Dancing Barefoot

Chapter 3. Inferno

A violent brushfire burned out of control, just a few miles from my house. The air was thick with smoke, and the sun cast a blood-red pall over the earth. As I walked to my car, thick snow flurries of ash swirled around me in heavy clumps.

I brushed the gathered ashes off my windshield, and drove to Studio City, where I had an audition for “John Doe.”

The casting office, which was once a small one-bedroom apartment, is across the street from the CBS studio. It sits at the top of an impossibly small stairwell which is always cramped with too many actors. They sit on the steps, the air heavy with the scent of Altoids, as they silently mouth their lines, and hope that this audition will be “The One.”

I stepped carefully around several other actors on my way to the sign-in sheet. As I neared the first landing, I was passed by an AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL GIRL (probably reading for the part of the AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL GIRL.) She wore a red dress. She moved in slow motion.

As she passed me, I was engulfed in the intoxicating scent of her perfume, and hit full in the face with a hypernostalgic memory from when I was about 15:

I’m with my best friend Darin. We’ve just seen a movie in Burbank and we’re driving back to his house in La Crescenta. We could take the freeway and be there in about 15 minutes, but we choose to take a more circuitous surface street route, knowing that it will ...