Our Life In the Spotlight

Vancouver is often dubbed Hollywood North, which means a lot of filming happens up here. This phenomenon has a few side effects:

1. The work crews regularly block traffic flows, invariably when you’re late to get somewhere, like picking up your kids from daycare where the penalty is 5 dollars per minute, so you’re reduced to yelling things you’d never thought would come out of your mouth like, “Get out of my way Jennifer Aniston!”

2. We regularly see a lot of stars, A-listers through to D-listers, around town. They like it here because Canadians don’t stalk (or gawk at) them… at least not too much.

3. My husband and I spend a good part of movies and TV shows identifying local landmarks.

4. Money spreads everywhere. Our office space was short-listed last week to shoot a Mike’s Hard Lemonade commercial. It pays way more than I imagined. Now I understand the price point on the bottle.

5. There are a lot of opportunities for actors (babies to adults) to have anything from minor to starring roles in commercials, tv shows and films.

This last point is where my story begins. You see, Nate was a Gerber baby: piercing blue eyes, porcelain skin, rolls of fat and light blonde hair. Witness:



Feel free to stop a moment to ooh and aah.

Now, every parent thinks his or her child is the most adorable baby on the planet, but after having everyone tell us to put our kid in commercials, I looked into it. I got Nate an agent (basically I filled out an online form and submitted a photo). And I waited.

Soon we were invited to our first cattle casting call, and I was full of excited anticipation, not knowing what to expect. I half hoped to see some crazy stage mothers doing blog-worth acts. In fact, I invited my closest mommy friend to come with me. Moral support is always best when you can gossip about people after the fact.

Over the course of many casting calls, I began to notice a pattern:

1. Your agent gives you roughly 12-18 hours notice to show up to the casting call.

2. Your time slot is always during your child’s nap time.

3. At the call you fill out the same paperwork (each time) and wait for up to an hour.

4. You and 10 other moms pass time amusing bored kids while pretending not to check the other kids out. Invariably one mom casually drops that her child was in a commercial last month and isn't this process such a drag. Couldn't they just fast-track the proven kids...

5. The baby wrangler takes your infant/toddler away to the other room.

6. You spend 2-5 minutes wondering if he smiled, giggled and wowed the crowd or if he screamed bloody murder.

7. You wait one week to see if you made the call back and start over again at number 1.

In the end, Nate was called to many casting calls, but he never made it to a shoot. He didn’t have the personality to go into the room without me. Even now, he’s the more tentative of my two children. Since we never signed him up to boost our own egos, but simply to see if he/we could have fun and earn money for his college fund, we pulled him out. No point stressing him or us out.

Jake though, Jake is a much more independent personality, even if he doesn’t have the classic Gerber baby looks.

When he hit seven months, I decided to try again. And that’s where the story really starts.

Installment two’s coming on Monday.