One night not long ago, with my three preteen daughters already in bed, I texted a neighbor. “My husband is away. You around to tape me tonight at 8:30?”

I got an instant reply: “Sure.”

Filming scenes in one’s home basement studio with the only single man in Bronxville may sound like the back story to “Deep Throat,”but it was merely part of my job as an actress, asked to produce an at-home audition — what’s now called, in my trade, a “self-tape,” in this case for an important producer, and due to be delivered by email the next day. Simon, my text-mate, was a local photographer whom I had recently met at a middle school chorus recital.

Whatever libidinal gleam might have glittered in his eye vanished, in a flash of disappointment, as Simon took in my appearance when he came to the door: I was already costumed as a 17th-century Quebecois innkeeper’s wife, described in the audition materials as “not a conventional beauty, not a beauty of any kind really, rugged, with no makeup” and “twice the size of her husband.”

Continue reading at NYTimes.com.