Really? You still don’t want to hear it? Oh, you’re worried about the neighbors in my New York apartment building back then? Hmmm. I never met them, but from what I remember, the people upstairs sounded like they were running a cat hotel while training for Riverdance. But okay, let’s wait.
The months ticked by, and I became more and more worried. It was one thing to feel the extra year slipping away, but something worse had begun to occur to me. What if one year turned into two, and two turned into “Poor Aunt Melba can’t come for Christmas this year, Billy, she’s working a double shift again”? I’m not sure how my name got changed to Melba in this negative fantasy, but the way things were heading then, anything could happen!
I felt trapped. And I felt dumb. I obviously hadn’t used my lucky penny at the right time, and now I had no edge, nothing that separated me from any other struggling sap in the city. What was I going to do? Drop everything and move to an engineless houseboat in a harbor in St. Thomas? This wasn’t “go find yourself” 1972 anymore! It was 1989, and the belts were way thinner!
At a loss, I signed up to participate in what was called the URTAs, a yearly audition held in New York by a consortium of graduate programs in the arts. Since these schools were located all over the country, they sent representatives to New York to recruit actors once a year. As my potential new life plan, this made no sense. I was still heavily in debt from undergrad, so paying for graduate school wasn’t an option at all. Plus, moving anywhere else seemed counterintuitive. I’d dreamed my whole life of making it in New York City, and I’d made it! Well, I resided there, at least. Now I was going to, what—move to Denver? It seemed I was getting further away from my dream, not closer to it. But there was only a month left on my apartment lease, and I had to make some decisions. Would I stay or would I go?
To be at the audition, I had to take time off from work I couldn’t afford. I was asked to prepare a classical monologue, a contemporary monologue, and a song. I spent any free hours I had at the Lincoln Center performing arts library, listening to cast albums and reading plays. I had no coach or teacher or really anyone to try my material out on. In the end, I blindly chose an odd assortment: Linda from Savage in Limbo by John Patrick Shanley, Rosalind from As You Like It, and “Somewhere That’s Green” from Little Shop of Horrors. I had nowhere to rehearse, no time to prepare. I’d go to sleep after twelve hours on my feet just reciting the lines in my head. The audition was held in a slightly spooky old theater in Times Square. I’d hardly even done the pieces out loud before. The stage was massive—I’d never performed in a space so huge—and my voice sounded thin. The audience was unresponsive.
But somehow I got in.
I was actually accepted to a few places, but at Southern Methodist University I was offered something I didn’t even know existed: a full scholarship to their Meadows School for the Arts. I mean, who in their right mind would offer to pay for actors to become actors? Bob Hope, that’s who! There’s a whole theater there named after him, and in general it’s a very wealthy school. But I’d never dreamed of such a miraculous thing. I felt relieved to have a new path, and vindicated to still be on track. I wasn’t ahead, but at least I was normal! Going to graduate school at normal-people times!
Except that when I got there, I realized that there was no normal. There were students from all over the place, all of them different ages and at various stages of their lives and careers. This was shocking to me. Didn’t they know the clock was ticking? Weren’t they worried about getting the first tuk-tuk in Bangkok?
Apparently they were not.
I also discovered that being away from New York at a more traditionally collegiate school had its merits and its comforts. I lived in a sprawling apartment complex with new wall-to-wall carpeting and a pool. I got to focus on being a performer without having to worry about my academics or the basics of surviving in the city—something I didn’t have that first year at NYU. I had an incredible acting teacher, Cecil O’Neal. I made great friends. We laughed a lot, loved each other, and tortured each other as only a close-knit company of actors knows how to do. There was a guy in the class ahead of us who nicknamed everyone’s heads, for example, according to what they reminded him of. Members of our class were named “Pumpkin Head,” “Pencil-Eraser Head,” and “Punched-In Football Head,” among others. I was dubbed “Hair Head”; I can’t imagine why.
I still find that, in general, having a plan is, well, a good plan. But when my carefully laid plan laughed at me, rather than clutch at it too tightly I just made a new one, even if it was one that didn’t immediately make sense. In blindly trying a different path, I accidentally found one that worked better. So don’t let your plan have the last laugh, but laugh last when your plan laughs, and when your plan has the last laugh, laugh back, laughing!
People always ask me how I got to be an actor. The good news and the bad news is: there is no one way. That I thought I had some sort of leg up on life or my career by bartering my perceived time chip was an illusion. In life, of course, there is no Fast Forward. Fast Forward doesn’t even always work on The Amazing Race. Half the time the team in first place makes it onto the earliest flight to a new city, thinking they’re ahead, and arrives at the next destination only to find it doesn’t open for two more hours. Then the other teams catch up, evening the playing field once more. On The Amazing Race, this might mean you lose a million dollars. But in life, maybe it’s actually…fine? Because who wants to Fast Forward anyway? You might miss some of the good parts. I’d rather keep pushing the rewind button on my red Radio Shack tape recorder and be that geek who knows the lyrics to the songs from every Judy Garland musical ever.
Oh, really? Now’s a good time? Oh, good! Here goes….
Clang clang clang went the trolley…
For some reason I had very old-timey ideas about what show business was like when I was first starting out. Maybe it was all those afternoons I spent watching The 4:30 Movie when I was supposed to be doing my homework. (Sorry, Dad!) Back then, there weren’t many ways to learn about what the life of a working actor was actually like, or even get a glimpse into how to get started. Pre–American Idol, the closest thing we had to a show business competition was Star Search, but the acting portion was oddly stiff and theatrical, and never seemed very authentic. The world of entertainment-related periodicals was different then too: there weren’t fifteen gossip publications like there are today, all of them competing to be the first to tell you where J. Lo had dinner last night or to reveal the name of Kate Hudson’s new bichon frise. The National Enquirer spent some time on the secret world of celebrities, but focused equally on alien babies and Loch Ness monster sightings. There was no Real Housewives of anywhere, and no Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat, where people could constantly update you on their every move. People—even famous people—had not yet begun to focus on their “brands,” and there was really only one daily show about Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, which was pretty fluffy back then, and fairly tame. Magazines were not yet going after every detail of what went on behind the scenes. No one was asking the important questions of today, like “Whose cellulite is this?”