Scrappy Little Nobody Read online

  The show also introduced a dangerous new concept to my family. Gypsy and the main character of Mama Rose explore the effects of the “stage parent” on both child and mother. My parents immediately saw in Mama Rose a blueprint of everything they wanted to avoid. We hadn’t met any stage parents in real life yet, but if I was going to be playing around with this theater thing for a year or two (little did they know), no one in my family was going to push anyone into doing anything, and for the next decade my parents went on high alert for signs that I wanted to stop. (I think they might still be waiting. Maybe that’s why my mom is always telling me she loves me because I’m a good person or whatever.)

  Early Bird

  I get embarrassed about being a “child actor.” Probably because I spent a lot of time around child actors when I was one. They’re crazy. When people ask me how I got started, I’ll usually make some crack about how I was one of those “freaky kid actors,” and how “all that’s missing is the drug problem.” I want to get in front of the story so I can control it! Maybe people don’t have judgmental feelings about child actors. I just worry that it conjures images of pushy parents, or tiny diva hissy fits, or Star Search. Okay, I did audition for Star Search, but I didn’t get on the show, so I hope you’re happy.

  At ten, I stood in a modest office in Manhattan and sang “Tomorrow” from Annie (I warned you) for a children’s talent agent. That was basically it. That was all I had to do. That, and cry in the lobby beforehand, because I got nervous and my mom had to remind me that my cousin Tina wasn’t going to get married thirty minutes from New York City every weekend.

  When I first moved to Los Angeles, occasionally a friend who was struggling would ask me how I got my agent, and telling this story always made me feel like a lucky little jackass. I would try to make the story funny, like I didn’t know they were hoping to glean some actionable piece of wisdom out of it. The truth is, I had nothing to offer in the way of advice. Cold-call a talent agent? But first, be ten years old?

  At that age, I didn’t have a résumé, but I wasn’t expected to. At ten, I had a big voice that stood in exponential contrast to my size. I could learn a melody. I didn’t sound like a dying cat.

  I was not one of those kids who started young and never stopped working—there are many pathetic tales in these pages to prove it. But I’m glad I got my foot in the door at an age when some of the scariest people had to take it easy on me, because I was Just A Kid. If you are expecting to find advice, I will be no help at all. I have no advice. I do have a truckload of opinions, which I will happily prattle on about to anyone who gives me an opening. I’d just like to add the “for entertainment purposes only” disclaimer to everything in here, like I’m a psychic hotline or a bot on AshleyMadison.com.

  I don’t know what my parents anticipated happening once I got a fancy agent four states away. Maybe they knew that supporting the larger dream while I was a kid was easier than praying it was a phase and begrudgingly supporting me later on. Maybe they only hoped I would book a commercial and get the kind of money that starts a solid college fund in one swoop. That would have been fine with me—I couldn’t differentiate between the prestige of a Broadway show and a regional commercial, so I would have been just as happy about becoming an underage corporate stooge.

  The agency that took me on lined up a few auditions for Broadway shows—the very first one was for Annie (I don’t know what to tell you guys, it’s just what happened). Then they lined up a handful of commercial auditions. My first auditions for commercials were weird. As were all the ones that would follow.

  Commercial casting directors were looking for either preternaturally beautiful children or children who were willing to cheese it up so hard they went blue in the face. At that age, I never thought about being pretty. That’s not because I was enlightened, it’s because I was a little kid and “pretty” seemed like adult criteria. (I did think about whether or not I would GROW UP to be pretty—all the time. I asked to see pictures of my grandmother as a young woman, I asked to see pictures of my mother as a young woman. I found out my mother’s side of the family was universally flat-chested, so I asked if my deceased paternal grandmother had anything better goin’ on back in the day. I was a ladylike and sensitive child.)

  As for the cheese factor, I was no better off. This was the origin of my aversion to child actors. Most of them were fucking weirdos—a bunch of precocious extroverts who were learning to kiss adults’ asses and say things like “How old do you want me to be?” I was a loud, hyperactive loser, but I was self-aware enough to know that would make me look like a dick.

  Perhaps because my family’s emotional range spanned from composed to stoic, I was not trying to play ball. For all the trouble I’d been in in my life for having “too much energy,” I could not figure out why I was supposed to be so excited about tangle-free shampoo. My hair was always tangled and I was doing just fine, thank you very much.

  Kids in these audition waiting rooms were unlike anything I’d seen before. They would make a big show of running up to other kids they knew and say things like “I haven’t seen you since we outgrew the Music Man tour!” They would humble-brag about the last commercial they’d booked or how they’d screen-tested for a TV pilot last week, and their sleazy managers would say, “Our little Portia is a booking machine!”

  Usually my mom or my dad was with me in these waiting rooms. My mom was always kind and wonderful, but, like me, my mom is a people pleaser and a rule follower. We were at a professional audition; I would go in with my headshot and résumé and try my best, and she would be the supportive parent who accompanies (but does not pressure!) her child.

