My audition was probably the thousandth recitation of Edmund from Long Day’s Journey that they had heard that week. I had taken an “Acting for Non-Drama Majors” course at GW, where I performed scenes from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with a girl from Long Island who was the scion of a hardware store empire. Raised far from the Pollitts of Mississippi, her accented pronunciation came out “Bah-rick! Bah-rick!” This was an idiotic idea, all things considered. When I eventually pitched it to my parents on the phone, my mother shrieked about what a mistake I was making. My dad just listened. When I told them that I was being offered a need-based scholarship and that NYU, the more expensive school, would actually cost him less money, he said to my mother, “Let’s hear him out.” I knew something other than money was behind that. Here was a man who had short-circuited his own dreams in order to provide for his family. “You’ll never be young enough to do this again,” he said.
I decided to stay in DC that summer of 1979, as I had grown fond of city living in general and Washington in particular. It also gave me some time to anguish over whether I had made the right move. In May, after my loss in the election, I sat at a local bar with a professor of mine, whose class I’d enjoyed. He was around fifty, but looked older. He liked to drink and smoke. He wore the uniform of the Washington educator: khakis, a Brooks Brothers button-down, a repp tie, and a navy blazer from either Paul Stuart or Jos. A. Bank. Over our drinks, he attempted to console me with a good deal of “GW’s loss is NYU’s gain,” and so forth. I had little skill then in detecting if a guy was hitting on me, as people were so much more cautious then. But it soon became clear that he was interested. Playing off both my passion for politics and my newfound interest in acting, he laid it on thick, suggesting I was a blend of Robert Redford and JFK. His compliments were delivered affectingly. He was a very smart man, and lonely in the extreme. He asked if we could have dinner, and when I declined, the mood changed. As we sat for another fifteen or twenty minutes, he shifted. When he grilled me about what I expected to achieve by going to acting school, I told him I’d give it a year and if I didn’t make it in showbiz to some degree, I would likely head to law school after all. He stared at me, sensing the conversation was coming to an end, and said, “You don’t really want to be an actor, do you? When you talk about your goals, there’s never any mention of happiness or joy, just some vague desire to ‘make it.’ Where’s the dream? Do you have a dream? There’s not a drop of boy in you. That must be tough.”
Once classes ended, I got a job at a restaurant called Luigi’s Famous, a glorified pizza joint. The owner was a native Italian named Corrado Bruzzo, a remarkably good-looking man, as if Mastroianni owned a DC pizza palace. His wife had just died of cancer in her forties, leaving behind their two children. Bruzzo was a mess, and he sat at his desk most days and just stared at papers. The real boss of the place was an African-American woman named Mrs. Mix, a tall, powerfully built force of nature with a hair net and a colossal bosom stuffed into a white kitchen uniform. She wore glasses and squinted at you as she shouted over the clanging of the large kitchen. “Tell that Alan Ballman to come in here!” she’d bellow. “Alan Ballman” was a name I enjoyed resurrecting years later, using it to check into hotels or with ma?tre d’s. Here was my summer love affair, a sixty-year-old, three-hundred-pound black woman from Georgia running a kitchen line with a ragtag staff, mostly from South America. I ran my ass off to please Mrs. Mix, sensing that it didn’t take much to rise in the ranks of that outfit. I quickly realized that she needed a sergeant, as she was forever passing her orders through me on to the dining room staff.
I quietly told Mr. Bruzzo that the waitstaff was hopeless. Mrs. Mix needed an adjunct “out front.” Mr. Bruzzo smiled wanly, and said, “OK, Alexa. OK.” (Bruzzo’s accented pronunciation of “Alex” came out as “Alexa.”) The name Xander was left in George Barimo’s office at 30 Rock. The next day, he lined up the waitresses, waiters, and busboys. They were around fifteen in number, and the grizzled men resembled Alfonso Bedoya’s crew from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Mr. Bruzzo said, “Today, I have asked Alexa here to be the direttore of the dining room. He will make the schedule, and if you have any questions, please bring them to Alexa. Thank you.” That was it. Two sentences, and then he turned and left to stare at a pile of photos of his late wife. Bruzzo had everyone’s love and respect, so they simply nodded. After he walked out, however, I thought they might stab me. Now some twenty-one-year-old, white college punk was going to be telling them what to do. The one Italian on the crew, a tough woman who resembled Patti LuPone, muttered, “What the fuck is this?” I spent my farewell-to-DC summer teaching grown men to polish silverware and setting rodent traps at closing time. I really didn’t need the added responsibility. I wasn’t paid significantly more money. But Bruzzo needed help and his response to my suggestions confirmed what I already knew. By sensing and responding to his grief, I realized I had an above-average empathy for other people’s feelings, likely due to growing up with my mother. I could understand other people, get inside them, better than most. I began to think that maybe this acting idea wasn’t such a bad decision after all.
I left DC, which was the first place I had ever lived away from home and where I had grown so much. I headed for the one place that seemed to make sense. Like Montgomery Clift leaving Shelley Winters for Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, I was headed for the Angela Vickers of cities. Driving from Washington to New York at the end of the summer, my father and I rode along in endless silence. I felt I was disappointing him. Yet here was the man with whom I had digested countless movies. Eventually, I asked him what he thought it took to be a good actor. He paused, as he nearly always did before answering a question, and said, “I think you need to be intelligent. And you’re pretty intelligent. So, you have a good chance.”