Casting Call

Yang calls from the tennis tournament she is at and says Lydia’s been asked to try out for a movie. The director is famous here which pretty much means I have no idea who he is. Yang says if Lydia got the part it would be 50 days in Guangzhou for the shoot. A big deal.

One minor problem is Lydia doesn’t want to do it. She told Yang that on the phone so then it was up to me to try again 10 minutes later. I just told her we were going to go, no questions asked. She started to cry, not real thrilled with the prospect. An hour later Lydia’s “agent” picks us up. Lydia is in a better mood, no complaining but not enthusiastic either. We ride in the back of the agent’s 10 year old mazda compact and Lydia starts to sketch. The agent tried to talk to her about the audition, that Lydia she be a certain way. Lydia just repeats that she doesn’t want to do it.

A mile or so out the agent is on his cell phone talking loudly and hostilely. It is the type of tone you would only take with a stranger or someone you know really well. He stops the car, gets out, then gets back in and drives on. We drive to central Beijing and park on a side street just off Dongzhimen Nei. We j-walk across the busy street and down a hutong where there is some art center. We enter a small building and take the stairs to the second floor. There are a few other girls Lydia age around. Lydia appears to be the only mixed kid. The floor layout is open and there are some middle aged men milling about, I figure assistants of some type. One of them hands Lydia a page of dialog and asks her to study it. Lydia says she doesn’t want to. Another little girl sitting on the coach across from us is reading the same page and practicing it with her parents in an overacting kind of way. I am pretty much useless since I can’t read or speak. Lydia studies the page for a bit and while well behaved just is not enthused.

Getting kids to do stuff can be remarkably hard or remarkably easy. I learned a lesson several years back when we took Aidan to a photo shoot for a family album. The photographer wanted certain shots but Aidan wasn’t in a very agreeable mood. So instead of giving Aidan, say a bear, and asking him to pose the photographer just let Aidan have the run of the set and when Aidan picked up the bear on his own, the photographer took the shot. Kids are not really so different than adults in this regard, it is much easier to convince an adult to do something if they naturally think of the “it” as their own idea. This is not to say that a top down structure for the important things doesn’t matter, we certainly employ it for many things and the kids conform. At least when they feel like it.

After about 30 minutes on the coach with Lydia showing little interest the gig was up. I have no idea who made the call but someone told the agent and then he tried to frantically call Yang but she was busy with her tournament. There wasn’t anything Yang could have said anyway to get Lydia to turn on the charm, it was a moot point. So the agent said it was time to go back home and we climbed back down the stairs, through the alley of the hutong, and across the still busy street.

Lydia did some sketches in the car on the way there in back, some of them shown here.

When we got to the spot of the drive where the agent was yelling on the way there he once again picked up the phone and proceeded to bark. At the intersection he pulled over to the shoulder and honked his horn loudly. Several times. Then I noticed the woman facing away from the street and talking into her phone. The driver ended up rolling down the passenger side window and yelling at her to get her attention. She got in the car and we continued on her way.

After they dropped us off Lydia was more relaxed and she told me she doesn’t want to do a movie, that other little girls can do it.