“THANK YOU!”
And that was the closest to becoming a Disney kid I ever got. Thank goodness.
Several years later, we were living in San Antonio, and my mother met a man whose daughter took ballet class with me. Of course, the conversation turned to my fantastic singing voice, and it turned out that the guy knew a guy who had a brother who recorded music and made albums. In his garage. Talk about kismet!
Except he didn’t do pop music (or German lieder), he specialized in Tejano music. The accordion music that the Tex-Mex region adores. Objectively, it is very danceable.
To most humans, I would not be the FIRST person you’d pick for stardom in this particular field. For one, I didn’t speak Spanish, and two, there was that really Caucasian thing going on with my face. At this point I was a bit older, fifteen, and I strongly registered my objections, but when my mom saw an opportunity, she couldn’t let it escape.
“Your voice is so pretty! That girl Selena is popular, and you’re just as pretty as her! You can do this!” There was no arguing. I would be her Central Texan Eliza Doolittle.
My mom immediately bought language tapes to play in the car. “Mi casa, su casa . . .” everywhere we drove, I drilled. I started flamenco class, which had nothing to do with Tejano but was similar enough to tap dancing that I enjoyed it, and after a few weeks of intense training, we met with the recording guy to talk debut album concepts.
Now, this guy should have been rightfully laughing us out of the state, but my mom is somehow able to make the most insane ideas seem plausible. At least when you’re in her sphere of contact. Once she’s gone, you start to catch yourself, like, Hey, now. Wait a second . . .
We sat there in a tiny recording studio behind a nail salon, and my mom painted the headline “White Tejano Star Takes San Antonio by Storm!” with such vivid enthusiasm that the producer dude, slurping from a two-hundred-ounce sweet tea cup, was totally digging it.
They brainstormed as I sat there silently, praying for an earthquake or tornado to kill us all. I kid you not: the strategy was to change my name to “Felicia Diaz.” Which was pretty considerate, because I got to keep my first name, just add the accent, like “Feliz Navidad.” I don’t know why I was so uptight about it; the plan screamed success!
The two of them came up with tons of debut song concepts, mostly with the word corazón in them (my violin playing was a HUGE asset, special skillz, y’all!), and we left planning to come back the next week to start recording.
In a very sad way, fate intervened. Before we could get into breaking the lyrics down phonetically for me to learn so I could insult millions of people and their culture in MP3 format, the superstar Selena was murdered by a fan. The whole future of Tejano looked to be a bit iffy. I was able to get that violin scholarship to go to college during the confusion, and my future of becoming a superstar disappeared into the mist.
Lo siento, mi amor.
[?Hollywood, I’m Inside You!?]
Because everyone discouraged me from getting a degree in theatre (thank you, everyone), I did the math-music thing in college, but in the back of my mind I was always going to move to Hollywood and become an actor. I could analyze my motivations until the day I die, but there just wasn’t any logic to it. I never had a doubt that it was how my life was going to go, and I was going to make it happen. My mother was often impractical, but she did instill a “leap and look later” attitude that’s pretty much responsible for my whole career.
Days after I got my Real Degree, I moved west. I didn’t go completely unprepared (I was only 95 percent stupid at the time), I had a few cards up my sleeve. I’d saved up a lot of money by living at home and playing violin professionally and having my mom drive me to college for four years, so that torture paid off in the end. I had also volunteered at tons of film festivals in Austin and made connections with “Hollywood insiders.” Most of them were screenwriters, which I later found out are the most useless connections you can have (only LA valets get treated worse than LA writers), but my friends did help me figure out where to live, how not to get killed on the freeways, and what kind of acting head shots immediately went into the trash. My first photo is NOT an example of what they suggested was successful.