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Why Are You an Actor?
I’m an actor because funny things happen to me and shame flirts with me. I left my apartment once and I didn’t tie my harem pants tight enough around the waist, so they dropped to my ankles while I was walking down Fifth Avenue. I found a stranger to help my shame and wanted to share a laugh. This lady was an older woman in her eighties with great style—big glasses, sharp quilted blazer—and I smiled, and turned my inner camera on so I could remove myself from the situation. I said, “My pants fell down,” almost like “Hi, how’s it going?” She didn’t respond or laugh because she wasn’t an audience member in my show. She grimaced, maybe thinking I was a streaker, and walked quickly past. So I said it again, to absolutely no one, but to the air around me and to the buildings, as I pulled my pants back up and tied them back together.
When I’m asked, “What’s it like being an actress?” I always say, “It’s like walking around with your pants down and around your ankles.” It’s somewhat of a stock answer so I was happy to experience it for real. Embarrassing and shamefully uncanny things that are at first humiliating and only funny later seem to naturally happen to me. I think this is a big part of why someone becomes an actor.
In my Chelsea days, in the nineties, I’d start baths and forget about them, flooding the beauty shop downstairs. But Kathleen, the owner, was laid-back and cool. “It’s the third time in a month I’ve flooded the beauty shop downstairs! I forgot about it! How could this happen again?!” Like forgetting is something that happens to you and not something that you participate in or that you’re like, you know, responsible for creating.
You’re stressed out and your friend calls and says, “What are you up to?” and you say, “I’m looking for my phone!” You look for your glasses for ten minutes while they’re on your head, or you’re wearing them. I’ve slipped on banana peels several times in my life, and not as a joke. The door has opened when I’m in the bathroom many times because I haven’t locked it, and the other person is more embarrassed about it than I am.
I’ll never understand how I could watch my hand casually toss my Nokia nugget into the gutter and into a puddle as I strode down the sidewalk. It felt like something out of The Matrix. This was made more absurd and uncanny in that it was the first of three times that I “lost” my phone that week. The second of those times, “losing” it just meant leaving my phone somewhere because I didn’t want to be reached.
But the third time, I was at Madison Square Garden with my eight-year-old niece, Isabella, for the Cirque du Soleil Christmas show. Have you been to the theater there? It’s huge, just . . . Wow. It holds around 5,000 people. Our seats were close to the stage, down in E or F of the first level, right in the center front.
We arrived at the perfect time for the theater, with less than ten minutes to wait—enough time to get some water, enough time to maintain our excitement and focus for the magical show, and enough time for me to wink at those who recognized me and wait for the curtain to rise. It was then I realized that my phone was missing. It felt like some bad joke. “Bella, where’s my phone?” I asked. She said, “Didn’t you just buy one on the way up here?” I had indeed, in Chelsea, when I hopped in a cab to swing by to get her.
So we’re digging through my bag and looking under the seats, and the people in front of us and behind us are looking as well. I’m patting my pockets and shaking our coats. “This is the third time I’ve lost my phone this week,” I share with the strangers around me. They’re laughing, of course. Bella says I must’ve placed it on the bar when we got our water. I ask the kind strangers if they could watch my niece for a second and I scamper, all hunched and hiding as I run to one of the theater ushers. She points me to the security guard, down and up front, standing at the lip of the stage. “I’ve lost my phone,” I tell the security guard, exasperated.
The guard points me toward the lobby, up the long flight of stairs. Should I stay or should I go? It was daunting. I would have to run.
The lights are dimming on and off, the intro music has started, and I am out of the gate—hauling up those stairs, two at a time. Panting, I ask the bartender if I left my phone there and he says no, but I can check the office at intermission. “Okay! Good plan,” I blurt out, and start my hunched and speedy jaunt again, down the steps, where the lights have dimmed but the theater is not yet completely dark.
There’s a spotlight on the performer playing a burglar elf, dressed in green spandex. He’s dancing around, introducing the show in Cirque du Soleil fashion—animated like a court jester. He warns the audience of a pickpocket and instructs everyone to hold on to their purses and wallets. I’m breathless and shaking my head like a crazy lady as the spotlight catches me mid-gate and I freeze: 5,000 people laughing. The joke’s on me as I run back up the steps to a security guard holding my phone out to me. Caught.
Things like that, that just “happen,” are the reason I’m an actor. David Harbour, who plays the cop in Stranger Things? I ran into him a couple of years ago walking with a crutch, in a full-leg cast. I was eating my pretzel croissant from City Bakery and he was going inside for a cookie. I asked what happened and he told me he had to back out of a production of Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare in the Park, where he was to play Achilles, because he tore his Achilles heel. Sometimes you’re in the play, but not the play you’d intended—and that’s what’s strange with a career in acting.
My mom was always burning herself in the oven; she said it was hereditary and that her father was always burning himself on the oven, too. “Is Glenn going to have a Band-Aid on?” we’d ask on the way to visit my grandparents, and when he did, we’d all laugh. In the house were lots of Band-Aids, peroxide, Neosporin, and, back then, Mercurochrome and Merthiolate, which we called “monkey blood” because it stained red. You’d blow on it if it was Merthiolate because it burned like hell and you’d beg Mom to use Mercurochrome because it didn’t burn. All of us over the age of thirty have mercury in our blood—they later learned it was poisonous to the brain, which is too bad because the stuff worked.
Needles and thread at the ready for mending, and baking soda for stains. I liked the grunge period in the nineties when Gen Xers wore ripped clothes with safety pins and tied flannel shirts at the waist—shirts that looked like hand-me-downs from your older brother, with missing buttons left unmended.
When I was a little girl, I had a rag doll that got so dirty and worn from all my playing that she’d get thrown in the washer and dryer repeatedly. She was 100 percent cotton. When her blue felt eyes came off, my mom sewed new ones back on with black thread, making her eyes solid pupils. I called her Muffin—there’s a nod to her in my Waiting for Guffman monologue, in the deleted scenes—and she had yellow yarn hair that was in a permanent up-swirl from my hand holding tightly on to her head.
I have a series of photos of Muffin and me, with my mom and dad and brother, from when we were five. We look picture-perfect, although the day had started badly, with me running away from the camera lens. I liked to say back then, “Don’t look at me! Don’t touch me!” when someone wanted to take my picture. I’d even splay my hand in front of my face and grunt as I said it. It was primal for me, but for others, it was funny. I know, look at me now.
The photographer didn’t scare me, but the camera did. I think it had something to do with how my parents changed when the camera pointed at them, and that I didn’t know my part in the scene. But also, I loved Muffin and wasn’t sure that my parents would want her in the picture because she had weird hair and looked poor and dirty. But the photographer liked her, so eventually he led me and Muffin to a flower bush to smell the flowers. My mood shifted as I found myself in the scene everyone wanted me to be in, and I was comfortable in the frame of the shot.
I wore Muffin out so much that I got another one for Christmas. She’d lose her eyes again and get new ones sewn back on—big black pupils again, like the lens of a camera.
