Avenue for the brief period of their marriage and its aftermath. Then, fleeing ghosts of boyfriends, husbands, and lovers past and present, my mother essentially kidnapped my sister and me and took us to London. I didnât see my father or hear from or of him for ten years. Weâd had a brief reunion just before my final fight with my mother, where Iâd learned of her deception. While I had a strong emotional connection with my father, I had only spent three days with him out of the last three thousand six hundred or so. His house and second family didnât at this point qualify as âhome.â
So for me, a theater, any theater, had become over the years a stand-in for homeâa kind of sanctuary where I could invoke happier times. I had wound up in this one at NYU by accident, in a way, after my original career choiceâactingâhadnât worked out.
I had wanted to go to theater school, but none of the schools I auditioned for would have me. Crushed, and lacking any kind of guidance, I spent a miserable year and a half at Boston University, studying whatever, just trying to get to my classes while what was left of my home life imploded: My little sister, Robin, became a runaway, my mother was arrested after drunkenly crashing Robinâs high school graduation (literally, with her car), and I wrestled Mother into AA. When my sister escaped to college far away in the Midwest, I dropped out of BU and moved back home to babysit my crazy mom. I took a job working at a newsstand in Harvard Square, but missing the theater desperately, I lucked into a position at the American Rep, where I met Michael. He encouraged me to start taking photographsâeven bought me a used Olympic SLR. Those pictures had gotten me into film school. The logic of it was loopy and half-assed, but, amazingly, it ended up being my ticket out of town and my motherâs life.
I figured that if acting wasnât going to work out, perhaps I could find a way to be a filmmaker. Movies appealed to me the way the theater didâthey were an escape, a journey to a different place where you could try on someone elseâs life for a few hours. But they also spoke to me in a language all their ownâa collage of images, cuts, and focuses that I had always understood. My childhood had been a long series of changing locations, casts of characters, and dramatically shifting emotional levels. Movies gave me a way to see my world that made sense. When you grow up privy to conversations about infidelity, drugs, drinking, love, greed, and hatred in language youâre too young to understand, itâs the pictures that tell you the story. The packed suitcase in the foyer tells you all you need to know about the end of Motherâs most recent fight with your stepfather.
The lights went down, and the musty-looking black curtains slowly creaked back, revealing the screen. In the dark, I heard the other students coughing, making hissing shush noises, and opening binder notebooks. The clacking whir of the projector started up in the booth. I popped the lid off my coffee and opened the wax paper wrapped around my still-warm bagel. The film was Antonioniâs 1966 Blow-Up , the story of a bad-boy fashion photographer in London who discovers he has inadvertently taken pictures of a murder while strolling through a park. I liked the filmâs self-Âconscious beauty and expected it to be murder mystery, but then it evolved into a treatise on perception and reality. The hero, played by David Hemmings, has no concern or understanding for the world that surrounds him. Because he lives in a world of surfaces, where sex, love, and death are meaningless, he has difficulty discerning whatâs real and what isnât. It also has an amazing sound track by Herbie Hancock.
After school I walked home, thinking about how lost all the characters in the film were. They were numb with boredom and unhappiness, but at least they got to do