OUT OF WORK ACTOR SEEKING EMPLOYMENT (NO JIGGERY-POKERY)

Cell phones saved their marriage.

He was in aisle 8, tracing his fingers over cereal boxes, decoding graphics intended on inspiring wakefulness, while she was in produce, groping the mangos.

"I need to find something soon or I will go completely stir-crazy." His finger looped around the perkiness of a certain Captain's mustache. She hated to see him loafing around the cereals.

"What about working at the police station again. They really liked you and the pay wasn't bad." Too soft her fingers told her. He hated the face she made when she pinched produce.

"That's not acting. Those young cops are so weird too. You act like a crazy and they have to spot the signs. I hate having my technique put under that kind of scrutiny. That's not what I spent four years in acting school for. Besides I could pretend to be someone else anywhere. And where are the flowers at the end of the performances, where are they ?!!" He decided on the Captain Crunch and tossed it into his shopping cart.

"But you are good at what you do and you need something," she said on auto-pilot, in a tone which could just as well have come from a recording on her phone: press 7 for generic encouragement.

"Well I was considering soliciting shy millionaires with fucked up childhoods. You know I get them to give me the lurid details of their dreams which I then take to a therapist, pretending that these dreams are the products of my own warped imagination. Then I take any advice back to the millionaires. A courier of the unconscious." Deep down inside, she disliked it when he avoided the topic of work with ridiculous flights of fancy but somehow on the phone it became tolerable as she could distance them from the man she loved.

And this was how it always was when they were out together in public. On their phones. In the flesh their toubles would ignite screaming fights but at a distance they could offer each other encouragement.

And at home they had speaker phones in every room.