On Sunday morning Sarcasm Girl and I flew down to LA for a Drama Department interview with Ithaca College. For her, of course. I already did my college interviews, thanks. The interviews (and auditions for the BFA candidates) were being held at the LAX Hilton in a sort of gang-bang operation where fifteen or twenty different college performace programs took over a part of the hotel and auditioned and interviewed from dawn to dusk. The interview went very well, we think. And there was the amusement–or bemusement–value of sitting around looking at dozens of high school senior dance students in almost identically idiosyncratic practice outfits sitting on the floor of the hallway stretching before their auditions. And, as Sarcasm Girl noted after hearing various of the vocal auditions from behind closed doors, “If I hear ‘Defying Gravity’ one more time I’ll have to kill someone.” It was like being on the studio lot where Fame was shot.

But the really cool, bizarro part of the day was that the Unified Auditions (as they were called) were not the only big deal in the LAX Hilton that day. Read More »