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thirty-eight and now disengaged from the world’s premier blockbuster movie star, Lauren Short couldn’t afford to be choosy about getting work, especially since she had not been seen in movies or on television shows for seven years.
    When her agent, Todd Mitchell, had sent her any script back in the good old days, she would begin reading it immediately, often finishing it before the envelope it came in hit the floor. The thicker scripts had excited her the most since they held the promise of extended projects and larger paychecks, and there were plenty of big paydays when she was in her twenties. She had starred or costarred in eight films over a four-year period, and while five were ensemble “sister” films, they had made her extremely visible to the moviegoing public. She had won half a dozen BET, Black Reel, and Image Awards for those movies, but once she’d started dating Chazz, the scripts stopped coming overnight.
    Todd Mitchell, her agent, had tried to explain why. “Lauren, baby, Chazz is white, and that’s why, um, why you’re not getting any more, um, ethnic scripts.”
    “But shouldn’t I be getting more mainstream roles, then?” Lauren had asked. “Shouldn’t I be ‘crossing over’ to multicultural movies? Sanaa Lathan has done it. So have Zoe Saldana and Kerry Washington.”
    “I’ll look into it,” Todd had said.
    Todd had looked into it.
    Nothing had come of it.
    As a result, Lauren quit acting to become Chazz’s arm candy at awards shows, premieres, and film festivals, spending stupid amounts of money on designer dresses she wore only once.
    For seven years.
    Today she held a script Todd had sent to her by express mail. She read Todd’s brief cover letter:

    Dear Lauren,
    Shantelle Crisp isn’t quite dead yet!

    In 2001 Lauren had starred in Crisp and Popp, a TV crime drama. She played the sexy, wisecracking detective Shantelle Crisp, and Hayden Billings played the no-nonsense white detective Richard Popp. They solved crimes when they weren’t flirting, lusting, and sleeping together. The show received rave reviews, mainly for not being “overtly racial,” but NBC canceled it because the stand-up comedian and lead writer of the show, Will Weaver, had upset the world during a live HBO special just after 9/11. . . .
    “Why is everyone blaming George Bush for all this?” Weaver had asked a packed audience in Los Angeles. “Sure, our president is a little short on intelligence, foresight, and knowledge of the English language, but terrorists have been on the warpath since the seventies. Didn’t we arm Saddam Hussein so he could fight the Iranians? And didn’t we give weapons to the Taliban to fight the Russians? Didn’t we know that this sort of thing was bound to happen eventually? If you give guns to pissed-off people, they tend to use them against whoever pisses them off at the time. Instead of pointing fingers, we should be pointing missiles . . . at Washington, D.C., and Langley, Virginia. . . .”
    Lauren sighed. I miss doing that show. Crisp and Popp was a smart, well-written, groundbreaking show that didn’t deserve to die because Will Weaver told the truth. That show was funny in all the right places, sexy in even more right places, and looking back, just about everything Will Weaver said in his rant was the absolute truth. No one wanted to hear the truth back then, though. And no one’s heard from Will Weaver since. They’ve barely heard from me or seen me, either—unless I was with Chazz.
    She nodded. “I need a job now,” she said. I need something that will show the world that I still have talent. I need something to show everyone that seven years with Chazz and our recent disengagement haven’t ruined me forever.
    She returned her attention to the cover letter.

    Please read over this first scene of Gray Areas , the pilot for an upcoming Tumbleweed Television sitcom. They want you to read for the part of Lauren Gray. You essentially get to play yourself!
    Call me