There were a few years in there where I mostly forgot about the whole skipping-a-grade thing. In elementary and middle school I spent time riding horses every weekend, sometimes working in a barn after school, and having birthday slumber parties during which we’d sneak out in the middle of the night to go pajama streaking. (We’re running! Around the block! In our pajamas! The excitement!) I also enjoyed such sophisticated pastimes as toilet-papering people’s houses (this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in my group of friends—in fact, it was a good sign if people cared enough to TP your house; I remember praying I’d be TP’d more), acting out elaborate soap operas involving my troll dolls, making horse blankets for my thirty-seven Breyer horses, and recording Judy Garland movies off the television with my red plastic Radio Shack tape recorder. I’d stay up late, listening to my cassette tapes over and over, which is why I’m happy to announce I can still perform “The Trolley Song” for you right now!
With my high starched collar,
And my high-top shoes,
And my hair piled high upon—
What’s that? Oh, okay, you’re probably right, let’s do it later.
Anyway, my dad met my stepmother around this time, and they got married, and we moved farther out into the suburbs of Virginia, partly so I’d be closer to the barn where I rode, which was ironic since it wouldn’t be long before I’d replace all the time I’d been spending there with all the time I’d spend doing school plays.
Skipping a grade came up again during my sophomore year of high school, when everyone but me started getting their driver’s license. I wanted off the school bus badly, and not being able to drive until later than everyone else seemed an unfair penalty for being able to read a little bit before them.
The drinking age in Virginia was twenty-one, but just over the bridge in D.C. it was only eighteen, and we heard that fake IDs worked there with surprising regularity. Our desire to get into the bars in Georgetown was due mainly to a wish to be able to dance for hours with the music turned up to volumes that weren’t allowed in our suburban basements. This was during a time in high school when dancing was in fashion. There came a day when dancing suddenly went away, when it simply wasn’t cool anymore. But during that time it was mysteriously deemed okay, and I remember all of us happily jumping around like freaks for any reason at all. Michael Jackson moonwalked on TV, and no one had seen or heard anything like him. With the top of her convertible VW Rabbit down, Virginia Rowan and I yelled along to Wham! and Morrisey and a new singer named Madonna. Bruce Springsteen was everything then. My friend Kathryn Donnelly would regularly get up on a table and sing every word of “Born to Run,” using a broom handle as her microphone. Musically, it was a great time to be a teenager.
I wasn’t interested in drinking at the time, but some of the other girls were, and everyone was petrified of getting pulled over. So that’s how I, at fifteen and without a license, was chosen to be the regular designated driver of Joyce Antonio’s father’s Mercedes. This made perfect sense to me as fair payment for having to suffer through the injustice of being a year younger than everyone else. My friends who wanted to drink were covered. Everybody won!
AHAHAHAHA, what a TERRIBLE idea this was. Literally the worst example of “learning by doing” ever. But I remember all of us thinking it was a really wise and grown-up choice, and feeling very proud of ourselves for figuring out this genius way to solve our need-to-dance-while-drinking-illegally problem. Because really, aren’t laws actually just pesky suggestions? Who needs them? Fifteen-year-olds know everything! The good news was that we’d taken the “Don’t Drink and Drive” campaign seriously. The bad news was that the “Don’t Get on the Road If You Aren’t a Licensed Driver” campaign just didn’t have as catchy a slogan. In fact, driving without a license was such a dumb idea, I doubt it had even occurred to anyone to start an ad campaign about how dumb it was.
Miraculously, we all lived. And eventually I got my license. During the driving part of the test, I worried that my ability to parallel-park on the first try would raise eyebrows, and the instructor would turn to me and say, “I have a suspicion you know how to do this because of all the time you spent sneaking into Winston’s with a fake ID so you could dance all night to ‘PYT.’?” Lucky for me, he didn’t.
Throughout all of this, my free year was still on my mind, and I was so intent on saving it for the “right” time that I missed an opportunity where it actually might have been helpful. I spent my freshman year in the undergraduate acting program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It is and was a wonderful program, and I had some great teachers, but at just seventeen years old, I felt lost, and doing things like sitting in a chair for hours attempting to summon feelings of “cold” and “hot” wasn’t what I’d envisioned college to be. I visited friends at other, more academic programs, and worried I was missing out. So at the end of the year, I transferred to Barnard College to be an English major.
Not surprisingly, my Temperatures class, among others, didn’t have much value at my new school, and almost none of my credits transferred. This would have been a wonderful time to start over as a freshman, but I wasn’t ready to let go of my lucky penny just yet! So in order to graduate on time, I had to take a full academic load every semester. To that, I added plays and musicals, and the a cappella group the Metrotones, which toured other colleges most weekends. I was completely overwhelmed and behind on my studies for three years straight. Barnard College has been very good to me, and I love going back to speak there or just to visit, but I’m sure they’ve (rightly) buried my transcript somewhere far below the 1 train at 116th Street and Broadway.
The year after I graduated from college ended up being the moment when I finally plunked my lucky penny down on the table. Most people would just call this “the year after I graduated from college,” but to me, it became the withdrawal on the time I’d put in the bank in my head.
My best friends from school all either had gone abroad, had gotten jobs somewhere besides New York, or had a year of school left. So without any of my buddies to share a place with, I lived in a tiny room in an apartment that faced an airshaft. Somehow, given my pretty limited and lackluster wardrobe, I was hired at a clothing store where I worked during the day. At night I got a job as a cocktail waitress. My days usually started before 8:00 a.m. and I’d get home after 2:00 a.m., dead on my feet but facing the same hours the next day. Even so, I didn’t earn enough money to have much to live on after I paid my rent.
Also, I realized that while I’d spent almost my entire time in school and in the summers being involved in some sort of performing arts, I was now living a life without any of them. Even when I was broke back in college, I was acting or singing in a million productions, and could always find a way to see plays and musicals too: volunteer as an usher, maybe, or get discounted tickets through the student store. Now, though, I had neither the time nor the money to see anything, let alone be in anything. Worried I’d get rusty, I had to resort to standing in the center of my living room/kitchen/bedroom facing the airshaft at three in the morning practicing scales.
Which reminds me—
Iiiiiiiii went to lose a jolly
Hour on the trolley
And lost my heart ins—