Table Read (or Spending My Saturday Acting)

First of all, thank you to everyone who texted, emailed, tweeted, FB messaged, and called me after Keri’s death. I’ve passed on all of your messages to the rest of my family. Writing that post ended up being very therapeutic for me, even though it was tough to write.

But now I want to get on to my regular, happier posts. I know that’s exactly what Keri would want me to do.

Last week, a friend of mine put it out on Facebook that he needed to get some actors together to have a table read for a pilot script that he wrote for a CBS competition.

If you aren’t familiar with the idea of table reads, it’s pretty simple. You have all the actors read their parts of a script while you are all sitting around a table. For a show that is on tv, this is when the writers hear if their lines make sense (or are funny) and the other departments such as costumes or props can make lists of what they will need for that week’s episode.

But for this script, we would each read a few parts so my friend could hear everything out loud and see if he liked how it was going.

We all met at his apartment in the valley and read the script to ourselves before we all got assigned our parts.

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It was a sitcom style script and it was really really funny! I don’t want to give a lot away because this is still a work in progress, but I can totally see it as a CBS sitcom on the air.

I got to read a couple of different parts which was a lot of fun. And there was one scene where 2 of the characters I was reading had a conversation so I got to have a funny little moment where I talked with myself.

After the table read was over, we all went over little notes we had about the script. There were a few things that needed clarification and some typos that we noticed, but overall it was an amazing pilot episode.

I’m not sure when the CBS script competition is making their cuts, but I would be shocked if I heard that this didn’t make the next round. And my friend promised that if something comes of this script, he will try to find a way for all of us who helped at the table read to be a part of it.

Even if nothing else comes from this, it was a great opportunity for me. I got to spend a couple of hours acting. I got to read an awesome script and make some character choices. And I got to network with a bunch of new people and reconnect with my friend who I hadn’t seen in years.

Overall, this was an amazing Saturday.

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