When I moved to Virginia, being out in public became much easier. There were, I believe, three main reasons for this.
1. People are polite. They considered it rude to interrupt dinner simply to inform me that I was on cable last night.
2. People don’t really care. They had interests other than movies. I might have been hanging out with a guy who just got back from building schools in Haiti, a chef who was nominated for a James Beard award or Thomas Jefferson’s five-times-great-grandson.
3. People who are legitimately famous live here. If someone really was stealing glances in my general direction, chances were good that Sissy Spaceck, John Grisham, or Dave Matthews was behind me.
I settled into our nerdy, hippie college town and it suited me. There was an annual festival celebrating books and another celebrating vegetarianism/stray dog rescue. There were seasons, glorious seasons, a full four of them. It was not just fire season, pilot season, earthquake season, and awards season, either. These were real seasons that demanded a change of wardrobe.
The place was also a writer’s paradise. There were almost more used bookstores than there were drunken freshman. Writers from Edgar Allan Poe to William Faulkner had chosen this place, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to find themselves and lose themselves and write it all down.
Our Charlottesville social circle consisted of people with far more degrees than I, which admittedly, was not much of an accomplishment. The last thing I had graduated from was a two-day class on producing short films from The Learning Annex. It did come with a diploma though, which I framed, since it was my first since 8th grade. Jeremy’s cohorts were all MBAs-in-training, the classic polo-shirt wearing, educational elite that I feared would rain their judgments down on my high school dropout self.
Most of them didn’t. A couple of them did. Generally, I got a lot of questions about why on earth I would leave acting. I was clearly an outsider and there were times I wondered if I was not better off in the environment I had just left. In L.A. no one scoffed at a high school dropout. It was a badge of honor; a metaphorical middle finger salute to the establishment. It indicated that you were such a brilliant artist that nothing so inconvenient as a formal education could hold you back. Here, people heard I hadn’t graduated from high school and they looked like they wanted to contribute to some sort of fund.
I bought a cookbook and made veggie stir-fry in the wok I had brought in my suitcase. I managed our bills, clipped coupons and delivered our rent check to the landlord on time. I learned how to use the coin-operated laundry facilities that were down the hall from our apartment, and usually got the stuff out of the washer before a college kid threw our clothes on the linty laundry room floor. I did normal. And I found a staggering beauty in all of it. This was the real life that I had once scoffed at while sitting in coffee shops with my actor roommates? What had I been so afraid of?
I obsessed over those multiple-choice career quizzes. They unfailingly told me that I was an artist—usually an actor. This was not reassuring. It made me wonder about the chicken and the egg-ness of it all. Was I simply born to be an actor? Or had my experience crafted my personality so strongly that every multiple-choice test was forced to come to the same conclusion?
The MBA program had a “Partner’s Association” organized to boost the morale of the lonely mate of the exhausted graduate student. These women (male partners didn’t seem to join) were very kind, but seemed to be from another planet than me. Many of them had kids and threw dinner parties that included a soup course and they decorated their homes using the rule of threes. They made New York-style cheesecake using the recipe on the back of the Philadelphia cream cheese container. They didn’t exactly know what to do with a broken-down former actor recovering from an eighteen-year career. I tried to politely extricate myself from the tennis parties, book clubs and the cookie swaps. Besides, I was a girlfriend of nine months, decidedly not a wife. Along with the complete abandonment of my entire life, career and identity, that level of commitment made my throat tighten.
As I tried to branch out from the graduate school world and make my own friends, I faced a surprising problem; I was not quite famous enough. You wouldn’t think this would be a problem for someone who leaves L.A. and doesn’t want to be an actor, but it makes things awkward.
I was not rightfully famous. It’s not like when I walked in a room, everyone knew who I was. They were more likely to squint at me and wonder if we went to high school together. I considered this to be a massive blessing; however, it’s tricky when you are beginning to be friends with someone. There was this period of psychological stress, wondering if they knew I used to be an actor, either by recognizing me or hearing it though someone else. If they already knew and I told them I was an actor, then I looked like a self-obsessed asshole. Because really, what kind of regular person meets a new friend and announces what their job used to be? Can you imagine? “Hey, I just wanted to mention, just to get it out there, that when I was eighteen, I worked at The Olive Garden. I hope that doesn’t make things weird now.”
So, when I tried to make new friends by taking pottery classes filled with newly divorced ladies, or agreeing to be a judge in the neighborhood Halloween pumpkin carving contest, I just wouldn’t say anything about it. Then I seemed sketchy and suspicious because when my potential new friends asked about my childhood or where I went to school, I looked as if I would rather bolt from the room than discuss my past. A friend once told me that I behaved like someone who had killed her entire family and moved out of state.
Whenever I finally confessed to being a former actor just to explain my scattered history, it always involved stumbling over my words, staring at my own feet while red blotches crept slowly across my neck. Then, the nice women sitting across from me in Introduction to Quilting Techniques would ask why I left L.A, with an inevitable look of astonishment. I would stammer out my diatribe of, “I started when I was really young and I feel like there are other things in the world that I am interested in…” They would look as if they were hoping for a better story. “My eating disorder counselor recommended that I take some time off…” or “I had an affair with a famous actor and his wife had me blackballed from the industry…” Even my story of leaving L.A. felt like a colossal disappointment.
