My aunt Kate was the one who got me hooked on performing. She was the coolest person I’d met by the age of preschool, and that’s pretty frickin’ cool. With big permed ’80s hair, she drove a yellow Datsun fastback and let me ride in the front without a child’s seat. The sound track to Cats was permanently stuck in the tape deck, and we’d sing “Memory” at the top of our lungs when we’d sneak out after bedtime to get curly fries at Hardee’s. Together, at the ages of six and twenty-four, we were practically Thelma and Louise.
Aunt Kate had briefly moved to New York City to become a musical theatre performer after college but was forced to return home because of health reasons (type 1 diabetes, the worst). She got a job as a librarian but kept acting locally, because no matter how many times you have to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for bored senior citizens at an Alabama dinner theatre, once performing is in your blood, you can’t get it out.
She also introduced me to the concept of a “work ethic” nineteenth-century-early. Aunt Kate developed horrible cataracts because of her disease, and for a summer became partially blind. She needed several surgeries to fix her sight but couldn’t afford to stop her job. She had to keep her health insurance. So, as a seven-year-old, I was recruited to go in every day and basically do her job with her. Shelving. Scanning in books. Chiding people: “Mrs. Bertram, you have to return that new Danielle Steel. Someone else has been waiting for it for weeks!” The best part is that her tiny branch was located inside the local mall (must have been a weird Alabama phenomenon), so she paid me for my time in items from the Hello Kitty store across the way. A Little Twin Stars pencil case was my first legitimate wage payment.
No job since has left me feeling so well rewarded.
When my aunt found out that a local Huntsville theatre group was staging To Kill a Mockingbird, she decided that I was absolutely perfect for the lead part of Scout. Mainly because my haircut matched the kid’s in the movie (through no fault of my own; again, my mom made bad choices).
“If you wear overalls to this audition, Felicia, you can become a star!”
I won’t lie. “Star” sounded super appealing to my seven-year-old self. If I couldn’t be reborn a princess, this sounded like the next best thing.
There was only one catch. “The audition paper says ages ten and above, Aunt Kate.”
“If they ask, just tell them you’re ten.”
“But that’s a lie.”
“You want them to hire you to be someone you’re not. So if you lie well, you’re showing them how great you’re gonna be at the job!”
I thought about it for a few beats and couldn’t argue with her logic. It was pretty confusing. So the next day I lied and got the part! It was a great lesson to learn so young: Never let the truth stop you from getting what you want.
Rehearsals started up, and I loved every minute of it. Not the work of acting necessarily, that was all right, but the feeling of becoming part of “The Theatre.” (Say it with a British accent, that’s how I wrote it.) No matter your age or race or background, all actors are treated pretty much equal, which is heady stuff for a seven-year-old: “equality.” I found out that being treated like I was important fit me like a glove!
The kid who played my older brother in the play, Jackson, was not so taken by my adorableness. He was thirteen and despised me because he didn’t like my upstaging him with my dazzling performance. (At least that was what my aunt told me.) I was great at memorizing my lines AND his lines and never hesitated to yell out when he flubbed them. I couldn’t understand why he was so sensitive about it! After all, he was the old one who should have better neural connections; I was only SEVEN. (Revealing that at rehearsal one day was quite the hat trick. Everyone was impressed. Except Jackson. He hated me for that, too.)
During one dress rehearsal, he screamed “Shut up!” when I helped him out with his dialogue (“You forgot the ‘eats raw squirrels’ line again, Jackson, jeez!”), and after that incident, the line was drawn, Hatfields and McCoy–style. Our families started sitting on the opposite sides of the auditorium, and we referred to his mom as “Old Fat Thighs.” The atmosphere got tense.
It all caught up to me during our first matinee performance. There’s a section in the play where Jackson’s character says, “Run, Scout, run!” and he pushes me to get away from the scary Boo Radley dude who turns out to be . . . well, it’s only been fifty years, no spoilers. Anyway, this almost adult (in Arkansas) kid pushed me SO HARD that I flew eight feet across the stage, tripped, and hit my head.
THUMP!