We were at a party and she was dancing to a Devo song with full punked-out abandon. I walked up to her, looked her straight in the eye, and put one hand through her spiky hair. I walked away, like a bold idiot, knowing that I had just made the first move. We ended up back at my apartment, drunk, and we fell asleep on the living room floor. In the middle of the night, someone rolled over, and just like that, we were kissing.
As we were making out, I thought, Oh my god, so this is what kissing is. I had kissed a few boys, but never felt anything and never understood what the big deal was or why people bothered to kiss each other at all. But for me, kissing a woman was different. It was the point of no return.
The next day in her apartment, I helped myself to her journal. Why would I do a thing like that? Because it was there, she was not, and I have no impulse control. In a fresh entry, written that morning, she asked of our night together, “Have I opened Pandora’s box?” After I went to the library and found out who this Pandora was (remember, I’m still a C student), I had to answer, “Yes, she has.”
Our relationship proceeded as smoothly as you’d expect between a teacher and a self-hating student who’s having her first-ever homosexual experience. I pulled her close, then pushed her away, then threw myself at her, then despised myself for doing it. I couldn’t stand to see her, and I couldn’t stand not to see her. I was tormented, guilt-ridden, ashamed … and out-of-my-mind excited. And I had no clue how to handle any one of those emotions, much less all of them together.
I hung out in Normal for the summer of my final year at ISU to marinate in the drama of the push and pull of love. To support myself, I got a job detasseling corn with migrant workers in the endless cornfields outside town. I wanted to do something physical and be outside so maybe I could get a tan. What I got was cuts all over my arms because I went sleeveless.
At the end of the summer, I reluctantly left Normal to start an MFA program at Cornell in upstate New York. I had auditioned for a bunch of grad programs earlier in the year, and to my absolute surprise, Cornell had offered me one of their six graduate positions. Cornell wasn’t Juilliard or Yale in terms of actor-training-program gravitas, but they wanted me! I got a free ride and the promise of two more years doing what I loved in the safety of academia. And seeing as I had projected every last ounce of neediness onto the gay teacher lady, I would imagine my exit came not a moment too soon for her.
Now that I had broken my relationship cherry, I finally got the sense to call Chris. It had been four years since I’d sent him the cruel letter that had ended our friendship. At home in Dolton over Christmas break, I got out my folks’ Harveys Bristol Cream, poured myself a mugful, and dialed Chris’s number.
“I’m sorry about that letter,” I told him. “I miss you. And I’m gay now, too.”
“I know,” Chris replied. And just like that, he forgave me. A fan of late sixties easy listening music, I felt such a joy to hear his familiar sign-off before hanging up: “Don’t sleep in the subway, darling.” I had my friend back.
MY MOM ALWAYS SAID THAT IF SHE COULD BUY ME A town, it would be Ithaca. It was perfect for me—woodsy, contained, and quaint. I arrived there via train and bus in the late summer of 1982. Ithaca is a lovely little place, full of old hippies and smarty-pants students. Every street is a steep hill, and all the students had wonderfully toned legs. I would have a pair of my own in short order. I had grown up feeling fat next to my bony brother and sister. They effectively taunted me, calling me “ub”—short for “tub-o-lard.” I had tried all sorts of tricks and fads to become slim and therefore happy. But now that I was finally losing weight, I still felt miserable. Once again, I could hardly get out of bed in the morning. Not only did I have that damn gay secret, but the fact that I had just come from the buckle of the corn belt had never been more obvious. Way out of my element, I made social gaffes at every turn. I actually tried to take out a priceless first-edition book like it was a regular library book. I had never eaten a taco or had Greek food. I had never had a bagel, much less a Jewish friend. Cornell was teeming with Jews, Greek food–eaters, vegetarians, and New York City types who kept hurting my feelings. Unlike these kids, I didn’t give two hoots about grade point averages, and how much I knew about anything was not a point of pride for me (yet). I was very alone and felt stupider than everyone else.
Even though it had a middle-tier graduate acting program, Cornell was an elite Ivy League school. Some kids who had been high school valedictorians found themselves at the bottom of the class when they got there. There were many incidents throughout the years where really good students jumped to their deaths into the gorges that tore through the landscape of this otherwise delightful little hamlet. They couldn’t take their own perceived failures. It was called gorging out. I understood their pain.
I was all on my own here. I had made my decision to travel across the country for grad school by myself and for myself. I didn’t consult my parents; I just sort of presented it to them. I had a long-running fantasy of someone magically appearing to hold my hand and guide me through the building of a life and a career. However, this fantasy was up against a harsh reality: I was going to have to dig deep to find the gumption to make things happen. I had zero belief in myself and would have loved to have been saved from the work of it.
One particularly tough morning, when I was doubled over in existential angst, I called in to school sick and the secretary said, “No one calls in sick to this program. It’s not done. You get yourself in here.” I stayed home anyway. For a self-identified good girl and rule-follower this was an outrageously rebellious act. I spent that day obsessively straightening my bed and blowing and reblowing my hair dry. My insides might be a mess, but damn it if my outsides would be. That night, I called the campus gay and lesbian hotline. I think somehow I knew that I had to feel okay about who I was in order to feel like I fit anywhere, or to make anything of my life.
“I need to talk to somebody,” I said. They told me to go to the Apple Blossom Café, and a volunteer named Alice would meet me there. I loved the ABC Café. It was full of dirty vegetarians and hairy lesbians, so of course I was both attracted and repulsed.
And so I went to the ABC Café to meet Alice. She showed up, and I recognized her—she was a graduate student in the directing program. “Oh, hi,” she said. “I had a feeling you were gay.” We talked, went out and got drunk, and slept together that night. (For a volunteer, she clearly went above and beyond.)
This might have ended up being a happy story of finding new love … but it wasn’t. I liked Alice okay, but she committed the cardinal sin of liking me more. I couldn’t deal with the attention—it made me want to punish her.
So I did. I ignored her phone calls, acted cold when we saw each other, and generally pretended that first night had never happened. It was like the old Groucho Marx maxim: never belong to a club that would have you as a member. I saw her a couple of weeks later, and she was with someone else. I was still a mess.
I LOVED THE CONSERVATORY-STYLE TRAINING AT CORNELL. For a depressed person in her early twenties like me it would become the perfect remedy: up at the crack of dawn with fencing or dancing, working until late at night on rehearsal for whatever play we were doing.
I forgot about myself and I focused on the characters I played. I discovered one of the great, unexpected gifts of learning to act: all the characters ever written are already inside you. It’s just a matter of accessing them and bringing them forward. And having no fear of the dark side.
Seein’ witches as Mary Warren in The Crucible.
Case in point:
Stuart White was an amazingly talented guest director from New York City. I met him early in my first semester. He came to Cornell to direct a Reynolds Price play called Early Dark. He cast me as Rosacoke Mustian, a young girl who loses her virginity when the man she loves violently rapes her. On stage.
This blew my mind. This character was nothing like me. I had never fallen in