Just Make A Choice!

You have a rather inconvenient scheduling conflict. You’ve got the dinner shift at your waitering job and the kitchen doesn’t stop serving until after midnight. If you want to stay home and wait for the kidnapper’s midnight call, you’ll first have to call in sick. Not as easy as it sounds.

You wait tables at a place called Lunch Counter, the magical new restaurant where the Turkey Clubs, Pork Chops, and Omelettes of the traditional American lunch counter are updated with wasabi mayo spreads and cranberry chutney. It’s another in a long line of way-too-high concept restaurants that take everyday slop and upgrade it with pricey ingredients to create a kitschy gourmet dining experience. They all fail within three years, but while they’re hot you make a lot of money waiting their tables.

You’ve been feeling like Lunch Counter is going to be your last restaurant job for a little while now. You used to think your big break was right around the corner and you just had to wait a few more tables before you would be a successful and very well respected actor who would pick his parts based on how they exercise your craft and not how much they pay, and also you would date Kirsten Dunst briefly but it wouldn’t be serious.

Years have passed with very little encouragement from casting directors and the tables in need of waiting have multiplied. An audition feels more like a chore than an opportunity. You’ve tried to forge your own path to success by writing a one-person show. It’s called, Where YOU Were On 9-11 and it’s an Anna Deveare-Smith style documentary monologue piece in which you interview people about where they were on September 11th and then you perform their stories word-for-word. You’ve been developing it for three and a half years now. Unfortunately, you can’t find anyone who was in or even near the towers who’ll talk to you, and you don’t feel like it’ll be ready until you do.

You don’t dream about overnight success anymore. What you dream of now is getting hit by a city vehicle, like a Parks Department truck or a street sweeper, and losing the use of your legs. The city would pay you a big settlement that would take care of you for life and your friends would gather around your bed shaking their heads in lament for the hugely successful acting career you would most certainly have had if only fate hadn’t robbed you of your legs.

You know when you either quit or get fired from your current waitering job you won’t have it in you to go find work at another restaurant. Which is why when you call in sick to Lunch Counter tonight and your boss tells you to either show up or you’re fired, it’s clear to you that saving Julia means finally giving up on your dream of becoming an actor. Stick it out just a little longer -- and just a little longer is all it might take for that big break to finally come around the corner -- and Julia dies.