No one prepares you for this part of an acting career in school.
Rent in NYC is astronomical. If you don’t have rich parents footing your bills, you can expect to either live in a shoebox or share a larger space with five roommates.
My parents are rich, but they’re not footing the bill. No, Robinson and Circe Montrose thought their second-born daughter should be doing something more monotonous, something more in line with her timid nature. Maybe Rouge, their golden child, could have made it on Broadway.
But Bianca? Sweet little Bianca, with her light-blond hair and porcelain skin?
The Big Apple was going to eat her alive.
But I was determined to prove them wrong. I got a decent scholarship at OCU and took loans to cover the rest.
Of course, the problem with loans is that you eventually have to pay them back.
That plus rent quickly exhausted what little money I managed to put away during college.
So I grabbed jobs wherever I could. A lot of barista gigs, some retail. Even a short stint as a receptionist for a law firm.
But the problem with those jobs? They conflict with auditions.
I would either have to beg a coworker to cover for me whenever an opportunity popped up or let it pass me by so I could eat that week.
Eventually I quit going for those gigs and turned to dancing in my underwear for complete strangers in a bar in Midtown. I’m on my way there for my shift right now.
The hours are good—they leave my days open for auditions—and the tips excellent.
Not exactly what little Bianca dreamed of when she stepped off that plane, but I’m getting paid to perform, right?
At least that’s what I tell myself every time I get on that tiny stage, my tits spilling out of the microscopic bikini top I wear.
It’s a means to an end. A waystation on my road to the Great White Way.
But…when will I reach the end?
I’ve been dancing there for five years now, and taken audition after audition, each one more fruitless than the last. I’ve done everything I can. Consulted countless vocal coaches, worked my monologues to death, starved myself for two weeks to get that Kate Moss look for my headshots. Stood in line for hours for every cattle call I could find. And all I’ve gotten after every audition is a brisk “thank you” and a gesture to the door. That was the case for my first audition, and that was the case for the three auditions I took just this last week.
Meanwhile, Rouge has risen through the ranks of the family business, and our father is grooming her to take over the family’s most prestigious asset, Aces Underground.
She’s had everything handed to her. Always has.
Granted, she’s apparently brought some great ideas of her own to the fold. Mom was telling me the other day. She wants to dress the waitstaff up as playing cards, each of them assigned a specific number and suit.
Sounds weird, but Dad is apparently eating it up.
Rouge is smart. A genius, even.
But there’s also a darkness to her. Something I saw a lot of during our childhood especially.
She learned to mask it well, but every time I’m in her presence, I can feel it.
I’ve developed a sort of intuition about these things. I can feel when things are about to go sour. It usually manifests into a twitch over my left eyebrow, but sometimes it’s just a feeling in my gut.
Maybe it’s my acting training. My ability to read other people, other situations. To be a good actress, you have to be intuitive.
A lot of freaking good it’s done me.
After nearly a decade in this godforsaken town, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m just another one of those faceless girls destined to be defeated by the City of Dreams.
A girl who was a star in a small pond but not able to find her light when pitted against a million others just like her.
