Say You'll Be Nine

Mitch Keyes was in his late fifties with a thick head of snow-white hair and dark framed glasses. It had been a while since I’d seen him in person, but he looked the same as always. I reached out to shake his hand. “Hi, Mitch. Thanks for meeting with me. Hope Diane isn’t upset I took you away from her.”

He smiled and patted me on the shoulder after the handshake. “Nah. She’s got some wine-tasting thing with friends tonight, so it worked out.”

We walked a couple of blocks down the strip to the Sunset Trocadero. Once we were seated, he pulled some printed pages from his messenger bag. “You got the sides, right? I figured you might not have had a chance to print them out, so I brought you a hard copy just in case. You have someone to run them with?”

I took the papers from him with a nod. “Yeah, my buddy Jarrod. He’s meeting me after this.”

“Great. Listen, I looked into what you’ve been working on with your boyfriend, and I gotta say, it’s good stuff. I know you were disappointed that we couldn’t find you more work when you were here, but that’s all going to change with this new exposure.”

“You think?”

He took a sip of wine and nodded. “Absolutely. Do you remember the guy who was cast as the dad in that teen movie Junior Sunday? He was discovered from a YouTube channel. He’d been trying to get into the business for years. Guy was a high school English teacher, but he was also the drama club sponsor. So he started making drama class videos for his students.”

That was interesting. I’d heard of singers getting noticed that way, but not actors. “I never knew that.”

An older woman with a thick brown braid and laugh lines around her eyes came over to take our dinner order. After she left, Mitch sat back and stretched his legs out on the other side of the table. “Tell me what you want, Cooper, and I’ll see what I can do.”

I wasn’t quite sure what he was asking. “For this part? Like… compensation?”

His smile was patient as if he was dealing with simple-minded folk. “No, I mean with your career. I can use this. Especially if we get the offer from the Sam Gwan project.”

Oh. He was talking about my career in general. “Well, I…” I stopped to think about what I really wanted. In the past, I wanted to act in film. Film acting had been my focus in college, and when I’d moved to LA, the first thing I’d saved up for was a six-thousand-dollar film acting program at the UCLA School of Theater. This had been my dream since I was eight years old and my mom had bought a camcorder before our summer camping trip. Jacks and I had spent the entire trip doing skits in front of the campfire for our mom, and she’d videotaped them one after the other.

That trip was when I’d discovered I was happiest hamming it up in front of a camera. But the real-life aspect of pursuing an acting career had been exhausting. The education classes had been challenging. My professors in college had given me a big wake-up call that acting wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. So I’d put my nose down and worked hard to prove that I could do it.

Now that I was finally possibly in a position to get somewhere with it, what did I really want to do? I decided to turn the question back on him. “What do you think is possible?”

“Well, let’s be real. We’re not talking a lead role in the next Scorsese film, are we?” He let out a chuckle. “But I think it’s possible to get you a supporting role in a rom-com, or if you wanted something steadier, I’ve got a lead on a Netflix series that’s looking for some fresh faces. It’s a series about producing a reality show, so I think I could sell them on the audience you could potentially bring to the table.”

“I’m having a medical procedure at the end of the summer that requires a week of recovery. They say full recovery can take up to a few weeks, but I can’t imagine shooting would be that grueling for a supporting role like this. Still, we need to find out what the schedule would be.”

Mitch made a dismissive sound. “We’ll worry about that when you get the offer. Now, let’s talk about these other ideas I mentioned.”

I asked him more questions about the pros and cons of each as we finished our wine and waited for our food. Ultimately, I decided the Netflix path might be the smarter choice if I wanted a steadier gig. But nothing said I couldn’t pursue both and see what happened. The chances of getting either of them were slim, so the chances of getting both were ridiculous anyway. Still, I had a nervous feeling in my stomach about the way Mitch had dismissed my comment about the bone marrow donation. It truly was a deal-breaker since Jacks was already waiting for my Cooped Up With Nine project to finish before he could get the procedure.