You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (34 page)

As the ceremony began and my dad and I walked down the path together, the sight of our guests filled my heart to overflowing. On either side of that aisle, beaming in the soft Tuscan light, stood the community that I was always searching for. Our families were there, as well as old friends from L.A. and new friends from our non-L.A. life. We were all one cohesive family, and we had come together to celebrate love.

I walked my father to his seat, between my mom and Grandma, then made my way to Jeremy, who was standing in front of the rolling countryside, wearing a light linen suit with sandals and waiting for me. When I arrived at the end of the aisle, I leapt into his arms for a hug, even though I was supposed to just stand there and play the role of the emotional-yet-composed bride. We wrote our own vows and Jeremy’s were funny even though I told him not to be funny, because funny vows are never actually funny. But somehow, offering yet another reason it was a good idea to marry him, he pulled off the elusive funny vow and I spent much of our ceremony doubled over and cracking up. We didn’t bother with a bridal party, a garter toss, or wedding presents. We focused on tiramisu and ill-conceived drinking games with limoncello.

We danced until even the Italians thought it was time to go to bed. It was so much fun, it didn’t even matter to me that a friend of our dog-sitter posted on an Internet fan site that I was getting married in Italy and that my new husband had forced me out of the film industry. We just laughed.

After our wedding, we stayed in Italy for a while. I get a high from traveling that can’t be found anywhere else. The opportunity to step out of my own life and attempt to see things from the perspective of another culture is intoxicating. Put me in a place where I don’t speak the language, I’m relying on unreliable public transport, and a pickpocket just stole my map; I’m in heaven.

Travel was always high up on my list of reasons to take a film project and I was overjoyed to learn that traveling is possible even without signing a movie contract. You can just go! You need a passport and a little
money, but it’s all out there, that big old world! You can see it for yourself! You don’t have to work long hours and promise the production’s insurance company that you won’t rent a scooter!

We cruised over gently sloping hills lined with olive trees and tried to figure out how to put diesel fuel in our teeny-tiny rental car. We saw ancient ruins sitting comfortably next to the neon signs of supermarkets. I sat in the shade of a pergola, writing and meditating. A little stillness had entered into my life. It was easy to credit that happiness to being in Italy or my newlywed status but it was so clearly deeper than that. A sense of quiet replaced the restlessness that was deep in my soul. It had been planted the moment I stepped off the plane in Virginia, and it was now a steadily creeping ivy, covering everything in a blanket of rich stillness. It finally felt like I was living a life that fit. I was no longer looking for the next thing, the next job, and the next compliment from Spielberg. I decided to be delighted with whatever life I found right in front of me. I had finally woken up.

Back home as a newlywed, it was time to figure out what the details of that life really looked like. Continuing to work for $8 an hour at the radio station was tempting, but the fact that the University of Virginia was in my backyard felt like some sort of sign that I should try to get this educational chip off my shoulder.

Before moving to Charlottesville, college seemed like a great thing for other people. With my education placed firmly on the backburner, it just never seemed like the right place for me. College was an environment where you learned theoretical things, out of context and without getting your hands dirty. The ivory towers of academia seemed wildly irrelevant to this real world I was trying to experience. But when higher education was right there, flaunting its beautiful, cavernous libraries in my face, I swooned and confessed my all-encompassing desire to attend
school. Current students, all enthusiastic and exhausted, rushed around carrying teetering stacks of textbooks. I longed to be stressed out about exams and panicked about research papers, too. I gathered together my GED, my pitiful N/A high school record and some random college credits. I held out my moldy crumbs as an offering and I applied to the University of Virginia.

I had gotten quite adept at sidestepping my history but for my application I had to face it straight on and explain my life. I even came clean about being thrown out of two high schools. My personal essay was bursting with my love of books and my longing to be part of something big, something with pride and deep roots. Something with a crest and a fight song that involved synchronized hand gestures.

It worked. I was accepted to the University of Virginia and became one of those students who stressed about papers and who napped on the Rotunda steps during breaks, and then ran across grounds (we didn’t call it campus, it’s not the Jeffersonian way) because I was late to class. I went to fair wage rallies, found the quietest nooks in the library and choked down the cafeteria food. For the first time in my life, I was really a student, I didn’t have to sit in the hallway and just pretend that I belonged.

Beyond needing to learn about APA grammar, I needed to learn how to learn. Sitting in a classroom, taking notes and reading stacks of crooked, photocopied PDF files was all incredibly foreign. But exams and research projects filled my days, and at some point, when I looked around, I realized I was actually doing this thing. In an attempt to fill in the gaps in my education, I studied everything from the History of Southern Africa to Introduction to Statistics. Textbooks about Buddhism and feminism and physics covered my kitchen table. I became one of those people who knew things about the works of Simone de Beauvoir and the basic laws of entropy.

The break-up with my old life was official. It was a no-fault divorce, to be sure; we separated amicably and without throwing dishware, but it was a divorce all the same. It had been a complicated, painful relationship,
yet I found myself avoiding any kind of “entertainment news” because I didn’t need to hear how Claire Danes and Acting made such a happy couple. That was when the good times flashed back, the fun sets, and the rush of positive feedback from auditions. There were moments when it occurred to me that maybe we could have worked it out. Maybe I should have held up my end of the bargain, the one that says that being an actor is hard, but you stick it out, anyway. The one that says that despair is part of the agreement. Perhaps I could have worked on the relationship a little more; maybe I could have been more accepting and forgiving of the film industry’s less charming attributes.

But for me, Acting was one of those men who purposely becomes so distant and intolerable that you are forced to leave them, so they don’t have to break the ties and leave you some sad has-been who appears in
People
magazine’s “Where Are They Now?” articles. Those articles always terrified me—the ones where a slightly dated photo of Famous You floats in an optimistic bubble over your current, un-famous self, while you try to justify to the world that you really haven’t outlived your personal ‘use-by’ date. But being a student only allows so much time to sit and brood about why you are twenty-nine and just starting college. I had a foreign language requirement to fulfill.

