Maybe it's easier than I thought

 
As a child, I had no idea how things worked. Jimmy Osmond was slightly younger than me, so when they said on TV that he was the youngest person to have a gold record, I was crushed that I would never be the youngest person to achieve this. I couldn't sing.

There was Tatum O'Neal's Oscar, the kid who played the ape boy on the old Land of the Lost who was the youngest person to get a black belt in karate---they were all slightly younger than me.

I had no idea that being a recording artist, a movie star or a martial artist required any work, that they weren't things that just fell into your lap out of nowhere.

But maybe I was right.

Andy Kindler was cast in the movie The Fiddling Horse, a role that was written for him. His friend and podcast co-host Josh "Elvis" Weinstein was given a small role in the same movie. Then, after a production delay, the star left the movie and Weinstein was promoted to star. Weinstein who was a writer and stand-up comic with no experience as an actor except for his time on Mystery Science Theater 3000 when he was a teenager.

My sister-in-law was appearing in a remake if a 1920's horror movie. Her brother dropped by the location to bring her something. He wasn't an actor, but the director saw him and gave him a pretty good part in the movie.

Timothy Bottoms' little brother was sent to spend the summer with him on the set of The Last Picture Show and they gave him a role in the movie. Didn't the poor kid have a sex scene?

And there are other cases. Tony Dow tagged along when his friend went to audition for Leave It To Beaver and was hired to play Wally himself. There were local kids in Dazed and Confused. The old guy in the diner in Midnight Run.

And, this is a different thing. We didn't have babysitters when I was past preschool. My mother didn't care. We just hung around. But she hired a high school girl to babysit us one time. She was the sister of a friend of my brother's, so I decided to keep it in mind when I heard she was a prominent extra in National Lampoon's Animal House, the blond girl in Donald Sutherland's class. I thought I'd be able to impress people with the fact that my old babysitter was an extra in a movie.

I was working at a place years later and she came in working on some charity event. I was helping her throw some trash in the dumpster. To make conversation, I said, "So...you were in Animal House, weren't you?"

She was shocked. She had no idea who I was and I didn't tell her. I let her think I was an idiot-savant who could somehow recognize movie extras I had seen twenty years earlier.