Picking up from yesterday –
So, I’m at this Vegas party with the two producers I’d been working with for the past two seasons.
At this point, I’d been pushing harder than last year to get on for the summer, being a little more insistent. But the production office people kept me at bay. “We’ll see, we’ll see. Uh, maybe kind of sort of.”
If I remember correctly, by this time, the “maybe, kind of, sort of” had basically slid all the way into a “Sorry we’re just not going to have room this year.”
When I was telling that to producers #1 and #2 on the Vegas roof, they were not standing for it. “What?! No. Not after two seasons. Not after all the work you put in. You’re a huge asset to us, and it’d be crazy not to have you around for the summer.” (Wasn’t that nice?)
They built me up and made me feel great. As I said in the other post, use your allies. I did. They had my back. And wouldn’t you know it, when high-level producers put in a call, all of a sudden there was room after all on the summer crew.
So, I packed my bags and went to Los Angeles to become an honest-to-goodness working person in television production – not just in the outskirt cities, but right smack in the city of Angels, where it can sometimes seem impossible to get your foot in the door.
I remember on one of my first days there, I was talking to someone else who’d had to work for a while to try to move up there, about what a sort of arduous journey it’d been for us.
We had one person who was 16 years old working with us. There were all of these people in high school or college doing their first summer jobs on America’s Got Talent because a family member worked there.
I was a wee bit jealous (though I don’t really know why, considering I was in college too). But, I’ve kind of skimmed over some of the hard parts of trying to constantly remain on the show.
It was tiring to have this job that you had to fight for every week, never knowing ’til the last minute if you’re on for another city – feeling like you’re holding on for dear life and could fall off this ride any second.
I think practically every story can cover the same event, but be told from many different perspectives. I’ve tried to basically tell this one from the “golly gee, wasn’t that lucky” perspective, as opposed to the “at times this could be a harrowing experience that made me want to bang my head against a wall” perspective.
But whether or not I tried to make that the focus on the blog, it certainly existed.
This is where I’ll pick up tomorrow.