ballet and goofy

Ryan was reading the English newspaper at his desk one day in Japan when he came across an audition call. There was an opera-ballet coming to Tokyo and they needed Caucasian men and women to be "extras" - people who stood around in the back of scenes, not singing or dancing, but filling the empty space. There was weight and height criteria, and we both fit in.

Immediately we got excited about the idea. How fun would that be? How crazy would that be? We looked at our remaining nenkyu (paid holiday days) and at the Japanese calendar to see if there were any no-school days around that time. Well, it just so happened that the audition fell on "Golden Week", Japan's version of Spring Break, and all we had to do was take off a couple days on either end of the holiday to allow for the shows if we got in. So we booked the time off, and planned our trip to Tokyo.

Knowing that no audition was a given, we planned that if we didn't get in, we'd spend the time looking around Tokyo and going to the Tokyo Disneyland. That would be a fair trade for not getting in!

We packed our bags, hopped aboard the bullet train, and zoomed to the little guest-house we had recommended to us by some friends. The old crooked Japanese man who ran the house was eager to receive us, and promptly sat us down for a long chat about his family and the many people who graced his abode. We hardly got away in time to get a little shut eye before the audition the next morning, but we managed to politely decline another cup of coffee and yawned our way into our room.

The next morning we awoke bright and early and headed off to the theatre where the process would begin. We went through a series of sign-ins and obtained our name tags, then waited and waited and waited until they finally brought us into the "audition room" - the stage. Having separated the girls from the guys, they brought us ladies in first and lined us up on the stage. They asked us to walk across the stage looking Egyptian, and looking as if we were holding some kind of trays in our hands. We were, as it turned out, auditioning for the part of servant girls.

We all did it once, in pairs, and then they took a look at the group and started weeding people out. I noticed a peculiar trend in the people they were getting rid of - they weren't skinny. I stood, knowing that I was on the chopping block, and hoped my hardest that they had gotten rid of as many as they needed to. Nope, they pointed at a couple others, including me, and then bade us farewell. SO disappointing! Especially since we had waited most of the day to do that darn Egyptian walk.

I let Ryan know and he bowed out of the audition, and off to DISNEYLAND we went to drown our sorrows!! It was great - Tokyo Disney, though we were there on the day that the US declared war on Iraq, so we were searched thoroughly at the gates seeing as we "looked American".

But that aside, we had a great day with Mickey, Donald and Goofy! I guess ballet isn't in the stars for us....oh well, we'll stick to other more exciting things like working on our wedding singing career.