When I was 22 I won the lottery. Not the California Power Ball or Mega Millions, but the U.S. Green Card Lottery, circa 1989, awarded by the State Department to 50,000 American wannabes from around the globe in an effort to promote diversity amongst its immigrants. My fiancé at the time (a very white Canadian man) had thrown his name into the hat, and when we arrived home from our honeymoon a fat envelope of congratulations offering permanent U.S. residency was stuffed into our mailbox. For a girl who dreamed of reinventing herself, the windfall was an unexpected escape hatch to a new life. Wasting no time, we completed the necessary paperwork, HIV tests, interviews, packed up a moving truck and, with barely a backward glance, headed south to New York City, eager to commence the pursuit of our very own American dream.
While my husband arrived with a job, I did not. Needing the money, I made an appointment at a temp agency where they (realizing I was a mad typist) shooed me out the door and up Madison Avenue to my first assignment. For eight hours straight I sat outside an office at a publishing house answering a handful of phone calls for an absent executive. This was the beginning of the 90s when everyone had an assistant, liquid lunches were the norm, and secretaries guarded corner offices like German Shepherds. Wearing my knee-length skirts and Canadian smile, I booked a ton of these mind-numbing jobs, filling in for executive assistants by taking messages, making lunch reservations and keeping their chairs good and warm. Out of sheer boredom, I started to write–clunky stories about my time spent as a music aficionado chasing after a band for the better part of a year. I saved them to a disc that I took from job to job, plucking away as time permitted. I wrote to pass the hours, to cleanse my palate. The fact that they were horrible really didn’t matter.
A couple years went by. I went to theater school, my marriage ended. I moved into my own place and juggled three jobs to pay the rent. I started a little theater company with a friend. We’d all write pages during the week and rehearse them on Saturdays. Eventually, we had a collection of one-acts and rented a theater, convincing our friends to fill the seats. We didn’t worry–not for one minute–whether the plays were any good; we were too stoked to be putting up a show in an Off-Broadway house. All art was good art in my mind, and I said, yes, to everything I could. I even did a play in someone’s basement apartment where I made biscuits in a kitchen as big as a coat closet for an audience of 15 jammed into a sweaty living room. Each opportunity provided a new and exciting experience, which was how I lived my life. Work, school, art, repeat—until somewhere, in the middle of it all, I fell in love again. And before I knew it, I was living in LA, married, with two kids.
I realize this isn’t an original story. In fact, it’s pretty cliché: lost teen turned groupie is rescued by first marriage only to discover her burgeoning artist and need for independence, so she goes it alone in the Big Apple, struggling to make her art at all costs, until, out of nowhere, new love shows up, which she resists for a while, but eventually–after many packed bags and break-ups–embraces wholeheartedly, moving across the county with him to settle down and start a family of her own.
Ironically, the cliché of the husband, kids and white picket fence isn’t what surprises me despite the fact that I never imagined this for myself. The cliché that stops me in my tracks, the one that I would never have predicted, is the middle age person looking back and wondering, when did I stop playing and start caring so much about what other people think? When did I become so cautious and pragmatic and painfully adult?
“Wow,” the girl in me gasps. “We were fearless.”
“Or, perhaps, foolish,” I respond. “I mean, really, where did all that get us?”
“But to play like that again… Wouldn’t it be fun? To create so freely, outside the box of this predictable life we lead? To trust the process and others. To be transparent. To make something brand new—“
“My god, that sounds exhausting,” I interrupt. “That’s what young people do. Twenty-somethings. Thirty-somethings even. People with time on their hands. People without kids. People without a reputation to protect. People with no stakes or skin in the game. People who—“
“People who care more about making art than about art being perfect?” the girl offers. At which point I fall silent. Because the truth stings.
There is one more cliché in this story. It’s the mom who perpetually tells her kids to live their lives with feverish, infectious passion. To find an abandon that reaches into the very core of their souls. To make a mess of things. To fail big, badly, and often. To suck so much at something that the audience feels obligated to hurl rotten tomatoes at their feet just as they prepare to take a bow. Of course, the kids look at her like she’s lost her mind. Like she’s one of those old people who stands on the street corner ranting on and on about something precious from long ago. And the truth is, she is.
