Give me some wool, and I’ll spin you a yarn.

I have another audition tomorrow, this one for the role of a mother in her early 40s. And I’ve been thinking about who I can believably "play," what my “place of life” would be as a woman in her early 30s? I feel too young to be the queen, to be the mother of adult children, but I feel too old to be the ingénue or the lover. But I suppose I fall more easily castable into the latter category. Lover, Romantic, Unwed.

So many actors have sordid pasts and upbringings, making it easy and understandable to want to lay on the skin of someone else, the idea that it’s easier (safer?) to be someone else than it is to be yourself. However, I think I’m realizing that to take on the skin of someone else means that I have to find that person within me, those feelings, and then face them, understand and inhabit them. And not all of those feeling are easy for me to have. Not all of those parts are natural for me to play.

And I think that’s why I love it and am challenged by this so much. (With all my scant experience!) I will have to find the romantic within me, the tyrant within me, the tortured within me. I’m going to have to let my internal flashlight illuminate corners I’d rather mark off-limits. Some of those corners I avoid because I’m afraid I’ll enjoy them too much—Who doesn’t want to dissolve into rage instead of pulling yourself up to decency? Who doesn’t want to allow the gnawing chatter to become a cacophony and play itself into Ophelia’s mad death? How easy it is to go mad; how very hard to stay sane.

And, surely, some of the corners of experience I may be asked to play, I don’t want to go into because I’ve spent so many years avoiding what they demand of me. To fully feel passion, desire, or even (don’t say it!) love?

It’s amusing to me that once I changed up my blog settings to list the subject tags in order of frequency, “love” became the first one. I think it makes sense if you put before it the words: “avoidance of,” “challenges with,” “attempts at,” “softening to,” “fear of.” But, just “love?” Hm. Yes, it makes me smile.

I also know that acting isn’t therapy, and can’t be primarily intended to process my own demons or fears through its use, but I can’t help but imagine there will be some side-effects like that. I imagine that I’ll get to see where my flashlight is happy to go, and where it isn’t. Where I’m naturally at ease, and where I’ll have to cull my acting chops.

But, isn’t that the thrill of anything new? Isn’t that the thrill of being alive? Being challenged to feel, do, and be that which you weren’t able to before, simply by the act of showing up with intention?

I have no idea how long or wide this acting path will be for me. But the caves it is already calling me to explore are worth the price of admission. 

Postcards from the Edge (of a Bookshelf)

Two nights ago I picked up a book that’s been on my shelf since July of last year. I brought it back with me from New Jersey, where I’d stayed with my brother and attended a good friend’s wedding. My brother was getting set to move from his (omg LUXURY) apartment (by SF standards) to Baltimore to live with his long-time girlfriend. (Seriously -- a huge one-bedroom for $950. Come ON!, she drooled.)

He was getting rid of nearly everything. And my brother is a keeper of books.

I didn’t know this about him. We haven’t lived in the same place since I was … 23 and he was 20, still living in our childhood home. So, for about ten years I haven’t been able to witness him living on his own, developing his own habits and patterns, becoming a real self-sufficient adult who buys his own eggs and toilet paper, and who apparently keeps books.

I am not a keeper of books. I am a library whore. I love them, escaped to the one in our neighborhood growing up, and mostly, I like to live light. But, as I’ve settled into my own adult-ness, and one place-ness, and probably not moving anytime soon-ness, I’ve begun to slowly add to these shelves.

And when Ben was about to throw out (or dear god, I hope donate!) almost all his books, I scoured his shelves for anything that wouldn’t weigh down my carry-on bag too much. I took a few “classic” novels, returned my copy of Catch-22 to myself, a few books on physics, and two on acting.

One is by Mamet, and is a little too mean for me (not as in base, but as in incompassionate and didactic). The other is called Auditioning by Joanna Merlin.

My brother had the great experience and success of doing the plays in high school and in college, and I even flew back once for his star performance in undergrad (the play of which I cannot recall), to attempt to make up for the years when I’d been absent from his life. He was a fun actor, an able one, and I still hope/wish that he takes it up again one day.

