I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star Read online

  After the wedding came the move to Detroit. My poor mom. She spent her learning-to-keep-house years in the convent, so she had no idea how to cook or clean for her new husband. On top of that, she was afraid to drive in Detroit (because of the traffic; I don’t think we had invented carjacking yet), and she didn’t have any friends there. But she always blooms where she’s planted and soon got promoted from regular nurse to running her unit at the hospital. She hosted fondue parties for my dad’s work friends, organized scavenger hunts with other couples, and finally found herself knocked up. Depending on which of my parents you ask on what day, I was either planned or a mistake, but either way the result was the same, me!

  As alike as we are, there are ways in which we are so different, and the traits we don’t share are the ones that I envy in her. She is such a hard worker and is obsessed with education. After moving to Detroit, she went back to school and got a master’s degree, then on to try to get a PhD. I ruined that for her, unfortunately. Stupid me. I got tired of my mom being gone during the day for work and at night when she went to class, so she eventually dropped out of the PhD program. Sorry, Mom. She didn’t stop educating herself, though. She did go back to college again, at the same time as I did, and got a second master’s in hospice care. And had a whole second career as a hospice nurse when I left home. I admire her ability to manage and run things. I don’t have that. I am a terrible goal accomplisher and delegator. I wish she would have passed some of that down my way.

  Sometimes growing up in a house with my mom felt a little like growing up in an I Love Lucy episode. She always tried her hardest, but there was usually some wild outcome when she would try to do things on her own. There was the year when she forgot to turn the oven on at Thanksgiving and the turkey was still frozen when we went to take it out. You’re probably wondering, as many do, why she didn’t check on it at all. Yeah, I know. My dad had to run out that night and find a ham at the twenty-four-hour grocery store. Or when she decided to have a surprise fourth-birthday party for me at my babysitter’s house, but since it was summer vacation and all my friends were scattered all over the Detroit area, she just had my babysitter’s daughter, who was twice my age, invite her friends. So, I woke up from my nap and wandered into the living room, and there were about twelve strangers screaming “Surprise!” at me. I don’t think I’d ever even had a birthday party before, not to mention a surprise party. Needless to say, I screamed, ran back into my babysitter’s bedroom, and cried. A few years later my mom hosted a party for me at our house, and almost immediately the kids started telling me my Kool-Aid tasted weird and because of that they hated me. I ran inside to the kitchen, where my mom was making small talk with some other moms, and told her, through tears, that no one liked me anymore because my Kool-Aid was bad. Another mom tasted it and did a spit take. “Didn’t you add any sugar to this?” she asked. My mom said, “No. You’re supposed to add sugar? I’ve never made this before.” Maybe Kool-Aid is different now, but back then you added about a full cup of sugar to the pitcher, and without it, it was just colored water. My dad is diabetic, so my mom just never added sugar to anything. And kids are assholes. I also remember the time she decided to bathe my bird, Sydney. We had a huge hundred-pound retriever who had a real hard-on for that bird. Well, my father and I woke up one Saturday morning to the sound of my mom screaming. This was not necessarily unusual, but still, we ran down the stairs frantically to find my dog with his mouth full of yellow feathers and my mom trying to pry it open. R.I.P., Sydney. One of my favorite Mollie moments, though, was a total Terms of Endearment reenactment in an ER after I broke a toe and they were taking forever. Well, those nurses got a real treat that night from my mom, who made it sound as if I were a professional ballerina with the New York City Ballet and every minute they didn’t treat me was potentially career damaging and we would be suing for all my lost wages.

  She would hide Christmas presents so well she would forget about them until she found them months/​years later. Which was somewhat disappointing on Christmas Day, but fun when they turned up after the fact.

  I’m sure all the craziness was what made my dad love her so much. There was never a dull moment, and for an engineer that’s pretty awesome. If I didn’t come home from school to find her in a power suit, heels, and rubber gloves pulling panty hose out of my dog’s asshole, I might find a new baby grand piano in what used to be the family room but was now the music room. She’s never been able to figure out how to turn on the TV or watch a DVD, but she can run an entire hospital, go to college, and find time to hit up T.J.Maxx on the way home. I admire her selflessness, energy, and positivity, and as a stepmom I hope I have some of those same traits.

