You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (6 page)

Within the first week, we met with Mark, the manager, and he decided that I had the possibility of becoming someone worthy of someone else’s time. A manager is different than an agent. An agent books auditions and negotiates contracts. I wasn’t really sure what a manager did but they did it for free until you booked a job and then they got a percentage of the earnings. Since Mom and I knew nothing about how things worked in L.A. and since this person was willing to manage me, we decided I needed to be managed.

As part of the management package, Mark would provide acting classes, which he was qualified to teach as he had appeared in a reoccurring role on a popular 80s sitcom. We would run through my “sides” (the scenes from the script that had been chosen for the audition) while sitting on a slippery brown leather couch in his living room. Mark would take a pink highlighter and circle the lines in which I was to “deliver the meat and potatoes.” We would do crying practice and he would click a
stopwatch, as I attempted to shorten the time it took for me to transform from bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to plump, slowly rolling tears.

“What makes you sad?” he asked me.

“Dead puppies.”

“Perfect. Think about dead puppies. Go!” He clicked the stopwatch.

As part of my new management track, I was also required to take juggling lessons. This was a perplexing part of my career building, as I was generally hired for a role as a runaway or neglected daughter of an overly-driven, slightly evil Working Mom, neither of which required knowledge of circus tricks. It seemed like perhaps Mark was providing me with the fallback skills for a lucrative career in the birthday clown industry if the acting thing didn’t work out.

So, I learned to juggle, along with the other half-dozen young clients of my manager. We had fun and it was nice to be with kids with whom I had a little something in common. We covered a variety of age ranges and had come to L.A. from just about everywhere, but we all had stories of being the freaks in our classes. None of us had trophies from basketball camp but we could all do a killer “bite-and-smile” that we had perfected on many food-related commercial shoots. So, we bonded by trying to get fancy with a bean-bag-behind-the-back move and ended up hitting the kid from the Sunny D billboard in the face. We all worked hard, not knowing exactly why we were working hard at this, but assuming that this was what it meant to be a young actor in L.A.

I finally understood the true purpose of the exercise when I noticed that Mark had brought us to the park that was adjacent to the Warner Bothers television studios. There we were, devoted manager with his flock of talent in all our pre-teen glory, frolicking in the California sun in direct sight line of the TV execs. The Big Wigs would be sitting in their corner offices making multi-million dollar deals and wondering where, oh where, could they find the next It Kid? All they needed to do was cast their eyes to the left, where they could view a veritable buffet of quality child actor choices. Chasing after brightly colored beanbags, I was an
eleven-year-old cuteness machine, pumping out warm fuzzy feelings all over the place.

After a hard day’s work cavorting in front of the television studio windows, Mom and I would return home to the eighth floor of the Holiday Inn. I wondered if the relationship with my new actor acquaintances would extend beyond juggling lessons. Maybe they would come over to the overly-chlorinated hotel pool and hang out, like regular kids seemed to do after school. But they all had their own homework and audition prep to do.

Everyone had acting lessons, read-throughs, and wardrobe calls that kept us too busy for idle socializing. Besides all that, there was the subtle, underlying reminder that we were each other’s competition. I watched in awe and horror as a few of the particularly savvy kids vied for the personal attention of the manager. Laughing a little too hard at his jokes, jockeying a little too hard to sit next to him. They seemed to know intuitively that his favor might translate to a persuasive phone call to an influential casting director.

Back at the hotel, I’d call my dad and get updates on how he and the dog were managing without us. He’d tell me about his day at work, and that my cousin made the cross-country ski team, and that Mikki had eaten another shoe, and I’d well up with longing for the mundane. It was obvious that life in Canada continued without missing a beat while I had taken this big leap to Los Angeles. Then I’d get excited to tell Dad about our visit to Mann’s Chinese theater and that my hands were almost the exact same size as Mary Pickford’s handprints. I’d explain to my dad that on studio backlots they made the Western saloon doors smaller to make cowboys look bigger and that I had seen the
Back to the Future
clock tower on the Universal Studio tour. He’d ask how the sound stages were set up and if people really used golf carts to get around.

I idolized my father and it baffled me to be the one who was explaining things to him. Dad was the one who knew how to turn a blade of grass into a whistle and skip stones so they jumped nine times across
the surface of Lake Ontario. How did I suddenly know things he didn’t? I felt split in two and wasn’t sure which person I really was. Was I the shy Canadian girl who was embarrassed about birthday parties or was I this new L.A. girl who spent her day juggling in an attempt to catch the attention of film producers?

When we got off the phone I’d throw all my textbooks on the bed in a heap. I was required to do all my schoolwork while away on these trips and mail my homework back to the teachers for grading. The assignments would inevitably be a pile of papers that didn’t seem to relate to one another and some scribbled notes about which chapters to read in which textbooks. I didn’t have a tutor unless I was on set, so I was on my own to begrudgingly lie on the itchy polyester duvet and try to understand sixth grade introductory algebra. While it was challenging being my own teacher, it was always better than being in school and having to deal with aloof classmates and frustrated teachers face-to-face.

While I was in the middle of a particularly confusing section on dividing polynomials, I could have sworn that a pigeon had walked through the open sliding glass door of our hotel room. Nope. I was wrong. Two pigeons had walked through the sliding glass door. They entered the room, cooing and bobbing with their small, scaly feet leaving indents in the stained beige carpet. This was utterly wonderful. I was very still, not wanting to scare my new companions and was keenly aware of the fact that I could hardly be expected to do math with wildlife in the room.

