A story, to be continued

Once upon a time, when I was about ten years old, my childhood best friend got me involved in an acting class. I went through this class twice, and then enjoyed it so much that my mom enrolled my brothers as well for a third time around. Our teacher's name was Jeannine, and once during this time she appeared in an episode of Growing Pains as a flirtatious young aerobics instructor who slapped Jason Seaver on the rear and got him in trouble with his wife. That may have been my first almost-legitimate brush with fame.

Our class met in an architecturally authentic Japanese teahouse at Brand Park in Glendale. We had to take our shoes off when we went inside, and weren't allowed on the raised tea ceremony floor that looked like it should have been a stage. There was a wraparound veranda outdoors, where we would eat our snacks halfway through class, and the teahouse was surrounded by a garden, complete with a little Japanese bridge over a koi pond. It was a strange place to hold an acting class, but very picturesque.

Each of the three however-many-week sessions ended with a low-budget play performed in front of our families. I remember that our class co-wrote one of these plays ourselves. It was about a group of people stranded on a desert island, and we all thought it was outrageously funny. I'm not sure if the adults agreed, but they laughed if only because they thought it was cute. In another play (which we did not write) I had one of the starring roles, as the Barbarian Queen trying to marry off her sons. I had to shout "Huzza! Huzza!" every time I stormed onto the stage, and to this day any time I hear the word "alas" it sets off in my mind the beginning of one of the play's monologues: "Alas-a-day, alack-a-day! Woe is me! Twiddle twaddle! Fiddle faddle!" I can't help it. It's stuck in me.

One day our teacher Jeannine brought a "friend" with her to class, who was actually not her friend but a talent scout looking for child actors to star in an upcoming movie about a grownup Peter Pan. Thanks to my best friend's mother, who wasn't actually supposed to have told us, I was privvy to this information beforehand, and I tried to exhibit my very best acting skills that day. When I saw Hook a year and a half later, I felt a twinge of disappointment that Peter Banning's daughter was several years younger than I was. It wasn't just that I hadn't gotten the part. I hadn't actually had a chance.

That was the beginning and end of any hope of a career in acting. It's sort of sad how sometimes life feels like a series of doors closing. It's not that I had ever really dreamed of a brilliant career in acting, on the stage or on the set. But at least at ten years old it felt like a vague possibility. Just like at one time in my life, even though countless prior experiences told me otherwise, I truly believed that the next time I stepped into the coat closet, I just might discover Narnia. We grow up and reality closes in on us. Our lives pass through possibility and then solidify. It can feel discouraging.

But lately I've been thinking about how, if life really is a whole lot of closed doors (and the older I get, the more it feels that way), then I'd much rather imagine myself standing in front of that line of doors and wondering which one I might decide to try opening again.




Next up: Amy opens a door...