It didn’t take long for the word to get out around school about my old job. Walking down the hall created a buzz that made me feel as if there was a swarm of bees just behind me. Bees who watched a lot of movies. I stared at my shoes and tried to count the classroom numbers in my head so I didn’t need to look up. I had dropped my glasses and scratched the lens, so I couldn’t hide behind that social mask. I walked around brazenly in my contacts, putting my poster face out there for the world to see.

“Hey,
Doubtfire
Girl!” a guy yelled down the hallway.

I turned around. “Yeah?”

“Oh. Um…nothing. Sorry.”

I sat in the stadium seating of Introduction to Something Important
and reviewed my notes from last class. As I tucked my feet under so that a girl could pass by, she shoved her cell phone in my face and I heard the camera click. Out of instinct, I had even attempted to get my movie smile on my face in time for the shot but my acting skills were waning. The look was likely more reminiscent of a startled rabbit than anything. She walked away like nothing happened and I felt like part of a World’s Fair exhibit.

It took me quite a while to make my first college friend. I tended to keep to myself and didn’t live in a dorm or join any clubs or go to any events wherein social interaction would be necessary. For the first couple of semesters, my most notable communication consisted of asking the person next to me if I was in the right classroom or apologizing for dropping my pen under their desk.

Thankfully, two girls finally put me out of my loner misery and befriended me. My new friends were a six-foot tall blonde British bombshell and an Orthodox Muslim who wore a hijab with her jeans and flip-flops. When the three of us walked together, I faded into the background. It was an incredibly efficient way to hide. I didn’t intentionally go out and find extraordinary-looking people, it just sort of happened that way. Perhaps it is just a case of people who are different being comfortable with people who are different.

My social anxieties lingered, so the classes where I could sit in the back and quietly take notes were my favorites. But these were rare, as the professors at UVA tend to be annoyingly engaged and interested in hearing from their students. I was convinced that whenever I was called on randomly and got the incorrect answer, tweets would immediately go out to the whole UVA community about how the
Doubtfire
Girl was stupid. I’d go home and find myself sprawled out on my neighbor’s kitchen table, sobbing that I just wasn’t cut out for college. Her three-year-old would watch me cry and then offer me a Cheerio. He was just trying to shut me up; he never really understood.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that no one really
cared about my answers; they were all much more worried about being cold-called themselves. It’s challenging to clear your mind from that old Hollywood brainwashing, the one that insists that everyone must find you endlessly fascinating. It’s quite freeing to think of yourself as just another frightened college student.

For many kids at school, once they got over the former actor thing, the fact that I was nine years older than them was far more intriguing. I was married and had a two-car garage and mortgage; these were fascinating and foreign concepts. I was different than rest of the students, but I had a role to play. They started calling me “Mama Jakub” because I always had Kleenex in my backpack, along with extra pens and some salient relationship advice. I told the boys to listen more and the girls to not get too serious, too fast. And then I told everyone that they needed to get more sleep and take vitamins.

For some incomprehensible reason, there are still college professors that make their students perform skits. I hate skits. They transport me back to self-conscious acting classes in L.A., with all the pantomiming and melodrama. You can tell that both the performers and the audience are whole-heartedly humiliated by the experience.

My Italian class was divided into small groups and we were given a skit project. We would film the skit, so at least we got to skip the realtime humiliation of performing in front of our classmates. My group consisted of people who happened to sit near me. There were four of us: one guy I knew a little, who knew about my acting career, and two other girls he knew but I didn’t. And whether they knew about me, well, I didn’t know. The impending unease was obvious.

We decided to meet at the apartment of one of the girls and “write the script.” This entailed figuring out how many Italian words we know between the four of us and then trying to stretch that into a story that
fit the five-minute minimum. I arrived at the college apartment ten minutes late because apparently the first two years of college don’t cover how to give coherent directions to your home. When I arrived, no one answered the door. I loitered in a hallway that smelled like weed and Hot Pockets, until a neighbor let me in to the apartment, which was not a huge accomplishment, as the door was unlocked anyway.

I waited, sitting quietly on the couch next to a guy who was passed out in his underwear. I looked around the apartment and tried not to touch anything, since the whole place seemed to be coated in something gluey. Let me just say that going to a college apartment when you are thirty-one-year-old married woman is a funny thing. Especially if it is your first college experience, and when you were nineteen you were usually living in hotels, and your most mutinous act was swiping an extra mini-shampoo from the maid’s cart. It was kind of like going to a zoo to look at the animals. It’s exotic and fascinating and there are many surprises, like the fact that there is half of a sandwich sitting on top of the toilet tank, or the eventual realization that no one knew who the sleeping-in-his-underwear guy actually was.

Finally, my skit partners arrived and we all sat on an unmade bed and wrote a ridiculous Italian tale of love and betrayal. I played the role of a server who watches all the drama unfold while attempting to offer the tormented lovers more food. This role was perfect for me as I was most confident in my restaurant Italian and
ravioli
counted as an Italian word. We did a couple of takes, with one of us inevitably forgetting that the double c in Italian is pronounced like a “k.”

Near the end of the day, one of the girls contracted what we call in the film business a “giggle fit.” This is a highly technical term, so let me explain; it’s when you laugh uncontrollably as soon as the camera rolls. It’s the stuff of great blooper reels and extra footage that plays under the final credits. My skit partner was doubled over with gasping laughter and just couldn’t get it together. It was getting exhausting. By the tenth time we tried to film our stupid scene and she turned purple, I had to
intervene.