I Got Cast in Sex and the City

And it was the worst day of my life. Rebecca Dana plays a lipstick lesbian and lives to tell. PLUS, Samantha's anti-menopause diet and Charlotte's new nanny (who doesn't wear a bra!)

“Tell Cynthia to sit up straight!” Patricia Field hollered across the set of the Sex and the City sequel early one morning during a break in filming.

It was 85 degrees, and Field was wearing a large purple hat with fur pompoms and a pair of lime-green suede booties. The famed stylist’s waist-length hair was its regular electric red, and it swished around as she hustled between costume adjustments. At one point, she took a cigarette break, plopping down on the edge of a dolly, while members of her team presented her with different itty-bitty clothing options for Sarah Jessica Parker.

I spent 14 hours of the longest day of my life as an extra on Sex and the City 2 this week. And then, instead of going back for the second day (and the five nights I was supposed to do in October), I quit.

Field, Parker, and the rest of the cast and crew were shooting on location at the Glen Cove Mansion, a resort complex on the North Shore of Long Island, just down the road from the Nassau Holocaust Center. (If you don’t want to know some things that happen in this movie, stop reading now! Seriously. There are spoilers.) The scene was brunch, the morning after a raucous gay wedding. Cynthia Nixon, in full Miranda garb, was slouching with her three best gal-pals on the veranda of a lovely restaurant, which was actually a rickety assemblage of white-painted plywood walls with fake windows and no roof. The dialogue was five script-pages of the usual inchoate patter:

Charlotte (to Samantha, who is about to down a handful of vitamins): “How are you going to swallow all of that?”

Samantha (incredulous): “Have we met?”

Outside, just so things looked realistic, a few hung-over wedding guests were bopping around, sipping fake cocktails, hugging and kissing each other at random and swatting bees. If you go see this movie when it comes out in May, and if the scene isn’t cut, look out the window over Charlotte’s left shoulder just at the moment she says “swallow.” You will see a group of nubile young men in golf attire pantomiming flirting, a heterosexual couple strolling arm-in-arm, and, in front them, a stray girl in a strapless purple dress, wandering aimlessly in mismatched Jimmy Choo sandals and carrying a hideous $2,100 Valentino handbag. That’s me.

I spent 14 hours of the longest day of my life as an extra on Sex and the City 2 this week. And then, instead of going back for the second day (and the five nights I was supposed to do in October), I quit.

This all started in early August, when on a lark I went to an open casting call for the film in Manhattan. I waited for several hours in line with thousands of other hopefuls, stood for two photographs, and wrote about the whole experience, such as it was. When I didn’t hear anything more, I put it out of my mind. Then last week, I got a call from a woman from Grant Wilfley Casting.

“Do you still have the same haircut?” she asked. I do. “Great,” she said. “You’ll be playing a lesbian.”