If you want to be a doctor, there is a clear path you must follow. Undergraduate school. Medical School. Then you do your residency. Poof! Now you're a doctor! Simple!
What the hell do you do if you want to be an actor?
See, you don't have to go to school to be an actor. Anyone can walk into an audition off the street calling themselves an actor. Granted, without a resume showing that you have experience, you'd better be pretty freaking talented if you want to stand a chance of getting the gig. Of course, it is possible for one to be employed as an actor without any academic qualification. People do it all the time, much to the chagrin of those of us who spent $100,000 obtaining an academic pedigree only to find out that 20,000 other kids with identical degrees (if not identical training or talent) arrived in New York City at the same time as us vying for the same infintessemal shot at making a living as an actor.
I could never have been a doctor. I'm terrible at math an science and I am incredibly squeamish. I would probably burst into tears the first time I had to dissect anything. But the idea that you actually have to be qualified to be a doctor, that there is a checklist of things you have to do before you can officially call yourself a doctor, really appeals to me. If only I had known exactly what awaited me after graduation!
Not only did I not have any idea how I was going to pursue my career, but I had no idea where I was going to live. My roommate was moving to New York, which left me alone in the three bedroom South Philly house we'd shared for two years. I loved that house so much. We'd found it literally three days before we had to move out of our summer sublet, the summer before my junior year. It had been so perfect; huge, cheap, and available immediately. We'd lovingly selected a vibrant color scheme for each of the rooms: bright pink for the living room walls with lime green trim, teal for my bedroom with mint green and pale pink accents, and dark purple with pumpkin orange and lavender accents for Molly's room. We spent three days in the blazing August heat painting without air conditioning, taking occasional breaks to eat at the Melrose Diner down the street. It took about six months for us to afford furniture to fill the enormous house, but it was the first lease for both of us and we wanted to do it up right. It became our technicolor sanctuary, our South Philly haven, where we would return from our 14 hour days of classes, rehearsals, and waiting tables at Chili's. In the summertime we would fold down the futon in the living room, the one room which had a tiny, ancient wall unit air conditioner, and the two of us would fall asleep (feet to feet...sorry boys, no girl-on-girl action) watching Friends on DVD.
We moved out of the house two months after I graduated from UArts. Molly was moving to New York and I was....well, I was moving on, too. I just didn't know how or where yet.
Thus began my adventures in subletting.
My first sublet was in Philadelphia, on South Street between 3rd and 4th. I was finishing out the last 3 months of my friend Kati's lease for her, and since I was doing her a favor, she knocked fifty bucks a month off the price for me. I was also paying rent to her parents which, thankfully, allowed me a great deal of leeway in terms of paying on time. See, I was a total fool and decided that I was tired of working two or three jobs, so I just worked one: hosting at Jones, a trendy, kitschy 60's comfort-food concept restaurant.
I was making $10.50 an hour. Working 30 hours a week. Living by myself in a one-bedroom apartment that cost $600 a month. You do the math. Complete fool. Phoebe, what were you thinking getting yourself into this mess? Not to mention the ominous shadow of $30,000 of student loan debt looming over me. Jeez.
The apartment itself was fabulous. I learned that I absolutely adore living alone. I am fantastic company. I love sleeping on the couch. I love walking around naked. I love cooking for myself. I love not leaving the apartment at all on my days off without judgement. I love laying low. I love being able to invite people over at 3am (nothing scandalous, unfortunately.) I love talking to the television. For those three months, I holed up in that apartment. It was bright and sunny and the perfect amount of space for one person. It was in the rear of the third floor, so the South Street din of wasted hipsters stumbling out of the former TLA after a concert was 99% imperceptible. It was my peaceful haven. I bought groceries from the gourmet grocery store down the street and Netflixed all three seasons of The Office, becoming completely obsessed. I paid for everything with my credit card. I had a financially irresponsible blast.
I knew it was temporary the whole time. I had already made plans to move to New York at the end of October. Molly was going on tour, so I was taking over her Astoria sublet. I think the temporary nature of the sublet gave me a sense of peace. Every decision I was making seemed temporary, so I no longer felt the pressure I'd felt all through college of making the most practical decision. Like I said, I did nothing scandalous. Doing nothing felt like the biggest deviation of all. I was totally unproductive and loving it...and knowing that even being unproductive was temporary made it seem okay.