  She is not shy about rewarding herself for goals accomplished, and one year, when I was very young, I remember she bought herself a mink coat. I know it’s not PC now to have fur, but it was four thousand degrees below zero in Detroit in the winter, and fur really is the warmest. I have such a vivid memory of riding home at night with my parents: it would be past my bedtime, and I would fall asleep on my mom’s lap, my face buried in her mink coat. I know, I know, you can’t let kids ride on your lap anymore, but back then it was different. I would always wake up as we pulled in to our driveway but pretend I was still sleeping, hoping that my parents wouldn’t want to wake me and I could stay like that all night. Warm, my mom’s arms holding me tight, smelling her perfume, and feeling the soft fur of her jacket all over my face. I have that mink coat now. I don’t wear it often, I don’t need to in L.A., and I worry about having an activist throw paint on me, but when I’m feeling especially Mollie-sick, I will get it out of my closet and bury my face in it. It takes me immediately back to those nights in the car with her when I felt so safe and loved. Even if I was a fender bender away from being launched out the front windshield, I wouldn’t trade those car rides on my mom’s lap for anything.

  Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

  IN FOURTH-ISH GRADE I WAS TAKING BALLET CLASSES, and I seemed to be getting serious about it. I don’t remember exactly why my parents pulled me out of Miss Bunny’s School of Dance, which was conveniently located a few miles away from our house, or if they even wanted to, but they started driving me twenty-plus minutes out of the way to the Milligan School of Ballet. And for some reason, it was decided that dance was my thing.

  See, all kids had a thing, and I didn’t have a thing yet. I wasn’t sporty—I tried soccer once, it wasn’t good. I was resentful that I had to miss morning cartoons on Saturdays. It was cold outside on those fall mornings, and I really wanted to just be home and cozy up in front of the TV while my mom made pancakes. Also, my dad was the assistant coach, which ensured that we fought a lot about soccer. I didn’t want to do it, but he made me stick the season out, and then I quit.

  Then there were the instruments, piano and flute to be specific. My mom was obsessed with a boy I went to grade school with, Tony Bonamici (he goes by Anthony now, or at least on the Internet he does), and he was a child piano prodigy when we were seven. I couldn’t compete with that! But my mom was convinced that if I practiced more, I could play like Tony. I didn’t practice, because I knew I’d never play like that kid. I don’t care what Malcolm Gladwell says about ten thousand hours; if I practiced thirty thousand hours, I still wouldn’t play like Tony. He had music in his soul. I just liked listening to my Madonna records, and practicing the piano really cut into that time for me.

  There were art classes, ice-skating, swimming lessons, and I think I even signed up for hockey at one point, but the practices were at 6:00 a.m., and that wasn’t a good time for me. Early and cold were both not options after failing at soccer. Clearly I was running out of time to find a thing and get good at it, so dance was sort of a last-ditch effort. I started ballet classes when I was nine years old, which in dancer years might as well be thirty-two. But I was really skinny, so I looked like a ballerina, and even if I wasn’t a great dancer, sometimes it’s all about looking the part. I liked dancing,
I liked my dance friends (one of them had a pool), I liked all the different classes Miss Bunny offered, and it was located in a strip mall next door to a video rental store, so we usually rented a movie a few nights a week after class. This was before the days of Blockbuster. (I guess we are now in post-Blockbuster days. Weird.) So, dancing stuck and it seemed like I had finally found a thing.

  Now that I’m a stepparent, I can imagine the stress my lack of a thing caused my parents. I mean, when people ask you about your kids, what do you say if they don’t have a thing? “Sally is such a mellow girl; she is happy just lying on the sofa for hours.” Or, “Doug was so cute watching TV all night last night.” No parent really wants to say that. You want to say, “Abe hit a home run at Little League last weekend,” and “Gretchen got the violin solo in Peter and the Wolf in her school orchestra.” “Bob rescued all the hostages in Call of Duty last night” just doesn’t cut it at company holiday parties and family reunions.

