Hi Reader,

Jodi Sonnenberg died last week, and I didn't know she was sick.

That's the part I can't put down.

Here's what I keep circling: I would have known if we still went to auditions.

Not because anyone owed me the information. Because I used to see people, actors, casting directors, session directors... You'd drive across town with a headshot you could hold in your hand and sit in a hallway with the same twelve women, week after week, for years. Jodi was an assistant when I first moved to LA, taking names at the front desk. That's how I met her. Over the years she came up through the casting ranks, I kept plugging away at this strange career, and eventually she was the one booking me.

And in that hallway, someone would have told me. Or I would have overheard it. Or intuited it....That's what those rooms and hallways were actually for — the part nobody put on the breakdown.

(My VO people, you had your own version. An engineer, a director, a producer on the line, and a bagel. Now it's you and a closet full of folded sound blankets...)

The last two times I saw Jodi in person were callbacks. Both for commercials she booked me on. Before that, more callbacks and first calls. That was the shape of our whole friendship — and it was a real one — and it lived entirely inside a system that doesn't exist anymore.

I'm not anti-self-tape. I've made my peace with self-taping. It's fine. There's parts of it I actually like...

But this last week got me.

I was sad enough that I put my laptop in the car and drove up to Lake Gregory. Auditions came in while I was gone. I taped them in a rented cabin, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds. The lighting sucked. But my career did not evaporate because I took a few days to take care of myself. Ya, me. The person having the career.

Which is a lovely thing to be able to tell you.

It is also only possible because of the exact thing I'm grieving. 💔

The system that let me leave town is the system that meant I didn't know Jodi was sick or dying.

I don't have a tidy answer at the bottom of this email. And I'm not going to invent one.

But my friend Caroline Fogarty said we should all do a Jodi dance. I don't feel like dancing.

But I'm doing a Jodi dance.

And then I'm going to call my people and check in. Tell them I miss them. Tell them I love them. I won't call a casting director — we've been told nine hundred times not to call casting directors. Half the people I invite to lunch dodge me anyway. I've decided this isn't personal. Nobody wants to leave their couch. It's not me and actors are not uniquely repellent.

Call your people. I mean, the ones you came up with. The women (or men) from the hallway. The guy from your on-camera class in 2011. The one who would have told you that your dear, beloved friend and advocate was sick.

Call them. Not to network. Just so we know things about each other. Just so we know each other.

That's it. That's all I've got. That and a broken heart.

xo,

P.S. Who have you lost track of? It doesn't have to be a death — just who did you quietly stop seeing when the pandemic changed how we did just about everything, when the audition waiting rooms went away? Hit reply if you feel like it, and tell me their name and what you miss. I read all of these, and I'll write you back. 💙