All this nervousness was well-founded; people were often thrown off balance by my past. They tended to respond as if I had just removed my jacket to reveal that I was actually a winged Pegasus. The next part would proceed in one of two ways:
Outcome #1—My potential new friend knew my films and felt embarrassed about that,
or,
Outcome #2—My potential new friend didn’t know my films and felt embarrassed about that.
They apologized either way because they were nice southerners, then there would be this long silence. I knew what they were doing. They were trying to remember what the poster of that movie looked like, and then do one of those age progressions like you see on fliers of missing people and make it match up to the face sitting across from them. I’d just wait, watching that familiar movie-induced distance creep in, creating an opaque fog between us. Sometimes those friendships didn’t go anywhere because apparently being friends with a former actor can be strange. I am not nearly that special, but some people seem to think, thanks to tabloid fantasy projections, that actors are fundamentally different from everyone else and can’t possibly be quality friendship material. A few brave souls waded through the fog and reached out a hand, but more than once, I found myself grasping at nothing, all alone in the haze.
All around me, adult people were getting their lives sorted out in a calm and orderly fashion. They seemed to be following a path that had been nicely manicured and they didn’t publicly weep at the mere thought of their future. It looked so nice. I decided to try to fit into this mold of the “educated adult.” I vaguely thought about college, but with such a disastrous educational background, who would accept me?
The fact that I hadn’t completed high school was something that haunted and shamed me. A GED could rid me of that particular insecurity and prove that I could have graduated high school had circumstances allowed. My lack of experience with standardized anything meant that I tended to freeze up during tests and even the thought of a Scantron form made me hyperventilate. But I needed to prove my worth beyond just being a film actor. At least I hoped there was worth there.
I took a GED prep class, which was held at an elementary school on the other side of town. The halls were decorated with hand tracings made to look like dinosaurs. I dodged little kids, struggling with backpacks bigger than they were and made my way to the strangely miniaturized bathroom with the foot pedal sinks and powdery green soap. I tried to remember if my elementary school was like this but I had absolutely no recollection of it.
My GED-prep classmates and I were riddled with the same insecurities; all of us were just hoping to have that piece of paper to prove that we were not complete failures at life. We all craved the same thing, a stamp of approval that told us that we were just as good as everyone else, even though our paths had not been the norm.
I liked my classmates. During breaks I hung out in the hallway and shared a bag of Doritos with a sixteen-year-old girl who sat near me. She was tired and her stringy hair wouldn’t stay behind her ears, no matter how many times she tucked it back. The day before she had gone home after a double shift at the fast food place to find that her baby was inconsolable. It turned out that the neighbor, who had been watching him, hadn’t bothered to change his diaper in more than twelve hours. My friend worried that she’d need to find some money to take him to the doctor to tend to the sores he had, since they didn’t seem to be clearing up. Another guy had dropped out of high school to help with the family farm when his father was diagnosed with cancer. Someone else had just been released from juvenile hall. Since I didn’t volunteer the information, no one asked why I was there and no one told me that I “looked like that girl.” As we sat and went over workbooks of scientific equations, we all realized that we were not alone in not fitting in. There was a whole world of us, with our stories that made people cock their heads sideways at us.
Our teacher came to me the last day, holding the completion form for the prep class. It had some general demographic questions as well as questions about my experience of the program. She had looked over the form and wanted to make sure that I had checked the correct box for my annual income range for the previous year.
“Is this right, dear?” She asked, pointing to the top box.
“Oh. Yeah. It’s right.”
She looked at me with a questioning look on her face.
“I used to be an actor.”
It was the first time I had said that. Using the past tense had never felt so profound. I was also pretty sure that would be the last time I would check the top box.
She smiled and patted my hand.
“Well, that’s nice, darlin’. I just wanted to make sure that you understood the question.”
She ensured that I had my #2 pencils and sent me off to the local high school to take the GED. There were maybe fifty of us, all gathered to take the seven-hour test and prove something to our parents, our friends, our former teachers and ourselves. We were armed with Red Bulls, granola bars, and frayed nerves. It was our chance to prove that we were just as good as people who had that high school diploma. Weren’t we? We hoped we were, despite the surreptitious routes that had gotten us there. We filled in the bubbles completely.
When the test results came in the mail, I tucked them under my arm and locked myself in the bathroom. If I had failed, I didn’t want to have to deal with that in front of my soon-to-be-MBA smarty-pants boyfriend. If I had failed it would mean that I really wasn’t cut out for the real world, I wasn’t smart enough to do anything but be an actor. If I had failed it would mean sucking it up, going back to L.A. and admitting that I made a mistake. I’d have to go back to pretending.
I didn’t fail.
A little, tiny, porthole-sized door opened to my future. The light streamed in. Maybe there was an alternate life available. Maybe the real world would accept me. Maybe I could adapt and learn how to do this thing. The GED results came with a certificate, which I framed alongside my two-day filmmaking class diploma.