He knew he was going to regret the next few words out of his mouth, but he had to make it up to Penny. "I'll do the audition for you."
"What?" Penny stared at him. She knew what Sheldon had said, but she needed to hear it again for clarification.
Sheldon sighed. "I'll do the audition for you."
He scanned her face, unable to read her expression. "Penny?"
"Sorry, I was thinking about something. Sheldon, you don't have to do that. I know how uncomfortable you are with public speaking and going to an audition takes a lot of guts. I'm not so sure you can handle that. Plus, what do you know about acting?" Penny said.
"Penny, if I can understand physics, then I am positively certain I can handle acting," Sheldon said with a smug look on his face.
She couldn't believe him. He actually seemed content with doing the audition for her. Sheldon didn't seem hesitant with his decision, and if he was, he was too damn good in hiding it from Penny. Perhaps this kind of thing could work. It was a huge risk that she was taking with Sheldon. She had been to plenty of auditions in her whole life, and Sheldon- well, none.
Maybe Sheldon is secretly an exceptional actor and he could get me that role, Penny thought, but she chuckled knowing that he believed his time was too valuable to spend what he conceived to be more of a hobby than a career.
Sheldon knew that she was doubting his abilities inside her head. "If you let me do this, I can see whether or not acting is as laborious as what you have told me."
Penny sensed he was challenging her.
"Okay, but listen to me. This is something very important to me and my acting career will take off if I get this job. I really need you to give this your all. Got it?"
He slowly nodded his head.
"Good. Now, let's see if I can teach you some of my techniques. Grab a notebook and pen," Penny ordered him, pointing under the coffee table where the items were placed while she dug through her purse for the script.
"Penny, I have an eidetic memory. I will remember all of everything you say."
She wasn't sure if teaching Sheldon acting would end up being stressful or fun.
Penny stood up, but before she can proceed teaching, she dashed to the bathroom and threw up all/ the alcohol in her system. She leaned against the bath tub, and out of the corner of her eye, she sees Sheldon approaching her. He entered the bathroom and knelt down on the floor, handing her an aspirin and a glass of water. She gave him a soft smile before swallowing the pill.
She heard Sheldon speak. "We'll start when you're feeling better."
"What is acting? Acting is the art or occupation of performing in plays, movies, or television productions. When you're playing a role or simply auditioning for one, you have to grab the audience's undivided attention. It's all about the performance you give and how well you deliver the dialogues. You don't read it once and recite it from memory just like that. You have to put some feeling into it. Be that character instead of pretending," Penny explained as Sheldon listened to her words.
Sheldon raised his hand up to ask a question. Penny rolled her eyes before calling out his name. "You seem to have a grasp on what acting really is. I can tell that you've learned countless of techniques from your acting classes. My question to you is with all the knowledge you have in this art, how come you haven't received a big part in a movie or a show?"
She looked at him and wished he hadn't asked the last part. Not because she was offended, but she has no answer to it. Penny worked her ass of trying to make this acting thing work. Moving west was a part of it, but nothing really extraordinary had happened to her recently.
"I don't know, but can we continue?"
Sheldon gestured her to proceed.
"Acting tip number one: The main idea in being a good actor or actress is expressing emotion and what you're feeling. The audience needs to know what is happening and to feel about certain situations. Let's try an exercise. You'll be a father whose son gets kidnapped and is telling me, the wife, the news. Ready?"
"What is the dialogue for this scene?" Sheldon asked.
"No dialogue. We're gonna try some improv with this. Can we start?"
Sheldon raised his hand. "Improvisation? Alright. But shouldn't you be playing the father and I the mother?"
"What? Why?"
He pointed to his body and to Penny's.
"Oh. Acting is all about taking up challenges. Since we switched bodies, we'll switch roles, too."
"I hardly see any possibility of a television show where the wife is a man and the husband is a woman."
Penny fought the urge to give him a good hit in the head. Couldn't he just let it go?
"Fine! You're the mother and I'm the dad. Happy?"
"I'm not unhappy."
"I'll start," Penny cleared her throat. "Honey, something terrible happened!"
"What happened, dear?" Sheldon said, delivering it almost robotically and with no emotion.