  Anyway, moving dance studios to the Milligan School of Ballet was a big step for me. This was a serious ballet academy that focused on classical Russian ballet. No more modern, tap, or jazz (what is jazz dancing anyway?)—it was serious Russian ballet only from now on. It turned out I was really bad at classical Russian ballet, and serious classical ballerinas are (generally) total bitches. That didn’t stop me from torturing myself for several years while trying to get better at it (I never did) and trying to persuade those bitches to like me (they never would). The main problem was I looked like I would be really good at ballet because I was so skinny. I think even my instructor Miss Karen Milligan would agree the disparity between my look and my ability was frustrating. However, I credit the time I spent on stage dancing, no matter my skill level, with giving me the confidence to try out for the high school musical and the magnet acting program as well. Well, I got cast in the chorus of the musical and made it into the acting program, somehow. It was fun, more fun than the regular high school classes. Toward the end of high school I was getting cast in some real roles in the musicals and plays. Acting was starting to feel like something I liked doing; at least I liked it better than dancing. Maybe my “thing” was changing.

  Then it was time for the future, and the future comes fast in high school. One afternoon, I fell down on the concrete steps of my front porch and hurt my knee. It really wasn’t all that serious of an injury, but I used it as an excuse to quit dancing so seriously. I was too scared to just quit ballet—I had put so much time and energy into it, my parents had spent so much money, and my room and bathroom were covered in ballet tchotchkes. In addition to all the time that not dancing would free up, I would have to redecorate as well. So I seized the opportunity and began an injury-induced phaseout, which was the beginning of the end of me and the Milligan School of Ballet. I was starting to like high school, I had after-school activities that were located in the actual school, and I had started to make more friends, kind of. There was one girl in particular, Marci Urbaniak. The term “frenemy” hadn’t been coined yet, but the first time I heard it used, the face of Marci Urbaniak popped right into my head. Marci had already worked professionally as an actress in the Detroit area. She had head shots, and I think she’d done some commercials or maybe industrial films (which she never forgot to remind us of) by the time we met in high school. Marci and another girl named Melissa were also in the high school acting program I auditioned for. Marci and Melissa were very best friends, they made that clear, and I would only ever be a third. I was welcomed into their inner circle, but only if I understood that their friendship came first and I would never, ever be as close to either of them as they were to each other. I didn’t really care, because I had my own best friend, Nicole, but she was supersmart and took the smart classes, and I needed some friends in my own classes. Besides, I’m pretty competitive by nature, so I enjoyed the challenge of seeing how close of a third I could be or if I could win one of them over. I never did. Once we all went our separate ways after high school, we quickly grew apart. Well, I did. Maybe they’re still close. I hope so.

  By the time we were thinking about colleges, I was at a loss. I didn’t know where to go or what I wanted to do with my life. The only place I could think of was New York, but my parents said it was too far away and they wouldn’t pay for school if I went there. My parents were always baiting me with tuition. The first time was when they pulled me out of private elementary school—they promised I could go back if I hated the public school, which I did, and then they changed their minds. They said the private school was too expensive and too far away. I tried again in high school, begging them to send me to a fancy private boarding school about forty-five minutes away. They said I could go there, but then I would have to pay for my own college tuition since that would eat up all their college savings. Again, I stayed in the public school. And finally, when college time came around, they conned me into staying close to home by telling me, again, that I would have to pay for myself if I went farther away. Since I can remember, all I wanted was to leave home and see the world, so I sat down with my parents and asked them seriously, how far away are we talking? What is the absolute farthest away I can go and still have you pay? Chicago was agreed upon—it was a train ride, fast flight, or a five-hour drive away, which was totally doable for a weekend if I got homesick (read: my mom missed me) or if I needed to come home for a weekend (read: laundry).

