Suzie Plakson has been making a living as a TV, theatre, and film actress for 25 years.  Highlights include recurring roles as Dr. Golfinos on Mad About You and Judy Erikson on How I Met Your Mother, Broadway’s La Bete, movies such as Disclosure, Wag the Dog and Redeye, and the voice of a blue brontosaurus real estate agent on Dinosaurs. For more info visit www.suzieplakson.com.

I’ve been auditioning for professional acting jobs for (cue scream of horror) thirty years. Auditioning is, indeed, a micro-art unto itself. It is an art within a presumably artistic business, an art fraught with frustration, futility, humiliation, anxiety, hidden crafts, and on very rare occasion, magic — magic that isn’t necessarily contingent upon getting the job. The magic happens when preparation and skill mix with the receptivity of the people for whom you’re auditioning — in spite of the pressures that would seem to preclude that possibility — and all within the room are transported, for a moment, beyond the rather unappealing business at hand.

A few of my general premises:

1) Show business is a mad, mad, mad, mad world.  Mediocrity is all too often the cream that rises; why does so much talent go nowhere, why does so much crap go everywhere? Don’t ask.  Literally.  To maintain a steady sanity, it is essential to accept, again and again, the fact of a systemic, smiling insanity and inanity. One must let go of finding a Why in so very many instances.  Particularly for the analytical amongst us, “But why?” leads to tortured madness.  Best