yes please(6)

I didn’t really know what kind of actor I wanted to be back then. I didn’t have a real plan or even a mentor to follow. I just knew the things I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be tied down and stuck. I didn’t want to decide who I was going to marry or where I was going to live. I took a public speaking class in college with Craig Finn, a friend of my cousin Lynn (Sheehan) Gosselin. Craig is a great musician who is now the lead singer of the band Hold Steady. I remember feeling like we both knew a secret: we were going to keep performing no matter what, and we both were going to have no money, stability, or children for the next ten years. I think we should stop asking people in their twenties what they “want to do” and start asking them what they don’t want to do. Instead of asking students to “declare their major” we should ask students to “list what they will do anything to avoid.” It just makes a lot more sense.

I was in my off-campus Strathmore kitchen when Kara told me she was going to move to Chicago after she graduated. She was a year ahead of me and had heard about these classes at the comedy mecca Second City. Further investigation led us to research ImprovOlympic, and they also had classes. That settled it. Kara was going to Chicago and was going to get an apartment, and I would join her a year later. “I can be a waitress anywhere!” I said to my horrified parents, who had remortgaged their small house twice to pay for my brother and me to go to college.

I started to believe in myself. I realized I could say whatever I wanted.

In the second and final performance of The Wizard of Oz, I decided to take control during the tornado scene. I paused, put the blinking dog down on the stage, and walked a few feet away from it. “Toto, Toto! Where are you?” I said, pretending to look for my lost dog in the fearsome storm. The dog froze and played it perfectly. I got laughter and some light applause for my efforts. I had improvised and it had worked. One could argue that it worked because of the dog. A good straight dog can really help sell a joke. Whatever. I have been chasing that high ever since.





plain girl vs. the demon




? Liezl Estipona

I HATE HOW I LOOK. That is the mantra we repeat over and over again. Sometimes we whisper it quietly and other times we shout it out loud in front of a mirror. I hate how I look. I hate how my face looks my body looks I am too fat or too skinny or too tall or too wide or my legs are too stupid and my face is too smiley or my teeth are dumb and my nose is serious and my stomach is being so lame. Then we think, “I am so ungrateful. I have arms and legs and I can walk and I have strong nail beds and I am alive and I am so selfish and I have to read Man’s Search for Meaning again and call my parents and volunteer more and reduce my carbon footprint and why am I such a self-obsessed ugly * no wonder I hate how I look! I hate how I am!”

There have been forty million books and billions of words written on this subject, so I will assume we are all caught up.

That voice that talks badly to you is a demon voice. This very patient and determined demon shows up in your bedroom one day and refuses to leave. You are six or twelve or fifteen and you look in the mirror and you hear a voice so awful and mean that it takes your breath away. It tells you that you are fat and ugly and you don’t deserve love. And the scary part is the demon is your own voice. But it doesn’t sound like you. It sounds like a strangled and seductive version of you. Think Darth Vader or an angry Lauren Bacall. The good news is there are ways to make it stop talking. The bad news is it never goes away. If you are lucky, you can live a life where the demon is generally forgotten, relegated to a back shelf in a closet next to your old field hockey equipment. You may even have days or years when you think the demon is gone. But it is not. It is sitting very quietly, waiting for you.

This motherf*cker is patient.

It says, “Take your time.”

It says, “Go fall in love and exercise and surround yourself with people who make you feel beautiful.”

It says, “Don’t worry, I’ll wait.”

And then one day, you go through a breakup or you can’t lose your baby weight or you look at your reflection in a soup spoon and that slimy bugger is back. It moves its sour mouth up to your ear and reminds you that you are fat and ugly and don’t deserve love.

This demon is some Stephen King from-the-sewer devil-level shit.

I had a lucky childhood. My demon didn’t live in my room. My demon just walked around my neighborhood. I grew up with a naturally pretty but very earthy mother who never told me to put on makeup or change my outfit. I didn’t have the kind of mother who flirted with my friends or wore tight jeans.

In middle school I was small and flat chested, which was also a lucky break. You can kind of slip around unnoticed that way, which is exactly what you want. I was made fun of for being short, but it was mostly by boys who were shorter than me. I rarely brushed my hair and I was skinny. I bordered on being a tomboy, but not enough to be labeled one. It was a wonderful but short-lived time when I was in my body but not critical of it. If you ever want to see heaven, watch a bunch of young girls play. They are all sweat and skinned knees. Energy and open faces. My demon would receive my school picture and maybe gently suggest I “do something about those eyebrows,” but for the most part it left me alone. I felt safe in the middle—a girl who had a perfectly fine face but not one that drew any attention.

Then I started caring about boys and the demon pulled into my driveway.