  My secret fantasy was always to be a fashion designer, but I couldn’t (and still can’t) draw, so I didn’t think I would ever get into a design school. But other than that, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Even though I was already taking acting classes, doing school plays, and so on, it didn’t occur to me there was a future in it. I just had fun doing it and I made some friends and it was a fun way to pass the time in high school until college, when I was sure I would really blossom. One day, in acting class, Marci announced that of the many theater programs she was considering for college, she was auditioning for an acting program at a college in Chicago and it was so exclusive that they only accepted 10 percent of the people who auditioned for it. Marci implied that an acting dilettante like myself would never get in and shouldn’t try because it was only for those who were really serious about acting. Well, Marci was right: I wasn’t serious about acting, but I was serious about Chicago, and I wasn’t really good at anything else yet. When I got home from school that night, I told my mom about Marci’s latest brag and that she thought it was too exclusive for me to get into … blah blah blah. My mom wasn’t having it. She got all fierce and said, “No one tells my daughter she can’t get in anywhere.”

  “Mom, the audition is this weekend. Today’s Tuesday. There’s no way I will get all the paperwork and crap together in time.”

  “Just let me figure that out. Start working on a monologue. We’re going to Chicago on Friday night.”

  Mollie Evans can be really intense when she needs to be, she rarely takes no for an answer, and, miraculously, in a world before the Internet and e-mail, she managed to get me applied and registered for the auditions that weekend at the Theatre School at DePaul University (thank you, magical fax machines). I did some weird monologue from a Jean-Claude van Itallie play called “The Serpent,” and when I finished, Ric Murphy, my future first-year acting teacher, asked if I had another monologue, something a little more mainstream. I didn’t. But I lied and made one up off the top of my head from To Kill a Mockingbird. What did I care? I wasn’t even going to go to this school anyway, but my competitive spirit kicked in again, and I was going to at least get accepted to this program, whether I went there or not. I was going to get a letter of acceptance in my mailbox no matter what and immediately show it to Marci.

  And guess what? I did! I was one of 10 percent of the kids who auditioned that year to make it in. But now I had to deal with the question of whether I would go or not. It was Chicago, it was acting, I would get a bachelor’s degree, which seemed to be really important to my parents after all the money they were about t
o spend, and I had a girlfriend there, Amy, who was a year older and studying smart-people things, so, built-in friend. The only snag was Marci. She got in too, and if she went there, it would ruin my total-reinvention plan, where I got to leave behind the old Judy and start fresh where no one knew me, so I waited to find out what she was going to do. She had auditioned for a few different schools—I didn’t. I applied to two crappy backups but wasn’t as excited about anything else now that Chicago was a real possibility. Thankfully, Marci got accepted to a musical theater program that she liked better than the plain old acting one at DePaul, so she went there. I accepted my acceptance and got ready to learn how to act.

  The Theatre School at DePaul University is a four-year conservatory program that focuses on acting entirely. You take a few academic classes, but they are kind of designed for us to pass, like the ones athletes take. And then you act. You act all day and all night basically. You take your acting classes during the day, and at night you are either on the crew of a play or in a play. It’s really time-consuming, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started. I remember thinking that I would probably transfer after my first year because I wasn’t going to be an actress and I was getting no real education, but it was fun. And it was such a small program. There were only a hundred students in our first year, divided into four classes, and after both first year and second you had to be invited back. They cut our class in half after the first year and then in half again after the second. If you were in danger of not getting invited back, you were put on warning. Your main acting teacher would take you into his or her office and tell you you were being warned. They would tell you why and what you had to do in order to be invited back. Once you made it to your third year, you were home free and didn’t have to worry anymore. I was on warning both years. I was told I had to work on my voice. The quality and the accent. I had a very distinctive midwestern accent. In the Midwest we have a specific way of speaking, it’s nasally, and I often ended my sentences with an up glide? So everything sounded like a question? When I was talking? And I guess that annoyed the faculty? So they told me to stop? Or I would get kicked out of school? Yeah. I guess they were right. It’s as annoying to write as it is to listen to. As for my vocal quality, I think in order to be onstage and be heard, you really have to project from your belly and not sound as if you’re shouting. It’s hard and I’m still pretty shitty at it, but I work on it when I need to, and the theater school taught me how to do it.