“Mom, please stop singing.” This, from my 13-year old, as she lies, draped over the couch, head in my lap, half watching, half snoozing through the 2015 Tony Awards. Apparently, I’ve provoked her with my local rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone, singing along with Josh Groban, who delivers it from the Tony stage.
“Sophie, let Mommy be Mommy!,” my battle cry whenever she tries to restrain my enthusiasms, many of which suddenly became an excruciating embarrassment when she first hit her teens a year ago. She lifts her head, flares her nostrils at me, baring a full mouth of metal before we laugh and she’s down again.
Alas, I feel compelled to sing. I still tear up at Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most exquisite paean to hope. It was my one sadness when cast as the lead in Carousel in Junior High School. A girl with a chest and lung capacity three times the size of mine got to sing it .
On Tony night, the ghosts come out, principally my own: my unlived life as an actress, that lost self who--despite some hard-won fulfillment, evidence of which is in my lap--still harbors a muted version of “I coulda been a contender.” After all these years, the ache’s not gone and I yearn, once more, to shed light on events of long ago; to understand my bloody bang up with the world and with my mother at a fork in the road to which I’ll never return.
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I was 21. My future lay before me as a vague but intensely sweet impression--a wide, light-filled swath of pure, latent good ready to reveal itself. I was young; my untested heart filled with love for a world whose rules and rewards I naively thought I’d mastered during a school career of honors and distinctions. I had just graduated from college, having spent my senior year in England. And, after a grueling, 2-day finalist audition, I’d been offered a place at The Bristol Old Vic Conservatory, one of the most competitive acting schools in the world. Surely I was Fortune’s child.
But I also happened to be the child of two mortals-- my specific parents--and, upon returning to the States in June, my mother vehemently nixed the Old Vic. “You’ll marry an Englishman! I'll lose you!," was her precise protest. “You’ll make your life there!” Alas, Daniel Day-Lewis would have my classmate and given my bent for brilliant, Byronic types, perhaps she had a spectacularly cockeyed and accidental point.
Had I not had my own doubts about returning to the U.S. at 23--which seemed very old--with no contacts and having to start from scratch, I would have fought for this chance and, even without my parents’ support, made it happen on my own. And how much harder I would have fought had I known what lay ahead.
But I didn’t, as I believed that without every possible advantage, I’d never succeed in this notoriously difficult profession. Driven by fear and the stunning stupidity that can only be excused in the very young, I also declined places like the Goodman in Chicago and U of Minnesota/Guthrie, the best of the 2nd tier schools. My heart was set on trying again for Juilliard and Yale, the premier American schools (both had rejected me the first time around), I had to wait for spring.
With nowhere to go, I spent an unscheduled year in New York, living with my parents. I’d take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, arrive at 7 or 8 am at the theater district, which was particularly grim and ragged at that hour, streets littered with Playbills, trash overflowing and druggies lying here and there, scattered like the vanquished on the battlefield of life.
My early arrival was an attempt to beat the lines at Open Calls, known to actors as Cattle Calls. But this is New York where you can never be first—not now, not then-- and, indeed, even at my earliest, there were always 10 or 20 in line before me.
Sometimes I’d look like I was heading to the same party as the homeless who’d wandered up from Times Square, dressed, depending on the role, as a peasant from Anatevka, a prostitute from Milwaukee, a debutant in a pink strapless dress and other assorted characters. I’d take my place in line, conspicuously reading and annotating Nietzsche or Plato or Thomas Mann; in part, to let the Midwest blondes and the chorus boys know that, unlike them, I hadn’t spent my life in in tap shoes or belting Bye-Bye Birdie in Summer Stock. I was a serious actress. Of course it was also, in part, to protect myself from what I knew was almost certainly coming: the word “Next!” like a chop to the neck, usually from an overweight guy with a brimming ashtray set precariously on a plank across the seats.
Meanwhile I worked as a waitress (fired twice: once for singing with the piano man, once because I understood my job as networking with the customers). Then, sequentially, as a cold caller for a market research firm, a clerk filing “buy” and “sell” tickets for the Royal Bank of Canada and as an Emergency Room ward clerk at the now defunct Caledonian Hospital, a dilapidated, turn-of-the-century facility in one of the bleakest, most dangerous sections of Brooklyn on the wrong side of Prospect Park. Walking there from the subway in the desolate winter dusk and constantly looking behind me, I felt the shock of being so very, very far from where I had hoped to be.
“This is why we spent $50,000 on your education; for you to be a clerk? A waitress?” The tendons in my father’s neck and the flash of his bottom teeth told me his patience was low.
Most of my friends were in law school, medical school or in entry-level jobs at places like CBS and NBC. A couple had Rhodes scholarships. Two had become young gofers for great men: one for Virgil Thomson, the other for John Houseman.
A few months into this, I started wearing long, concealing dresses, as my clothes were getting tighter. It was becoming painful to see my college friends. The energetic, confident chemistry we’d always shared was being drained away with every fresh disappointment and if my buddies happened to chirp on about their first job or about grad school, I could barely speak.
My Yale and Juilliard auditions came and went and, again, I was passed over.
Soon after, I visited my friend Clare, in on spring break from an MFA program in Seattle. I awoke with a jolt in her parents’ guest room somewhere in New Jersey. An unending wave of panic broke over me and made me desperate to run at full speed away from myself. But I was in a strange house. There was a dog. Who knew if the front door was alarmed; I had to stay still. Hour after hour I whispered Psalms, feeling that if I stopped for one second, I’d die. I holed up in that room through breakfast, terrified that if I opened my mouth in the presence of another human being, a raging wail would escape and Clare’s mother would call an ambulance. Worse, she’d get a rewarding shot of schadenfreude; the woman had always made me feel that she was competitive with me on her daughter’s behalf.
In late May, a year post graduation and in anxiety and despair, I decided to take the Law Boards. I got a job as an unpaid intern at Legal Aid while continuing to audition and take occasional off-off Broadway roles, typically playing to audiences of 10-20. I studied for the LSATs through the summer and fall, applied, got in, and found myself, the following spring, cash in hand, weeping in the Ladies’ Room outside the Bursar’s office. I just couldn’t do it.
There was nothing I’d experienced that inspired me in this direction, not even weeks on the bench beside “Turn-em-loose-Bruce,” a maverick judge of the day who’d invited me to sit with him, as he scribbled limericks during cases and displayed his seductive fluency in Plato between them. I had none of the passion and energy and obsession I had for the theater, none of the ferocious determination that students who belonged in law school probably had for the law. Once I let my parents know what I’d done, they told me to leave the house. It was now 2 years post graduation.