I’m not sure what made me sign up for such a random extracurricular activity, one that I had never had any experience with before. It was probably because my friend Cory (who had a boy’s name but was actually a girl) was a very serious writer and when they announced a playwriting club, she was quick to point out that she was DEFINITELY going to do it because it would DEFINITELY give her a chance to work on her creative expression. I loved Cory and I loved writing stories and so I signed up too and that is how I found myself staying after school once a week during the fall quarter of fourth grade, under the tutelage of Mr. Budd and Mr. Kramer.

Mr. Budd was a tall, skinny high school English teacher. He had a large nose and a mustache, wore glasses that could only be described as spectacles and when he crossed one leg over the other when seated, I could catch a glimpse of his argyle socks. When we met one-on-one to discuss the progress of my play, I could smell a distinctive cologne and catch the afternoon light glaring off his bald head. Years later, I took an elective English class with him my senior year, studying The Albatross and the Allegory of the Cave, during what would become his very last year of teaching before retirement.

Mr. Kramer was my third grade music teacher and would go on to cast and direct me in all four high school musicals. I associated him with everything Good about school, having very clear and vivid memories of him bringing his keyboard into my classroom the year before, teaching me how to play the recorder, conducting me in the third grade chorus. He had small eyes that crinkled up when he smiled and a habit of stroking his long black beard when he wasn’t sure what to say.

After all the other students boarded the school buses and headed home for homework and a snack, Cory and I stayed behind and learned how to write a play. We came up with a plot and characters, learned how to properly format it.

Character: Yes, I do.

Don’t forget the colon! Capital letters!

Any action goes in parentheses.

CHARACTER: (walking offstage) YES I DO!!!

My play consumed me even though today I only have a vague recollection of what it was about. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom constructing it, speaking the lines outloud, thinking about how they should sound, what made sense and what didn’t. I recall reading it over and over on the late bus home, my head nestled against the hard window, my feet resting on the leathery brown seat. I crossed out words and added lines, acting them out while walking home from the bus stop, my blue Converse sneakers crunching on the dried autumn leaves underfoot.

The plays would become actual productions in the spring. Anyone in the school could audition for them and other students would direct them under the supervision of Mrs. C, an overweight fifth-grade teacher with a bad case of rosacea who would die of breast cancer before the age of fifty. I’m not sure where I got the idea to audition for the plays, having already been a part of the writing process. I don’t know if my mother suggested it or if Mr. Kramer had or if it was something that I simply was excited to do.

I do remember being nervous for the audition. All we had to do was memorize and recite a poem. (I obviously look back on this simple time fondly as just last week, at two separate auditions, I was required to recite there monologues, two contemporary and one Shakespeare and also sing a legit soprano song with a “Caribbean feel” to it. Ah! The days of simple poems!) Mr. Kramer and Mrs. C would be in the classroom auditioning all of us one by one and I remember pacing the hallway, snapping the scrunchie on my wrist, going back and forth over my lines, trying not to listen to my fellow classmates auditioning before me.

My nine year old self had only had to memorize something once before when, in first grade, I was cast as the narrator in the Thanksgiving play. I shared the role with a classmate named Brandon who I’m pretty sure I was in love with. Brandon would grow up to be a tall athletic boy with a goofy grin who’s backyard I would sometimes sneak into when playing with the girls in my neighborhood. He randomly approached me one day at my high school locker with “Hey, remember that Thanksgiving play? My parents have it on VIDEOTAPE. We found it last night when going through home movies!” I begged him to see it and we promised to meet up and watch it but of course, that never happened.

My six year old self was completely freaked out by the prospect of memorizing paragraphs at a time about Indians and Pilgrims when most kids in the other class had just a line or two apiece. My dad, always around to get bothered by help with homework, assisted me with highlighting my part in bright yellow highlighter. We practiced in the living room while he sat on the couch prompting me when I forgot my lines. My mother assured me over and over that I could do it and that my teacher would NOT have given me such a huge responsibility if he didn’t think I could do it.

