With my high starched collar,
And my high-top shoes,
And my hair piled high upon—
What’s that? Oh, okay, you’re probably right, let’s do it later.
Anyway, my dad met my stepmother around this time, and they got married, and we moved farther out into the suburbs of Virginia, partly so I’d be closer to the barn where I rode, which was ironic since it wouldn’t be long before I’d replace all the time I’d been spending there with all the time I’d spend doing school plays.
Skipping a grade came up again during my sophomore year of high school, when everyone but me started getting their driver’s license. I wanted off the school bus badly, and not being able to drive until later than everyone else seemed an unfair penalty for being able to read a little bit before them.
The drinking age in Virginia was twenty-one, but just over the bridge in D.C. it was only eighteen, and we heard that fake IDs worked there with surprising regularity. Our desire to get into the bars in Georgetown was due mainly to a wish to be able to dance for hours with the music turned up to volumes that weren’t allowed in our suburban basements. This was during a time in high school when dancing was in fashion. There came a day when dancing suddenly went away, when it simply wasn’t cool anymore. But during that time it was mysteriously deemed okay, and I remember all of us happily jumping around like freaks for any reason at all. Michael Jackson moonwalked on TV, and no one had seen or heard anything like him. With the top of her convertible VW Rabbit down, Virginia Rowan and I yelled along to Wham! and Morrisey and a new singer named Madonna. Bruce Springsteen was everything then. My friend Kathryn Donnelly would regularly get up on a table and sing every word of “Born to Run,” using a broom handle as her microphone. Musically, it was a great time to be a teenager.
I wasn’t interested in drinking at the time, but some of the other girls were, and everyone was petrified of getting pulled over. So that’s how I, at fifteen and without a license, was chosen to be the regular designated driver of Joyce Antonio’s father’s Mercedes. This made perfect sense to me as fair payment for having to suffer through the injustice of being a year younger than everyone else. My friends who wanted to drink were covered. Everybody won!
AHAHAHAHA, what a TERRIBLE idea this was. Literally the worst example of “learning by doing” ever. But I remember all of us thinking it was a really wise and grown-up choice, and feeling very proud of ourselves for figuring out this genius way to solve our need-to-dance-while-drinking-illegally problem. Because really, aren’t laws actually just pesky suggestions? Who needs them? Fifteen-year-olds know everything! The good news was that we’d taken the “Don’t Drink and Drive” campaign seriously. The bad news was that the “Don’t Get on the Road If You Aren’t a Licensed Driver” campaign just didn’t have as catchy a slogan. In fact, driving without a license was such a dumb idea, I doubt it had even occurred to anyone to start an ad campaign about how dumb it was.
Miraculously, we all lived. And eventually I got my license. During the driving part of the test, I worried that my ability to parallel-park on the first try would raise eyebrows, and the instructor would turn to me and say, “I have a suspicion you know how to do this because of all the time you spent sneaking into Winston’s with a fake ID so you could dance all night to ‘PYT.’ ” Lucky for me, he didn’t.
Throughout all of this, my free year was still on my mind, and I was so intent on saving it for the “right” time that I missed an opportunity where it actually might have been helpful. I spent my freshman year in the undergraduate acting program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It is and was a wonderful program, and I had some great teachers, but at just seventeen years old, I felt lost, and doing things like sitting in a chair for hours attempting to summon feelings of “cold” and “hot” wasn’t what I’d envisioned college to be. I visited friends at other, more academic programs, and worried I was missing out. So at the end of the year, I transferred to Barnard College to be an English major.
Not surprisingly, my Temperatures class, among others, didn’t have much value at my new school, and almost none of my credits transferred. This would have been a wonderful time to start over as a freshman, but I wasn’t ready to let go of my lucky penny just yet! So in order to graduate on time, I had to take a full academic load every semester. To that, I added plays and musicals, and the a cappella group the Metrotones, which toured other colleges most weekends. I was completely overwhelmed and behind on my studies for three years straight. Barnard College has been very good to me, and I love going back to speak there or just to visit, but I’m sure they’ve (rightly) buried my transcript somewhere far below the 1 train at 116th Street and Broadway.
The year after I graduated from college ended up being the moment when I finally plunked my lucky penny down on the table. Most people would just call this “the year after I graduated from college,” but to me, it became the withdrawal on the time I’d put in the bank in my head.
My best friends from school all either had gone abroad, had gotten jobs somewhere besides New York, or had a year of school left. So without any of my buddies to share a place with, I lived in a tiny room in an apartment that faced an airshaft. Somehow, given my pretty limited and lackluster wardrobe, I was hired at a clothing store where I worked during the day. At night I got a job as a cocktail waitress. My days usually started before 8:00 a.m. and I’d get home after 2:00 a.m., dead on my feet but facing the same hours the next day. Even so, I didn’t earn enough money to have much to live on after I paid my rent.
Also, I realized that while I’d spent almost my entire time in school and in the summers being involved in some sort of performing arts, I was now living a life without any of them. Even when I was broke back in college, I was acting or singing in a million productions, and could always find a way to see plays and musicals too: volunteer as an usher, maybe, or get discounted tickets through the student store. Now, though, I had neither the time nor the money to see anything, let alone be in anything. Worried I’d get rusty, I had to resort to standing in the center of my living room/kitchen/bedroom facing the airshaft at three in the morning practicing scales.
