When you look for the bad, expecting it, you will get it. When you know you will find the good—you will get that.
—Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna
When Gus turned three, we had to make a decision about preschool, which meant we had to finally decide whether LA or Rhinebeck was going to be home base. Getting into school in Los Angeles isn’t just insanely competitive; it’s mortal combat. We started hearing stories from friends about the interview process, about a French immersion school where children were reading by the time they were two years old. This was so foreign to Jeff and me. I grew up going to preschool at the split-level house of Mrs. Ann Allison (of Witches Brew fame) in Sterling Park not far from ours. She lived upstairs, and downstairs we learned our ABCs and all about Jesus. Of course, everyone wants their kids to have more than what they had, but the idea of this little not-even-three-year-old being interviewed, or the school looking at us and wondering, Are you famous enough? Do you have enough pull? Do you have enough money? I couldn’t do it. We put our heads in the sand.
Instead of being in LA looking at schools, or letting them look at us, we were at the cabin. The trees were budding, the forsythia bushes were boasting their beautiful yellow blooms, and the sun was out. Gus was catching turtles with his dad down by the reservoir, learning about leaves and bugs and rocks. That little boy loved rocks. It wasn’t Proust, but I’d like to think the curiosity he was tapping in to was something more valuable.
One day, Jeff had a Skype meeting with a producer about a potential job. If it worked out, it would mean a little less travel for him. I wanted it to work! For the meeting, I had to get Gus out of the house because he was a loud toddler who loved to crash his Thomas trains and yell “Percy is coming!” over and over. If you aren’t familiar with Thomas the Train, Percy is Thomas’s buddy the little green engine. But that particular phrase sounds really bad when shouted by a toddler in the background of a business meeting.
I bundled him up and we headed off to the Lions Club park just down the hill from the high school and beside the brook where, I’ve been told, all the teenagers dangle their feet and swap their first kisses.
As we were playing, a Gus-size boy with a huge head of bright yellow curls came running over. Sam and Gus took to each other immediately, and I was left talking to Sam’s dad, Paul, who within two minutes asked the million-dollar question: “Where are you going to put Gus in school?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted.
“Well, over in Red Hook, there’s a really cute preschool named Little Feet. It’s in the old chocolate factory, and the teacher, Ms. Patty, is supposed to be amazing.”
Right then I knew—we didn’t have to be in LA. We could make a life here, at the cabin. Frantic, I started grilling this poor man. How big is the class size, what’s the tuition, and how do I find Ms. Patty!?
An hour later Gus and I burst through the cabin door, breathless. As casual as the cat who swallowed the canary, I asked Jeff, “How was your call, babe?”
“It was great. How was the playground?”
A mile a minute, I relayed all that I had learned. I told him all about Sam and Paul and Ms. Patty, and he sat there with a dopey smile on his face. When I’d finished, or at least stopped for air, he said, “Cool. I have the number for that place. My knee surgeon, Andrew, suggested it too.” Kismet.
We still had to persuade Ms. Patty to make room for Gus. Her classroom was magical and filled with the scent of patchouli, which she told me calms the kids. I don’t know if we convinced her, but Gus, well, he wasn’t going to leave that sweet little school until he had a promise that he could go back. And just like that, we became full-time cabiners.
We already had the wardrobes. When you start an acting gig, you usually do your read-through and then you go to your wardrobe fitting, and that helps you take on the shape of your characters. Over the previous two years Jeff and I had shoved all our LA gear—his bracelets and rings and Chrome Hearts collection and my trinkets and hippie skirts—into boxes, and we basically only wore things that we could buy at the hardware store or at the department store in town. Only this wasn’t for a role, and we weren’t acting. Changing out our LA wardrobe for our Rhinebeck clothes felt natural and right.
Ira sent us to the Rhinebeck Department Store, owned by Barbara and Dick. Dick is a fox. A cashmere-sweater-collared-shirt-pressed-chinos handsome man, and I know that in his youth he was deadly. Barbara is his much younger wife who is a source of boundless good cheer and energy. I’d put money on her being the captain of the cheerleading squad. They saw the similar age difference between Jeff and me and felt that we were kindred spirits.
Barbara creates incredible window displays, and inside the store are old, wide-plank wood floors and a gorgeous, scraggly moose head hanging over all of the goods they carry—the kinds of things that your grandpa wears but hipsters in Brooklyn have appropriated.
