Emotionally hungover from a Tony Awards I didn't even watch
I'm writing this while waiting to hear from my editor about when a piece I wrote is going to publish. (I'm trying to break the very unhealthy habit of refreshing and refreshing the website.) I'm going to wait to send this until the piece is live—this is one of those newsletters that's less an essay and more a "hey here are a few things I've written lately," so feel free to scroll down to the links if that's what you're here for—but I've got this time right now. There's a lot of waiting like this—sometimes I know when a big piece is coming out, and I find myself counting down the days; sometimes I don't know and suddenly there it is online, someone sharing it on twitter or, okay, I've refreshed the website, just to see.
Wait actually, I think this is turning into an essay.
When I was in college, I wanted to be an actor. I mean, I was an actor in college, after my first awful freshman year of never getting cast in anything, all these callbacks and the girl a year ahead of me, with a beautiful moon face and half a British accent, getting every part I thought I had a shot at. That year wasn't actually bad—not getting cast was how I started stage managing and production managing, and, if you know me, you can see how that was formative work, how I still try to production manage everything in my life, I'm never happier than when I'm making a plan or scheduling a meeting—but it was bad for the part of me that wanted to act, that loved nothing in the world as much as acting.
Eventually, I started getting cast in things. It was time, an acting class, voice lessons. I got to do some really fun things onstage. But I couldn't help but see that having transferred from the very small pond of high school to the larger pond of college, I was no longer one of the best actors. And I knew that New York would be a bigger pond. I also knew that I wasn't thin and pretty and... actorly. In college I played lots of mothers. Some ingenues, too, but I knew that I wasn't going to have a good time as a 20-year-old woman trying to act in New York.
Maybe I didn't want it badly enough. I hate that kind of advice—If you can do anything other than act/write/make art, do that instead!—but I also loved other things. I loved writing. I loved reading plays and talking about them. I loved making a play happen, behind the scenes, however I could.
Part of why I didn't pursue acting, though, too, is that I knew I hated rejection and hated instability. I wanted a steady job that wasn't predicated on other people's evaluations of me and my work and my talent.
The joke, here, is that I'm now a freelance writer. L-O-L.
I don't feel about writing the way those bad-advice martyrs wanted us to feel about acting in college, the way I still hear people telling writers they should feel about writing. I could do plenty of other things. (I've only been doing this thing, like this, for less than a year.) But the trade-offs feel worth it. The instability, the constant auditioning of my work. The waiting here for an email from my editor to let me know when this piece will go up, this piece that was two weeks of my life (and several years leading up to that), which will take people less than ten minutes to read, if they read it, and then, poof, it's gone. This is like spending days cooking Thanksgiving dinner only for it to be eaten in ten minutes, but times a million, and I don't even get to sit at the table with my family as they eat.
I also think I'm a better writer than I am an actor. (I want to ask someone who's seen me do both, but I'm scared because, honestly?, I want her to say my acting was just as good.) Still, I probably loved acting more. Maybe because you were in the same room with your audience. I won't lie, I really fucking loved that feeling. I loved the work leading up to it, too.
I'm thinking about theatre today because the Tonys were last night. When I thought, a few minutes ago, "Oh whoops this is turning into an essay," I thought that's what it would be about—the years I spent watching the Tonys alone in my bedroom, thinking I was connecting through the TV screen to my future. I practiced my acceptance speeches in the bathroom mirror during commercial breaks. The Tonys feel doubly sad to me these days, because I've lost that part of me and also I can afford to see almost zero Broadway shows, so I have really no connection to who wins.
A couple of years ago, a guy I was in plays with in college won Best Book of a Musical. This year, Best Book went to a writer who was in the writers group I ran when I worked at an off-Broadway theatre. In that group, he'd workshopped a scene from a play about (I think) people being stuck in a video game. I loved it. For years, I asked him to write the rest of that play.
I don't know what else to say now, except I guess we both ended up on different paths.
When I worked in that job, working with playwrights, people used to always ask me, "Are you a playwright, too?" just the same as when I was the receptionist at Doctors Without Borders and people would ask, "So when are you going to the field?" Both felt equally impossible—I knew I could write, I knew I could do what MSF called "logistician," which was basically production managing, I think, but I couldn't do it in that context.
Which was fine. I couldn't do the put-yourself-out-there-for-rejection-all-the-time thing with acting, but I can do it with writing. (Not being in the same room as the rejectors sure helps!)
A lot of the actors I knew in college are playwrights now. One of the playwrights I knew in college writes YA novels. We were all so young, really, hardly the people we'd be.
WOOF. How bout that surprise essay, eh?? All I wanted to do was say hello and preface the sharing of some links to things I've written lately!
Here's the piece I was waiting for this morning, about how we understand our place on Earth: Could astrobiology research convince us to fight climate change?
I also wrote about how we think about communicating with aliens, and how we think about communicating with humans far, far in the future, and how the two are, in many ways, the same: Greetings from Earth.
In non-space news, my first romance review column came out at the New York Times: Summer Reading: Romance. (Rumaan Alam was also kind enough to interview me about reviewing romance; I only saw two snarky tweets about our conversation.)
And if you want to see me take what being-in-front-of-an-audience I can—and with another erstwhile actor, too!—come to Book Culture at 7pm on 6/20, where I'll be interviewing the brilliant and lovely Meg Flaherty about her brilliant and lovely new memoir, Tango Lessons.
xxo