There's Enough Pie for Everyone! When I was an acting major at the University of Calgary, I remember a librarian on the Fine Arts Floor and I trying to solve a mystery: despite the card catalogues proclaiming that several compendiums of monologues were catalogued as having a specific monologue I was looking for, (I was an after a unique audition piece for upcoming general auditions which would be one that the panel hadn’t seen before or hadn’t tired of — I wanted to avoid being the fifteenth “Saint Joan” they’d seen that day…) — none of the compilations seemed to have the audition piece despite a careful scan of each page…until the librarian pointed out a razor cut near the spine — and the specific page containing the monologue was missing. Someone had taken out an X-Acto knife and had removed the monologue from the book — not due to a shortage of photocopying change. The librarian had seen it before in the law library: so fierce was the competition among law students to be the only ones familiar with obscure law cases, (and the perceived importance of no one else being privy to that case) that they meticulously removed them from law texts to give them that extra edge. Not long ago, I was in the roster of an online voice talent agency which had a web interface where talent could upload their auditions — but any approved talent, after logging in, accessed a page which displayed *all* the talent’s full names, e-mail addresses, and audition files — which could be listened to by other talent; but more importantly — and more sinister — could be easily corrupted, deleted, or replaced by anyone who chose to.
Read the rest here:
The Myth of Competition