We bought Pendleton blankets and wool coats and sweaters and things that will last a hundred years. Jeffrey was adamant that he and Gus have the matching red-and-black plaid one-piece jammies Barb put up in her window, complete with the button-up butt—they were both always running around with their butts hanging out of those things.
I soon learned that my skill set fit the environment at the cabin. I could knit my son a sweater. I could build myself a garden. I could do the hard-scaping and landscaping, the painting and putting together. The women in my family were very capable and made pies from scratch and plucked their own chickens. I’d heard stories of my dad’s mom grabbing snakes by the tail and cracking them like whips so they couldn’t bite her kids. Or my great-grandmother Alice, who was the first woman in town to bob her hair and who worked a job that was usually reserved for male employees until she had earned enough money to buy a whole farm for her tall, younger husband. As a kid, I would hang out in the kitchen with the ladies. One aunt in particular could wash the dishes with her sleeves buttoned at the wrist and not get a drop of water on herself. It was the most precise thing I’d ever seen. That was elegance! And I finally felt like I fit in with these strong women.
* * *
One evening while at dinner with the Rudds at Gaby’s, a little Mexican place in town, my phone dinged with a new email.
“Ha! I just got an offer for a Christmas movie called Naughty or Nice!” I rolled my eyes. Jeff laughed.
“Hold the phone!” Julie said, shutting down the noise of the kids. “Tell me more!”
“Umm, the character is named Krissy Kringle,” I read, laughing.
“Oh my God, you have to do it,” Julie insisted.
There was zero chance I was going to do some cheese-ball Christmas movie. That was like career suicide.
“I don’t think you understand. We love those movies,” Jules cried.
“We love those movies,” Paul chimed in.
“We’re Jewish, and we live for Christmas movies,” Julie insisted.
“Read us the synopsis,” Paul demanded.
The description had every cliché, but it also sounded kind of fun. My friends were babbling on about how wonderful this was. When I told them I couldn’t do it, I thought they were going to climb over the table, snatch my phone, and accept the offer for me.
Jules said, “You have to do it!”
Paul said, “I dare you to do it.”
After that dinner, I kept thinking, What else am I doing?
My acting work had always been my dream. Getting a job like the one I had on One Tree Hill was what I had wanted for my entire life. It was a fairy tale—I was a small-town girl who at age twenty had worked at MTV and now had a great role on a new series. But have you ever read a fairy tale? I mean, an original Brothers Grimm fairy tale, like Cinderella, where the stepsister cuts off her own toe to fit her foot into the glass slipper? They are dark. And in my particular fairy tale there had been a villain who pitted female actors against one another, pushed us to do gratuitous sex scenes that always left me feeling ill and ashamed, told young female actors to stick their chests out, put his hands on all of us, and pushed himself on me, forcing unwanted kisses.
I wasn’t completely naïve—when I was at TRL Ben Affleck had groped me on camera; I was nineteen, and I’d taken it on the chin and kept going. One of MTV’s top brass called me and said, “You handled that so well.” I didn’t realize that I was being groomed—trained to be a good girl and a good sport, someone who would put up with much worse behavior.
Those experiences left me exhausted and jaded. Jeffrey helped me find my love of acting again. When I met him, he told me, “If you’re going to work, I want it to be fun for you. No more taking jobs that put you in a bad place.” He took all the hard shit off the table. I know not everyone is this fortunate, and I’m thankful every day.
Working on White Collar resurrected my love for acting. That team of creatives and professionals showed me how a production is supposed to work, based on mutual respect and deep kindness. I had minimal responsibilities there, which was perfect. But I definitely did not want to sign up for six years on another show ever again. As an actor, you go into auditions begging please hire me. They interview and audition you, but there’s never a point where you get to sit down with the producers and ask, Okay, what’s your track record? Are you a creep? Are you going to bring your baggage to work? You don’t get to see all the cards before you have to play the game. And once Gus came along, I didn’t want to take a chance like that—I could be stuck in a miserable job until he was in fifth grade. I loved to act, but I had to figure out a way to do it that worked for me.
The previous year had been a bum out, professionally. I had new goals now. I was determined to find a female-driven vehicle I could thrive in. My manager, Meg, was thrilled I was going to make a go of it and actually audition.
I pored over scripts. There was an overwhelming theme in that year’s crop of pilots. Slut cops. Captains who get frisky when they’re stressed. FBI agents who can’t help but kiss their co-workers. These babes were women in power, but they were also DTF.
I approached these auditions like I would any job. I did some research, looked at real female officers, paid close attention to how they dressed, talked, carried themselves, wore their hair.
