The Test Actors Of America

We know that they are perpetually aggrieved. Although they are paid a regular, competitive salary; although they receive a level of public attention that is arguably beyond commensurate with their abilities; still, they find their duties odious.
They are regularly visited with calamities, of a severity not wholly vitiated by short duration. They are informed by telephone of the deaths of their spouses; volatile elements are stealthily added to their dinners; their furniture is eternally subject to seizure and removal. They are charged with devising and demonstrating appropriate human responses to such circumstances; since they can rarely be sure of the exact provenance of the trials they undergo, their stated craft mingles with their native sentiments. Naturally, they do not invariably play the Job; they are also visited with romances, a farrago of riches, fulsome winds of acclaim. But this, to them, is pasteboard, and vanity; each plaudit, each asset, dangled by a childish providence that’s apt enough to snatch it back.