I’m Over All That Read Free

always looking for myself. That journey into myself as I evaluated my beliefs and values, whether living at home or in far-flung corners of the world, has been the most important journey of all. That journey is what led to my search to understand the true meaning of spirituality. I was learning that I truly was creating everything. I was attempting to understand the character I had created as myself in the theater of life.

I’m Over Being Concerned About What I Shouldn’t Do
    I like ageing because I can forget all about the things that mattered in the past. I used to think it really mattered if I wore high heels to a premiere or not. Can you imagine? Over the years, I’ve realized that the “theater” of the past is a script I no longer want to play a part in.
    The older I get, the more adventurous my script becomes, maybe even risky. But there is no fun to be had in a safe script. I learned that from watching my parents. I left the safe harbors of my parents and childhood in order to sail with the wind a long time ago. I explored and explored, and always the journey took me inward.
    I acknowledged the theater of war, the theater of politics in Washington, the theater of television news. . . . If we humans were writing the scripts and acting in the theaters of reality, I wanted to change my script. I decided to explore the theater of inner truth.

I’ll Never Get Over Trying to Understand Men and Women (Especially on a Movie Set)
    I have many actress friends around my age, and when we get together we discuss how difficult it is, and always has been, to be a woman in this movie business obsessed with youth and sexuality and beauty. We know we have had to be tough and resilient, but have we also lost our feminine vulnerability? What good is being vulnerably feminine, anyway? I don’t think men really prefer that.
    When I look at the pictures on my Wall of Life, the wall in my home where I’ve hung hundreds of photographs documenting movies and many different moments of my life journey, the faces peering back at me are almost all men. True, in the last ten years I’ve been comforted by the faces of Elizabeth, Nicole, Jane, Meryl, Sophia, and some others. While the men may have been brilliant actors, they were not the human beings the women were, either in reliability, intelligence, or courage. Contrary to popular thought, women working together on films do not “cattily” compete with each other. On the contrary, they bond together, usually against an insensitive male in power. On Steel Magnolias, our director Herb Ross was consistently unkind to Dolly Parton and to newcomer Julia Roberts. The rest of us called him on it. The movie was fantastic and Julia went on to become the biggest star in the world. Women communicate on the level of feelings and the heart. Men tend to stay on the surface level of logic and the brain. There was a well-known adage that went around the sets of Hollywood in the old days: Never marry an actress—she is so much more than a woman. Never marry an actor—he is so much less than a man.
    But I must confess, I’ve always been attracted to my male co-stars. I found male actors very intriguing, particularly when it came to vanity. The vanity of male actors is an impossible wall to scale. They know it, too. Robert Mitchum was a lesson in contradiction for me. He often seemed to be embarrassed by the makeup man or the camera director placing his chiseled face in a more favorable light. He would make self-deprecating jokes about his face, but when he walked away it would most assuredly be done in the Mitchum stride and strut—the “don’t mess with me, I’m a tough guy who rode the rails with the hobos” body language. His voice, which he boomed as a throwaway over his shoulder, had a well-practiced lower register. Yes, he was a man’s man in his own mind, but I saw something different. He used to say, “I’ll do this piece-of-shit script just so someone else won’t have to. Better me