The time came for me to leave Philadelphia as I'd been planning. Having sold or given away all of my furniture and most of my household appliances, I enlisted my friend Matty to help me drive my meager belongings (books and clothes, that's all I've got left) in a UHaul van from Philly to New York in exchange for future theatre tickets, but at the last minute, he booked a show in New York and was unable to help me. He called to tell me this while I was having brunch with my friend Alee. Faced with the prospect of moving to a new state alone, without help, I promptly burst into tears in the middle of the Marathon Grill. (Fool!) Alee came to my rescue like a busty, pint-sized knight in shining armor. She devised a plan which consisted of her and I getting up at 5am on Wednesday morning, loading up the van, driving to New York, and her returning to Philly on a 2:00pm bus to get to her Acting on Camera class at UArts by 4:00. It was an insane plan. But by golly, it worked... until the MapQuest directions I'd printed out got us lost three times (once on the freeway, once in Manhattan, and once in Queens...which is the most ridiculously laid out freaking city I've ever seen. It's like Dr. Seuss was the urban planner assigned to the job.) So Alee drove and I cried and worried about her being late to class and when we finally got to Astoria, I had to send her on the subway with twenty bucks and a bus ticket and was left to unload the truck myself. She was only twenty minutes late in the end, and the teacher didn't bat an eye.
The thing is, I have a driver's license, but I'm terrified of driving. You'd never know I used to be a SoCal girl. I haven't driven a car in almost five years, and I was certain that me driving a UHaul van through three states equalled impending death.
The Astoria sublet was supposed to be 7-plus months and I was thrilled. After moving twice in five months, the idea of staying put for a while was immensely appealing. Plus, I fell quickly in love with Astoria. Everything I needed was within five blocks: the laundromat, nail salon, Commerce Bank, Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, cheap pizza and Thai food I could have delivered to my door in fifteen minutes. Astoria park was a ten minute walk away. The N train was four blocks away. I quickly fell in love with the N train as well. If the N train was a person, it would be my boyfriend. It's so efficient and clean and reliable. It's always quick and it runs frequently. Plus that red lit-up "N" on the front never fails to emerge from the dark depths of the tunnel like a beacon of hope on those late nights after work when all you want to do is go home, eat pizza in bed and fall asleep watching TV.
For five months, things were great. I hardly ever saw the roommates and when I did we got along well. It was this lovely little melting pot of cultural diversity, very New York: Chia-Ying was from Korea, Sade was from Nigeria, and Emi was Japanese--but from Southern California. Supported by a sense of accomplishment (I made it to New York, after all!) and comfort in my new temporary home, I quickly became immersed in the city and kept myself busy for five months working at two restaurants, interning and taking classes at the Actor's Movement Studio and doing an off-off-Broadway show. Of course, the minute I begin to think I'm finally settling down, The Universe steps and to show me who's boss...and delivers me opportunities I could never have expected.
So I booked The Irish...and How They Got That Way at the Walnut Street Theatre. Which took me back to South Philly. Life is funny that way.
I hadn't intended to leave the Astoria apartment. To save the hassle of moving, I planned on subletting my sublet so that I'd have a place to return to after the show closed. But there had been some conflict with my roommates around the time I was packing to leave for Philly, and three days after I started rehearsals, I got a Facebook message (not a phone call, not even a proper email) telling me that they had had a roommate meeting and decided it was time for me to move out. There's a much longer version of the story, but sufficed to say I ended up in New York on my day off from rehearsal, renting yet another UHaul truck with Molly and moving my stuff out of the Astoria apartment while the roommates were out. I left a passive-aggressive note and some miscellaneous stuff behind, stored my stuff in Molly's enormous walk-in closet, and quietly but angrily moved on with my life.
I changed my address once again and settled into the boys' South Philly house. The boys, Jake, Jamison and Brad, are three friends of mine from UArts, who are all currently seniors. Since their parents were still paying their rent and they had room to spare, they'd offered for me to stay with them rent-free, as long as I paid their utilities and baked cookies once in a while. It was an absolute dream. Their house is just beautiful: big, bright and recently remodelled by their landlords next door, who happen to be our married teachers from school. The living room is furnished with dilapadated but comfy dorm-room boy furniture and frequently adorned with empty cereal bowls and spoons, piles of old Sports Illustrated, Time magazine, Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stones, and empty pizza boxes. I quickly took it upon myself to find ways of making their home nicer, though they never once asked me. I figured since I was freeloading I'd better make my presence constructive. I purchased a wastebasket for their bathroom, did the dishes, put up shelves in Jamie's room that had been sitting in a pile in the corner of his room for an entire year.
I adored living with the boys. They were so easy-going, so pleasant, being in that beautiful place where school is still exciting and stimulating yet still safe from the harsh realities of the real world. I envied them--and dreaded thinking about the time when the show would close and I'd have to leave. Not that I had to leave. They would have let me stay as long as I needed to get my feet back on the ground. But as the closing date drew nearer, it began to dawn on me that I had absolutely no money, and no intention of getting a job in Philly. I'd have to make a decision: stay in Philly and work towards getting an apartment, or move back to New York right away, subletting until something else made more sense. The thought of staying terrified me--after a several months of auditioning locally I hadn't gotten as much as a callback, and there was no way I was going back to waiting tables at Chili's. Staying seemed like taking a million steps back. Philly had replaced my parents' house in the sense that my heart was there, it felt like home...a home that I inevitably would have to leave in order seek out the next challenge. Thankful for the detour, I realized there was no turning back now. I'd have to go back to New York.
