Call from Unknown Number is Not In Fact Big Break

For Tessa McInnes, it was a day like any other. She awoke before the crack of dawn to make her way to Ripley Grier for an open call, got typed out and was preparing to head to another soul-sucking shift when she felt a buzz in her pocket. It wasn’t the brief buzz of a text message or the insistent double buzz of an Instagram notification, but the long sustained vibration of a phone call.

“Even before I looked at the screen, I could feel it—it was a theater with some news.” Tessa recalled in a phone interview last night. “Sure enough, when I looked at my phone it was an unknown Wisconsin number. I thought, YES! Now is my big chance to play Sophie’s boring friend in Mamma Mia! It’s finally happening!”

Although the call was in fact from the same area code as Madison Regional Musical Theater Barn--where she had auditioned just last week--it tragically turned out to be from a telemarketer selling automotive insurance.

“I was crushed,” McInnes remembers, “More crushed than the time I played Ophelia at the West Haven Barn Theater and was almost literally crushed when the set collapsed during the mad scene.”

Despite this setback, McInnes says she will live to audition another day. “Who knows,” she concluded wistfully, “Maybe they just lost my number! And anyway, being excited about unknown numbers is almost as fun as booking the role.”