Alllllrightyyyy! I bring you this next installment of my paywalled post, and it’s another deleted chapter from Tired as F*ck, and another continuation of the “God/miracles” theme that I mentioned in the previous deleted chapter/Email to God… and it’s also why I took it out. The book’s theme just wasn’t about my miracles anymore, AND the book was already too long. So it got chopped.
But first, another lil bonus for paid subscribers, is that I’m doing an ASK ME ANYTHING, and you can ask your questions over at this post. You can ask anything now, but I will actually be in the comments of the post answering questions live tomorrow (Wednesday) at 3:30 pm ET.
Just to reiterate: the Q&A is happening on a different post, not this one!
(I’m currently visiting my friend Annie, (who is in Tired AF too!) in North Jersey. She is two weeks away from the due date of her second baby, so I’m doing a lil last minute visit.)
Ok. Onto the deleted chapter. If you haven’t read Tired as F*ck, this won’t make as much sense, but for those who have: this chapter came in the book after I was on The F*ck It Diet, after read the Artist’s Way and quit acting (the first time), and was working at my mundane little office job in Lincoln Square. So I was around 24, or maybe had recently turned 25. It was really that first year and a half of me healing my relationship with food, and trying to see what my life was like if I didn’t have the pressure of acting (the first time I quit…).
All of this was glossed over in the book, and seriously condensed. I wanted to be able to tell every single little beat of the journey, but it was just. too. long. And so I consolidated it down to: I got an office job! Then I started acting again! Then I did a lot! Then I… got burnt out!
This was one of those big moments that I took out that got be from my office job back into acting (temporarily. I’ve … since quit again. Ha.)
How to Cry Because of Church (again*)
*Again, because I’d already written about my crying fit when I had to be a confirmation sponsor for my cousin Fiona, and my sister Margaret.
That year, once I’d settled into my boring little life, I did a few things in the name of creativity for the sake of it, just to try and feel slightly alive: I got back into improv classes, I joined a few indie improv teams, I wrote and performed a two-hander cabaret with my friend Ashley Mortensen from NYU who had just come off of the Wicked Tour as the Elphaba stand-in, and I kept writing blog posts for my little side project: The Fuck It Diet. I even wrote an email to Margaret Cho(’s assistant) to make sure she didn’t mind that my blog title the same as one of her joke titles. (She never wrote back.)
I also started coaching some of the kids I used to babysit on audition monologues, which became a way to make a little bit of extra money, in a way that was a little bit less exhausting than babysitting, so I could buy some more flowy shirts from Old Navy and an extra big bra.
I remember I went to see Into the Woods with my friend in Central Park, starring Amy Adams as the Baker’s Wife, and Jessie Mueller as Cinderella. I remember watching, enthralled by Jessie Mueller’s performance. She is so so good. And she doesn’t look like a tiny, perfect little ingenue, either. She is just a normal woman. It was inspiring. She is such a good actor and singer, and that it overrode the normal casting requirement that Cinderella look like a willowy cartoon princess. I had been avoiding seeing any theater as much as I could, because I didn’t want to have to face my sadness about quitting so abruptly. So, of course, watching Jessie, my eyes got watery watching, not because of the story, but Jessie was doing what I had been too self-loathing to do. (Not to downplay her talent and say “oh if I was just more confident then I’d be working as much as Jessie Mueller!” And not to say that she isn’t attractive, but she is not the teeny tiny little fairy ingenue type, and therefore, watching her perform, I was looking at hard proof that the things I was so insanely brutal to myself over, were not inherently true…)
In the spring, my mom and sister came to visit me. I remember thinking how relieving this visit was compared to how it had always been. This time, there was no unspoken tension about how I was squandering away my life in the most expensive city in the world, having my parents pay for my apartment so I could audition, and then not auditioning like I was supposed to. Now, I had quit and I was fully supporting myself. Nobody could say anything to me about anything, and if they did, they didn’t have a leg to stand on. I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do: working a 9-5, supporting myself, and doing little creative projects on the side, just for the joy of it. Hands off! Let me be! Thanks!
We were wasting time walking through the theater district towards a theater to see Breakfast At Tiffany’s starring Danaerys Targaryen, and my mom stopped in her tracks and pointed to a tiny little hotel that we had *apparently* stayed in together when we visited New York for my NYU audition. “Don’t you remember this, Caroline???” Actually… no. I didn’t. I didn’t remember a lot, actually. Everything was a blur. A trauma-blur, most likely. Unless I had some kind of early onset alzheimers, which, honestly, I’m not ruling out yet.
Then she looked across the street and said, “Caroline look! It’s the Actor’s Chapel!!! Remember how we went in there before your audition? You were so excited!” Again, no. I actually didn’t remember any of that, at least not consciously. Though, in high school and college, I did used to go into lots of churches and excitedly light candles and say a prayer that I would be on Broadway, and also fall in love. Hmph. “Do we have time to go in before the show??” Unfortunately: yes, we had plenty of time.
I nodded, yes we can go in. I felt really weird, and I immediately started taking very shallow breaths to try and shut down whatever weird thing I was feeling.