Posted May 9th, 2003 by Michelle

I just went to an audition for a national Tylenol commercial. I hadn’t heard from my agent since the day afer I got back from the trek, and it was nice just to get the call. The assistant who called me tokd me about the audition, and then said that they were still thinking of me, that they hadn’t forgotten me, that all the calls recently were for weird ages and minorites, but that I was still in the front of their minds and that I would be hearing from them soon. It was really nice. Work inspires work, even if it is just an audition, and I spent the morning looking at next week’s auditions.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be in college right now. It was only ten years ago for me, but technology has gone nuts since then. We barely had the internet, and if we did, certainly never used it. I know I used email. I know my rent was $350 and that seemed like a huge luxury. Which it was. I had rooms in my apartment that I never used. I had a music room, for god’s sake, something that I haven’t had since. My refrigerator had its own room. I could easily sleep six. I was acting every day, writing every day. Why, then, do I not look back fondly on my college years like so many others? I see them as years of lonliness and hard work, with wee bits of fun thrown in only randomly. I have great memories of the best shows I did- Quilters, A View From a Bridge, A Comedy of Errors- and that makes me wistful of only needing talent and drive to get cast.

Now I live and work in New York. I haven’t done a play in a year and a half, and even though my last show (The Second String) is possibly some of the best work I’ve done in years, it’s not nearly enough.

I’m sitting here in News Bar, typing away on my portable keyboard and Palm Pilot, and realizing that I will never be happy with a normal life. I will never be satisfied with a 9 to 5, or even a 4 to midnight, for that matter. I don’t even know that I would be happy with just doing a show for a living. Tessa once wrote me an email, saying that she could see coming to visit me, somewhere totally unlike where I am now, me coming out of a house where I lived with my husband, somewhere far away. i don’t know how developed this vision was for her, but it is huge in my minjd and I can’t seem to ecape it. Nor do I want to. I see myself somewhere far away, too. I don’t know where. But I am sure, sure as I am of my family, that I only need find it. It is why I am still single, it is why I am discontented, it is why I feel not exactly right eery day of my life.

I’ve been searching online, looking for the people who are going to take advantage of me, who are going to find the right place for me in the world. I feel like I even know when it is supposed to happen- late September. I am committed to the AIDSRide the weekend of the 19th of that month, and then I feel I am free. I want to put this show together with Sean, do the AIDSRide, and then get the hell out of Dodge. I even feel like my landlord will let me go.

I have to know all of this in heart, less I go mad.

On that note, I’m off for an early Mother’s Day, starting with a massage. It’s going to be a good day.