Which reminds me—
Iiiiiiiii went to lose a jolly
Hour on the trolley
And lost my heart ins—
Really? You still don’t want to hear it? Oh, you’re worried about the neighbors in my New York apartment building back then? Hmmm. I never met them, but from what I remember, the people upstairs sounded like they were running a cat hotel while training for Riverdance. But okay, let’s wait.
The months ticked by, and I became more and more worried. It was one thing to feel the extra year slipping away, but something worse had begun to occur to me. What if one year turned into two, and two turned into “Poor Aunt Melba can’t come for Christmas this year, Billy, she’s working a double shift again”? I’m not sure how my name got changed to Melba in this negative fantasy, but the way things were heading then, anything could happen!
I felt trapped. And I felt dumb. I obviously hadn’t used my lucky penny at the right time, and now I had no edge, nothing that separated me from any other struggling sap in the city. What was I going to do? Drop everything and move to an engineless houseboat in a harbor in St. Thomas? This wasn’t “go find yourself” 1972 anymore! It was 1989, and the belts were way thinner!
At a loss, I signed up to participate in what was called the URTAs, a yearly audition held in New York by a consortium of graduate programs in the arts. Since these schools were located all over the country, they sent representatives to New York to recruit actors once a year. As my potential new life plan, this made no sense. I was still heavily in debt from undergrad, so paying for graduate school wasn’t an option at all. Plus, moving anywhere else seemed counterintuitive. I’d dreamed my whole life of making it in New York City, and I’d made it! Well, I resided there, at least. Now I was going to, what—move to Denver? It seemed I was getting further away from my dream,
not closer to it. But there was only a month left on my apartment lease, and I had to make some decisions. Would I stay or would I go?
To be at the audition, I had to take time off from work I couldn’t afford. I was asked to prepare a classical monologue, a contemporary monologue, and a song. I spent any free hours I had at the Lincoln Center performing arts library, listening to cast albums and reading plays. I had no coach or teacher or really anyone to try my material out on. In the end, I blindly chose an odd assortment: Linda from Savage in Limbo by John Patrick Shanley, Rosalind from As You Like It, and “Somewhere That’s Green” from Little Shop of Horrors. I had nowhere to rehearse, no time to prepare. I’d go to sleep after twelve hours on my feet just reciting the lines in my head. The audition was held in a slightly spooky old theater in Times Square. I’d hardly even done the pieces out loud before. The stage was massive—I’d never performed in a space so huge—and my voice sounded thin. The audience was unresponsive.
But somehow I got in.
I was actually accepted to a few places, but at Southern Methodist University I was offered something I didn’t even know existed: a full scholarship to their Meadows School for the Arts. I mean, who in their right mind would offer to pay for actors to become actors? Bob Hope, that’s who! There’s a whole theater there named after him, and in general it’s a very wealthy school. But I’d never dreamed of such a miraculous thing. I felt relieved to have a new path, and vindicated to still be on track. I wasn’t ahead, but at least I was normal! Going to graduate school at normal-people times!
Except that when I got there, I realized that there was no normal. There were students from all over the place, all of them different ages and at various stages of their lives and careers. This was shocking to me. Didn’t they know the clock was ticking? Weren’t they worried about getting the first tuk-tuk in Bangkok?
Apparently they were not.
I also discovered that being away from New York at a more traditionally collegiate school had its merits and its comforts. I lived in a sprawling apartment complex with new wall-to-wall carpeting and a pool. I got to focus on being a performer without having to worry about my academics or the basics of surviving in the city—something I didn’t have that first year at NYU. I had an incredible acting teacher, Cecil O’Neal. I made great friends. We laughed a lot, loved each other, and tortured each other as only a close-knit company of actors knows how to do. There was a guy in the class ahead of us who nicknamed everyone’s heads, for example, according to what they reminded him of. Members of our class were named “Pumpkin Head,” “Pencil-Eraser Head,” and “Punched-In Football Head,” among others. I was dubbed “Hair Head”; I can’t imagine why.
I still find that, in general, having a plan is, well, a good plan. But when my carefully laid plan laughed at me, rather than clutch at it too tightly I just made a new one, even if it was one that didn’t immediately make sense. In blindly trying a different path, I accidentally found one that worked better. So don’t let your plan have the last laugh, but laugh last when your plan laughs, and when your plan has the last laugh, laugh back, laughing!
People always ask me how I got to be an actor. The good news and the bad news is: there is no one way. That I thought I had some sort of leg up on life or my career by bartering my perceived time chip was an illusion. In life, of course, there is no Fast Forward. Fast Forward doesn’t even always work on The Amazing Race. Half the time the team in first place makes it onto the earliest flight to a new city, thinking they’re ahead, and arrives at the next destination only to find it doesn’t open for two more hours. Then the other teams catch up, evening the playing field once more. On The Amazing Race, this might mean you lose a million dollars. But in life, maybe it’s actually…fine? Because who wants to Fast Forward anyway? You might miss some of the good parts. I’d rather keep pushing the rewind button on my red Radio Shack tape recorder and be that geek who knows the lyrics to the songs from every Judy Garland musical ever.
