A Working Actor's Lament (Chapter 48)

When Will I Learn???

Just before Robin and I left for our 9 day jaunt away from the prying eyes our bosses (well, my new boss, but that is another blog for the New Year), our company held a raffle for box seats at the Staples Center for the "Dancing With The Stars" tour. Robin and I didn't win the 4 tickets that were raffled off and it stung, being that we watched Season's One and Three (we felt we needed to stop watching so much TV during the second season). We were then notified that there were going to be two additional tickets that were going to be sent to our Media VP. Another raffle was held and yours truly was picked (well, it could have been yours truly's wife since they put both of our names on the same raffle ticket). We could not wait for 7:30 on December 28th to arrive.

That afternoon, at 5:31 PM (29 minutes before we were on our way to see the stars of dancing), we received an email from Kathy Kay, the director of The Victoria International Film Festival in Canada. We had been patiently waiting to hear from them since we have visited Victoria and loved that city. We clicked open and read the email:

December 28, 2006

Dear Sean Spence:

We are very sorry to inform you that we at The Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival are unable to screen your film "LUCIDITY" this year. We have been filmmakers ourselves and know how disappointing it can be to get a letter like this. Although you may have heard this from other festivals, it is true: we simply do receive more films than we have screen time so tough decisions had to be made.

However, we did appreciate the opportunity to view your work and consider it for our 2007 festival. We hope that you will carry on making movies because we see a lot of promise in your work. We'll definitely keep your contact information in our database and an entry form for 2008 will be sent to you in the summer of 2007.

We wish you all the best,

Kathy Kay Director VIFVF

This was not the way I wanted to start off my evening, but over the past couple of rejections, the sting is getting less and less. I think when we get accepted into our next one, it will be such a shock that I might even forget to blog about it, although I doubt it. Oh well, off to see Mario Lopez, Emmit Smith, Jerry Springer and the rest for an evening of ballroom dancing.

We arrived at the Staples Center and stepped into our room up in the box seat section. It was a great feeling to feel like we were important, or like we won a raffle or something along those lines. We shared the box seats with 5 other couples (2 of those from 1-800-DENTIST) and waited for the lights to dim. Then the "Dancing With The Stars" came out: Harry Hamlin, Joey McIntyre, Joey Lawrence, Drew Lachey and Lisa Renna. Where was Emmit? Where was Mario? Where were all the people who I wanted to see?

All in all, it was an alright show. Since Harry and Lisa are married and they never danced together on the show (Lisa was on season 2 and Harry, season 3), they danced the waltz together and it was very sweet. There were also some company dancers that really knew there stuff and added that level of difficulty that the stars couldn't bring because of the book signings and premieres they had to attend instead of learning the dances for the tour. We decided after seeing the Rumba four times, we had pretty much seen what the rest of the show was going to be, so we left after 15 minutes into the second act.

I don't know if I didn't enjoy the show because of the email we received just before we left or not. Nah, it was probably the show.