Confidentially, (if this place can be called that), acting was one place for him that his stutter completely disappears, and he is the confident man I know him to be.

The Auditioning book hadn’t a crease in its spine. Brand new. And Ben gladly passed it on to me.

I began reading it again because in class at Berkeley Rep on Monday, I opened the notebook I’d brought, which I use for theater stuff, apparently. In the notebook were some handwritten notes and quotes from Merlin’s book. I must have written them down when I was reading the book last summer, and then promptly put it back on the shelf.

The quotes were revelations, the extending of a hand down into the dark world of trying and hoping and trying some more in the course-less world of theater. I took the book back off the shelf the other night, and haven’t been able to put it down since.

There’s practical information about what happens at an audition, compassionate anecdotes about sitting in the waiting room for one, and tips and exercises for how to explore a scene or monologue. It’s a great book. I’m devouring it. And I know I’m at a place where it’s relevant now, where it wasn’t when I began it a year ago.

I have a frame of reference now; I have a better understanding of the challenges I’m putting in front of myself, and the ones that are inherent to the process.

If my best friend hadn’t gotten married, if I hadn't had the funds to go, if I hadn’t stayed with my brother, if he hadn’t been discharging all his books, if I hadn’t taken this class at Berkeley Rep, if I hadn’t picked up this very notebook, I wouldn’t have gotten this gift.

This tome is a welcome hug and nudge on a path I’ve never walked before – but someone else has. 

Nightmares / However...

Nightmares

I have noticed over the last several years that I only get nightmares when I’m about to change something really big. When something really big is changing. I never had nightmares growing up, or none to really take note of, but in the last near-decade, I’ve had about 3 or 4, plus last night’s.

The first time it happened, I was still in therapy, and was able to process with her. I came to realize that, for me, my nightmares were like big boogeymen waving me away from the work I was doing. However, instead of being something that frightens me away from the path I’m on, I realized that if my subconscious is going to pull out all the stops and create a massive ‘hell dimension’ for me, then I must be doing something right. I must be on the right track toward health, and the scared part of my ego, my habits, my core fears must be truly shaking in their boots that I’m about to abandon or walk through a pattern that doesn’t serve me. I am about to shed whatever it is that’s blocking me from my highest good, and, altruistic though the nightmares’ goal is (to “keep me safe” by holding me back in a stagnant pattern), that pattern I'm working on is about to go.

For me, nightmares are actually a guidepost that I’m on the right path. And desperately terrifying though they are in the moment, and in the moments after I wake in a panic, like last night, I do know they are simply showing me that the work I’m doing is poignant and positive.

My brain can be a bit of a dick sometimes.

However…

To continue the thoughts from yesterday about discovering the necessity of wearing or having some kind of buffer between me and the untoward thoughts that come toward me as I walk in the world, there is a rub—and not the good kind.

The rub is that I also want to be seen, I also want to be attractive, I also want to be asked out. So, if I conclude that in order to be “safe” in the world, I have to put up a boundary between me and you, then that means that I’m deterring positive as well as negative attention.

And then I’m back to the thought of being “the undefended self,” a book I’ve heard the title of, and am loathe to pick up (yet).

How to walk in the world with enough self-ownership that I don’t feel corroded by the lascivious thoughts of some, but attract the interest of others?

I mean, surely, we all know, (well, for me this is true) – physical attraction means a lot on first impression. But, if I’m walking with some kind of “you can’t touch me” attitude, then the guys who I may want to touch me will get that message too.

I don’t know the answer yet. I think much of it will lie in the work I’m doing and starting to do that caused my nightmare in the first place—around healing my relationship with sex, sexuality, and trust. I probably don’t know the answer yet, because I’m trying to divine it out of the same information and pattern I’ve always had and used. 

There’s a phrase I’ve heard: “You can’t fix a broken brain with a broken brain.” And extreme and diagnostically critical as that notion may be…

My brain can be a bit of a dick sometimes. 

grubby fantasy paws

I was watching Louis C.K. on Netflix the other day when he had Parker Posey on as the love interest. She was the cutesie shop girl, helping him find a book for a made-up reason so he could talk to her.