My mother was equally shocked and amused, as she looked up from the 1,000 piece puzzle of the Eiffel Tower that she had set up in the corner of the room. The birds did some laps, checking under the bed as if they might have dropped a sock on a previous visit. Then, as abruptly as they arrived, they walked out to the small balcony and flew off. I collapsed in a delighted pile of giggles. Los Angeles truly was a magical place.

When they re-appeared the next day, it was clearly time to name them. I was convinced that this would be a long-term friendship and I had to be prepared with an appropriate way to greet them. They were
christened Gregory and Audrey. I was obsessed with old movies and the idea of a pigeon with the surname of Peck struck me as hysterical. The other pigeon was a particularly lovely one, graceful and clean (for a pigeon) and so Ms. Hepburn became her namesake.

My new feathered friends visited several times a day. They got more comfortable and stayed for a longer time, sometimes settling in for a while on the shade of the shiny brass floor lamp while I attempted social studies homework. Gregory and Audrey’s visits to the Holiday Inn provided a dose of ritual and grounding to the chaos that life had become. I was surrounded by people I had just met. There was no schedule for the day, the sheets weren’t mine, and we were making Cup-A-Soup with a submersible heating coil for dinner. Life was temporary and flimsy but my pigeons were real. They were predictable. The big question of my life was all up to the movie gods: whether or not I would become someone. But in the meantime, I was already someone who was worth the time of my pet pigeons. For a few moments, that felt successful enough.

Mark quickly got me into meetings with agents, all while throwing out mildly self-congratulatory comments about his extensive “connections” and “network.” After reading a scene for an agent (complete with the conjuring of dead puppies and crying on cue) she agreed to sign me and started sending me to auditions. Now, instead of just juggling in front of production studios, I actually got to go inside the building.

The audition for
Night Court
felt like the big leagues. The long hallways of the Warner Brothers studios were adorned with massive, larger-than-life photos of Harry, Christine, and my personal favorite, Bull. They stood there, with arms crossed and toothy grins, knowing exactly how awesome they were as they entered their seventh season of the show. Important-looking people with multi-colored scripts and call-sheets dashed in and out of closed doors, conducting vital sitcom business. The
standard moms and kids loitered around the casting office, fidgeting with their résumés and head shots.

On set of
Night Court
with Benny Grant.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

My audition went well and the casting director for
Night Court
, Justine Jacoby, wanted to hire me. It was a little more complicated, however, because it was my first job in the US and she had to navigate all the red tape surrounding work visas for Canadian citizens. She wrote a letter to the government stating that no American could do this job and requested an H-1 work visa for me. Since the extent of my role in
Night Court
was to walk into a room dressed as a miniature flight attendant and say something like, “Hey, you’re cute,” it’s quite possible that my talents were overstated. But, for whatever reason, the casting director put herself out for me and once you get one work visa it’s much easier to get the next one.

Night Court
was a multi-camera show that was filmed in front of a live studio audience. We had plenty of rehearsals which progressed in the same way that Canadian shows had. There was a sound stage and a large crew, all standard issue stuff by this point. The show was a well-oiled machine and the large cameras easily wheeled around the three-walled sets. Hair stylists, makeup artists and wardrobe assistants seemed to appear out of nowhere to make small adjustments and then vanish just as quickly. The series regulars navigated the sets like they were in their own living rooms, leaving the guest stars to wonder if that was a functional door or if we were going to look like idiots by pulling on a doorknob attached to a wall.

After a few days of table readings, blockings, and camera rehearsals,
tape night came. The audience was big. Really big. There were a couple hundred people who had waited in the hot Burbank sun for hours to see the hit show. The mass of tourists with their white sneakers and neon visors spilled in, climbing up the metal bleachers, all pumped and ready to see Harry and Christine. As they got settled, the stand-up comic got the crowd geared up for the show and pointed out the light-up “laugh” and “applause” signs that dangled above their heads, should there be any confusion about what their specific emotional contribution should be. The audience giggled at the sight of the familiar sets and tried to peer around the corner to see where the dressing rooms were.

During rehearsals, everything had been pretty straightforward. I walked through the door, said my line, John Larroquette mugged a face, the director said cut and we went to lunch. On tape night, though, the electric energy that buzzed through the studio suggested that this was different and it made me nervous. Nerves were an unfamiliar on-set feeling for me, but then again I was not used to filming in front of bleachers. The crew never made me anxious, they all had jobs to do and weren’t really watching me—they were watching the details of the scene. But these people came specifically to stare at the actors. My chest felt tight and my eyes refused to focus. I tugged on my costume, thinking my collar had gotten smaller somehow. Why was it so hot in here? And if it was so hot, why was I shivering?

I tried to convince myself that I had seven years of shoots under my belt, this was just another one. I dug my right thumb into my opposite palm. I had always been an anxious kid, who worried and over-thought everything, so Mom had called this my Breathe Button; whenever I got nervous I could just press that spot and remind myself to breathe. Suddenly, the assistant director was calling me to my first position for my scene. I pulled myself together and on cue, I walked into the shot in my tiny flight attendant uniform, a robin’s egg blue suit and black patent leather shoes with matching handbag. At the sight of my outfit, the crowd went into hysterics.

Generally, when a few hundred people laugh at you, it’s not a good thing. The panic lodged in my throat, but then I remembered this was a sitcom and laughter was likely a positive reaction. But what about my line? Should I wait until the crowd stops laughing? That lengthy gap would feel unnatural. But if I said it while they were being so loud, it would never be heard. This was totally different than in rehearsals when the bleachers were empty. I decided to give the audience a beat to take in my whole ensemble, including jauntily placed pill box hat, and then said my line as the cackling was dying down.