To start at part 1, click here
“This came for you in the mail today.”
Bertha looked up from the script that she was reading and looked towards her mom (also her agent), who was standing in the door with a small envelope.
After starring in The Disaster, she wanted to make sure that she didn’t stay off the screen for too long, so she was actively looking for parts that interested her. She had lost count of the number of films that she had auditioned for…but until she auditioned for The Disaster, she had failed to get any roles. Then, miraculously, she had gotten the lead! She hoped that this would be the start of something big! Of course, the film that she had been in was a rather low-budget, independent film, but sometimes that was how stars got their start!
Sure, she had auditioned before some of the major movie producers, and some of them even liked what they saw, but the answer was always something to the effect of “We can’t have a name like Bertha Gertrude showing up in the credits. It’s just not a respectable show-biz name. Go change your name and come back.
Bertha hated her name, and would have loved nothing better than to change it, but at barely 14 years of age, she wasn’t old enough, yet, to do this on her own, and her parents wouldn’t give their consent. She felt that her name had closed quite a few doors for her. She had been told, often enough, how pretty she was, but as soon as a boy who might otherwise be interested in her heard her name, any potential relationship was over before it even started.
Slowly, she got up and went to take the letter – having only been in one film…and an indi at that, she wasn’t exactly what could be called a screen star, so the last thing that she was expecting was fan-mail. She looked at the return address…Canada! From a place called…Armpit?? This had to be a joke.
She slid a fingernail under the flap and ripped the envelope open. Out fell a single sheet of paper and a small picture of a boy. He had a rather goofy grin…and a ton of pimples…but he looked like a nice enough guy. She read through the letter. She laughed out loud when she read that his friends called him “Thord”. Having a name like “Thorson Thorkelson” probably wasn’t too much better than “Bertha Gertrude”, she figured. The best part about the letter was that “Thord” hadn’t made any comments about her name. This guy didn’t seem too bad. She looked and saw on the back of the picture that Thorson had written down “TheThord” as his twitter name as “ThorsonThorkels”. So she logged on to her twitter account, searched for Thorson’s profile and clicked “follow”. Then she typed “@ThorsonThorkels how’s it going?”
She spent a few minutes reading the tweets of the people she followed, then she logged out of twitter and picked up her script again. For some reason, she couldn’t concentrate on it…at all.
~~to be continued~~ (part 7 here)
Quest for Whirled Peas 