When he finally works up the guts to ask her out, he goes on a long cute/awkward monologue about how it must be hard to be a cute girl in the city, because you just want to do your job and help someone out, and then they end up asking you out, and you just wanted to be helpful.

It cuts (like the show is wont to do) to a clip of him doing stand-up, and he talks about how being a pretty girl in the world means that you have to be every guy’s walking cum fantasy. That as soon as a guy looks at you, you feel shot in the eye with cum. You walk down the street, and have buckets of cum thrown at you.

Now, granted, this is hyperbole and intended for comedic effect, but. C’est vrai, non?

You know I’ve been working on how to walk authentically – how to carry myself authentically in the world, without feeling usurped by other people’s impressions and thoughts about me, particularly about my appearance, and therefore without hiding myself, internally or externally.

I’ve written about how when I notice you noticing me, I stand a little straighter, walk a little more precisely, and also stop breathing. I withdraw a part, an authentic part, of myself when I know you’re watching.

How, then, be an actor, eh?

And they’re related, but we’re talking more about beauty here, because one hopes that people see more than visage while I’m in performance. And that I offer more than visage, too.

But I was chiding myself, or simply noticing with intention to “change it,” that I withdraw, or protect a part of myself when I notice you noticing. I thought that if put up a shield around myself when I notice leers or glances or lolling tongues, that I was doing something inauthentic, that I was hiding myself, which is what I’m attempting not to do in this lifetime.

But, then I heard Louis C.K.’s joke, and I thought, Not everyone’s thoughts are benevolent. Not everyone who looks is looking with kindness. And I don’t want to be a target for cum-buckets.

So, in effect, I do have to put up some kind of armor or protection (or, erm, prophylactic) in the world of men. Sorry, guys. But, I can’t expose the all of me, because that lays it out to be perverted, literally. There is some kind of a way that I need to be able to walk with a bit of a buffer between me and you so that I don’t get thrown by all the lustful thoughts. 

And, perhaps, you think I’m conceited and self-centered and believe I’m hot shit. But, a) if you read this for any period of time, you know that’s not true, and b) so what. I know that I am not the most hideous thing to walk the planet, and I know I garner unwanted attention that is purely physical.

This weekend at the call-back (for the role I didn’t get; c’est la vie), the practice was over, and I was walking to the play house’s kitchen to throw away my tea. One of the men who’d been auditioning was milling around the entrance to the kitchen. He said he needed to use the bathroom which was why he was in that section of the house, but he never actually went. He made small talk, and then asked if he could give me his number.

Automatically, since I assume people are being benevolent and kind human beings, I said yeah, sure. And then he tried to get me to remember his phone number, to recite it, and when that was obviously not working, and I’d realized enough that this was an “advancement,” I made no significant effort to get a piece of paper or take out my phone, and the whole thing just faded and I said, maybe I’d see you at rehearsal sometime.

I want to be a person engaged in the world. I want to be authentic, and show up, and be present. And I don’t want your grubby fantasy paws on me, either.

Trust me: if I want your cum on me, I’ll ask for it. 

On Witnessing the Inevitability of Life

My mom and I spoke yesterday for the first time in a while. As in, really talked, not a quick check-in, how are you, okay, gotta go. She and I can speak for hours, on subjects ranging from all manner of depth to superficiality. 

Yesterday, she wanted to ask me my advice about a situation she and her long-time boyfriend (for lack of a better term for a live-in adult partner) were facing. His son, my age, was having consequences (severed tendons) that seemed to refer to alcohol (after an altercation with a guy at a bar).

This apparently wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, and despite the stories he told about it (he slipped and fell on the sidewalk after the altercation), my mom and her boyfriend were concerned that this pattern of incidents pointed toward alcoholism.

So, she called me to find out what they should do.

I gave the best advice I know for the families and loved ones of someone in an addiction: Get the help for yourself that you wish the person had. I suggested Al-Anon, or CoDA (Co-Dependents Anonymous), which are geared toward the families of folks facing addiction.

Because, I told her simply: There is nothing you can do.

