“It was spring, it was rainy, it was the early nineties, meaning that Seinfeld was all the rage, and so was Michael Jordan, and so was crack cocaine, the latter of which, at this point, I had no first-hand knowledge. As for Jerry Seinfeld and Michael Jordan, I knew them well. Each evening, having spent my day carrying sixty-pound drywall across damp pavement and up bannisterless staircases in one of the state-of-the-art family residences being pre-wired for the Internet—whatever that was—in a cul-de-sac eventually to be named Placid Village Circle, I would drive to my apartment and watch one or the other, Seinfeld or Jordan, since one or the other always happened to be on. They were famous, they were artists, they were exalted. I watched them and dreamed of my own fame and art and exalt. The more I dreamed, the more vivid the dream seemed to be, until it was no longer some faint dot situated on an improbable timeline, but, rather, my destiny. And all I needed to turn this destiny into reality was to make it out of my midsized city—not worth specifying—and move to L.A., where, of course, an actor needed to be if he was to have any chance at that thing called success. But, from my perspective of a thousand miles, L.A. appeared immense, incensed, inscrutable, impenetrable, and every time I thought I had enough resolve to uproot myself and rent a U-Haul I would quickly retreat into the soft, downy repetitiveness of my home town, with its low stakes, high livability, and steady paycheck from my father.”
—“Audition,” Saïd Sayrafiezadeh