Which brought me to that horrible Sunset Park sublet. I know I've blogged about it before, but I must emphasize how truly awful it was. Thankfully only a block and a half from my beloved N train, the neighborhood was the first one I'd ever lived in that scared me. I would frequently be woken up at 3 am by the ear-splitting sound of fireworks being set off right below my open window. Every single time I thought it was a gunshot, but the absence of police sirens and screaming assured me that it wasn't. Dirt covered every surface of the apartment, no matter how many times I wet-Swiffered the floor of my bedroom, my feet were still black with grim on the walk from my room to the bathroom. The apartment itself was huge and full of potential to be nice, but the boys who lived there were college boys, living there out of financial necessity. I liked them very much--I think the years of living with my little brothers has made me much more suited to living with boys--but couldn't believe they had actually lived in this filth for an extended period of time. I would kill myself if I had to live in a place like that for more than two months.
On August 31st, I moved for the fifth time since my college graduation.
The move was no picnic (it never is) but luckily I was able to leave the UHaul truck out of the equation this time. Molly was moving the same day, so together we moved my things out of her old apartment, and drove most of them to my new sublet with the help of our friends Tamara and MK and their car. I told Molly I feel destined to write our moving experiences into a screenplay for a girly buddy-flick.
Now I'm subletting from my friend Alex while she's in Philly for three months doing a show. I'm living with my good friend Matty, who is the best temporary gay husband a girl could ask for. He loves to cook and clean, and we stay up girl talking for hours every night after we get home from our respective jobs. The apartment is small and cozy, very clean and close to the subway, crocery store and laundromate. It's in Bay Ridge, in the very depths of Brooklyn, so it takes friggin' forever to get anywhere in Manhattan (I took the subway into Astoria to have breakfast with Molly, MK and Tamara last week and it took me an hour and forty minutes, no exaggeration), but it's so cheap I can't complain. Though a couple of boxes of mine remain in Molly's apartment, Matty and I were able to move the rest of my stuff from Sunset Park by D train. This of course resulted in a farcical turn of events. Picture Matty and I saddled with duffle bags, shopping bags, and overpacked cardboard boxes in arm, making a mad dash for the door the minute the train stopped at our station. My knees buckled at the moment of truth and the box fell out of my arms. We tried to push it onto the platform before the doors closed, shrieking in alarm, and the box split open, spilling books and pictures all over the concrete. Once safely off the train, we collapsed in laughter. It was like a scene from a movie.
Having changed addresses on all my credit cards and bank accounts once again, I'm feeling happy and settled--for now. That's the thing; I always feel comfortable in the places I sublet, at least on a superficial level. Deep down, however, I'm constantly plagued by a sense of uncertainty, never knowing where I'll end up the next time.
My friends think I'm insane. Truly, at this point, I feel insane. I'm dying for a lease of my own, to recreate the sense of safety and comfort I had at the multi-colored South Philly house of my college years.
When I was a kid, I went to 10 different schools in 13 years. I was always the new kid, always starting over every 9 months. I never had any control over my destination, or course. When you're a kid, you go where mom and dad tell you to go. I lived in Philadelphia for 4 years--longer than I had lived anywhere for a consecutive period of time since before I was 8 years old. This nomadic way of life is the only thing I've ever known. I often wonder if that's one of the reasons I was drawn to this craze career path to begin with. Having the possibility of travelling, of living and working all over the world, is certainly something I find appealing about being an actor. I'm a textbook Sagittarius, after all--I get restless easily. I have to feel stimulated and inspired all the time or I go insane...but with a life that is currently at the most unstable it's ever been financially, I feel like I'm getting more than enough stimulation by just trying to survive. I've been supporting myself since I was 17, but I've never had to work so hard just to stay where I am in life, let alone get ahead. I'm 22 and I'm exhausted. In this crazy, beautiful journey I've chosen to take, I need just one thing to be constant. Just one. Something to make me feel like I have a point of reference, an anchor to keep me from losing my mind. A sanctuary. On the other hand, I know the Universe has kept me in this tumultuous pattern of chaos for this long for many unforseeable reasons. I have to believe that where I am is right, for right now. And so I'm enjoying the present, cuddling with Matty while watching Project Runway together, sprawling out in Alex's big comfy bed, and trusting that when it comes time to move out, the Universe will help me find my way to wherever and whatever is right.
In the meantime, I'm thinking about downsizing my belongings...yet again.
