On the Less Glamorous Food Options of a Globe-trotting Creative

David and I had a mellow weekend in London, eating better than we had been on our own.

4AM Monday David left for the airport to fly from London to Vienna; that same night, David flew again, this time from Vienna to Zurich. The European casting tour is winding down to its last week, and the traveling pace has picked up. As I type, David is boarding a plane in Zurich to head for Paris, where he will spend the night. Tomorrow night, he will travel from Paris to Rome.

All this traveling may sound glamorous, but it is too often far from it. In Stockholm, David changed hotels at midnight, just having flown in from Hamburg, because the hotel room was literally the size of a closet with no windows -- which even my taxi driver in Amsterdam, who overheard my conversation with David, confirmed is a fire hazard. One's diet of any kind goes awry on these types of tours, too. For the last couple of days, David has been surviving mostly on a box of gourmet chocolates I'd bought for him in Amsterdam. When he rang from Zurich a little while ago, he told me that he had managed to stuff his face with a bratwurst at an Italian restaurant before his flight. "Bratwurst at an Italian restaurant? After you'd been touring through Germany all this time, unhappy with the food?" I asked. "You don't want to know," he said. I suppose this exchange gives an insight into what the restaurant had to offer.

Food during casting is notoriously bad. Most of the time, the creatives work through the day with no lunch breaks -- we are lucky if we get 10 minutes to chew our food. And it seems that a creative has an option of either (1) eating whatever food is offered during a casting session and get fat and/or ill (because the food items tend to be sandwiches or, in Germany and Holland, bread pieces smeared in unknown creamy substance and laden with meats) or (2) of scrounging for edible, more healthful bits and nearly starve. David and I joked today that we could begin a Dirty Dancing casting tour diet: It's not easy to eat healthfully, but it's sure easy to starve if you are not careful and are too picky. (We don't recommend it.)

I fared better than David in Amsterdam: I've learned to order lettuce bits, tomatoes, cucumbers and cheeses at the cantine, and to demand that there be nothing else added onto my order (the chef really would like for me to cover my salad with creamy slop of what seems to be cole slaw and gherkins). And if this rudimentary salad tactic failed, I knew there was a Burger King down the road from where I could get chicken wings. The dinners were mostly good, since the creatives would eat out together and these dinners were jolly with nice food and plenty of wine.

Now in London, casting and without David here, I am running into a bit of a "food depression." Last night, I went to see the show (Dirty Dancing), after which I had great trouble finding a casual, decent meal. It's difficult enough to eat by oneself in London, let alone at 11PM. I didn't feel like going to a show-biz late night restaurant, but I didn't feel up for the miserable food options at the hotel I am staying (which I hate). I wanted a pizza, but didn't know of anywhere for late night pizza near my hotel. I finally found myself at a late-night Subway on Oxford Street around midnight, amongst drunk people, ordering a meatball and cheese sub with lettuce, tomato and cucumber, knowing that I really would just pick at the cheese and maybe the meatballs. I just wanted some melted cheese (like a pizza). When I went back to my hotel room and unfurled the soggy, disgusting sub with sad pieces of cheese, once melted, now hardened to resemble plastic, I knew I'd hit a new low.

Until today, lunch.

At lunch the casting assistant takes everyone's lunch orders. I thought simple, and ordered a Greek salad. Apparently, any kind of salad is difficult to find in the area of London we were in. So at 2PM today, after having eaten only 6 mushrooms for breakfast as the scrambled eggs at my hotel are totally inedible (the Radisson Kenilworth, NEVER stay there if you can help it, the one in Covent Garden is far superior and that in itself is a sad statement), I found myself with a chicken sandwich from MCDONALD'S, picking through for the chicken bits and the shredded lettuce. The casting assistant had told me that there were no salads of any sort to be found, but perhaps I could eat a chicken kebab. I thought, okay, that will have to do. But I guess one person's kebab is another person's chicken sandwich from McDonald's. Any glamorous visions of my being a globe-trotting theater sensation died then. I am a sensation, of course, and surely globe-trotting, but in that moment, picking through a sandwich from McDonald's, having eaten almost nothing all day, ravishing on shredded lettuce and chicken from, shall I say again, MCDONALD'S, I felt that all this casting and traveling is, as I know all too well, extremely hard work and, too often, not at all as glamorous as it sounds to people who are not having to sit through person after person dancing or singing or acting and picking through a sandwich from McDonald's trying to find some sort of food source.

When David and I are together in a city, our food intake is far better, since we make a point of going to restaurants as a way for us to enjoy ourselves and relax. When alone in a city, unless catching up with friends in that city, dining options become bleaker. I stocked up with nuts from M&S to bring with me to auditions tomorrow, while David bought another box of chocolates at the airport for himself. Tonight, if I get the courage, I intend to go to Roka and sit at the sashimi counter myself, but that courage to dine alone at a nice, chic place with lovely food is more difficult to muster than it seems.

This Friday, very early, I will join David in Rome -- and we both look forward to this. We are starved for a breather, during which we might eat lovely food and relax before going back to New York and heading straight back into Toronto casting -- and a long weekend in Rome is the perfect remedy.