Facing "The Realities"

On June 26, 2010, I was privileged to perform one of the monologues in the new play by Brandon Sharkey, "The Realities." The play is about people who have been on reality shows and how the experience has affected their lives. All of us who performed in it have been on reality shows, but the monologues were not our true stories. I got cast in the show partly because I was on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" But the monologue that I performed was about a woman who had been on Big Brother, who was now trying to deny that the experience had changed her at all. In fact her new "celebrity" had changed her whole life and was driving her to drink and pills in order to cope with it.

In a way, I feel like that is what I am dealing with now in my own life. I came to LA almost on a whim for the first time in 2005 for three months, to see if I could get work here as an actress. I expected to work a little and get a childhood fantasy out of my system. What I did NOT expect was that I would fall in love with LA, that I would get work on the first day I sought it, and that I would do so well that I would want to keep coming back again and again until ultimately, I would have to choose between a new life here and my old life in the Bay Area. But that is exactly what happened. Of course, it isn't quite that simple. The wild card for me is that I had already given up my career and my old life because of my back injury and my lupus, and that acting gave me back a sense of worth, of purpose, of dignity that I couldn't seem to find with anything else (believe me, I tried!). It doesn't take into account that my health improved dramatically when I lived in LA, to the point where my joint pain almost disappeared. But my husband hated LA, and told me every time I raised the question that he would never leave our waterfront home in Foster City, even if I made it big in LA, which of course I have yet to do. So when I asked him one more time if he would be willing to move, even to a drier area like San Jose, he said no, and I realized that he wasn't ever going to change his mind. I offered once more to come home at the end of the year, but we both knew it was a hollow promise. My heart is in LA now, no matter how much I try to deny it.

So currently, I am trying to face the reality that I will be moving forward alone. It's a scary prospect. I never expected my little experiment to turn out this way. It was, as the title of my blog attests, supposed to be just a year in LA. Suddenly, I'm a full-time resident. I have moved to a 1950s style apartment in Los Feliz (right off Hollywood Boulevard) with hardwood floors, on a street with both huge magnolias and palm trees, an apt metaphor for the Southern girl who has ended up in this most exotic of worlds. My dog, Pasha, lives with me now - she and I packed up my things from my beautiful waterfront home in Foster City over an Independence Day weekend (another metaphor?) that was punctuated by periods of such wrenching sobbing on my part that I thought some of my organs might be damaged. This is the most difficult experience of my life.

But Pasha and I made it to Los Feliz on July 5th, after an eight and a half hour drive on a trip that usually takes six. For an eleven-year old pug that had never traveled more that 45 minutes in a car before, she did fantastic. She was a little confused about the apartment - no traction on the hardwood floors, no back deck to run across to chase squirrels and boats - and as I showed her my little place I kept saying things like "I know it's not as big as what you're used to," apologetically, idiotically, and crying. No, it's not what we are used to. But I think this may be the last great challenge of my life: to embrace the fears I have about being able to care for myself with my illness; to live on greatly reduced means (I have a disability income that allows me to make a limited amount of money each month, and so far I have not exceeded it); and ultimately, to live and work successfully and happily in one of the most eclectic, fast-paced, competitive, cosmopolitan, challenging, and glorious cities in the US, if not the world. Am I up to the challenge? Well, only by living it will I be able to tell.

I was going to use this post as a kind of mid-year analysis, to see how I am doing. So I will close by saying that although I haven't worked in July, it was by choice (I turned down some unpaid work) because I had too much going on in my personal life and the stress caused me to feel really bad. But January through June, this is the best year, business-wise, that I have ever had. I completed a new reel in July, which you can see by going to my profile at Now Casting and clicking on the 2009-2010 Theatrical Reel. It's mostly comic and I'm very proud of it. I also got a new look; I am keeping my hair dark after coloring it for "I'm Alive," and I cut it in a short, curly bob. I like it; I wore it this way 20 years ago and it makes me feel a lot younger. I'm getting new headshots next month since I look really different. I guess I am trying hard to live an authentic life, to face reality whenever I am confronted with it and to tell the truth as much as I possibly can, even when it hurts. That feels like growth. So I guess my year in LA has been good for me so far, even though so far it is the hardest work, emotionally, that I have ever done.