  My dad had far less patience. He was my stoic life vest. He’s the smartest person I know. Not the smartest person I’ve ever met (I’ve met Dr. Oz and Dakota Fanning) but the smartest person I can call on the phone. He’s an incredible resource but also very frustrating. It’s like having Stephen Fry for a father. He makes you feel like an idiot just by breathing.

  Like my mom, he wanted to make his children feel loved and wanted, but he’s almost painfully Irish, so repression is more in his wheelhouse. The only time I’ve ever seen him cry was when he described the plot of the film Rudy to me. The unnerving thing was that I didn’t even realize he was crying for ten minutes. At first, it just seemed like he had allergies or he’d eaten some spicy food. Aside from the tears, there was no other indication that he was emotional.

  Sometimes I’d sit there, surrounded by kids loudly going over their one line of dialogue with parents chatting about which voice coach they were going to use now that Mrs. Ulanova had taken on too many students and wasn’t giving little Teresa the kind of personalized attention she really needed to flourish, and I’d feel myself start to spiral. I wouldn’t just wonder if I belonged there, I’d descend into big-question territory. Is this what everyone outside of Maine is like? Is this what the future will be like? Is this what actors are like? Is this what I’m like?

  I would turn my head maybe fifteen degrees and my dad would be staring straight ahead, and then, as if he’d been waiting for me, he’d throw me a look. These people are freaks; let’s get this over with, get the hell out of here, and get a Hostess Cupcake from the rest stop on the way home. It felt like coming up for air.

  It only took a few months before my agent mercifully realized that I sucked at commercial auditions. They decided I should start coming in only for theater, which made me very happy. Not because as a ten-year-old from Maine with no experience I thought I was too good for anything, but because professional auditions were in New York, which meant that one of my parents had to take time off work, drive me six hours to the city for an audition that usually lasted ten minutes, and then drive me six hours back. Yes, you are correct, what my parents did for me was crazy and I’ll never be able to repay them as long as I live.

  I had my first successful audition at age twelve for a musical called High Society, although when I arrived I assumed it wasn’t go
ing to go well. In the waiting room, I was struck by the uniformity of dress. The character was from a rich family, and my competitors looked the part. How did a girl age ten to fourteen even come by a sweater set? Weren’t those available exclusively to toddlers and women over sixty?

  The audition room was long and mirrored and had creaky wooden floors. I gave my sheet music to the pianist in the corner and turned to face a small row of people sitting behind a folding table at the far end of the room.

  “Whoa, whoa. Let me look at your nails, young lady.” Legendary casting director Jay Binder, who would become my greatest champion, was motioning me forward.

  My nails were forest green with gold stars, which was pretty unusual, especially on a child in the days before Pinterest-chic nail art. I walked up to show him, unsure if I was in trouble or about to be told how wonderful I was.

  “I got them done in Florida. I was visiting my grandparents for Thanksgiving and my mom took me to a nail place.”

  “Your mother let you get green nails?”

  I nodded.

  “Pretty cool mom. All right, what are you gonna sing for us, honey?”

  I walked back to the center of the room with a great gift. Jay Binder had said, Come up here, we’re not scary; we want you to do well, cute nails, now please go do something impressive. Almost every audition that has gone well in my life started with something like this. A week later, I was told to come back and audition for the director and producers.

  Mike and Anna Take New York

  As supportive as they were, my parents were looking for a way to get me to New York without relying on them for transportation since they enjoyed having jobs and paying bills and other accoutrements of middle-class survival. By this time, my brother was fourteen and they deemed him perfectly capable of accompanying his twelve-year-old sister on a bus to New York. So that’s what we started doing.

  People who grew up in major cities may wonder why the hell I would act like it’s a big deal to be unaccompanied in New York City at that age: it’s populated with both adults and children, it’s a functioning metropolis, Kevin McCallister was only ten in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and that kid saved Christmas. Conversely, people from suburban areas act like my parents sent me wandering around the site of the Baby Jessica well, blindfolded and holding a flaming baton. So pick a side and prepare to judge me either way!

  My parents bought a couple of bus tickets, and my brother and I got ready for our day trip. We packed extra batteries for our Walkmen, the family cell phone “for emergencies,” two Lunchables, and this time—drumroll!—I wore a cardigan. I was gonna totally look the part. The one cardigan I owned was chunky and black with a jewel-toned pattern that looked so much like jet fighters from the Star Wars universe, I referred to it as my X-Wing sweater. I paired it with wide-leg jeans and black lace-up boots with thick rubber soles. How classy was I?

  When my callback went well, I was asked to come in again the next day. This put a small wrinkle in our plan since my brother and I only had the clothes on our backs and a bunch of dead batteries, and by the way, we needed to get back to Port Authority by four p.m. or we would miss our connecting bus in Boston. Naturally, we told them it would be no problem and we were looking forward to coming in again the next day! My parents had given us about forty dollars, so they faxed a copy of their credit card to a squalid hotel and convinced the hotel manager that although their children were checking in now, they themselves would of course be along later that day; what kind of children would be staying in a hotel room in New York City alone?

