That's certainly true when you're actually in "the show biz," however peripherally, and it was true again last night, as Regina Lyric Light Opera held auditions for its upcoming production of Carousel (May 21-26, should you happen to planning a trip to Regina at that time--hey, it could happen!).

I was not only auditioning but also sitting in on auditions on behalf of the Lyric executive (something required by our bylaws), so I auditioned first. The director, Robert Ursan, is a good friend of mine--in fact, he was best man at my wedding--but you know what? I still hated auditioning, even though I was singing a song I knew well for someone who has heard me sing a hundred time--heck, I've even taken voice lessons from him!

It's much worse when you're auditioning for someone you've never met. No matter how confident you are in your own abilities, there's something about that blank, non-committal stare you get from the director that makes you quail inside and wonder how you ever dared to think you could sing or act. You half-expect to hear derisive laughter behind you as you walk out of the audioning room.

The funny thing is, I've also been on the other side of the table, holding the auditions instead of auditioning. I try to be as warm and welcoming as possible, and I can tell people are just as nervous auditioning for me as I am auditioning for someone else.

And let's not even talk about auditioning for film and TV work, where you're expected to act for a camera.

I think it comes down to the fact that auditioning--just you and a couple of directors and maybe a camera--is a little too intimate. When you're performing, the mere fact there are so many people watching you has a distancing effect; you know they're there, but they're a kind of faceless mass, not people you have to really interact with on a personal level. It's easy then to forget about them as required and concentrate on your performance. But when it's only you and a couple of other people, that's when the inhibitions you thought you didn't have any more, because they never bother you on stage, suddenly raise their heads and start sneering at your pretensions to talent.

But, as Sondheim points out, there's nothing to be done about it. Auditions are a fact of life if you want to perform. I just try to think of them as character-building, like, oh, I don't know, changing diapers, maybe, or that summer I spent working as a manual laborer at the Weyburn Inland Grain Terminal. Do your best, get them over with, and then, hopefully, you can get on the to fun stuff--on stage, in the spotlight.

10:02 PM

But yesterday I found myself using that very cliche.

The situation was thus. I headed out, as is my wont on Mondays, to the YMCA to ride the exercise bike and read the Globe and Mail, thus improving both my body and my mind (well, as long as I avoid certain columnists) at the same time. I was wearing my almost-new New Balance runners (runners is the local term for what, in 1967 Tulia, Texas, we called "tennis shoes" and others, I have heard, refer to as "sneakers"). Not one block from my front door, the left shoe, which had been securely tied (I thought) mere moments before, came untied.

Nothing for it; I knelt in the snow (it was only -17 C that day, not -31 as it had been two days before, but still, kneeling was not the activity I was most interested in pursuing under those conditions) and tied it up again. I actually blamed myself. "If only I had tied it tighter to begin with," I said to myself, "it would not have come undone. At least the right shoe is well-tied!"

And so it seemed. But four blocks further on in my trek, and still two blocks from the Y, I found myself kneeling in the snow again to tie up my right shoe, and that's when the cliche fell naturally from my lips: "If they can put a man on the moon," quoth I, "why can't they make a shoelace that stays tied?"

I think it's a fair question. What exactly is so difficult about this? We're not talking rocket science, after all.

After some thought, I blamed the fashion industry, because I blame the fashion industry for many of the ills that bedevil 21st century Western culture. Presumably fashion has decreed that round laces are more aesthetically pleasing than flat, even though in my experience flat ones actually stay tied, which you might think would be of prime importance to the shoelace industry, but obviously isn't.

But perhaps there is some greater technical problem here that I am unaware of. Perhaps the Problem of the Untied Shoelace is one of the great mysteries of the universe science has yet to solve.

In any event, it also occurred to me, as I made my way into the Y at last, both laces at least temporarily tied, that my question was more apropos than I had originally thought.

After all, we can't put a man on the moon any more, any more than we can make a shoelace that stays tied; we threw away all that technology 30 years ago when we decided we'd been there and done that. We'd have to start from scratch, almost, to accomplish now what the Apollo missions did in the 1960s.