After several years working at the phone-hoe station, I was twenty-four years old and plan A, the one where I was going to go to school for psychology, was back in effect. I was finally old enough to get financial aid to pay for my schooling, and I had enrolled at Mercy College. There was a campus on Thirty-fourth Street in Herald Square. The phone-hoe station was on Thirtieth Street, just up the block. By now I had been promoted to monitor, which meant that it was my job to listen in on phone calls to make sure that the talkers were following the rules and that the callers were well taken care of (wink wink). I scheduled my classes around work shifts; I needed about fifteen minutes of travel time in between. THIS was adulthood! I figured that I would cross the bridge of whether being a therapist was actually still my dream when I finally got my degree.
I still thought about performing. That year on my birthday, before I started back at school, Crystal took me to see Hairspray on Broadway. It was the best surprise ever! Hairspray was one of my favorite movies, but I’d yet to see the stage version. The curtain rose on Tracy Turnblad in her bed. The music began and Tracy opened her eyes and started to sing: “Oh, oh, oh, woke up today feeling the way I always do.”
By the end of that one line, I was crying. The song had hardly begun and I was already in tears. Seems I really identified with Tracy, in a body that people are less inclined to accept and respect but still determined to be happy and share her talent. It hit me all at once that I was talented. That I, like Mom, had a gift to offer the world, but that, unlike Mom, I was wasting it. I was smart; I had a voice, a point of view. I could be an artist! I could make art with my life, but instead I was listening to guys jack off over the phone by night and chasing a career I no longer really wanted by day. I hadn’t realized that I cared about being an artist until that very moment. I cried until intermission. My instincts had been telling me to pursue something else—art—but my fear had been louder.
Luckily, the universe (or whatever) was stronger than my doubts.
My first week of classes was pretty easy. It was my third college, after all. I had class just about every day. I had to take a language class for my major, and Mercy offered an American Sign Language class. I’d been wanting to learn ASL since I was a child. Mom knew the alphabet and a few words here and there from teaching differently abled kids, and I’d always admired that. I also had a family psychology course that I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into. That first week of school, I got a call from my friend Henry Ovalles. Henry was a Lehman graduate, one of the school’s more talented actors who was now the assistant director of Lehman’s theater department. He was calling me because he’d learned about a film audition he thought might be right for me. I hadn’t been a part of any production in about two years at that point. Henry said he knew that but figured he’d give it a shot: the casting agents were looking for a heavyset black girl between eighteen and twenty-five years old. I asked what the role was.
“The movie is called Push. It’s based on a book by someone named Sapphire. The audition is for the lead role, Precious. The audition is here at Lehman on Monday,” he said deliberately. As if he wasn’t blowing my fucking mind!
Mom was out of town doing something that night, but I called her and told her about the Push audition resurfacing after almost five years. I asked if the book was still in the house. She told me where to find it and encouraged me to go to the audition. I reread the first page and put it back on the shelf. What was I doing? What did I think was going to happen? I wasn’t an actor and I had just put my life back on track. I’d survived an almost three-year eating disorder, panic attacks, depression, and failing out of school. I’d found my footing while taking phone sex calls for ten cents a minute just so I could save money to go back to school for the third time. I had my first family psychology class on Monday, and I didn’t want to miss it to audition to play an incest survivor. (The irony is not lost on me.) I’d never done an actual audition. College theater was a thing, but was it really? This audition was for a real movie with a director I actually knew and respected! During the five years the book was making its way to production, Lee Daniels, a powerhouse director and producer, had taken over from Susan Batson. At the time, his film Shadowboxer was constantly running on Showtime. I’d seen it over and over. The movie has a scene in it featuring Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding, Jr., having sex while Helen wears a birthday hat. I like shit like that. Anyway, this audition would be the real deal, and I didn’t think I was capable of that.