Twitter comes through again! My goodness, I love, love, love that social network.
If you’ll remember back to #EverySimpsonsEver, I had some good tweets (if I do say so myself ;).)
And around that time, I started following some people from The Simpsons. And some of them started following me back!
Well, one of them is a writer on the show – Mike Price. He put out an invitation to go to a table read and said that anyone who wanted to go should DM him back.
Do I want to go to a Simpsons table read?! I immediately directed messaged him. Then he asked if I wanted to bring someone. I said of course, having no idea, really, who’d I bring. This is one of the greatest invitations I could get my hands on. So I started by asking some out of town people – my dad, my high school theater teacher, my friend Jaime in San Francisco.
Alas, no one could come in on such short notice. So I turned to my LA friends. (No offense to my LA friends, but come on. When something that cool happens, I turn to the people I’ve known and loved forever.)
As I went through my brain Rolodex of who might have the ability to come, some were working days or out of town, but there’s a friend I’ve known and gotten along with since we worked on a show a couple of years ago. He loved The Simpsons and was between shows, so we went together! 🙂
We got there a little early and moseyed on down to the building where the table read would be.
There was tons of food available (both healthy and non-healthy options – obviously they had donuts, ’cause it’s The Simpsons :-)).
Everyone mingled a little. There were scripts waiting at a little wall-length couch with our names on them. (We even got to keep them afterward! In my bedroom right now is a Simpsons episode people won’t see for a year! I can’t believe no one confiscated it.)
Obviously the truly magical part was when the cast sat down and started reading. A lot of the people were there to do real work. Writers were looking down at the script, taking their notes and such. But for the most part, I sat with my head up and eyes open just watching in awe.
Hank Azaria is less than 10 feet away from me talking to himself as different characters in real time! How much cooler can it possibly get?
I loved watching body positions and facial expressions of the actors change for each character. What an incredible show.
At the end, I went up to Matt Groening and introduced myself. Then I told him I’d been watching The Simpsons my whole life (and while growing up I watched it with my dad). And I thanked him for giving us something we could enjoy together and for bringing so much happiness into my life through all the laughter throughout the years.
Then he remembered my name. (I love when people do that!) And he was like, “Thank you so much, Aurora.” [*You have to read that with super genuine-ness in your voice.*]
Even though it was compliments he’d probably heard 1,000 times before, he seemed so nice and thankful. And it was just awesome.
I swung by the gift shop on my way out and totally got a Fox Studios t-shirt, and now every time I wear it, I think of the awesomeness of the table read!