The feedback from casting directors was hilarious.
“What’d they say?” I asked Meg after one audition for a job I really, really, really wanted.
“Well honey, they said you were . . . frigid.”
And another one, “They’d like to know if you could come back and change your hair and clothes.”
“Change them how?”
“Edgier? ‘More dangerous’ is the note I got.”
“So . . . slutty?”
“Exactly.”
I do not exaggerate when I say this went on for dozens of auditions. I even ran into Sophia Bush in the waiting room on more than one occasion. “Can you believe this shit?” we lamented. If only they would cast us—then we could use our powers of persuasion and common sense to convince the producers that after a woman investigates a grisly murder scene and finds out her dad is the culprit, she does not want to take her shirt off for some dude. No matter how hard he smolders.
My plans of being a power female were going down in flames.
But then I got a call. “Remember the hot biker cop role?” Meg asked.
Yeah, I remembered. “Well, you didn’t get that. But Michael Peña is the lead and he’s getting a say in who plays his ex-wife, so they want you to come in and read with him.”
Playing the role of a nagging, concerned ex-wife? Mother to a small son? Don’t have to get naked or be sexy or brood? Wear sensible shoes? I could do that in my sleep. Michael picked me out of the lot. I don’t want to brag, but my nagging is definitely Emmy worthy.
But the show didn’t get picked up.
Hence my availability for the Christmas movie offer, which felt to me like a step backward. But then the producers told me that Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross, the parents from Family Ties, were going to play my parents. What? How cool. I couldn’t say no.
When I read the script, I saw that no one was asking me to do anything inappropriate. I didn’t have to take my shirt off. I didn’t have to say provocative things. There was barely a kiss at the end of the movie. The shoot was only three weeks long, so I didn’t even have to hire a full-time nanny. I needed only a babysitter to help me out. The idea that I could do these little tiny spurts of work that I felt good about and be a mom for the rest of the year was very appealing.
At first, I was defensive about doing these kinds of jobs—it’s only three weeks, they pay women what they’re worth, they don’t make me take my clothes off—rather than just admitting that I liked doing them and that I also liked to crochet, garden, and watch old movies. There was so much pressure when I was in my twenties, when independent film was ascendant and everyone wanted to play a heroin addict or a sex worker, to make “art” films. But in this odd little holiday genre, I unexpectedly found my power-woman roles. I had control in casting and script changes and how my character looked and dressed. This was a revelation!
My feminist manifesto came in the form of an elf costume.
I’m interested in making art that helps an audience feel good and inspired to rise to the occasion. If I can make people comfortable enough to hear the message and be empowered, then that’s good art to me.
Quickly, my favorite gigs became working for Lifetime because women are valued on those jobs. The most important player is a woman. The audience is decidedly female. The directors and writers, all women. A woman is always number one on the call sheet. So, I was happily making movies about stressed-out women living fast-paced city lives and then going to the country to find some homespun love. Sound familiar?
The first week on these jobs is always about getting to know co-workers. We ask each other the usual questions: Where do you live? What do you do on the weekends? Do you have kids? Over and over I found myself having to explain that I didn’t live in California or New York. When I’d say, “I live in a log cabin and my husband chops wood to keep our house warm,” I had to laugh out loud, and whomever I was talking to would inevitably say, “Oh my God, your life is a Christmas movie.”
They weren’t wrong, and I was incredibly grateful. I had never felt more supported professionally in my entire life. Paul and Jules were cheering me on. Barbara and Dick and the ladies who worked for them at the department store were over the moon that I started doing Christmas movies set in little towns just like ours.
The Christmas movies also meant I had plenty of time for Gus, but now that he was going to be in school with Ms. Patty, my days would start to become mine again, and it made sense to start trying for that second baby.
Jeff was reluctant. Gus had been a miracle baby, and he was growing into a special kid. The three of us had found a great balance, and Jeffrey was afraid of upsetting the scales. He would say, “Gus is perfect. We’re perfect. It’s easy to travel as a family. Let’s not throw a monkey wrench into this.”
I felt rejected that he didn’t want to grow our family the way we’d initially planned. I hadn’t signed up to have a one-kid family. I wanted to be pregnant again. I loved feeling like my body was a science experiment, and choosing natural childbirth had given me a lot of confidence. That was really empowering. Not to mention, I had found something I was good at, and it seemed crazy to do it only once. I didn’t want to be greedy and ask for too much, but I desperately wanted another child.