A Field Guide to Awkward Silences Read Free

for
America’s Got Talent
.
    I signed up to audition with a spring in my step and a slighttwinge of remorse at having to use my own name. This was something for which I had not been entirely prepared.
    Most of my practice (
America’s Next Top Model
auditions aside) had been under the guise that I was someone else. One of the advantages of this system was that I got to weather rejection after rejection, flop after flop, without ever feeling the sting of actual failure. Every time, I was venturing out under a protective shell. Everyone else was climbing out of trenches to face the barrage unprotected, but I was neatly secluded in the turret of a tank.
    I was putting myself out there, all the time, without actually putting myself out there at all. I was, in fact, putting someone else out there. She had her own name and e-mail address and everything. And if I failed, well, that was because I was trying to fail. Not because I wasn’t good enough. It was a neat system, really.
    None of these baffled judges had ever seen me trying my best. They had no conception of what that would look like. So I could preserve the illusion of myself intact.
    I don’t think I’m alone in believing that I secretly carry a really wonderful person around inside me at all times. This person is genuinely good and smart and talented and kind enough to do all the things that real me fails at. This person is a bang-up performer and stays in touch with all her friends and puts together coordinated outfits and when she writes the sentences that sound perfect in her head land on the page just right and she uses the correct bins for glass recyclables and doesn’t say “uh” or wave her arms around when talking.
    You would think I would be a little concerned that she has never once appeared in twenty-six years, but I feel convinced she’s in there somewhere, just waiting for her moment. The only difference between her and Failure Gloria is that people have actually seen Gloria.
    It had seemed courageous, before, this bold determination to fail,as splashily as possible. Now it felt a little cowardly. What if my worst wasn’t bad enough? Then I’d just be on record as an actual failure.
    What if, all this time, I should have been trying to be my best instead?
    •   •   •
    No. I was prepared. My training would pay off. I was going to be so wincingly bad that I’d make it on the air. I was going to join my idols. All I had to do was seem sincere. As the saying goes, if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
    I pondered my shtick. I would be a performance artist, I decided. Gloria had tried this once before at a Christian talent agency, offering a triple-threat combination of mediocre monologues, bad song, and worse dance. “Come back to Earth, Gloria,” the organizers had gently urged as I aimlessly roved the stage, staring off into the middle distance. This approach seemed ripe for a broader audience.
    I would rap and mutter and speak in tongues and shout the names of the Founders and sing snippets of “I Dreamed a Dream.” I drilled myself into the wee hours of the morning, then waited in line all day, going over the routine.
    It was almost, a nagging voice suggested, as much work as developing a real skill.
    I smothered this voice quickly.
    •   •   •
    I glanced around the roomful of hopeful people waiting to audition at the Ronald Reagan Convention Center. Either they were serious, or they had taken the pursuit of rejection to a whole new level.
    A young man with a melon-shaped head and diminished interpersonal skills approached me and sang a few snippets of Usher, spitting into my face. Old men plied their banjos, ineptly. A girl and her entire family waited in front of me, humming “Grenade” by BrunoMars, thumbing her iPod in flagrant defiance of the rule against singing to recorded accompaniment. A tiny young rapper got stage fright after the organizers formed a circle around him and tried to make him rap for the