In Pieces(43)

I can’t say I learned anything that night, or at least not anything I could take to the set with me the next day—God forbid—but I was totally compelled. I wanted to tell the actors what I thought, how at times I was confused and then completely transfixed, wanted to ask them why they chose to work on things that were so complicated to explain. I walked away with a new hunger, and not for chocolate cake. I wanted to get up there, wanted to work, really work—not the kind of work I’d been doing. I wanted to learn the break-it-down, bit-by-bit, layer-by-layer craft of it.


There’s a saying that actors have: “Life is what happens in between jobs.” Then there’s the riddle: “What is the worst time in an actor’s life?” Answer: “When they’re not working and when they’re working.” Both of these apply. During the months that The Flying Nun was in production, I had zero time off because I was in every scene of every script, so when hiatus arrived at the end of the first season, I tried to fill my life with everything I wouldn’t be able to do after the second season began.

Immediately, I started seeing a therapist once a week, even though I didn’t stay with him for long. I remember shuffling into his office for my session and sitting on the edge of his hard leather sofa, feeling just as stiff as the furniture. It was perhaps our second meeting, so I’m sure I looked terrified, because I was, and deeply sad, trying to hide myself in layers of baggy clothes, looking slightly childlike. Without even registering my appearance, he opened the session by scolding me for being fifteen minutes late, telling me I was acting disrespectfully to us both. I felt ambushed, tears dripping off my chin as I tried to defend myself, explaining how every day the clock was relentlessly on me and I was never late, admitting it was a luxury to allow myself a little tardiness, something I didn’t know I felt until I heard it come out of my mouth. I wish I could have said, “Thank you for your time, you’re not the right person for me,” and left. But I couldn’t find that part of myself, and as the session continued I fell back into my familiar cell, locked behind my face, unable to speak.

This same doctor insisted that I attend a torturous, weekend-long group marathon as well as his weekly group therapy sessions, when a knot of strangers, usually years older, would burst out laughing when one of the members asked if I’d driven there or had I flown over, one of a hundred unfunny jokes thrown in my direction while inside my head a voice pleaded for me to speak. Please speak. But I sat with my head down, a little ragamuffin girl, mute and now with a pounding headache.

Then on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, scene nights at the Actors Studio, I’d step out of the ragamuffin’s wordless world and become an entirely different person. And on Wednesday nights, when Lou Antonio, the charismatic New York actor, conducted his popular exercise class, I could hear my voice again and I could open my mouth and use it. This class was not an evening filled with sit-ups and push-ups—though that might have been a good idea too. These exercises had only to do with acting.

The first time I timidly stepped into his class, I hadn’t even put my rear in a chair before I heard Lou shout, “I want six people up, now!” Without worrying if I was prepared or informed or qualified, I jumped onto the stage, then looked out at the theater, half-filled with actors just settling in. As soon as Lou had all his volunteers standing ready under the rudimentary work lights—making it somewhat brighter onstage than it was in the audience—the exercise began. It went something like this, give or take a few details: Lou climbed onstage with us, then one at a time whispered to each actor their own private motivations. In my ear, he informed me that I was desperately in love with the unfamiliar performer standing to my right, adding that I had an overwhelming urge to touch him. Then, he quietly told my love interest that one of his contact lenses had popped out and though he desperately needed my help to find it, an obnoxious odor seemed to be radiating from me—basically, I reeked to high heaven. After everyone onstage was given a secret drive, always a motivation in direct conflict with someone else’s, Lou called “action,” and what must have resembled a scene from The Snake Pit began. He would then move into the audience or stand in the back and yell out different locations periodically: You’re on a storm-tossed boat, in a roasting desert, stuck in a crowded elevator. All of which would radically change the physicality of everyone’s behavior, but not their need to get whatever it was Lou had told them they wanted.

I loved every joyful minute of it. And even though most of Lou’s exercises seemed like silly party games, they were actually a kind of limbering up, stretching your imagination, strengthening your ability to act on a fleeting impulse, and challenging your concentration. The more intense exercises—sense memory, emotional memory, room, and the private moment—I wouldn’t learn until later, all conducted by Lee Strasberg himself.

One Wednesday night during that first hiatus, I was heading home from exercise class with the top down on my flashy sports car, still feeling slap-happy from the evening’s improvisations. I had the 1812 Overture playing loudly on my eight-track—yeah, go figure—when I stopped at a red light on Sunset Boulevard. Pounding on the wood steering wheel as if it were a bongo drum, I noticed a car filled with cute guys pulling up next to me, and for a moment I was just an ordinary girl… in her ordinary blue Ferrari playing the overture of 1812 full blast. So I met their eyes and smiled. Most people my age were looking at either college or the threat of Vietnam, and to them anyone over the age of thirty was under suspicion. They were listening to Jimi Hendrix or the Beatles or Buffalo Springfield, not Tchaikovsky in an ostentatious vehicle, and though I was clearly not over thirty, they immediately recognized me as a participant in that over-thirty world, and of all things, the Flying Nun herself. So to the timing of Tchaikovsky’s thunderous cannon fire, they all flipped me the bird, except the one poor guy who made a wet raspberry sound. I drove the rest of the way home feeling like the ragamuffin again.