Yesterday I caught sight of myself in the mirror at work. It
was accidental. I have not quite perfected my mother’s trick of just looking at
the hair, or whatever it was she wanted to check, and ignoring the wrinkles and
wattle. The gestalt hit me. I’ve gotten old. For a brief handful of seconds I
caught myself thinking, What have I done
with my life? Why did I put off living?
Then I suddenly remembered that I did not put off living. I
put off settling down. What needs to happen is to go over my early life and
remember that I did what I damn well pleased for over 20 years. I am not
waiting to retire so I can do things. I’ve done them, begad.
After college, I worked at low paying jobs and played around
with theatre. I was in a musical with Garry Moore. My then boyfriend (sort of
affectionately known as The Wicked Step-Ex-Boyfriend) had talked about moving
in together and I moved 800 miles away leaving instructions with my parents to
not divulge my whereabouts. We are both much happier. He has his home and his
partner and I have mine. Our years together (on and off or at a distance) were
filled with adventure, if not happiness.
I moved to Manhattan to break into theatre. First, I freaked
out and went to Cambridge, MA for a while, staying in someone’s dorm room. A
friend found a foothold in Manhattan and I joined him, where I went to
auditions, hung out in piano bars, did odd jobs in corporate libraries,
advertising companies, and at HBO. At HBO I ended up in an office overlooking
Bryant Park and the NY Public Library. I watched the lights come on the Empire
State Building (which I tended to call the Statue of Liberty because I’m easily
confused by monuments) each night from my office window. I worked for a literary
agent and for some famous authors.
Eventually I moved on to Boston, where I did six shows in
two years as opposed to no shows in three in Manhattan. I worked as a paralegal
and took classes in cartooning, tapdance, cooking, and ancient Greek. I might
still be there if I hadn’t fallen and broken my kneecap. Then again, someone
had to go back south and look after our parents, or as I called them My Parents
and my sister called them The Parents. I started back into theatre and slowly
wound down into a full-time permanent job with a house of my own, thinking I
had the rest of my life all worked out. All that slipped away when I found
someone that actually wanted to marry me. And after I got over bursting into
tears every time I heard the “M” word, I finally settled down.
None of the above really exposes the warp and woof of what
went on: getting so drunk that I lost track of how I got from one end of
Manhattan to the other, parading as a female impersonator on Christopher Street,
meeting other actors with interesting abilities such as silverware
impersonations (loved the shrimp fork!), having my glasses broken during a
fight on the Boston T, trying to train a cat to be tossed in the air for a show
(didn’t work out so he was just carried on stage briefly), portraying the Token
Tapdancing Lesbian in a gay musical only to have my roommate find out about it
later … All good fun.
But settling down has not, really, stopped me from doing
whatever I damn well please. It just seems that with age, what I damn well
please involves more napping. And jigsaw puzzles online.