"Our son! Someone saw a man luring him away from his group at the museum! His preschool teacher looked everywhere and he's missing," Penny made her voice sound so frantic.
Sheldon shook his head. "A progeny of mine will certainly inherit my intelligence, and he'll be smart enough to know that he should stay with the group. Are you sure this is my son?"
"Sheldon he's five!"
"So? When I was five, I wrote my paper A Proof That Algebraic Topology Can Never Have a Non-Self-Contradictory Set of Abelian Groups."
Penny gaped at him. "Wow. When I was in kindergarten, I was supposed to marry Jason Saridson at recess, by the time my class got out there, he was already engaged to Chelsea Himmelfarb."
"Started to be promiscuous at an early age, huh? Not too surprising."
She shot him a look, and he immediately backed away.
"Okay, I don't think we'll get pass this exercise without ripping our heads off our bodies, so before we do such thing let's move on to tip number two."
Sheldon glared at her. He opened his mouth to object, but Penny beat him to it.
"Make your posture match your character. For example, if you're playing a crippled old man, you make it seem like so," Penny demonstrated how to as Sheldon nodded. When he copied her movement, she continued. "As I said before, put yourself in the place of your character. It's self-explanatory, be that character you're playing. I'm gonna give this another shot, so new exercise. Um, let's do an easy one. I guess we can play as each other."
"You act like me and I act like you?" Sheldon asked.
"Not like me, but me. Here, I'll start," Penny thought of something that Sheldon would say. "Penny, it's Saturday and I need to do my laundry at precisely 8:15 pm. Now, you."
Sheldon paused, and then started to flip Penny's hair around, twisting the ends of it with his finger. "I'm Penny and I love shoes and having regular coitus with various men!"
She shook her head. "That is not me."
"Which part?"
"All of it!"
"You regularly spend your money purchasing footwear and are constantly at a bar trying to bring a stranger home."
Well, technically, Sheldon was right.
"What's with the hair flip then? I don't do that."
"It's an acting choice I made," Sheldon grinned.
They went through several more lessons before Penny ran out of them. Overall, if Sheldon gave his all to it and not questioned each exercise, he could be a decent actor. The eidetic memory would be a plus for him since he wouldn't have to spend so much of his time memorizing pages of scripts. Penny gave him a copy of the script for the audition, and Sheldon remembered all of her lines after reading through it once.
She showed him how she wanted a certain sentence would come out as well as body language to use during the scene. Sheldon mirrored her actions, and after all the infuriating lessons she gave him, Penny was hopeful about the plan.
If he executed it the way she wanted it to be, Penny would be so proud.
Sheldon sat on a plastic folding chair as the room swarmed with women, all whom were auditioning for the same role as he was for Penny. They were taller than Penny's height, and had longer yet similar colored hair. Most of them were wearing nothing but a camisole and a pair of short shorts, and adding to their already tall stature were a pair of five inch heels.
Penny wanted Sheldon to dress modestly, knowing that showing up with barely any clothing was not the right way to impress the casting agents. They'll silently judge you even before you speak. She handed him a pair of jeans and a nice top that didn't show any cleavage or shoulders, but clung to her waist tightly. Before Sheldon left, Penny marveled on how hot she really looked. She asked Sheldon what he thought, and he simply rolled his eyes and said goodbye.
"Penny Queen?" a man with a clipboard entered the waiting room called, and Sheldon swiftly got on his feet.
Once he came into the next room, he bumped into a sobbing woman who cursed him out and wished him bad luck before storming out. Sheldon stood in front of a video camera resting on top of a tripod as he introduced himself to the casting agents.
The intense glare from them intimidated Sheldon, and he was beginning to have doubts about whether he could proceed with this. They spoke with a stern voice, much like his mother's when she was angry at him. He swallowed the lump in his throat, and the bright lights in the room made his forehead sweat.
Don't give up now, Cooper, he thought to himself before taking one deep breath and began to recite the monologue.
It was hard to see the casting agents' faces as he spoke, but he didn't really care. Not seeing their faces was enough to keep him going. Sheldon used all of the techniques Penny taught him. He made sure to use his hands as he gave his monologue and put feeling in what he was saying.
