I made the mistake of Googling an actor’s name last night.
I haven’t thought of her in a really long time and I really have no idea why she popped in my head in the late hours yesterday. It had been so long I couldn’t even remember her last name at first.
But then I remembered her. The one who has my career.
I mean not MY career. Clearly, it’s her career. But when I look back on when I was younger just starting out in theatre and think on the career I imagined for myself – my ideal, my hopes and dreams – her career is as close to what I had wanted. Yale. Shakespeare Festivals. Film. TV. Her resume goes on and on. I, on the other hand, have a resume that looks like I just started acting 5 years ago and then hit a 5-year pandemic.
She’s beautiful, this career thief. I mean truly, genuinely CLASSIC ingenue. You can tell just by looking at her she has the grace and class of a 15th generation royal. And her resume is made of the clouds of ingenue dreams right down to Viola De Lesseps in the now very real stage play of Shakespeare in Love based on the 1998 movie of the same name.
Just a quick detour: When I was on the educational tour of the Utah Shakespeare Festival back in 2000 (I was 10 years old at the time *COUGH*), there was a student at a talk back who asked if we performed any other plays on the tour like Hamlet, or Shakespeare in Love….
That was a funny story for 20 years.
I did not play Bianca on the educational tour of The Taming of the Shrew because I am not an ingenue. I am a Kate. Or a prostitute. Or lady in waiting #4. But at the time I was a 21-year-old Southern Utah University college student who, when I was dressed up as Tranio, or a Servant (or any other male role I could play in Shakespeare’s cannon), I could very easily pass for a 15-year-old high school student when I was in costume as a man. There’s not a chance the me at that age would play Kate in any real professional sense.
I can see that now.
But I was going to be a Lady Macbeth someday. A Kate someday. A Titania someday. A Beatrice someday. And I would just do the dirty work of lady-in-waiting #4 at whatever festival would take me until that happened. Especially Utah. I wanted to get a gig in the summer season at Utah and work my way up. To be an actor on the summer Shakespeare festival circuit was going to be so cool.
But then I dropped out and got pregnant at 22 and spent the next seven years in Oshkosh, Wisconsin caring for a disabled newborn and eventually finished up the degree I never finished at SUU.
So I cried last night. And if I think too hard on it right now my eyes start to burn. Because I had dreams. I had goals. And I failed. And kind of, as a result, gave up Shakespeare.
I often tell the kids (THE KIDS WHO ARE JUST A COUPLE OF YEARS OLDER THAN MY KID NOW) to trust in Katy Perry’s words: “Maybe the reason why all the doors are closed [are] so you could open one that leads you to the perfect road.” (I’m being fucking funny there. Laugh.) The road less traveled and all that. And sometimes I’m good with that when I even try to tell myself that – different roads, doors, etc. Sometimes I do feel this genuine sense of a higher purpose and all that. Bigger things, bigger meaning. Not the best ingenue in Shakespeare festivals in the whole of the USA, but something, someone, else. Just as meaningful, but other.
But not last night.
Last night was the end of a long day filled with family drama that never ends from my biological father that’s a whole other story for another time (I promise it’s coming – the story of generational trauma). And then (again, for whatever unknown reason) I ended up putting The Ingenue’s name in Google, and then the thought spirals began and there was no way to stop them. So I cried and went to sleep.
Because when you go from your biological father’s abusive emails that day, to having to fill out extra paperwork for your disabled daughter’s mandatory social security reporting because it’s the first time you did it and you did it wrong, to admin and website things for your husband’s business that are necessary and good but not, you know, art, and then search and find a resume you wish was yours but you know yours will never look that way even though years ago when you had dreams you thought it would by now…