You believe in honoring your commitments, and a friend got you the touring company audition, so you keep the contract you’ve already accepted and politely decline the offer from Barter.
You do other small touring jobs, and Barter does indeed call again to ask you to step into a tour as a temporary replacement for, learning two shows in a weekend, and the third on the road. You live in the DC area for a while, doing office temp work for a great company. Steve gets you your first job at The Wayside Theatre, playing the Waitress in “Hank Williams: Lost Highway,” with a truly exceptional ensemble. You still hang out and sing with Steve and he even writes a two-person one-act for you and your boyfriend, which you perform in the cabaret space at the theatre. You go to some friends’ weddings, you do some shows, and you have some real questions about how people ever afford health insurance and wonder sometimes if you should just work full time at the law firm where you’re temping. You keep auditioning though, and you get callbacks three years running from the American Shakespeare Center’s touring company (formerly Shenandoah Shakespeare). The second year they rejected you, they came back with an offer late in the spring but you had already signed on to play Maria in “The Sound of Music,” so you stick to your summer plans and hope that another season will break your way with ASC. It eventually does, and you accept an offer to tour with them.
Before you leave DC for your Shakespeare year, you’re an “extra” for the Ford’s Theatre production of “Shenandoah.” You watch New York actors working every night, and you realize that you might not be as good a singer, but you think you just might be as good an actor, and you start thinking more seriously about New York.
The ASC tour is "Cyrano de Bergerac” (Roxane), “Midsummer” (Hermia/Fairy), and “Julius Caesar” (Calphurnia). You are still grateful for the perfect match you had with Tyler as Cyrano. Even though you never get especially close outside of rehearsal, it feels like you are exactly the partners you both needed, and if he called you today to come do a show, you’d try to get there. The tour offers EMC points, but is non-union, so you are also responsible for directions between venues and wardrobe maintenance. Including laundry. When you hit the road in September, you aren’t sure if you want to turn union. When you come back for the holiday break, you sign the paperwork to collect those EMC points, meaning you can turn equity when the tour is over.
Six months later you move to Brooklyn to live with Lilli, your ASC roommate and one of the best friends you’ve ever had. You get temp jobs, you work as an artist model, and a theatre usher, and bookkeeping for an architect, and you go to lots of EPA auditions and you do some showcases. You play Portia in the Inwood Shakespeare production of “Merchant of Venice”… which is outdoors at the northern tip of Manhattan… and fully half of the performances get rained out. You also meet two people who will impact your life for a long time, Elliot (Shylock) and Rick (Antonio). Elliot gets you role-playing work training financial advisors, and Rick becomes one of your dearest friends. He introduces you to theatre companies in NJ that you work with for years. It takes a lot of auditions before the Bickford finally hires you; the farce in which they finally cast you, years later, turns out to be the last performance he will ever see you do.
But long before that happens, you, Lilli, and some other friends self-produce a production of “The Credeaux Canvas,” to which a friend invites the playwright himself. You only meant to do this play that you loved, but you end up running a theatre company in NY for more than a year… while, yes, dating the guy who is really the one who wants to have a company… That relationship implodes, but you stick with the production you are producing and performing anyway until you finally do the last budget paperwork and walk away from him and the company for good.
One of your temp jobs, that you’ve held for a while, is at Columbia University. They offer you a part-time, permanent position.
Do you accept the job? Do you decline?
You have a real salary, but also flexibility. You’re still living with Lilli in Brooklyn. You’re beginning to do some cabaret singing and have an occasional gig singing in restaurants with friends. You are turning 35 and really starting to wonder what you should do. Your voice teacher comes to town to visit and tells you about how hard it was for her to move to Florida, until she 100% embraced the new place and committed to finding new skills and new happiness. You wonder how to do that for yourself, so you decide to go out of town for your birthday. You book a bed & breakfast in Beacon and have a nice train ride.
And then a magic moment happens.
You sit down for dinner and check your email. You have been cast in the TV show you auditioned for a few days ago and when you come back to town after your weekend, you don’t have to go to the office. You are going to work as an actor. The universe said yes.
You make your birthday wish, which has, so far, continued to come true. And you buy a baseball cap so that you can still enjoy your weekend outside without worrying about sunburn. You still take time to consider what you want to come next, and decide that you’re ready to live on your own.
You start saving, and you also do your own cabaret show (with a lot of support from your friends). Then, the next spring, you move into your own studio apartment. Rick and another friend help you paint it blue, and more friends and your parents help you move in. Two weeks later, you go to New Hampshire to do a play.
You come home, run a 10k, do the farce at Bickford and go straight into rehearsals for “A Wilder Christmas,” which is a showcase contract that turns into a mini contract for a one-week extension, and is an amazing ensemble, and one of the most beautiful shows you have ever performed.
A few months later, you are hired to play Jenny in “Chapter Two” for a theatre in Pennsylvania, where you can work as a local hire by living with your parents. The man playing George is one of the best actors you’ve ever met, and every night you jump off the cliff together to tell this story.
When the show is over, what do you do