That whole experience came to mind as I paced up and down the hallway of the elementary school, silently running through my poem of choice – Shel Silverstein’s “I Cannot Go To School Today”. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach when I overheard another girl reciting the same exact poem.

“I cannot go to school today
said little Peggy Ann McKay,
I have the measles and the mumps!
A gash, a rash and purple bumps!”

OH NO! Some chick STOLE MY IDEA!

(And so it began. Little did I what I would be in for, fifteen years later. Sitting in line at a New York City audition, should you hear the girl ahead of you singing “your” song, nothing short of hysteria erupts. SHOULD I SING IT ANYWAY? DO I SING IT BETTER? SHOULD I CHANGE IT? I’LL CHANGE IT. BUT TO WHAT? SHIT FUCK DAMN!)

I put my ear up to the door to hear how she was doing.

Dude.

“My mouth is wet, my throat is dry.
I’m going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I’ve counted sixteen chicken pox.”

I was startled by a simple fact, something that my nine year-old self knew immediately. Something that didn’t need to be validated by anyone else, something that reinstated my confidence in myself, that made me pull myself together and get ready to kick some ass:

The girl ahead of me? Sucked.

She was forgetting a lot of words, stopping and starting quite a bit, that was definitely true. But more than that? She had no intonation to her voice. There was no excitement, no whining, no nothing. There was no believable commitment to the text, to the very important fact that little Peggy Ann McKay is FAKING SICK. This is evidenced by the last bit –

“What’s that you say?
You say today is SATURDAY?
Goodbye, I’m going out to play!”

Girl was totally reciting it as if she was rattling off a grocery list.

I took a breath and walked into the room, chin in the air.

“I will be reciting the same poem, by Shel Silverstein,” I announced.

And I was off like a ROCKET.

I whined my way through her symptoms, I made it sound fresh and new! I remembered EVERY SINGLE WORD! At the end of it, I sounded ecstatic! I was cute! Effervescent! Lovely! Most of all: I had fun.

Mr. Kramer and Mrs. C exchanged bemused looks and thanked me for coming.

I received the lead in one of the many one-act plays that had been written by my classmates earlier in the year.

I do not remember which one, do not remember which part I played, which lines I said, who directed me or shared the stage with me.

I remember the bright glare of the spotlight in my eyes when I first stepped onto the tiny elementary school stage. I remember the silence in the auditorium, everyone focusing on me. I remember the electric shock I felt when people laughed at something I said, at a facial expression I made. I remember diving headfirst into my mother’s arms when it was over, more proud of myself than I had ever been in my young, short life.

My family, my teachers, my classmates, complimenting my acting job AND the play I had written. I wanted the night to last forever, I wanted people to shower me with love like that for hours on end. I was an actress! I was a writer! And everyone knew it! Everyone!

My mom took me to Friendly’s afterwards for ice cream. I ordered a mint chocolate chip Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup sundae, no cherry. Sitting in the blue and red vinyl booth, I realized how ordinary everything seemed–the bright lighting of the restaurant, the plastic menu, the calmness of the waitstaff, moving in and around tables, unaware of the night I had just experienced.

I suppose that was the moment it happened. The moment that sealed the deal for me and unknowingly orchestrated every single year of my life that followed. It was in that moment that I recognized the real life/fake life dichotomy of being an actor, though I probably was too young to even realize I had taken note of it–the way that you could rise up so high that eating mint chip ice cream sundaes with your mom felt normal, dare I say even slightly boring?

Yes, I may have reveled in my mother’s compliments while licking whipped cream off a cold metal spoon. I may have skipped through the late spring air in the parking lot, all the way to the car. I may have chattered all the way home about the whole thing. And yes, I would eventually forget about it. I would get on with school, with my friends, with my life.

Until the next school year came around…

And that is how, in the late afternoon autumn air, holed up in a classroom, scribbling furiously with a pencil in my notebook, creating a world far away from my own, I took my first step toward becoming a total, unapologetic, want-to-do-it-all-again, there-really-is-no-cure-for-me, addict.