Apparently, the son had texted to cancel a brunch with his dad yesterday morning, claiming he’d not been able to sleep well, and would be a zombie. His dad texted back, Okay, but we need to talk.

I suggested to my mom that her boyfriend change his tactics. If the son is really in the grips of a disease and an addiction, then he needs to know he has allies. And, really, what would another conversation do about it, as they’d brought up A.A. already and talked about their concern? Play the tape: What do you hope to accomplish from a talk with him that hadn’t already been said? So, the son will say (again), you’re right, I’m sorry, I’ll do better, different. The dad will sit back in his chair with relief and triumph. – And then the son will do whatever he was going to do anyway.

I told my mom some things that sound harsh and even crass when speaking about a loved one in a hard place: That ultimately, the intention of a conversation like that is to get the result that the son’s dad wants, that my mom wants: relief and reassurance that the son be happy, be healthy. And if he is happy and healthy, then they two can be as well. Ultimately, these desires are selfish: I want to feel better; I want to feel relief. (And I know that's a hard thing to hear when speaking about a parent's love for a son.)

Furthermore, though, their desires for his changed behavior proclaim that they know the best course for the son. And they don’t. We spoke about “not robbing someone of their bottom;” that getting sober isn’t the way for everyone; and that the person very very much needs to come to the conclusion themselves that they need or want help.

You cannot tell someone to get sober. They have to want it themselves, or it won’t stick; and if you demand it from them, they’ll feel pit against you and your expectations, instead of aligned with you against the terrifying proposition of giving up the one thing in the world they know how to do.

To let go of the results of someone else’s addiction is a grave assignment; that’s why there are support programs for the people who are in that circumstance. It isn’t easy for the people on either side of the bottle.

I told her too, that the thing she does have control over is how she chooses to engage the situation. I talked about Loving Detachment, which I haven’t mastered at all, but have less antipathy toward. I told her she could “pray” for him, in whatever way that meant for her (the agnostic Jew), even if that meant sending thoughts of hippie rainbows toward him. I suggested using the phrase, “I pray that he gets the same peace love and happiness that I want for myself.”

Because it may not be this kid’s path to get sober, to stop drinking, to stop getting in bar fights. It may not be his path to live past 35, is the ultimate truth of it. And that’s where the enormous task of Loving Detachment becomes so painful. And, that’s where help for the loved one’s comes in handy. There are people who have been where they are, and some of them are not there anymore.

The thing about 12 step support, I told her, is that you hear others’ “experience, strength, and hope;” you hear them telling the same stories, not from 3rd person hearsay, or generalization: you hear your own story coming from someone else’s mouth, your own feelings being mirrored back at you, and you realize you are not alone in your struggle. That these folks were where you are, and they aren’t (hopefully) there any more. How did they do it? Stick around and listen. There is hope here.

The last thing I suggested was that the boyfriend amend his text to his son about “needing to talk,” and simply say, “You know what, I’m here when you need me, if you ever want to talk. Otherwise, I’ll just see you on Thursday for the game.” (or whatever.)

It’s not that people in their addiction need to be coddled or allowed to behave inappropriately toward their loved ones. They simply need to be given enough rope to hang themselves. To come to their own desperate conclusions in their own time.

And if you have the strength, or the exhaustion, to let someone you love do that – you all have a better chance to be helped.


* Disclaimer: Opinion and interpretation is only that of the person who gave it, and by no means representative of any other group or entity. 

You Must Be This Tall…

I still haven’t submitted my photos to the “real people” modeling agencies that my friend suggested to me after seeing some of my photos from my October photo shoot with a friend. Or sent the hard copy photos to the modeling scout who saw me while I was busking in Union Square on Black Friday.

This morning, I was querying why I haven’t done these simple, low risk tasks, though they’ve been on my internal and external to-do lists for months. The answer was simple: I’m afraid I’m not good enough.

When I first stopped drinking, I read this memoir by a guy who’d also stopped drinking. In explaining why he drank the way he did, he writes, and in explaining why I drank the way I did, I quote: "I always felt one drink behind—One drink behind being funny enough; one drink behind being smart enough, cool enough, attractive enough." One drink behind being good enough, in essence. So there always had to be one more drink, then; and after that, oblivion.