  The next morning, against our parents’ explicit orders, we went out in search of the Village—specifically, Bleecker and MacDougal. Our dad had talked about that corner with affection and awe, and we could see why. Each corner of the intersection had a café that looked like something we’d only seen in movies. My dad probably meant, like, the music scene in the sixties, but we shared a plate of pancakes and figured life would never get better than this. None of those cafés are there anymore, and I don’t want to sound like one of those people who complains, “Oh, New York has changed so much, it isn’t what it used to be,” except that that’s a LIE. I have ALWAYS wanted to be one of those people, and now I am!

  After our adventure, we went to my second callback. I could tell it was going well, because they were keeping me in the room for a long time. This is the only metric I have; I black out in auditions, even to this day. As my brother and I left, an assistant jogged after us. She caught up to us at the elevator and said, “You’re doing great, and we want to bring you back again tomorrow”—she swallowed and lowered her voice—“but we were wondering if you had anything else to wear? Maybe we could see you in some nicer shoes or something?”

  Instead of saying, “No, bitch, I came down here on a bus and I washed my socks and underwear in a hotel sink this morning,” we assured her that we were all over it, no problem, message received. I had no idea what they were looking for, but I knew that no matter what a casting director said, you were supposed to agree and figure it out later. It was dark out when we left the casting office, so we decided to wake up early the next day to buy me some respectable shoes with what was left of our cash.

  The next morning we asked the receptionist at the hotel where to find the nearest Payless. At this point in our program, I’d like to gently remind anyone who thought that was a punch line to check yourself. Finding respectable shoes for girls at Payless is perfectly normal for lots of families. I mention it by name in this story because it makes me feel sentimental, not because it’s supposed to be ironic. To the people reading this thinking, We already knew it was normal, don’t be so preachy, I apologize; I have been around rich people too long and it has made me defensive.

  It took almost all morning and into the afternoon to find a pair of shoes that looked dressy but left us with enough cash to get McDonald’s before we caught the bus home. Eventually, we found a pair of white strappy sandals that were a size too big, but they were on sale, so they were coming with me! I slipped them on with my wide-leg jeans and my ratty sweater and thought, I’ve done it! I look like a rich girl! I still looked like a delinquent who didn’t know how to brush her hair, but now I had white shoes.

  I went to my final audition. I blacked out. We caught the bus home.

  My brother and I kept repeating that I shouldn’t get too excited. I shouldn’t count my chickens. I was twelve, but I’d experienced enough rejection that I had a system in place for managing my expectations. Somewhere around Hartford, we turned on the “for emergencies” phone. I had a voice mail saying I got the job. We celebrated for however long it takes a busload of people to wake up and scream at you.

  jaded old chorus girl

  I lost a Tony Award to Broadway legend Audra McDonald when I was twelve, so I’ve been a bitter bitch since before my first period. I’m very proud to have lost that Tony to Ms. McDonald. She is one of the finest talents in the theater world and genuine Broadway royalty. I also feel that if I had won and made a televised speech at age twelve, the delayed embarrassment would have been so severe, I’d currently be a Howard Hughes–style shut-in, but without the money for the mansion or the planes or the legion of servants to take away bottles of my urine.

  Starting in theater gave me a basic work ethic that I may not have gotten if I started in film and television. I worked six days a week, eight shows a week (two shows on Wednesdays and Saturdays, Mondays off). It wasn’t so much the schedule—I worked in accordance with child labor laws—it was that I was held accountable for my work.

  Once, during rehearsals, our director was playing with the shape of a musical number that involved most of the cast—which jokes should stay, where they should go, etc. He decided to try reinstituting a small joke I’d had in a previous draft, and we started the number again from the top. I lost where we were in the music and I opened my mouth to say the line, a measure too late. He was already shaking his head and signaling the pianist to stop.

  �
�Anna just lost a line. Let’s go back to how it was before and start again.”

  Okay. Those are the rules and I will operate within them from now on. I’ll just double my memorization efforts, pretend I’m not crying, and see you all again tomorrow! Beyond tutoring breaks every three hours, I didn’t get special treatment.

  When I booked High Society, it was unclear how long I would be in New York. My contract was for six months, but shows can go under after a few weeks of poor ticket sales. Since my dad was a substitute teacher at the time, he was able to move to New York with me, and my mother stayed in Maine with my brother.

  We rented an apartment in Yonkers (“we” is accurate; he signed the rental agreement, but I was the one who paid for it) and commuted into the city each day. Yonkers was not very glamorous, but it was cheaper and I was being paid the union minimum. When you are from Maine and you get a job on Broadway, you take what they offer. Between my accountant mother and my former-banker father, I’m sure a budget was worked out, but by the time the show was in tech rehearsals, it was clear to my dad that it was not manageable.

  I have no idea if Dad had been planning to say something, but one day when he was dropping me off at rehearsals, the producer walked past us and casually asked, “How are things, Will?”

  “Well, Michael, not good.” My dad is plainspoken. It’s a wonderful quality that I feel lucky to have inherited and that has gotten me in trouble more times than I can count.

  “When my daughter is grown, she can make the decision to starve for her art. She can live in a one-bedroom apartment with five people and work a second job during the day, but we aren’t going to be able to make this work any longer, and I’m going to take her home unless we figure something out.”