Sheldon could feel himself shaking nervously, and he tried his best to control his anxiety. After saying the final line, he heard the sound of paper being passed around as well as writing.
"Thank you, Ms. Queen. We'll contact you within three days if anything," the woman said as she requested for the next person.
Sheldon gave them a slight nod and walked out of the room.
So this is why Penny is always anxious before, during, and after auditions, he told himself. Sheldon wasn't sure whether they liked his performance or not, but what he was sure is that he did the best he could.
If only they thought the same.
Penny nervously paced around her apartment. It had been three days since Sheldon went to the audition for her and things were looking not so good. Sheldon told Penny every detail of the audition, and she couldn't find anything that he did to mess up.
The anxiety was killing her, and never it had reached to the point where she's biting her fingernails. Sheldon was sitting on her teal blue couch, typing away on his keyboard about an experiment he conducted.
The phone began to ring, and Penny stared at it for a moment, her heart pounding faster than ever. She checked the caller idea and squealed when she recognized it as the number she had been waiting for. Penny quickly accepted the phone and shoved it into Sheldon's hand so he could talk for her. She couldn't hear much but the muffled voice on the other line. Sheldon's face was expressionless but two minutes into the call, he turned his head to Penny and gave her a soft smile.
"Thank you. I am anticipating on working with you. Goodbye." The call ended, and Penny jumped up and down in excitement. She didn't need to hear anything more than what Sheldon had said on the phone. She got the part and she couldn't thank Sheldon enough for it.
"I can't believe it! I'm going to be a star! Sheldon, you're a freaking genius!" Penny was smiling uncontrollably.
Sheldon enjoyed Penny's reaction. "With an IQ of 187, it's no doubt I am."
"Shut up! I'm just so happy! Thank you so much. You don't know how much this means to me!"
"I can see it."
Without any warning, Penny wrapped Sheldon around her arms and pulled him into a hug. The hug wasn't like the one he had given her when she gave him the Napkin. It was different. It felt... more special. Sheldon stiffened at first, before returning her hug. The sounds of their breaths were the only thing they could hear, and neither of them moved an inch. The hug lasted for more than ten Mississippi's, and Penny was surprised it was that long. She then turned her head slightly and gave Sheldon a kiss on his cheek before he pulled away in shock.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Sheldon. Something took over me and well..."
Sheldon smiled. "No worries. I am very happy for you. You prepared so much for this role and no one deserves it more than you."
Her heart was about to burst. That was the sweetest thing Sheldon had ever said to her. "You really think so?"
"I don't think so. I know so."
Penny didn't want to kiss him again on the cheek, afraid it would be too much physical contact for one day.
She let out a sigh after she realized they still haven't come up with an answer to the riddle. "Sheldon?"
"Yes?"
Penny lowered herself down on the couch. "Do you have any clue about what the fortune cookie is telling us?"
Sheldon hated not having the answers to questions. He felt his face twitch but controlled it soon after. "Maybe we can break it down?"
"Alright... so 'a journey soon begins, its prize reflected in another's eyes.' I'm guessing the journey it's talking about is us switching bodies."
"The next line, 'When what you see is what you lack, then selfless love will change you back,' probably tells us that what we see in each other is something we don't have, our selfless love will fix this situation."
She shook her head. "Sheldon, you just reworded it. What does it mean? What do we lack?"
"Thinking back to the night of Anything Can Happen Thursday, understanding of each other?"
Penny bit her lip. Was that the reason why they switched? To understand each other better? "Perhaps it is." She glanced over to the clock hung up on her wall, realizing that Sheldon needed to go. He was hoping that Penny wouldn't notice the time. Sheldon dreaded going to the Cheesecake Factory to work. After saying goodbye and another thank you, Sheldon left the apartment to get ready.
In deep thought, Penny mused that maybe half of the fortune was complete. Sheldon (hopefully, she thought) finally understood her love for acting.
Was she supposed to understand his love for physics?
A/N:
Penny's acting techniques were taken from a wiki how article. I, sadly, have no idea about acting.
Super sorry for such a long update. Thanks for all the reviews though :)