More Severe than Significant

Finding auditions when I lived in London was really tough without an agent, and finding an agent was impossible. Eventually I gave up on that and was a lot happier for having done so, but in the time I was still trying I did manage to get one audition for a film, a short in fact. It was a French short called Bed and Breakfast. I read the script and thought, really? It didn't seem to make any sense, and not in a thriller way or a hidden metaphor way but more of a pointless way. I was heading to Soho for my audition regardless, and despite knowing that they wanted me to have American citizenship (I lied when they asked and quoted the names of places from a Sufjan Stevens song to describe the area I grew up around in Michigan).

Its not necessary to tell you I didn't get the part. I'd more or less forgotten about the whole thing until tonight when I stumbled upon this interview with Ellen Feiss of 2002's Mac Switcher ad fame, a fame due mostly to the rumors that she was stoned in the ad. The interview, more than four years after the fact, focused mainly on the trials and tribulations of her Mac ad fame. She wasn't an actor before the ad and never tried to be one after, but recently she'd been in a short film in France, only taking the part after two months of convincing over the phone by the director who wanted her because the character drops mushrooms at one point and from her performance in the Mac ad he thought she could pull it off. The film is called Bed and Breakfast. My memory isn't terribly good, but something about that title twigged. Then when she said what she thinks of the film, that its "ridiculous," and "doesn't really make sense," I thought, my goodness, could this be?

A quick click on the link provided and a skim of the synopsis confirmed that this was in fact the film I'd auditioned for in London more than a year ago. An obscure, foreign, decidedly poor short film with no distribution, which I auditioned for in a place and time where I was getting no auditions whatsoever and subsequently forgot about, had suddenly come back into my field of vision all this time later. A coincidence of no significance and yet so severe.

People say the world has become a smaller place since the advent of the internet, but I can't say that I completely agree. The world was always quite large as it was, and now with the infinite ether of the internet extending out from its every electrical orifice, it has grown, and continues to grow exponentially. Should this growth have an increasing or decreasing affect on the rate or scale of coincidental occurrences in our lives?

Or, more to the matter, does it simply give us the means to prattle on about them to a greater extent when they occur?