It’s ridiculous, however, to think that I’m not “good enough” somehow to submit photos to professional agencies of myself, I wrote to myself this morning, because that’s like saying, I’m not tall enough to ride a roller coaster. That I walk up to the measuring stick in front of the ride, and the sign with the painted finger points to five feet tall. ... I am 6 feet tall. But I tell myself, I convince myself, that I’m not tall enough. I’m not yet enough to ride this ride.

It’s absurd. But it’s the truth of how I (sometimes) interpret myself in the world.

Many years ago, I wrote a poem that included the line: [Fear], you Nancy Kerrigan my knees before I even stand up. (Or something like that.) That fear takes me out before I even have a chance to try. I wrote that so many years ago. And fear continues to pull a Tanya Harding on me.

I am pretty sure that the only cure for this, let’s call it, personality dysmorphia (like anorexics have body dysmorphia – seeing flaws and fat that aren’t at all there) – the only cure for this is self-esteem, self-care, and just walking through the fears anyway.

To walk up to the measuring stick at the roller coaster, see that this ride is actually accepting me, and walk onto it. – The ride is Life, if you haven’t figured that out.

I am enough. I am healed enough, sane enough, funny enough, smart enough, pretty enough, engaging enough, lovable enough to participate in life, to have relationships, to have valuable friendships, to throw my photos into the hat, to show up to auditions, to even show up to musical auditions. I am enough to have this, to be this.

Because, I am six feet tall, by god! – And I want to ride. 

Reading Tea Leaves

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

This passage is torn off the side of a Celestial Seasonings box of tea. They used to have a ton of quotes and passages, but in the last 10 years or so, changed their packaging.

In fact, I wrote to them once, when I noticed that the once-inspirational packaging was gone, to state my preference for the old, and also to make a case for the flavor Cranberry Cove, which had dropped out of production. I even searched Amazon and eBay for boxes people might have hoarded.

Growing up, I only drank Cranberry Cove tea when I was home sick. I would hold a mug bigger than my hands under my face, inhaling the steam and scent. My mom would stir in some honey, and it was comfort incarnate. When I went home to NJ to pack up my childhood home in 2011 when my dad was selling the house, I scoured the tea cabinet for any straggling remains of the boxes that had likely been there since the 90s. I found a much-bedraggled box about a third full, and brought it back to Oakland with me. I have 3 bags left now, and I only drink that tea under special circumstances, when I need my version of ultimate comfort.

I have in my kitchen cabinet a collection of passages torn off tea boxes, and a few fortune cookie messages. I found them again about a month or more ago, and going through them, I found the Thoreau one.

This was about the time that I was making my decision to focus entirely on acting and theater as my artistic and impassioned outlet (and source). I pinned the cardboard quote to my fridge with the San Antonio magnet I bought in 2010 when I attended a conference, and in fact, performed in a play with my friends.

I have a very specific style of the magnets I buy from airports. They’re these 3-dimensional, near-cartoonish representations of the city where I am. I don’t know why, but I love these best. There’s Singapore pinning up my “time plan” for the week. There’s New Orleans, pinning up a page from a magazine, a photo of a home with the word “yes” dotted all around it, on everything in sight. YES. There’s Sydney, holding up a small note to myself about how I want to manifest my gifts in the world, probably as a result of some “What Color is your Parachute” exercise: create, organize, implement, get messy, entice/encourage/invite.

There’s Maui and New York, and a magnet made of petrified wood that I bought at the Petrified Forest in Arizona while driving/moving cross-country in 2006.

Finally, there’s a magnet of the Serenity Prayer, and one with a Hebrew prayer that was a gift, and I don’t know what it means, but it’s pretty, and “spiritual.”

Under that magnet are cut-out words from the back of an Ashby Stage program: “Oh my dear; Who’s ever ready?”

Who is ever ready to endeavor in the direction of their dreams? Who is ever sure and confident that now is the time to begin? There is no starting pistol or cosmic alarm signal to tell me, Yes, Molly, Now is the time.

There are only these small messages, these scraps of encouragement and camaraderie culled from the pages of life.