Seeing Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

since they’d arrived, and two of them had been for student films, which, though they offered good experience and introduced you to a student director who might conceivably be the next Steven Spielberg, didn’t pay anything and were therefore less prestigious both in the studio and on the child’s résumé.
    With her heart hammering in her chest, Ruth had approached Mimi about this last week, and the conversation hadn’t been at all reassuring. Mimi had sighed, taken off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes for several minutes—she made it clear that she was often exhausted from her ceaseless work on her clients’ behalf—and said, “Look.”
    Ruth hated when people said Look , both because whatever was coming next was inevitably something you didn’t want to hear, and because it implied that you were mentally incapable of grasping even the obvious on your own.
    “First of all, there are three boys’ parts in Hollywood for every one part for girls. It’s always been that way and it always will be and no one knows exactly why, so stop comparing. Second, Bethany’s never going to be going out as much as the other girls.”
    Ruth had been stunned. “Why?”
    Mimi had sighed heavily and said, enunciating each word, “Bethany’s a niche actor. Her agent says so. I’m saying so. A showcase panel has said so. She’s going to be the sidekick, the kooky friend, the kid that’s slightly, hmmm, off . That’s what she’s going to be auditioning for, because that’s what she looks like.”
    Mimi had gone on to make it very clear that this was final, and that if Ruth continued to harry her, she would drop Bethany as a client. Just as Ruth reached the doorway Mimi had said over her shoulder, as an afterthought, “I assume you understand that if she loses me as her manager, she’ll lose her agent, too.”
    Ruth had given an involuntary gasp. Bethany’s agent was the linchpin of their hopes. Without a good agent, Mimi had made clear, your child might just as well be in Sheboygan. The conversation had been very distressing, but what could they do? They didn’t know anyone else. For now, right or wrong, they needed to stick with Mimi.
    From the classroom, Ruth heard one of the students shrieking, “ You’re just like my mother! ” Privately Ruth thought an inordinate amount of class time was devoted to scenes that were violent or ugly or inflammatory in some way. When she’d mentioned this to one of the other mothers, the woman had just shrugged, so it was possible that Ruth was overreacting. The class was taught by Donovan Meyer, a once-successful character actor whose career had reached its zenith in 1983 with a two-year stint as a recurring character on Guiding Light . He was spectrally tall and thin (the camera adds ten pounds, a factoid that everyone at the studio murmured like a mantra), with chiseled features and penetrating blue eyes that Ruth suspected were enhanced by tinted contact lenses she’d been able to make out very clearly the one time she’d seen him in daylight. The confident studio mothers, as well as all the kids, called him Dee. Ruth called him Donovan.
    The classroom door opened and a tall, slender reed of a girl came out. This was Allison Addison, one of the children who lived with Mimi and who were known collectively around the studio as the Orphans, though they all had families someplace far, far away: Akron, Pittsburgh, and so on. Allison’s family, as Ruth recalled, lived in Houston, but if she missed them or minded, Ruth had never seen or heard any sign of it. Allison had an astonishing, even an alarming, beauty, and though she was technically only a year older than Bethy—fourteen and a month to Bethy’s thirteen and three weeks—she was light-years older in every other way; older, possibly, than Ruth herself. Ruth, frankly, was wary of the girl. Bethy had said on more than one occasion that she wasn’t always nice.
    Now she came right over and flung herself onto the sofa only a