” I had interrupted that interaction there and there, my tone being deeper and stronger. In my head resounding like an “Enough!”
“Mr Rogers, do we have a Mr Rogers?” a secretary called from the door at the end of the room. “Hi! That would be me” I stood up. replying while walking towards her and nodding goodbyes to my competitors.
As I entered the room for my audition, three black people, two men and a woman, well, I guess, like I have ever did with anything else in life. They were sitting at a big desk, waiting for me.
The woman in the middle stood up, gave me a firm handshake and added:
“You are hired, the part is yours, what happened outside was your audition. We are looking for people like you, you are perfect for this role. So our job is over, it has been a few very hard months. The job though, I must add, It’s not necessarily going to involve acting but… are you familiar with leadership and particularly with the responsibilities of a President?”