Oh, really? Now’s a good time? Oh, good! Here goes….
Clang clang clang went the trolley…
For some reason I had very old-timey ideas about what show business was like when I was first starting out. Maybe it was all those afternoons I spent watching The 4:30 Movie when I was supposed to be doing my homework. (Sorry, Dad!) Back then, there weren’t many ways to learn about what the life of a working actor was actually like, or even get a glimpse into how to get started. Pre–American Idol, the closest thing we had to a show business competition was Star Search, but the acting portion was oddly stiff and theatrical, and never seemed very authentic. The world of entertainment-related periodicals was different then too: there weren’t fifteen gossip publications like there are today, all of them competing to be the first to tell you where J. Lo had dinner last night or to reveal the name of Kate Hudson’s new bichon frise. The National Enquirer spent some time on the secret world of celebrities, but focused equally on alien babies and Loch Ness monster sightings. There was no Real Housewives of anywhere, and no Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat, where people could constantly update you on their every move. People—even famous people—had not yet begun to focus on their “brands,” and there was really only one daily show about Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, which was pretty fluffy back then, and fairly tame. Magazines were not yet going after every detail of what went on behind the scenes. No one was asking the important questions of today, like “Whose cellulite is this?”
The 4:30 Movie featured mostly old films and was categorized around a weekly theme: Elvis week, Westerns week, horror week, etc. That’s where I fell in love with movie musicals starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. That’s where I decided Katharine Hepburn was my favorite actress of all time. That’s where I learned that an actor’s highest calling was The Theatah and the ultimate goal for a true thespian was BroadWAY, emphasis on the WAY. I was inspired by the black-and-white movies of the 1930s and 1940s, like Stage Door, in which young hopefuls lived together in a sorority-type house, sleeping with their hair in old-fashioned curlers that looked more like rags, practicing dance steps in their tiny galley kitchen while wearing silk tap pants and dreaming of BroadWAY. I loved their vivid vernacular and tried to incorporate it into my life. “Say, fella, this gal’s got sore gams,” I was in the habit of saying. “My dogs are barking—got a dime for a cup of joe?” This being the mid-eighties, no one had any idea what I was talking about.
I was determined to make it to BroadWAY, and that meant I somehow had to become a member of Actors’ Equity, the theatrical union. The union conundrum: you can’t get a union card without getting a union job, and you can’t get a union job unless you’re in the union. My plan, although the path was long, was to earn enough hours as an Equity apprentice to become eligible, which could take years. The only faster way would be to somehow get cast in an Equity role. Apparently this happened once in a while, when a part called for something unique that none of the members of the Equity company were able to do. As a young actor, I remember focusing obsessively on the “special skills” section of my résumé, peppering it with abilities, even ones I only sort of had, in case one of them might lead to my big break. Included on my résumé at the time were “skills” such as driving (not a given in New York City), roller skating (the musical Starlight Express was big at the time), dialects (although this claim was vague and pretty much untrue, I felt it made me seem sophisticated and Shakespearean), and Rhonda Weiss impressions (Rhonda Weiss was one of my favorite characters from Gilda Radner’s Live at Carnegie Hall show, a VHS tape I watched obsessively). Why I thought anyone would be more impressed by my Rhonda Weiss than by Gilda Radner’s is still an embarrassing mystery to me today. But back then, especially when coupled with dialects and driving, I thought it made me seem quirky and well-rounded. Probably despite these skills rather than because of them, I landed a spot in the Equity apprentice program at the Barn Theater in Augusta, Michigan.
The Barn was (and is) a well-respected summer theater
that had a resident Equity company and even occasionally drew some Broadway stars. In the lobby of the theater hung framed headshots of “Barnies” of note—actors who’d once been apprentices here, just like I was, and had gone on to bigger things. I didn’t recognize any of their faces, but I was still impressed. It was beyond my wildest hope that my headshot would one day hang in this lobby too, prompting scores of theatergoers to remark, “Who?” I could only dream of such obscurity!
On the first day at the Barn, all the Equity apprentices auditioned for the directors and members of the Equity company to get their specific casting for the summer. The core Equity company consisted of experienced actors, most from New York, who’d been hired for the whole summer. Many of them had worked at the theater before, and they all knew each other. They asked me a few questions, then chose a piece for me to sight-read: “Slap That Bass,” a Gershwin number from the musical Crazy for You. I didn’t know the song, but the whole point was to see how well we could perform with limited preparation. The rehearsal period for each show was only two weeks, so it was important to show them how quickly we could learn music and dance steps. I was nervous but not too worried, since in general I could sight-read pretty well.
Or so I thought.
Even though I was only expected to read off sheet music on the stand in front of me, I wanted to really perform the song, to prove I was not only a speedy learner and a good singer but a good actress too. My casting for the entire season depended on what I did in this audition. The pianist played through a few bars and hummed the melody for me until I felt ready to try the song alone. Then I took a deep breath and started to sing.