I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star Read Free Page B

thought my appendix had ruptured in voice and speech class, but it turned out it was really just bad gas. Now, I just want to say in my own defense it wasn’t me who demanded an ambulance be called and that I go to the ER—it was my teacher. And it wasn’t my fault that the voice and speech room was on the third floor and that the EMTs had to carry me down three flights of stairs and through the lobby of the building in a stretcher-chair to the ambulance. I’m really not that high maintenance, usually. I did walk home after they diagnosed me as “gassy” in the ER. But besides that episode, I felt like the life I created in Chicago was what I wished my high school experience would have been like. I have always been a late bloomer, but I was really happy there and really grew up in those four years. By the time it was all over and I was ready to move to L.A., I felt like I had nailed it, nothing could get me down.
    There is a TV movie called
Who Is Julia?
that I saw years ago. It’s about a beautiful woman who gets in a terrible car accident, her face smashed beyond repair, so, as per usual, she has a face transplant. They replace her face with the face of a plain-looking lady who dropped dead of brain death (this is a direct quote from IMDb.com . They describe what happened to this character as “faints and suffers brain death.” I swear I am not making that up). She goes from being this gorgeous woman to being, well, Mare Winningham. Moving to L.A. to be an actress made me feel like the Mare Winningham character in
Who Is Julia?
I went from feeling like I looked one way to learning that I looked totally different.
Everyone
here is gorgeous! Remember, this was before Judd Apatow made nerdy/dork/stoners the new black. I looked around the waiting room at auditions and felt like I was back in high school again. The people were dressed better than me, they were calmer than me, they seemed to use better deodorant, and most of all they were pretty. Like fashion-magazine pretty. Way prettier than me. For a while I got to audition for the lead roles, but they kept going to Pretty McPrettyson, and I began to get called in to play Pretty’s best friend/sister/assistant. I had to stop reading the descriptions for the characters I was going in for. The descriptions, or breakdowns, as we Hollywood folk like to call them, were something like “all ethnicities, all ages, all sizes.” Even my character in
The Wedding Planner
was supposed to be an overweight, middle-aged British woman. But how could I be upset? I was getting paid to act in a movie. Only one time do I remember my feelings getting hurt when the feedback from a casting director was that I wasn’t ugly
enough
. In my mind the casting director was saying, “Yes, she’s ugly. The character breakdown did call for ugly, and she is that, but we need even
more
ugly. Do you have anyone who is even uglier than this … oh, what’s her name … oh, right, Judy Greer, do you represent anyone uglier than Judy Greer?” That one left a mark. But thenI remembered
Who Is Julia?
and it was Mare Winningham who was the star of the movie, not the car accident lady with no face left over, and wouldn’t you rather have a long awesome life (read: career) than be gorgeous but dead (read: living with my parents again?). So maybe I don’t look like Megan Fox, but I do OK, and if I hire a team of people to clean me, dress me, fix my hair, and paint my face and body, I can look above average on a red carpet for thirty minutes, which is plenty of time for my picture to be taken before I toss the Spanx, wipe off my lipstick, get a martini in my hand, and start having real fun.

Mom
    MY MOTHER IS AN UNCONVENTIONAL PARENT, THANK God. She tried to be a normal mom, she tried to do the normal things, like cook dinner and host my birthday parties, but it just wasn’t her. She is really impulsive. For example, if there was a blizzard outside but she wanted to go to the movies, we would go.