Now, even with the monumental education I got at Howard, it took me some time to pursue my passion. I still had big dreams of being a star, but reality deferred them. I was a single mother with a baby to support on my own and bills that weren’t going to pay themselves. I was pulling shifts and making enough money to get back on my feet again, and eventually I would stack enough cash to buy myself a little town house somewhere down the line and live a decent life raising my son. So focused was I on getting money and keeping up with my responsibilities that I actually lost focus on the bigger prize: acting took a backseat to the real-life hustle of single parenthood.
My father, who always saw bigger things for me, even when I didn’t immediately see them for myself, wanted me to have so much more. It was he who tapped me on the shoulder one day, pulled my face toward his, and ordered me to stop hustling backward. “What are you still doing here in Maryland?” he asked me one day while I sat at the kitchen table feeding Marcell. I was in my work clothes, ready to rush out for the evening shift, with an exclusive focus on squaring my baby away before I hit the door.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I got a job.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “But didn’t you graduate with a degree in acting? Ain’t no acting jobs in Maryland. How you expect to catch fish on dry land?”
I looked at him, alternately confused and a tad annoyed by the conversation, considering I had only a few more minutes before I needed to be on the other side of town. I absentmindedly looked at my watch, then focused on putting the last spoon of mashed potatoes and peas in my baby’s mouth. Daddy was undeterred. “You gotta go where the fish are,” he said, this time more urgently.
“What you talking about? Fish?” I asked, even more annoyed.
“The jobs! You gotta go where the jobs are! Los Angeles!” he said, exasperated. “You want acting jobs, but they’re not here in Maryland, they’re in Los Angeles. Where your cousins are.”
He wasn’t lying. At the time, my cousin Dee was in Los Angeles with her son, Bobby, who, inspired by my star turns at Howard, had become a child actor and rapper. Little Bobby would always come to see me in my plays, with his little lemon head perched on a seat right on the front row, feet all dangling and swinging above the floor. When I hit the stage, I would have to focus above his head because he would be sitting there, staring up, beaming at me, smitten and totally turned out by my acting—quite the sweet little distraction when I was trying to stay in character, but a distraction nonetheless. Still, he got enough of the acting bug to get good—good enough for a Maryland-based manager, Linda Townsend of Linda Townsend Management, to send him on an audition in Los Angeles, where he booked a gig on a UPN show called Minor Adjustments, starring fellow Howard University alum Wendy Raquel Robinson. Unbeknownst to me, Dad already had put in a call to Dee, seeing if she would be open to me moving into the two-bedroom apartment she and Bobby were staying in while the show’s season played out. She was on board. “I’m going to send her out there with you, then,” Dad told Dee.
My father had a gift for putting an idea in your head and making you think you came up with it. Before I knew it, I was chucking up deuces to that comfortable life in Maryland and making plans to throw myself into the mix of the cutthroat entertainment industry. At the time, I was a twenty-six-year-old single mother—born and raised in the heart of Chocolate City with very little professional acting experience on my résumé, zero prospects for acting work, and very few leads that could get me in the room with the people who could get me auditions and jobs. In other words, to anyone even remotely familiar with Hollywood and its inner workings, I would have been tagged easily with the “least likely to succeed” stamp across my forehead. But none of that mattered to me or my father or most anyone else who loved and wanted more for me.
Within days of my father putting that bug in my ear, I was considering where I’d go to pursue my acting career. Today, with film productions opening up work for actors and crews in nontraditional film cities like New Orleans, Atlanta, Cleveland, Chicago, and the like, there are plenty of places an actress trying to lay down roots can go to find work and a decent living, but back when I was first getting started, there really were only two places for working actors: New York for the theater scene and Los Angeles for film and television. After some careful consideration, I nixed New York, because theater doesn’t pay, the rent is too damn high, and finding affordable child care would have been about as doable as catching a first-class flight to Pluto. Besides, I was checking for Cali because I was seeing fellow Bisons on television: at that time, Wendy Raquel Robinson, Paula Jai Parker, Anthony Anderson, Isaiah Washington, and Marlon Wayans were just a few of the Howard alums who were making a name for themselves on both the small and big screens, and all of us who’d graduated alongside and after them were watching and marveling at their success. So I decided. “You’re right, Dad. California it is.”